tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post5005574864820056148..comments2024-03-18T20:24:18.935-05:00Comments on Alexander Pruss's Blog: Special Relativity and physicalismAlexander R Prusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-13082492828520942142017-07-12T03:14:00.715-05:002017-07-12T03:14:00.715-05:00I agree with the conclusion, but I’m not so sure a...I agree with the conclusion, but I’m not so sure about the argument.<br /><br />It is not clear, <i>pace</i> Kant, that consciousness really is unified. Speaking for myself, I sometimes experience one event as clearly happening before another, and sometimes not. But I rarely experience two events as positively simultaneous. I recall an experiment (sorry, I don’t have a reference) in which people listened to speech with a click sound added. They could report hearing the words and the click, but were unable to say in which syllable the click had occurred.<br /><br />In the case of feeling cold and seeing red, I’m sometimes attending to one sometimes to the other but rarely to both together. I <i>infer</i> that I’m experiencing both simultaneously, but I don’t directly <i>experience</i> them that way. Hume’s famous ‘bundle’ passage springs to mind (though his point was different).<br /><br />I doubt that Einstein’s concept of simultaneity of distant events requires conscious perception. Wouldn’t a pair of photon detectors and some electronics suffice?<br /><br />It seems unlikely that relativity directly limits our ability to experience simultaneity (if indeed we do experience it). No parts of our brains are more than 10^(-9) light-seconds apart. But 10^(-9) seconds is orders of magnitude less than the time scale in which conscious experience changes (say, 10^(-1) seconds).<br /><br />To model Napoleon as described, you would have to represent time in this world by a space-like dimension in the 5-d world. Arguably, cause-and-effect is intrinsically temporal, so it’s not clear that you could make a ‘causally isomorphic’ model in this way.IanShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00111583711680190175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-37740016661916559232017-07-12T01:19:48.787-05:002017-07-12T01:19:48.787-05:00What kind of non-physicalism do you accept ?What kind of non-physicalism do you accept ?Wardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02306677359857103075noreply@blogger.com