Skip to main content

Steven Hawking on time

He says there's no beginning or end of time, for we move in a circle: we are always coming back to where we (or one of our dopplegangers) have been before.

Okay, this is all hearsay, but I still want to mull over it.

This eternal return provokes a question:  is the same "I" here that was here eons ago?  If one replies yes, then it seems that time as we conceive it normally is illusory. A more adequate grasp of time recognizes that there is nothing new under the sun.  Or rather, it is only because we are limited to seeing things "under the sun" that anything seems to be new. 

Ironically, Hawkins, a materialist, attributes to science a God-like grasp of nature, a perspective through which he sees -- rather abstractly -- every actuality that will be and/or has already been as if it is present to him.  Wow! What an irony: a man who claims that you and I are nothing but dust in the wind also claims to have a kind of infinite gaze. 

Might not the very fact that he is able to make the latter claim count as evidence against the former?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more