Why is Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) popular?

[Kyle Pierce]

Every once in a while I come up with a question that I haven't seen addressed before. So if I missed something, please let me know.

So, why is MWI so popular, and is there a connection with beliefs, surely this has come up, but anyway, seems to me that MWI is a perfect fit for an atheist position. Why? Because in MWI there is no such thing as Eternity, only the infinite extension of duration. And this same conception of time seems not only natural but necessary for atheism.

So this is pretty obvious but what's not as obvious is the agenda that comes with MWI. Of course, this is in keeping with <gestures vaguely at everything>.

Happy New Year

Kyle

[David Sundaram]

IMO, the 'infinitely-in-all directions many worlds' theory should be as terrifying to 'wrong-doers' as it is reassuring to 'right-doing' ones, since it logically reinforces the theory presented in The Bhagavad Gita, to wit:

"The godless do not know how to act or how to renounce. They have neither purity nor truth. They do not understand the right principles of conduct.
They say the universe is an accident with no purpose and no God. Life is created by sexual union, a product of lust and nothing else.
Thinking thus, these degraded souls, these enemies of man­kind – whose intelligence is negligible and whose deeds are monstrous – come into the world only to destroy.
Giving themselves up to insatiable passions, hypocritical, self sufficient and arrogant, cherishing false conception founded on delusion, they work only to carry out their own unholy purposes.
Poring anxiously over evil resolutions, which only end in death; seeking only the gratification of desire as the highest goal; seeing nothing beyond;
Caught in the toils of a hundred vain hopes, the slaves of passion and wrath, they accumulate hoards of unjust wealth, only to pander to their sensual desire.
This I have gained today; tomorrow I will gratify another desire; this wealth is mine now, the rest shall be mine ere long;
I have slain one enemy, I will slay the others also; I am worthy to enjoy, I am the Almighty, I am perfect, powerful and happy;
I am rich, I am well-bred; who is there to compare with me? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will pay – and I will enjoy. Thus blinded by Ignorance,
Perplexed by discordant thoughts, entangled in the snares of desire, infatuated by passion, they sink into the horrors of hell.
Self-conceited, stubborn, rich, proud and insolent, they make a display of their patronage, disregarding the rules of decency.
Puffed up by power and inordinate conceit, swayed by lust and wrath, these wicked people hate Me Who am within them, as I am within all.
Those who thus hate Me, who are cruel, the dregs of mankind, I condemn them to a continuous, miserable and godless rebirth.
So reborn, they spend life after life, enveloped in delusion. And they never reach Me, O Prince, but degenerate into still lower! forms of life."

Note: This is not the theory I present and support in my treatise, to wit:

"An equally [to the traditionally the 'Christian' view] grotesque, clearly retribution projecting fantasy that grossly self ish and consequently hateful deniers of their and others’ communality with all Life will suffer the worst imaginable fate – albeit in this case, with  said ‘fate’ continuing to spiral ‘downward’ without end, which leaves  the issue of what ultimately ‘happens’ to such souls schematically unresolved – is documented in Ch.16 of The Bhagavad Gita, to wit: “Puffed  up by power and inordinate conceit, swayed by lust and wrath, these wicked people hate Me Who am within them, as I am within all. Those who thus hate Me, who are cruel, the dregs of mankind, I condemn them to a continuous, miserable and godless rebirth. So reborn, they spend life after life, enveloped in delusion. And they never reach Me, … but degenerate into still lower forms of life.” Both this and the above-described ‘final judgment’ scenario are clearly negative emotion ‘loaded’ and thematically vengeful. Such negativity and punitiveness are not ‘in accord’ with Jesus’ vision and teaching (presented and discussed in the preceding chapter) that Love and  Joy constitute Life’s  universal Source ‘code’, to wit, that ‘God’ is a beneficent ly-inclined ‘Father’, from which all Life springs, however.

