Time Without Human Perception

Continuing the topic of - what the heck is spatial position when your eyes are closed - - what the heck is the passage of time when you have no perception?!

How do you know that time is passing by? The second hand on the clock moves. Stuff moves. There are sounds. There are actions. Okay so what about when you close your eyes and eliminate all sound - well yeah of course you know that time is still passing my because you perceive your thoughts - thoughts moving by, thoughts. But what about when you eliminate all thoughts and simply sit only as the observer? How do you know that time is passing by? What does it then mean for time to pass by? If there is no sight, so sound, no thought, what is left to perceive? Do you then perceive nothing? Does time then stop existing?

Well first of all why should we assume that there is nothing to observe without sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, thought, feeling? Is that really all that we perceive? What about the perception of time? What about the perception of space? What does that mean? Is the perception of space and time only a by product of our perception through other senses? What becomes of - what are - space and time when you’ve got no normal perceptions left to observe the universe with? 

Does time stop? Is that what they call being entirely “in the present” when you lose all sense of passage of time? Is it then not only a metaphorical portrayal of the moment, but instead a literal one? And when the normal way of perceiving is non-existent, wouldn’t it be absurd to suppose that the rest of the universe does not exist? Or would it be absurd to suppose that it did? Does the universe exist independently of my perception? Or rather, does it exist independently of my conscious perception? Well the answer to the latter is most certainly uncertain and unfalsifiable, but the answer to the first one - as long as I am still consciously aware, then I obviously still observe something, and that something is the universe, so the universe still exists, but in a way that is entirely different from what we “assumed” it to be under our normal way of perceiving.

How many times do I have to repeat the phrase, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon (it’s just a finger pointing). Your perception, your description, your model of the universe is not the universe, but it is all that your universe will ever be - what you believe it to be, that it is. But the question is, how do you escape perception and perceive the universe? That’s the universe I attempt to explore a little further every day, every hour, every minute.

The Universe Without Eyes

Anyways, what I wanted to wrote down was this:

1) When you close your eyes, how is it that you know where the different parts of your body are? When you close your eyes, you still feel your fingers, your hands, arms, body, legs, feet, yes. But more importantly, you still feel their relative position to each other - why/how? Is it only because you remember where your hand goes and where your foot goes, etc.? Well that sounds absurd does it not? Yes, you feel them, most certainly, but HOW do you feel RELATIVE POSITION? How do I know that when I close my eyes, my feel aren’t positioned above my head? How do I know that my hands aren’t 5 kilometers away even though I can feel them exactly as they were when I had my eyes open and saw them half a meter away from my eyes?

2) How is living in a 3D world relevant at all once you close your eyes? What does position mean when your eyes are closed? Distance, direction, dimension, how do I know that there are 3 dimensions when my eyes are closed? Well, I don’t, obviously. But then how to I begin to comprehend anything in 3 dimensions with a relative position to be when my eyes are closed? Yes, perhaps I’ve only seen things in 3 dimensions when my eyes are open, and therefore I only have experience of perception in 3D in “real vision”, but how has this got anything to do with the way I perceive anything when my eyes are closed? 

I’ll attempt to document the ideas I got from these questions later, but the bottom line is, how the hell do you even start comprehending anything in the normal human perspective when you haven’t got any eyes? What in the world is the universe even when you don’t have to see it through “eyes”?

How does a relativistic particle perceive a non-relativistic particle?

I would just like to point out again (to myself) that velocity is just a unitless number, since time carries the same units as distance in 4-dimensional spacetime, and the speed of light  just a conversion factor of seconds into meters, both of which are arbitrary units.

So what implications does this have to the question “what is a universe with only spacetime and photons”? In an exclusively radiation filled universe, can space and/or time exist? If so, how? Can/does empty space exist in between the photons? How can a photon exist as a (point) particle when it exists everywhere along its path simultaneously (i.e., what does it really mean to exist as a particle and a wave simultaneously)?

So I think I concluded that time only exists for non-relativistic particles and therefore does not exist for relativistic particles in the previous spacetime post so it makes no sense to talk about motion or moving for a universe with only photons since that entails rates of distance per unit time. Or rather, all motion in whatever universe is just a ratio in the photon’s perspective. We non-relativistic particles perceive relativistic particles as “moving” but they perceive us as “ratios”. What does that mean? What does it mean to “perceive something as a ratio”? I think that the photon (or neutrino or whatever) would be just as clueless about what velocity means as we are about what this ratio thing means..

