The Treadmills of Time

By Richard John Kosciejew

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to an assigning of some levelling plexuity, and that, the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system; we can legibly assume that the cosmos, as a legitimate point of singularity, as an undivided totality in the contributions for making of its whole. In that, for evincing to the progressive principal order of complementarity, as placed within the intertwining relations within its given parts. Minded that this collective and undivided whole exists in some sense within all contributions of its parts, then one can declare positively or firmly maintain that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the evidence for all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain is equivalently matched to all physical phenomena, as this can be viewed as an emergent property in the possessive nature of totality, such that it can be found within the whole for existing by its reason of certainty. As, can be feasible as plausibly concluded, that locality presupposes the consciousness of the universe, as we are conscious to its existing conventions within this prevalent response to approaching the expeditions into which of the past-present-future dimensions, allow to some marginal glimpse into the unthinkable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496936172

Richard John Kosciejew

Richard john Kosciejew, a German-born Canadian who now takes residence in Toronto Ontario. Richard, received his public school training at the Alexander Muir Public School, then attended the secondary level of education at Central Technical School. As gathering opportunities came, he studied at the Centennial College, he also attended the University of Toronto, and his graduate studies at the University of Western Ontario, situated in London. His academia of study rested upon his analytical prowess and completed ‘The Designing Theory of Transference.’ His other books are ‘Mental Illness’ and ‘The Phenomenon of Transference,’ among others.

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Published by AuthorHouse   10/15/2014

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CONTENTS

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to an assigning of some levelling plexuity, and that, the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system; we can legibly assume that the cosmos, as a legitimate point of singularity, as an undivided totality in the contributions for making of its whole. In that, for evincing to the ‘progressive principal order’ of complementarity, as placed within the intertwining relations within its given parts. Minded that this collective and undivided

whole exists in some sense within all contributions of its parts, then one can declare positively or firmly maintain that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the evidence for all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain is equivalently matched to all physical phenomena, as this can be viewed as an emergent property in the possessive nature of totality, such that it can be found within the whole for existing by its reason of certainty. As, can be feasible as plausibly concluded, that locality presupposes the consciousness of the universe, as ‘we’ are conscious to its existing conventions within this prevalent response to approaching the expeditions into which of the past-present-future dimensions, allow to some marginal glimpse into the unthinkable.

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PART ONE

In Time

… a moving image of eternity ‘(Plato)

… the number of movements in respect of the before and after’ (Aristotle)

… the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act of experience to another (Plotinus)

… a present of things past, memory, a present of things present, sight, and a’; present of things future expectation (Augustine)

…once questioned of time, of which I did so reply, Had you not asked me ‘what is time,’ I would know.

These definitions, like all attempts to encapsulate the essence of time in some neat formula, are unhelpfully circular because they employ temporal notions. Although time might be too basic to admit of definition, there are many questions about time that philosophers have made some progress in answering by analysis both of how we ordinarily experience and talk about time, and of the deliverance of science, thereby clarifying and deepening our understanding of what time is. Of what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan) absorbs in the apprehensions toward belief. That is, ‘ideas’, as eternal, mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world, are something such as of a thought or conception that potentially or veritably is to exist. By the element or the plexuity of elements in an individual velleity, which feels, perceives, thinks, wills and especially reasons as a product of mental activity. Though, having itself the intelligence, intellect, consciousness, mental mentality, faculty, function or power in an ‘idea’, the foreshadowing inclination is knowing its minded combination, often specific and used in combination to both - a fair minded or evil-minded human history. It is in essence a history of ideas, justly as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stress contemplation and reasoning as language in the interpretative unclothing of thought.

Although ideas produce many problems of interpretation, but narrative descriptions between them, they define a space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they may be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. ‘Ideas’ tentatively forward a given provisional contributive distribution, for which things of component constituents are applicably oriented. Even to the sensibility that objective knowledge can be affirmatively approved for what exists in the mind or the appointed representations with which it is expressed. They are the essential constituent components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true can be understood.

Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of gratifying objectivity and a timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified the point where they make up the only real world. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’ opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas became assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being. With a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like an image, and the impression that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in a fanciful imagination. It is not reason but the ‘imagination’ that is found responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what directly leads us to attribute the necessary relation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.