This is not to say that The Flow of Life’s Love and Joy experience and expression doesn’t ‘fork’ negatively (that is, relatively speaking) in the case of folks whose attitudes, intentions and behaviors in relation to other aspects  of Life and/or Life Itself are value-negating, mind you. Universally operative psychospiritual dynamics, often referenced as ‘The Law of Attraction’ and/or ‘The Law of Karma’, ensure that “With what measure ye  mete, it shall be measured to you” (Mark 4:24) and “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7), as Jesus and the apostle Paul more colloquially stated. But the dissolution of a soul  that has become unloving and unjoyful in relation to others and Life at Large is just that: an ‘i’dentity-dissipating ‘happening’ wherein and whereby the ‘elements’ that comprise a psychospiritual entity are dispersed and recombinantly recycled. In effect, said soul’s components get ‘dissolved’ and ‘absorbed’ back into and so become a part of the beingnesses of other aspects of Life in the context of the absolutely positive Flow of the capital  ‘E’ Entity of our Life-Matrix, wherein everyone and everything in existence derives from the same Source and so is given the same ‘blessing’: “Ye [are all] the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45) is how Jesus put it.

There is no ‘zero’ in this regard, let alone something negative relative to  that, in other words! Analogous to what physicists believe to be the case  with physical matter-n-energy, soulful beingness can never really be ‘lost’  (albeit, as just explained, a psychospiritual constellation may stop experiencing and expressing Love and Joy and so ‘cease’ to continue as such, so thinking and speaking, as Jesus did, about the possibility of ‘losing’ one’s soul or others ‘losing’ theirs – in this case meaning the coherency of your or their psychospiritual being and relatedness to others – may nevertheless be a functional way of considering options in face of the dissolution and recycling dynamic* that is an operationally built-in feature of Earthly-life’s ‘evolutionary’ transmigrational process, which, like an oceanward flowing river, ever-proceeds towards more and more compre­hensively integrated Love and Joy experience and expression, albeit not in everyone’s case, as just spoken of here."

[Kyle Pierce]

So, I take it the bit about MWI and eternity is a non-starter.

Regardless of that, I shall complete the thought, that MWI is just one contender among many that define out of existence the notion of eternity. There is no such thing as timelessness in MWI. This turns out to be a critical question for all contenders: what lies outside of Time? ...or some variation thereof.

[Scott Roberts]

On Sunday, January 3, 2021 at 2:00:56 PM UTC-10 Kyle Pierce wrote:

So, I take it the bit about MWI and eternity is a non-starter.

I wouldn't say so. MWI seems to be popular among those who want to preserve a belief in a mind-independent spatiotemporal reality.

 

Regardless of that, I shall complete the thought, that MWI is just one contender among many that define out of existence the notion of eternity. There is no such thing as timelessness in MWI. This turns out to be a critical question for all contenders: what lies outside of Time? ...or some variation thereof.

What lies outside of time is that which allows one to be aware of time passing.

 

[Brad Walker]

Kyle, what's your definition of eternity?

Theism is usually related to the cosmological multiverse. Atheism seems orthogonal to MWI, other than it'd be a bizarre creation that'd require theological explanation.

Is MWI popular? Maybe it's the most popular QM interpretation, but it's not a majority view. MWI is successful because the math works, and people don't understand reductio ad absurdum.

On Sunday, January 3, 2021 at 8:12:48 AM UTC-7 Kyle Pierce wrote:

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"So, why is MWI so popular, and is there a connection with beliefs, surely this has come up, but anyway, seems to me that MWI is a perfect fit for an atheist position. Why? Because in MWI there is no such thing as Eternity, only the infinite extension of duration. And this same conception of time seems not only natural but necessary for atheism."

I think you are on to something here. There is an undeniable trend in which materialist speculations become ever-increasingly absurd to avoid anything which may link back to traditional religious metaphysics. That is not only limited to materialist science and philosophy, though, and can be found in all manner of worldviews, even 'idealist' ones to some limited extent. It should be a huge cause for concern IMO. 

[Brad Walker]

Isn't "infinite (extension of) duration" an oxymoron?

On Sunday, January 3, 2021 at 8:12:48 AM UTC-7 Kyle Pierce wrote:

[Santeri Satama]

What does 'infinite extension of duration' mean?

