reflected_light wrote:This theory then suggests a shared human consciousness. If we are all tricked by the same illusion then perhaps it is our ability to observe that connects us. Could the observation itself be the illusion?
This is why I don't like using the word "illusion" and I certainly don't hold with the notion of a shared human consciousness. It's not that we're being tricked into observing something that isn't there but rather that we're interpreting our observation incorrectly. "The problem of the observer" has haunted physics for a century and the most famous analogous example goes back a long way further. We see the sun rise in the east, traverse an arc across the sky, and then set in the west. Therefore the sun orbits the earth. This is a perfectly logical conclusion and yet we know it to be false.
Make no mistake. If our solar system contained no other planets then the heliocentric model of cosmology would NEVER have been discovered because no other evidence exists to even hint at the possibility. In fact in the absence of other planets to say that the earth orbits the sun is no more meaningful than to say that the sun orbits the earth. They simply orbit each other. The heliocentric model is without doubt the most remarkable feat of human reason in the history of our species and it's all too easy to overlook this fact. It is insanely counter-intuitive until we understand how it works and then it instantly becomes bloody obvious. The same could be said of Newtonian gravity which is also about as counter-intuitive as it gets until such time as we get it. This says much for the way our intuitions are shaped by our learning but I'll avoid the digression.
The observed expansion of the universe has been the most difficult nut to crack but in fact it lends itself to a breathtakingly simple explanation which immediately makes all the counter-intuitive conclusions of modern physics evaporate. You've confessed to only a superficial grasp of physics so I hope you can get it, but those with a little bit more should be able to get this quite easily. It doesn't require a degree in physics ( I haven't got one) but a good layman's grasp would be helpful and a flexible mind is essential. We don't observe the universe expanding but rather we observe the universe
aging. Einstein's model of General Relativity is second only to the Copernican paradigm in terms of the deep truth it reveals. It shows us that gravity and time are intimately interwoven in a precise mathematical relationship which is inversely logarithmic in its nature. This means that the universe ages more slowly within galaxies than it does between them because the galaxies are gravitationally bound. Because the gravitational field is stronger within a galaxy than it is in intergalactic "space" time quite literally passes more slowly in these regions. When we think we're observing the universe expanding what we're actually observing is the galaxies moving away from each other, a subtly nuanced difference in perspective which makes the world of difference.
It takes a bit of conceptual gymnastics to get your head around this but an observation is nothing more than the construction of a mental map of our surroundings by our consciousness. If time passes more quickly between galaxies than it does within them then the observer's mental map will perceive this as the galaxies moving away from each other. This is not an illusion because the galaxies are indeed moving away from each other but they're not moving away from each other in space, they're moving away from each other in TIME. The space exists only in the mind of the observer because he spatialises time, as does Special Relativity when it represents time as a spatial dimension. This means that our current models of physics are modelling the mental map of the observer rather modelling than the real universe.
That 3 dimensional space is solely the construct of the consciousness of the observer has been mainstream metaphysics since the pre-Socratics. For almost 3 millennia not a single philosopher has ever said anything different but for reasons best known to themselves our physicists have steadfastly ignored this fact. All of the biological sciences accept this as a given and neuroscience has gone a long way to describing the mechanisms for this and yet the physicists remain adamant in their hubris and therefore remain stuck with a spacetime paradigm which makes no sense.
If they were to pay some closer attention to what scholars in other fields have shown us they could see that a spaceless model of the universe leads seamlessly to quantum gravity and the so-called Theory of Everything but I won't head down that path because that part gets rather technical.
The only other point I'd make is that this is a genuine scientific hypothesis because it yields testable predictions which contradict those of the spacetime paradigm. These relate to the phenomenon of "quantum" entanglement, which has nothing to do with the rest of the quantum mechanics nonsense but is a straightforward prediction from GR. The irony of all this is that Einstein knew bloody well all along that his paradigm was wrong and said so many times. The reason why he knew it was wrong was because the "spooky action at a distance" contradicted it and entanglement had been satisfactorily demonstrated. For almost a hundred years since the ostriches have never lifted their heads out of the sand.
Regards Leo
- By Good_Egg
- By Fried Egg