Time's Arrow; a series of nows (General)

by dhw, Sunday, December 11, 2016, 13:00 (2692 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Time certainly is a series of instants. In view of quantum theory with delayed choice experimental results how to interpret this? No death!

https://aeon.co/ideas/there-is-no-death-only-a-series-of-eternal-nows?utm_source=Aeon+N...

QUOTE: "...our theory of the universe, called biocentrism, in which life and consciousness create the reality around them, has no space for death at all. To fully understand this, we need to go back to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, one of the pillars of modern physics. An important consequence of his work is that the past, present and future are not absolutes, demolishing the idea of time as inviolable."

QUOTE: "So what happened to your great-grandmother after she died? To start with – since time doesn’t exist – there is no ‘after death’, except the death of her physical body in your now. Since everything is just nows, there is no absolute space/time matrix for her energy to dissipate – it’s simply impossible for her to have ‘gone’ anywhere."

So what happened to cause and effect? What happened to memory? There is no ‘after death’ does not mean there is no death. And if the death of the physical body is real, so is the birth of the physical body and the growth and ageing of the physical body, and so is every event that happens in the “now”. So what does all of this actually tell us? I’ll tell you what it tells me. My theory of the universe is not biocentric, and I do not believe my life and consciousness create the reality around me. I believe the sun, the moon, the stars exist independently of my life and consciousness, and my perception of them, no matter how subjective it may be, is not my creation of them. Whether the energy of my great-grandmother continues to exist or not is absolutely meaningless to me unless someone tells me whether by “energy” they mean my great-grandmother’s individual identity. If the death of her physical body means the death of her identity, then as far as I am concerned, she has ‘gone’. I agree that time is a series of nows, but that does not in any way “demolish” the process of physical birth-life-death, or any other “reality” that follows the pattern of cause and effect. And cause and effect means that each now is an after that follows a before. That is the sequence I call “time”.