Eternity is a religious/metaphysical concept. In math, it corresponds with the absurd notion of "actual/completed infinity". Yup, standard math of Cantor's Paradise is an absurd joke, an oxymoron. MWI is written in the language of the absurd joke, so the meaning of "infinite extension of duration" is far from clear to me in that context. What do they mean by duration?

Continuous expansion of Bergson-duration,  that's something I've given some thought and can comprehend to some extent. Expanding from now towards both past and future. Rejecting the absurd notion of infinity and replacing it with unbounded, open-ended process which especially at top level ("duration of all durations") is undecidable whether it will halt or not. Duration has potential also to become bounded and halt and cease. Here the signature is more like (+,+,-,-), 2-2 rather than the 3-1 signature of Minkowski time-space.   

[Santeri Satama]

Religion vs atheism is a bad frame of discussion. Bergson duration is empirical science with introspection included and with search for creative and better new math. For me it associates most naturally with animistic world views, which are neither religion nor atheism, just what is most normal and common among human cultures.

[Kyle Pierce]

Brad, I agree it is an absurdity, and perhaps I have given this absurdity the wrong label, not meaning to get into Bergson's duration. Ask an MWI advocate what they think, and whatever they say about time, I'm likely to find that absurd also. 

[Kyle Pierce]

S. S., it isn't necessary to bring religion into this, even though that is where we often end up. I am just trying to point to the hidden battleground where eternity and time are rendered meaningless and discussions founder. Like it or not, we are weighed down with the history of these endless battles over Plato's vision of Time as "the moving image of Eternity" and the flat, extended view of the modern mentality.

[Dana Lomas]

I'll jump in and preempt Lou by quoting Blake in suggesting that 'Eternity is in love with the productions of time'

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

On a broader view, these arguments over the nature and meaning of "time" are what we should expect from the 'aperspectival mutation' (Gebser) of consciousness, in which we consciously recognize and attempt to integrate the '4th dimension' into our various worldviews. We saw that happen in literature, art, and entertainment first and then in philosophy, science and technology. 

[Scott Roberts]

On Sunday, January 3, 2021 at 7:58:26 PM UTC-10 Santeri Satama wrote:

Eternity is a religious/metaphysical concept. In math, it corresponds with the absurd notion of "actual/completed infinity".

They do not correspond. The theologian's 'eternity' simply means "not temporal". Its reality can be inferred, by noting that without a stance "outside of time" there can be no awareness of time's passing. And if you are a mystic it can be experienced, or so it is said. Nothing to do with Cantor's actual infinities.

Yup, standard math of Cantor's Paradise is an absurd joke, an oxymoron.

I would say that is going too far.  Actual infinities cannot be experienced, and so do not exist. Which is not to say one cannot have some mathematical fun by pretending they exist.  You don't get something like Cohen's proof of the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis from an oxymoron. Although there cannot be a flying horse, one can have stories about Pegasus.

 

[Brad Walker]

It's interesting that MWI isn't the mainstream view. Who is the averagely educated physicalist to disagree with Sean Carroll? He's written many books and is a tenured professor at Cal Tech, a top STEM school. Is ignorance still plausible after all the MWI evangelism? Are physicalists less committed to reason than they imagine?

[Brad Walker]

Multiverse, quantum and cosmological, is physicalism jumping the shark.

On Sunday, January 3, 2021 at 8:12:48 AM UTC-7 Kyle Pierce wrote:

[Santeri Satama]

jse,

Sure, you can have fun with absurd notions. 'Absurd' is here a technical term for violation of LNC. I think math should be honest, not a game of academic elbow tactics. You can't have fun with absurd notions and claim that they are consistent. That's dishonest.

Kyle,
Eternal vs. (open ended continuous) duration is a temporal debate. Are mathematical truths eternal or durations? Current math strongly suggests duration.

[Kyle Pierce]

Temporal debate, yes, I agree. As for the idea of mathematical objects having duration, surely Husserl would disagree. Temporality implies contingency, does it not? This point is interesting because on it turns the nature of ideal objects, which are regarded, by idealists at least, as timeless. I have no clue what mathematicians would decide if they had a survey about the timelessness of mathematical objects. But I think I know what idealists would say. 