A similar appeal to certain ‘principles of the imagination’ is what explains our belief in a world of enduring objects. Experience alone cannot produce that belief, everything we directly perceive is ‘momentary’ and ‘fleeting’. Whatever our experience is like, no reasoning could assure us of the existence of something as autonomous of our impressions that continues to exist when they cease. The series of constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features that Hume calls ‘constancy’ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind so eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms that can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments’, and the observation of those particular effects, which have succumbantly resulted from [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’.

Until very recently it could have been that most approaches to the philosophy of science were ‘cognitive’. This includes ‘logical positivism’, as nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have agreed that science ought to be ‘value-free’. This had been a particular emphasis by the first positivist, as it would be upon twentieth-century successors. Science, so it is said, deals with ‘facts’, and facts and values and irreducibly distinct. Facts are objective. They are what we seek in our knowledge of the world. Values are subjective: They bear the mark of human interest, they are the radically individualized products of feeling and desire. Fact and value cannot, therefore, be inferred from fact, fact cannot be influenced by value. There were philosophers, notably some in the Kantian tradition, who viewed the relation of the human individual to the universalist aspiration of difference as an alternative differential. Nevertheless, the legacy of three centuries of largely empiricist reflection of the ‘new’ sciences ushered in by Galilee Galileo (1564-1642), the Italian scientist whose distinction belongs to the history of physics and astronomy, rather than natural philosophy.

The philosophical importance of Galileo’s science rests largely upon the following closely related achievements: (1) His stunning successful arguments against Aristotelean science, (2) his proofs that mathematics is applicable to the real world. (3) His conceptually powerful use of experiments, both actual and employed regulatively, (4) His treatment of causality, replacing appeal to hypothesized natural ends with a quest for efficient causes, and (5) his unwavering confidence in the new style of theorizing that would become known as ‘mechanical explanation’.

A century later, the maxim that scientific knowledge is ‘value-laded’ seems almost as entrenched as its opposite was earlier. It is supposed that between fact and value has been breached, and philosophers of science seem quite at home with the thought that science and value may be closely intertwined after all. What has happened to cause such an apparently radical change? What is its implications for the objectivity of science, the prized characteristic that, from Plato’s time onwards, has been assumed to set off real knowledge (epist~m~) from mere opinion (doxa)? To answer these questions adequately, one would first have to know something of the reasons behind the decline of logical positivism, as, well as of the diversity of the philosophies of science that have succeeded it.

More general, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is burgeoning on several fronts. Contemporary philosophical reflection about the mind ~ that has been quite intensive ~ has been influenced by this empirical inquiry, to the extent that the boundary lines between them are blurred in places.

Nonetheless, the philosophy of mind at its core remains a branch of metaphysics, traditionally conceived. Philosophers continue to debate foundational issues in terms not radically differently from those in vogue in previous eras. Many issues in the metaphysics of science hinge on the notion of ‘causation’. This notion is as important in science as it is in everyday thinking, and much scientific theorizing is concerned specifically to identify the ‘causes’ of various phenomena. However, there is little philosophical agreement on what it is to say that one event is the cause of another.

Modern discussion of causation starts with the Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist David Hume (1711-76), who argued that causation is simply a matter for which he denies that we have innate ideas, that the causal relation is observably anything other than ‘constant conjunction’, that there are observable necessary connections anywhere, and that there is either an empirical or demonstrative proof for the assumptions that the future will resemble the past, and that every event has a cause. That is to say, that there is an irresolvable dispute between advocates of free-will and determinism, that extreme scepticism is coherent and that we can find the experiential source of our ideas of self-substance or God.

Many philosophers of science during the past century have preferred to talk about ‘explanation’ than ‘causation’. According to the covering-law model of explanation, something is explained if it can be deduced from premises that include one or more laws. As applied to the explanation of particular events this implies that a particular event can be explained if it is linked by a law to another particular event. However, while they are often treated as separate theories, the covering-law account of explanation is at bottom little more than a variant of Hume’s constant conjunction account of causation. This affinity shows up in the fact at the covering-law account faces essentially the same difficulties as Hume: (1) In appealing to deduction from ‘laws’, it needs to explain the difference between genuine laws and accidentally true regularities: (2) Its omission by effects, and effects by causes, after all, it is as easy to deduce the height of the flag-pole from the length of its shadow and the law of optics: (3) Are the laws invoked in explanation required to be exceptionally deterministic, or is it acceptable to say, that to appeal to the merely probabilistic fact that smoking makes cancer more likely, in explaining why some particular person develops cancer?