Well, Einstein asks “what happens when we catch up with a beam of light” but what he really asks is “what happens to the perception of a non-relativistic particle when it reaches the same velocity as a relativistic particle”. What happens to the second half of the question “what happens to the perception of a relativistic particle when a non-relativistic particle suddenly acquires the same distance/time ratio as the relativistic particle”? Wasn’t that part of the deal too since in relativity everything is relative and so you shouldn’t just be questioning things from the absolute perspective of a non-relativistic particle? Did that second question get answered along the way/was I just not paying attention??? Uh…?

How can space or time exist without physical objects and vice versa?

Space and time are the same - I don’t understand how they could exist without physical objects, just like physical objects could never exist without space and time. But we always talk about space and time as if they came before physical objects, how do we know that it wasn’t because of physical objects that space and time existed. But of course that’s a rather pointless question because it’s presupposing the existence of time for there to be an order to things, or it could just be asking the question, is time necessary for causality? Can causality exist independent of time? Association can, but can order? Order exists in space, but space and time are basically the same type of thing, they’re both media, for storage of information.. And I begin to be reminded that this must all just be a problem with the limitations of language to explain the concept that we already understand, have always held, in our way of experiencing or perceiving, but that cannot be conveyed through thought in the form of language. Or “thought” is only language, a product that “happens” but is not caused? At least not by intention. But arguing about all this is meaningless because of the nature of “truths” anyways, so just leave that.

Back to the problem - How can time exist without physical objects? I seem to have defined* “time” as the order of events happening between physical particles**. I said, if there are no events, how can there be time, how would we know if there were time, and more importantly, what difference would it make if there were or weren’t time if there were no events to happen anyways? And how could there be an event without a physical particle? Well, a physicist would say, that’s silly! Light exists, and light is not a physical particle. It could well be a particle, but it is not physical, and it takes “time” for a photon t travel from a point in space to another point. But that’s silly too! The time it takes for light to travel from one point depends on the reference frame of the observer, the motion, the relative velocity of the observer in the reference frame, but if no physical particles existed to be a observer in a reference frame, then how would we know how much “time” it takes for a light beam to travel from one point in space to another point in space?

Is saying that other photons exist in other reference frames to observe other traveling photons stupid? Time does not exist in the reference frame of a photon. For a photon there is no such thing as time, no such thing as velocity, no such thing as motion. But then what is a world completely devoid of physical particles but filled with empty space and photons? Does it even make sense to suppose the existence of empty space when the only existing particles are non-physical (by virtue of the same argument of time)? We, as perceivers only used to experiencing and perceiving a universe with both physical and non-physical matter could imagine a universe filled with empty space and photons, with photons moving from point to point at different “times” some before, some after, and at first sight it seems perfectly sensical, but immediately on second thought, how could this possibly be?

How could photon 1 start traveling from point A “before” photon 2 starts traveling from point A if time flowed for neither of them? Or imagining of that scenario requires us to “be there” to observe it, even if it is only a scenario in our heads, but by being there, we are the physical particles there to “observe” the photons. Photons cannot be observers because the act of observation seems to require “time” or at least anything that we, as human perceivers, could possibly imagine. But then isn’t it pointless to “think about” the non-existence of physical matter anyways? Since you would never be able to imagine it because the very act of imagining it, perceiving it, trying to perceive it at all creates its existence.. Just like everything else.. But what if it’s completely “internal”? Having nothing to do with the physical world, but only with what “goes on” in the mind?

What is an event in the mind? It requires no physical objects at all! It requires no “real” physical objects, but then are we saying that just because a physical object that exists purely in the mind if not “physical” at all simply because it is not “real”? It seems that everything and anything “real” has the exact same properties as everything and anything “imaginary” except that one is real and the other is imaginary; one exists in the “real world”, and one exists in the “mind”. So I don’t think that just because an imagined physical object is not real, it is not physical, so to say. And so we are going in circles once again, trying to “imagine” the unimaginable but circularly causing the imaginable just because we are “imagining” the unimaginable, which is not being “imagined”.. I think that the conclusion always gets to the same basic point - that creation creates itself, everything and anything creates itself and itself and itself, and back the the problem of zeros and ones and ones only creating ones and zeros only being zeros all over again. Everything is so unimaginably “simple”. “Simple”.

*Not a good thing. I use the term “define” loosely here. I don’t want to give anything a definite definition.

**By “physical particle” I really just mean non-relativistic. I’m not really sure what being a “physical” particle would entail anyways (as opposed to an “imaginary” particle?) not sure why I just completely forgot about the term “non-relativistic”. Sorry.