[Kyle Pierce]

When you point out this trend, it does seem pretty apparent. Maybe we are witnessing evolutionary forces at work. Scary thought, since evolution sort of determines what "the right side of history" turns out to be.

[Scott Roberts]

On Tuesday, January 5, 2021 at 5:17:23 AM UTC-10 Santeri Satama wrote:

Sure, you can have fun with absurd notions. 'Absurd' is here a technical term for violation of LNC.

A theologian might argue that since God is infinite, God can experience an actual infinity, making it real. I wouldn't agree, but that's just my opinion. Where in all this is there a break with the LNC?

 

I think math should be honest, not a game of academic elbow tactics. You can't have fun with absurd notions and claim that they are consistent. That's dishonest. 

Some people want to play by intuitionist rules. Some don't. Calling the latter dishonest strikes me as fanaticism.

 

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"When you point out this trend, it does seem pretty apparent. Maybe we are witnessing evolutionary forces at work. Scary thought, since evolution sort of determines what "the right side of history" turns out to be. " 

Yes, we are certainly witnessing evolutionary forces at work (evolution of consciousness). Gebser describes the dynamic very well in The Ever-Present Origin,

"Here [with Descartes] we can discern the tragic aspect of the deficient mental structure: Reason, reversing itself metabolistically to an exaggerated rationalism, becomes a kind of inferior plaything of the psyche, neither noticing nor even suspecting the connection. Although the convinced rationalist will be unwilling to admit it, there is after all the rational distorted image of the speculatio animae: the speculatio rationis, a kind of shadow-boxing before a mirror whose reflection occurs against the blind surface [e.g. MWI]. This negative link to the psyche, usurping the place of the genuine mental relation, destroys the very thing achieved by the authentic relation: the ability to gain insight into the psyche.

In every extreme rationalization there is not just a violation of the psyche by the ratio, that is, a negatively magic element, but also the graver danger, graver because of its avenging and incalculable nature: the violation of the ratio by the psyche, where both become deficient. The authentic relation to the psyche, the mental, is perverted into its opposite, to the disadvantage of the ego that he become blind through isolation. In such an instance, man has become isolated and his basic ties have been cut; the moderating, measuring bond of menis and menos is severed. Cut, severed: what was again the meaning of the root da-? It is this "cut off, severed, divided," the "demonic." The gates to the "demonic forces" have been opened; nothing exists out of itself, everything follows upon something else, everything has become a consequence. We may well ask: a consequence leading to what?"

[next section is "The Integral Structure"]

[Santeri Satama]

tiistai 5. tammikuuta 2021 klo 22.22.05 UTC+2 Kyle Pierce kirjoitti:

Temporal debate, yes, I agree. As for the idea of mathematical objects having duration, surely Husserl would disagree. Temporality implies contingency, does it not? This point is interesting because on it turns the nature of ideal objects, which are regarded, by idealists at least, as timeless. I have no clue what mathematicians would decide if they had a survey about the timelessness of mathematical objects. But I think I know what idealists would say. 

I'm an idealist and process philosopher.

Mathematician refers to undecidability of Halting problem, Church-Turing thesis and Curry-Howard correspondence. According to these, proof-events don't spread to eternity, just to open ended duration - which can be bigger than a universe, or smaller or whatever. 

[Santeri Satama]

keskiviikko 6. tammikuuta 2021 klo 3.08.14 UTC+2 jse...@gmail.com kirjoitti:

Where in all this is there a break with the LNC?

'Completed infinity', in other words finite infinity. 

Axioms that claim that non-demonstrable, non-computable real numbers form a field violate most basic syllogism. Plain dishonesty.

[Kyle Pierce]

The halting problem etc. would seem to have very little to do with what I'm talking about. You're talking about computability. I am not.

[martin...@gmail.com]

How does MWI differ in its handling of Eternity/Time compared to other QM interpretations? 

