Block Universe and experience
The Block Universe Model of time suggest that all moments (past, present, future) exist "now", in a 4-dimensional block of spacetime, static, there is no flow of time, movement or change. Your experience of it is supposed to be an ilusion, like the photograms in a film, because you have memories, but... At the point of your death, will you restart again experiencing your whole life? Will you stay "frozen" with your last feeling? Won't you experience anything?
Comments (11)
The idea that you start your life again at the moment of death is not new to the physics model which you talk about. The idea of eternal recurrence was suggested in the writings of Ouspensky and Nietzsche.
But it is all speculation and I wonder how different it is really to the idea of reincarnation, even though the reincarnation believes that the person is reborn as a new, unique individual. But both eternal recurrence and reincarnation are based on the cyclical model of time and the archetype of rebirth.
Not at all. You seem to be implying that we are experiencing our lives like watching a video on loop but the block universe doesn't say that at all. In fact it would seem, under your definition, be incompatible with it because that would require our experience dynamically change as one "moves" through a block universe.
Under the block universe of Eternalism, your experience is static and thus you are sort of trapped in subjective world of what you're currently experiencing. There isn't a fact to what you did experience or what you will experience, just as much as there isn't a fact as to what there was or will be in the block universe itself. Every moment just is.
But you have a subjective experience of "flow", what will happens when it ends?
I don't think YOU have to worry about experiencing Block Time. In Eternity & Infinity there is no Change, no Time or Space, to be experienced. Our senses only detect differences. Can you feel positive or negative Nothingness? Block Time only applies to abstract mathematics. :joke:
Block Time experience : https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time
It doesn't. If your current experience consists of just a single instance of time where you feel like things are passing then that doesn't change, any more than the universe will.
Of course this is assuming that this feeling of the passage of time is one that is compatible with Eternalism and it's debatable whether or not it is. Some believe that this feeling can be captured through the way the brain processes temporal experiences while others may perhaps argue that the very experience of passage necessarily includes change and thus would mean that the static block universe is false. Depending on which side you fall on, well there's your answer.
So, there is nothing special with the last "slice"?
Again there is no "movement" of subjective experience from one moment to the next under a block universe with no flow of time, which is what you're talking about in your OP.
If you want there to be such "movement" then you'll have to introduce some notion of dynamic passage with which to make sense of it. Combined with a block universe model then you're probably referring to something like the moving spotlight view of time, which isn't a static B-theory of time, but a part of the class of tensed theories of time known collectively as the A-theory of time.