Nevertheless, one of the centrally obtainable achievements for which the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploitrated in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analysis or explanations of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts as fitness and biological function. By introducing ‘teleological considerations’, this account views beliefs as states with biological purpose and analyses as their truth conditions specifically as those conditions that are biologically supposed to covariance, varying with another variable or relating to covariant theory. Nonetheless, the principle that the laws of physics have the same form regardless of the system of co-ordinates, which are expressed in a statistical measure of the variable of two random variables that are observed or measured in the same mean time. This measure is equal to the product of the deviations of corresponding values of the two variables from their respective means.

The American philosopher of mind (1935-) Jerry Alan Fodor, is known for resolute ‘realism’ about the nature of mental functioning, taking the analogy between thought and computation seriously. Fodor believes that mental representations should be conceived as individual states with their own identities and structures, like formulae transformed by processes of computation or thought. His views are frequently contrasted with those of ‘hotlist’ such as the American philosopher, Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), or ‘instrumentalists’ about mental ascription, such as the British philosopher of logic and language Eardley Anthony Michael Dummett, 1925-, in recent years he has become a vocal critic of some aspirations of cognitive science.

Nonetheless, a suggestion extrapolating the solution of teleology is continually queried by points as owing to ‘causation’ and ‘content’, and ultimately a fundamental appreciation is to be considered, is that: We suppose that there is a causal path from A’s to ‘B’s’ and a causal path from B’s to ‘A’s’, and our problem is to find some difference between B’s-caused ‘A’s’ and A-caused ‘A’s’ in virtue of which the former but not the latter misrepresented. Perhaps, the two paths differ in their counterfactual properties. Despite the fact that A’s and B’s nuisance gives cause by A’s’ wherefore each, fragmentation is in pieces of its matter in the contestation of conveyance, and, as, perhaps, a conceivable assumption deducing that of only A’s would cause ‘A’s’ in ~ as one can say -, ‘optimal circumstances’. We could then hold that a symbol expresses its ‘optimal property’, the property that would causally control its tokening in optimal circumstances. Correspondingly, when the tokening of a symbol is causally controlled by properties other than its optimal property, the tokens that eventuate are ipso facto wild.

Suppose presently, that this story about ‘optimal circumstances’ is proposed as part of a naturalized semantics for mental representations. In which case it is, of course, essential that saying that the optimal circumstances for tokening a mental representation are in terms that are not in themselves a possibility for either semantical or intentionality. (It would not do, for example, to identify the optimal circumstances for tokening a symbol as those in which the tokens are true, that would be to assume precisely the semantical notion that the theory is supposed to naturalize.) Befittingly, the suggestion ~ to put it briefly ~ is that appeals to ‘optimality’ should be buttressed by appeals to ‘teleology’: Optimal circumstances are the ones in which the mechanisms that mediate symbol tokening are functioning ‘as they are supposed to’. With mental representations, these would be paradigmatical circumstances where the mechanisms of belief fixation are functioning as them are supposed to. To such a degree that it evinces in prove that the teleology of the cognitive mechanisms determines the optimal condition for belief fixation, and the optimal condition for belief fixation determines the content of beliefs. So the story goes.

Temporally becoming and the A- and B-theories of time are accorded to the B-theory. Time consists in nothing but a fixed ‘B-series’ of events running from earlier to later. The ‘shifting’ going from the future through to present and back into the past and, moreover, in shifting, with respect to these determinations, as later sort of change, commonly referred to as ‘temporal becoming.’ Gives rise to well-known plexuities concerning both, of what does the shifting and the sort of shift involved. Often it is said that it is the present or now that shift to ever-later times. This quickly leads to absurdity. The ‘present’ and ‘now’, like ‘this time,’ are used to refer to a moment of time. Thus, to say, that the present shifts to later times entails that this very moment of time-the present-will become some other moment of time and thus cease to be identical with itself. Sometimes the entity that shifts is the property of ‘nowness’ or ‘presentness’. The problem is that every event has this property at some time, namely when it occurs. Thus, what must qualify some event for being now ‘simplicities’ are it’s having the property of nowness now. This is the start of an infinite regress that is vicious because at each stage we are left with an unexpurgated use of ‘now’, the very term that was supposed to be analysed in terms of the property of ‘nowness’. If events are to change from bringing future to present and from present too past, as is required by temporal becoming, they must do so in relation to some mysterious transcendent entity, since temporal relations between events and/and times plexuities for it must occur at a particular rate, and yet, a rate of change involves a comparison between one kind of change and a change of time. Herein, it is change of time that is compared to change of time, resulting in the seeming tautologies that time passes or shifts at the rate of one second per second, surely an absurdity, since this is not a rate of change at all. Broad, attempted to shift these plexuities by saying that becoming is ‘sui generis’ and thereby defies analysis, which put him on the side of the mystically inclined, as Bergson who thought that it could be known only through an act of ineffable intuition.