I don't really see any material differences. But that's just on a very naive level. Can anyone elaborate?

[Santeri Satama]

keskiviikko 6. tammikuuta 2021 klo 17.20.56 UTC+2 Kyle Pierce kirjoitti:

The halting problem etc. would seem to have very little to do with what I'm talking about. You're talking about computability. I am not.

I'm talking about implications of contemporary computation theory to proof theory. What mathematics itself can say about temporality of mathematical objects, and that has changed radically since Turing machine.

Even Badiou, philosopher of Set theoretical ontology, leaves the door open to contingency with his theory of Event and evolutionary truth theory. You think evolution is scary, and it can be that too, but what about dead end determinism that leads to inevitable Doom and falsification of a theory by extinction?

[Kyle Pierce]

SS -- That is interesting in part because I've never heard of such a thing. Would this imply that the perennial wisdom sources have been superseded and their ontology rendered antique? Does Whitehead leave room for timelessness or eternity? (synonyms, one would hope)

Martin -- from Wikipedia: "MWI views time as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized." One major contrasting view would be David Bohm's implicate order, which is perhaps a canonical example of "timelessness" in the West.

[Santeri Satama]

Perennial - long time, repeating wisdom sources are just that. Final and complete not implied. Whitehead:

We have first to make up our minds whether time is to be found in nature or nature is to be found in time. The difficulty of the latter alternative-namely of making time prior to nature-is that time then becomes

( 66) a metaphysical enigma. What sort of entities are its instants or its periods? The dissociation of time from events discloses to our immediate inspection that the attempt to set up time as an independent terminus for knowledge is like the effort to find substance in a shadow. There is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing.

It is necessary however to make a distinction. In some sense time extends beyond nature. It is not true that a timeless sense-awareness and a timeless thought combine to contemplate a timeful nature. Sense-awareness and thought are themselves processes as well as their termini in nature. In other words there is a passage of sense-awareness and a passage of thought. Thus the reign of the quality of passage extends beyond nature. But now the distinction arises between passage which is fundamental and the temporal series which is a logical abstraction representing some of the properties of nature. A temporal series, as we have defined it, represents merely certain properties of a family of durations-properties indeed which durations only possess because of their partaking of the character of passage, but on the other hand properties which only durations do possess. Accordingly time in the sense of a measurable temporal series is a character of nature only, and does not extend to the processes of thought and of sense-awareness except by a correlation of these processes with the temporal series implicated in their procedures.

https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1920/White1_03.html



I don't think Bohm's implicate order is 'timelessness'. Bohmian decoherence and active information of quantum potential are temporal processes. Implicate order is movement and flow, a priori category compared to (abstract) explicate classical timespace, which has to learned. 

[Kyle Pierce]

Thanks for the Whitehead quote. He shows that the question of timelessness is not straightforward.

Here's my source for Bohm: https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/david-bohm-implicate-order-and-holomovement

"[Bohm] maintains that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. This reality he calls the Implicate Order. Within the Implicate Order everything is connected; and, in theory, any individual element could reveal information about every other element in the universe."

and: “The actual order (the Implicate Order) itself has been recorded in the complex movement of electromagnetic fields, in the form of light waves. Such movement of light waves is present everywhere and in principle enfolds the entire universe of space and time in each region... 

I guess you can see how one might interpret this as asserting a timeless implicate order. Timeless in the sense of being outside of temporality. 

So I think the best approach is to agree, it's complicated.

[Lou Gold]

... it's complicated.

Except in the silence.

[Santeri Satama]

Kyle, it's not very complicated. Bohm is a process philosopher, everything happens in holomovement. I can see how interpretation of implicate order can start from way too narrow concept of time, in relation to Bohm's general ontology,  and that way conclude that it's "timeless" in relation to that very narrow concept of time. The more coherent and loyal interpretations starts from the big picture of holomovement and interprets particulars in relation to the whole.

[Kyle Pierce]

I must have missed your lecture on the broad concept of time! 

I would be happy to hear about that, thank you.

