Time

I don't understand time. It is fluid and yet our brains make it into something linear. Time is relative and therefore time does not actually exist. It is an illusion, a point that has been stretched, like an elastic band, and has become a line. Space and time are like two elastic bands. But what about past and future? Is the past also fluid, and more importantly, is the future fluid?

If time doesn't exist, everything happens at the same time, and that has quite a few consequences. When everything happens at the same time, there is no choice, there is no free will, everything is fixed in that one point of time. If time does not exist, then the past is just as fixed as the future. And what is consciousness, in such a universe, where time does not exist? What if everything is really fixed in a Newtonian way? What then is consciousness?

Descartes has saddled us with a lot of bullshit. The separation between mind and matter does not exist. There is no psychic and physical reality. There's only one thing. Now suppose there were matter and spirit, how should the two communicate with each other? It seems like a simple question, but it is impossible to answer. It's a bit like asking where exactly gravity comes from. We absolutely don't know the answer to that. It is 2020, we can develop a vaccine against Corona in 6 months (although I have my doubts about it) but no one knows exactly what gravity is. How is it that two particles, between which there is a vacuum, attract each other? Nobody knows.

So what then is consciousness? You could say that consciousness simply rides along on a universe in which everything is fixed. That there is no choice or free will, but there is consciousness that can observe everything. But what's the point in that?

I often think about life as a VR game. That maybe there is someone somewhere with VR glasses, that that is my consciousness, and that this life is just a game. But that is actually just shifting the problem, because then you can start asking the same questions for the person with the VR glasses.

It's a mess. Nobody knows what we're doing here. And what bothers me endlessly is that many people act as if they know. We raise our children with truths that do not exist. There are no truths. We don't know what we're doing here, we don't know where we're going today, we don't know what gravity is, we don't understand anything about consciousness, we don't understand time and space, and yet we pretend we have it all figured out.

Time. Where does time go when you sleep? Does anything actually matter in this little life of ours? What is time and space? I think my biggest fear is time. Imagine being locked in time and space... Is that perhaps life, being locked in time and space?

Does consciousness exist without time and space? I think so. Actually, it only exists in that reality without time and space.

Greetz, Cardoen