To escape from the shackles of both plexuity and mysticism, as well as to satisfy the demand of science to view the world non-perpetually, the B-series through a linguistic reduction in which a temporal indexical proposition reporting an even as past, present, or future is shown to be identical with a non-indexical proposition reporting a relation of precedence or simultaneity between it and another event or time. It is generally conceded that such a reduction fails, since it generally of no indexical proposition that is identical with any non-indexical one, this being due to the fact that one can have a propositional attitude toward one of them that are not had to the other; e.g., I can believe that it is now raining without believing that it rains (tenselessly) at t7. The friends of becoming have drawn the wrong moral from this failure-that there is a mysterious Mr. X out there doing The Shift. They have overlooked the fact that two sentences can express different propositions and yet report one and the same event or state of affairs; e.g., ‘This is water’ and ‘this is a collection of H2O molecules’, though differing in sense reporting the same state of affairs-this being water, but this being of nothing but this being a collection of H2O molecules.

To maintain that time discrete would require not only abandoning the continuum but also the density property as well, giving up either conflicts with the intuition that time is one-dimensional and physics literatures contain speculations about a discrete time built of ‘chronons’ or ‘temporal atoms’, but thus far such hypothetical entities have not been incorporated into a satisfactory theory.

In a scholium of the Principia, Newton declared that Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, ‘flows equably’ without relation to anything ‘external’. There are at least five interrelated senses in which time was absolute for Newton. First, he thought that there was a frame-independent relation of simultaneity for events. Second, he thought that there was a frame-independent measure of duration for non-simultaneous events. He used ‘flow equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious ‘temporal becoming,’ but instead to note the second sense of absoluteness and partly to indicate two further kinds of absoluteness and partly to indicate upon the further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate the latter, note that ‘flows equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious ‘temporal becoming’ in the second sense of absoluteness and other kinds of further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate its notation that ‘flows equably’ is modified by ‘without’ relation to anything external. Here Newton was to assert (third sense of absolute) that the lapse of time between two events would be what it is even between two events would be what it is even if the distribution of motions of material bodies were different. He was presupposing a related form of absoluteness (fourth senses) according to which the metric of time is intrinsic to the temporal intervals.

Leibniz’s philosophy of time placed him in agreement with Newton as regards to the first two senses of ‘absolute’ which assert the non-relative or frame-independent nature of time. However, Leibniz was very much opposed to Newton on the forth sense of ‘absolute’. According to Leibniz’s relational conception of time, any talk about the length of a temporal interval must be unpacked in terms of talk about the relation of the interval to an extrinsic metric standard. Furthermore, Leibniz used his principles of sufficient reason and identity of indescernibles to argue against a fifth sense of ‘absolute’, implicit in Newton’s philosophy in which physical events are situated. On the contrary, the relational view holds that time is nothing over and above the structure of relations of events.

Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity have a direct bearing on parts of these controversies. The special theory necessitates the abandonment and duration. For any pair of space-like related events in Minkowski space-time there is an inertial frame in which the events are simultaneous, another frame in which the first event is temporally prior, and still a third in which the second event is temporally prior. And the temporal intervals between two-time like related event depends on the world time connecting them. In fact, for any > 0, no matter how small, there is a world time connecting the events whose proper length is less than, (This is the essencity of the so-called twin paradox.) The general theory of relativity abandons the third sense of absoluteness, since it entails that the metrical structure of space-time covaries with the distribution of mass-energy in a manner specified by Einstein’s field equations. But the heart of the absolute-relational controversies-as focussed by the fourth and fifth sense of ‘absolute’ -is not settled by relativistic considerations. Indeed, opponents from both sides of the debate claim to find support for their positions in the special and general theories.