[Santeri Satama]

The old discussion goes back to Heraclitus and Parmenides, in the Western canon. Inseparability of change and time, and idea of eternal and immutable, where ever that came from. Ontology of Becoming vs. Ontology of Substance. Any case, Bohm is a process philosopher in the Heraclitus camp, as his term for most general level of ontology makes clear.

As for lecture, don't except much, as my "own" thinking is fuzzy suggestions and pointing towards what could be analogy to what is today considered a theory. But as I can't write books on the question, best I can do justice to influences of others before is what I'm trying to cook up in the duration of writing this response. And when you write a comment, you can observe and imagine how is that duration pretty similarly as I do. And/or give attention to different characteristics. So we start from the empirical. "Now" is a duration of indefinite size, as we appear, no clear phenomenal separation between past-present-now, a tapestry of various flows. Durations can have mereologies,  part-whole relations of embeddings etc, as well as consecutive relations, and what not? All this happens as it is, temporal processes now self-reflecting temporal processes.

Why temporal atomism does not work? Zeno's proof that continua don't reduce to discrete quantification, a line can't consist of infinity of infinitesimal points (the idea of atom) if we want to keep thinking consistent, at least when thinking about abstract, static states. So temporal holism instead of atomistic reduction to idea of point, or reduction to clock time. 

Physicalism has gifted us with very interesting confusions, though. Added in time more variations and imaginations for variation of form, which is how time manifests and is. When I search for most general self-definition of time as a suggestion for wider consensus, another bigger indefinite duration.

[Kyle Pierce]

Very interesting! A question that seems relevant here: are you familiar with Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy by D R Griffin? There's a long discussion of panexperientialism and pantemporalism that I am still not comprehending entirely, no doubt. But this seems like what I was looking for in my question about Whitehead. I will get my head around that before I go further.

[Santeri Satama]

Haven't read that. Panexperientalism and pantemporalism sound good, thanks for the hint.

[Kyle Pierce]

Pantemporalism is the position that time is ubiquitous in the universe, that time exists even in the experience of electrons and photons. Time and experience are mutually dependent, all the way down. This is straight out of Whitehead. D R Griffin says more:

"Pantemporalism, or even the weaker conviction, shared by almost everyone, that time has existed at least since the origin of our universe, conflicts with another belief that initially seems equally well-grounded — the belief in an ontological dualism between experiencing and nonexperiencing things. But this latter conviction belongs at best only to soft-core, not hard-core, common sense, so it can be given up without self-contradiction."

So, given this, what are we to make of the human experience of timelessness, in spiritual and psychedelic traditions?

Is the experience of timelessness... simply an illusion?

[Dana Lomas]

Its like imaging the wildness of a perpetual pendulum, whereby there is no exclusive dwelling as either the timeless stillpoint at the apex of it cycling, or as its spatiotemporal motion in and out of that stillpoint ... such is, according to the Heart Sutra, or the Tao Te Ching, or T S Eliot, the dance of formlessness><form or stillness><motion or timelessness><time.

[Kyle Pierce]

Thank you, Dana, I like the image. And I have to ask, where did you come up with the triad form-motion-time?

Ancient Greek philosophers were obsessed with stillness and motion. Well, some of them, at least.

Hindus and Buddhists have long spoken of form and formlessness. 

Who was it that ever spoke of time and timelessness in such a way? C S Peirce never caught sight of that, despite the profundity of his insight into threeness.

And still, the question of how to understand the experience of timelessness doesn't quite have a satisfying answer, as yet.

[Santeri Satama]

lauantai 9. tammikuuta 2021 klo 17.39.48 UTC+2 Kyle Pierce kirjoitti:

So, given this, what are we to make of the human experience of timelessness, in spiritual and psychedelic traditions?

Is the experience of timelessness... simply an illusion?

The pool in the whirl in the flow...

When some dude next to you stops internal dialogue, it's a local phenomenon at least on some level, a duration relatable to other durations of the environment. A duration without subdurations, awareness without content. Potential intent that is able to react to intents in the process of actualization faster than speed of thought. Zen test of master trying to hit the pupil in meditation with a stick, and if the pupil can dodge the strike without thought, test is passed.

