No Future

Does the future exist? Do we?The Einstein-Lorentz paradigm of 4-dimensional spacetime tends to give us a mental picture of something like a hypersphere, in which events of the future (or the past) are as real as the house next door or the 7-11 down the street. But is this an accurate picture?The Hubble expansion shows us a universe in which the most distant and ancient parts become a sort of reverse "event horizon", beyond which we will never see, though they grow further away in our perception over time. Doesn't the present seem like just such an event horizon?A better way of thinking of it, of course, would be to see the distant past or moment of instantiation as the actual horizon. In this picture, we are staying right where we are, while the past trails out behind us in all directions. But we know there is an illusion involved in that thought; we calculate that while the observable universe is only 13.7ish billion light years in radius, the actual co-moving now is 78 billion light years out or more. Is the past like this? Has it gotten much much further away, but we only know about it year by light year?We sometimes hear that matter and spacetime are converse descriptions of one another, that matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move. In this way of thinking, space only expands out once matter exists. Is time like that? Is the present moment the edge of that expansion in spacetime? Is the future somewhere we are going? Or is it a place we are making for ourselves?There is yet another way of looking at this question. We often hear, when doing math with Einstein and Lorentz, that as we sit here typing we are actually moving into the future at very nearly the speed of light. What is this "we" that is moving? It isn't our bodies, our bodies are right here. In 3 dimensions our body in its location is just one frame, in the next frame it is a slightly different body. Accepting all 4 dimensions, our body is a hypercubical extension from then to now and on to, whenever. Either way, its not moving. What is moving? If it's our minds, they are just a chemical reaction going on in our body, aren't they?What are we? What is this consciousness or observer that so much of physics seems to depend on? Is science saying we have a soul? What happens to that soul when it runs out of body? Does it just observe itself up a new one, or does it stop there at the end of the line and scream?Cosmology please.

Hi Iblis,I didn't understand this very well, and then at the end you seem to change topics. I'm going to try to enlist cavediver's help.

---

--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

This is difficult: you are making the natural progression of thought on this subject, but Percy is rightly concerned over the scope! It is also a bit too train of thought (something of which I am continually guilty) and will quickly loose those not used to thinking instinctively in 4d. I would pull back to the "basic" cosmology for now to set the scene, perhaps tightening up on the language and explanations, and then deal with the rather open-ended discussion on consciousness as a follow-up.

Yep, I'm evoking pretty hard in that post, because I want anyone with any knowledge to be able to see a place to start from. But I am only asking one question.The observer appears to be moving from the past, to the future. What is really happening?We can think of this in terms of the relationship between the future and the past, or between the light cones and the example event horizons, or between matter and spacetime, or between the observer and the observation. But wherever we start, our answer should model the whole question.

Thanks, I'm asking the question in the "smorgasbord" start-wherever-you-like way that I am because I want all the answers I can get. I want our audience to be able to judge the clarity of thought involved in each approach for themselves.I think it is appropriate for this forum because, as I have tried to demonstrate, modern physics seems (in the layman mind) to favor concepts like predestination and postulate the existence of something remarkably like the soul. The extent to which these concepts may be real implications of the math, or just models to help make the math easier to follow, should be laid out somewhere.These two (or more) apparent ideas are one piece of reality being modeled in several different ways. Which parts are map, and which parts are territory?

Pass. Decline promoting this for now, that's fine. As cavediver mentions, this is too stream-of-consciousness for an "e" topic; and I don't see a way to make it much better without losing the point. Another time I might be smarter, we can review it then maybe.