The space-time is known of a four-dimensional continuum combining the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point is the location of an event, all of which together represent ‘the world’ through time; paths in the continuum (world lines) represent the dynamical histories of moving particles, so that straight world lines correspond to uniform motion; three-dimensional sections of constant time value (‘space like hypersurfaces’ or ‘simultaneity slices’) represent all of the space at a give time.

The idea was foreshadowed when Kant represented ‘the phenomenal world’ as a plane defined by space and time as perpendicular axes (Inaugural Dissertation, 1770), and when Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1814) referred to mechanics as ‘the analytic geometry of four dimensions,’ But classical mechanics assume a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat space and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized ‘absolute simultaneity’ and made the velocity of light a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann showed in 1908 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions; observers on relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a four-dimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. Minkowski’s model then made possibly the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time in the presence of mass and the paths of falling bodies as the straightest world lines within the curvilinear efficiency of space-time.

A property of the carriers, or space-time paths, of well-behaved objects called spatiotemporal continuity, such like that of a space-time path in a series of possible spatiotemporal positions, each represented (in a selected coordinate system) by an ordered pair consisting of a time (its temporal component) and a volume of space (its spatial component). Such a path will be spatiotemporally continuous provided it is such that, relative to any inertial frame selected as a coordinate system, (1) for every segment of the series, the temporal components of the members of that segment form a continuum temporal interval, and (2) for any two members and of the series that differ in the temporal components (ti and tj), if Vi and Vj (at least macroscopic objects of familiar kinds) apparently cannot undergo discontinuous change of place, and cannot have temporal gaps in their histories, and therefore the path through space-time traced by such an object must apparently be spatiotemporally continuous. More controversial is the claim that spatiotemporal continuity, together with some continuity with respect to other properties, is sufficient as well as necessary for the identity of such objects-e.g., that if a spatiotemporally continuous path is such that the spatial component of each member of the series is occupied by a table of certain descriptions at the time that is the temporal component of that member that is, then is a single table for that description that traces that path. Those who deny this claim sometimes maintain that it is further required for the identity of material objects that there be causal and counterfactual dependence of later states on earlier ones (ceteris paribus, if the table had been different yesterday, it would be correspondingly different ‘now’). Since it appears that continuous paths, it may be that insofar as spatiotemporal identity, this is because it is required for transtemporal causality.

It has become apparent that something such as a mind is a product of mental activity that has in itself an ‘idea’. Human history is in essence a history of ideas, as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stresses contemplation and reasoning. Justly as language is the dress of thought. Ideas, as eternal, mind-independent forms, or prototypical archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism made thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas,’ so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ (1596-1650), the conscionable extension of ideas to cover whatever is in human minds an extension, of which, Locke (1632-1704) made much use. But are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like sensations? If representational, are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they mental acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor mental acts, but dispositions? Malebranche (1632-1715) and Arnauld (1612-94), and then Leibniz, famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes’, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.

Ideas provided the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes’ ideas became assimilated to whatever it is that lies of conveys to the mind is ascertained by any thinking being.

Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in fancied imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found to be responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect things to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. The series of constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features which Hume calls ‘constancy’ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind in such a way as eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence’. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms which can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which results form [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume, there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind: ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, … there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.

The appending presumptions that are based on the fundamental principles whose assertive assumptions presented in the surmising constrainment to the one-to-one correspondence as having to exist between every element and elements of psychological reality and physical theory, this may serve to bridge the gap between mind and world for those who use physical theories. But, it also suggests that the Cartesian division is inseparably integrated and structurally real, that is to say, as impregnably formidable for physical reality as it is based on ordinary language that explains in not a small part why the radical separation between mind and world as sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes’ persists, as philosophical postmodernism attests, one of the most persuasive features of Western intellectual life.

The history of science reveals that scientific knowledge and method did not spring from a fully-blooming blossom for which the minds of the ancient Greeks did any more than language and culture emerged fully formed in the minds of Homo sapient. Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation. However, it was only after the inherent perceptivity that Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.

The Greek philosophers that we now acknowledge and recognize as the originators of scientific thought were mystics who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The legendary mystification or mysteries for which, in some way are prescribed by whose ancestral heritage has been lost, as the variousness of Greek myths in lacking a factual basis or historical validity. The Greek religious heritage has made it possible for these thinkers to coordinate in the attemptive efforts to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The action toward one’s actual existence but cannot be confuted for servicing practicability, might that of assembling some equalities that state of its quality or state for being accidentally vicinitized to a closer pretension. Such that, presuppositional foundations are taken by or based on succeeding self realizations - might that, deferential dismissiveness is taken to be of something that is taken for granted or as some true existent, especially as a basis for action or reasoning. Nonetheless, these of the affirming of fact, in that of something that is taken for granted or advanced as fact, e.g., decisions based on assumption about the nature of society, generate the conjecture that there is a persuasively influential underlying substance out for which everything emerges and into which everything returns, are attributive to Thales of Miletos, as something that is done. Thales, was apparently led to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view ‘essences’ underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were ‘substances’.