[Santeri Satama]

Physicalism conditions us to confuse time with measurement, clock time etc. Pendulum could be misleading in that sense. On the other hand we have also internal potential of clock times, we can program ourselves to wake at certain clock time etc., humans, dogs, etc. can develop very accurate habits of when is eating clock time etc.

Passage of time is a measurement, and clock time is a possible but not only form of measurement. Awareness of being aware, metacognition, is already a measurement, creating the experience of passage of time, rich mereology of durations. "Timeless" refers in this sense to ceasing of measuring, ceasing of experiencing passage of time. But if we comprehend the concept of time as mereology of durations, ceasing of experiencing passage is still in time, not timeless. 

[Kyle Pierce]

Now you're getting into Husserl's territory. btw, I just came across a recent article:  Huang, D. A Mereological Perspective on Husserl’s Account of Time-Consciousness. Husserl Stud 36, 141–158 (2020). 

I read most of Husserl's tome on Time-Consciousness many years ago and still dip into it now and then. 

So I'm going back to the books.

[Dana Lomas]

Question about the pendulum analog, is it actually possible to measure the time the pendulum is in motion, unless one can determine the exact now-point of timeless stillness? This somehow seems a conundrum.

[Lou Gold]

And still, the question of how to understand the experience of timelessness doesn't quite have a satisfying answer, as yet.

YES, difficult to comprehend (grasp with mentation) but, NO, not hard to understand (stand under with devotion). There's motion, rest and awareness. 

[Santeri Satama]

lauantai 9. tammikuuta 2021 klo 20.16.27 UTC+2 Dana Lomas kirjoitti:

Question about the pendulum analog, is it actually possible to measure the time the pendulum is in motion, unless one can determine the exact now-point of timeless stillness? This somehow seems a conundrum.

Let's remove now-point from our thoughts for a duration. Math and geometry as reduction to "point" is the wrong turn. Line as infinity of infinitesimal points is just wrong, Hilbert needs to leave "point" as undefined primitive notion in his axioms of geometry, so nobody really knows what they mean by "point" nowadays. Euclid is clear, point is just the end/border of a line. Whitehead's point-free geometry of 'Regions' is a continuation of Platonic planar atomism. As is also Rational Trigonometry, developed by Wildberger. The pendulum arc of motion can be expressed rationally as the spread of the quadrances.

What has interested me, among many things, is the math of synchronicity. The ability of relativistic travelers to (subconsciously) sync their internal pendulums so that they can meet, and say, unfold spacetime so that they surprise each other by meeting unexpectedly, for some purpose. When I saw this lecture and in it the slide "Scalar and vector parts", I went "WOW" big way, that's it!

Mathematician at large is revealing here an important aspect of itself for the human metacognition. Difficulty here is not inherent, language is about as clear and coherent as it can get. Difficulty is conditioning in the old way of thinking and the vast potential of the new approach.

***

Lou,

just standing under with devotion leads as easily to misunderstanding as to understanding, or more easily. And misunderstanding and authoritarian following can lead to bloody mess. Devotion is highly irresponsible in that sense.

Also, math is not just mentation. Comprehension process of deep ideas can start with dancing them, embodied knowing and intuition seem inseparable, and attempts of linguistic constructions to express the deep ideas are as more dialogue than solitary contemplation. We've talk this before.  

[Dana Lomas]

Alas, if only I'd been paying attention to algebra lessons in high school instead of daydreaming about being like some Henry Miller-esque poet living in Paris :)) 

[Santeri Satama]

Dana, not paying attention to high school algebra is a blessing in this context, much less rubbish to clean away to make room for next incarnation of M@λ. This is a story of poets drinking absinthe in a cafe near a bridge crossing the Seine, one poet telling the other about the new language he has invented, and making up more as he goes, and the other poet thinking: "Interesting! I could also invent a new language, very different but such that can talk in comprehensible and interesting way with the new language I'm hearing...  so that instead of just declaring our poems from our romantically drunken poet-identities, our relation could become and be poetry itself!"