The last remaining feature of what would become the paradigm for the first scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century is attributed to Pythagoras. Like Parmenides, Pythagoras also held that the perceived world is illusory and that there is an exact correspondence between ideas and aspects of external reality. Pythagoras, however, had a different conception of the character of the idea that showed this correspondence. The truth about the fundamental character of the unified and unifying substance, which could be uncovered through reason and contemplation, is, claimed, mathematical in form.

Pythagoras established and was the central figure in a school of philosophy, religion, and mathematics: Pythagoras was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids (symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides’ have aligned themselves as by their use in the same regular polygon) and whole numbers became revered essences or sacred ideas. In contrast with ordinary language, the language of mathematical and geometric forms seemed closed, precise, and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations. The meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans felt that the language empowered the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity most revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological implications of the quantum mechanical description of nature.

Progress was made in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in physics, from the time of classical Greek philosophy to the seventeenth-century in Europe. In Baghdad, for example, from about AD. 750 to AD. 1000, substantial advancement was made in medicine and chemistry, and the relics of Greek science were translated into Arabic, digested, and preserved. Eventually these relics reentered Europe via the Arabic kingdom of Spain and Sicily, and the work of figures like Aristotle and Ptolemy reached the budding universities of France, Italy, and England during the Middle Ages.

For much of this period the Church provided the institutions, like the teaching orders, needed for the rehabilitation of philosophy. Nevertheless, the social, political, and an intellectual climate in Europe was not ripe for a revolution in scientific thought until the seventeenth-century. The continuatives progressive succession had entered into the nineteenth century. The works of the new class of intellectuals we call scientists were more avocations than vocation, and the word scientist did not appear in the English until around 1840.

Copernicus would have been described economics and classical literature, and, most notably, a highly honoured and placed church dignitary. Although we named a revolution after him, this conservative man did not set out to create one. The placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe, which seemed right and necessary to Copernicus, was not a result of making careful astronomical observations. In fact, he made very few observations while developing his theory, and then only to ascertain in his prior conclusions seemed correct. The Copernican system was also not any more useful in making astronomical calculations than the accepted model and was, in some ways, much more difficult to implement, What, then, was his motivation for creating the model and his reasons for presuming that the model was correct?

Copernicus felt that the placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe made sense because he viewed the Sun as the symbol of the presence of a supremely intelligent and intelligible God in a man-centred world. He was apparently led to this conclusion in part because the Pythagoreans identified this fire with the fireball of the Sun. The only positive support to favour activity in the face of opposition was to supply what is needed for sustenance and maintain to hold in position by the serving as a foundation or base for that which Copernicus could offer for the greater efficacy of his model was that it represented a simpler and more mathematically harmonious model of the sort than the Creator would obviously prefer.

The belief that the mind of God as Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature was the principle of the scientific thought of Johannes Kepler. Consequently, most modern physicists would probably feel some discomfort in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of what word. Physical laws, wrote Kepler, ‘lie within the power of understanding of the human mind. God wanted us to perceive them when he created ‘us’ in his image so that we may take part in his own thoughts … Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s’, at least ‘insofar as we understand something of it in this mortal life’.

Believing, like Newton after him, in the literal truth of the word of the Bible, Kepler concluded that the word of God is also transcribed in the immediacy of observable nature. Kepler’s discovery that the planets around the Sun were elliptical, as opposed perfecting circles, may have made the universe seem a less perfect creation of God in ordinary language. For Kepler, however, the new model placed the Sun, which he also viewed as the emblem of a divine agency, more at the centre of a mathematically harmonious universe than the Copernican system allowed. Communing with the perfect mind of God requires, as Kepler put it, ‘knowledge on numbers and quantity’.

By the later part of the nineteenth-century attempts to develop a logically consistent basis for number and arithmetic not only threatened to undermine the efficacy of the classical view of correspondence debates before the advent of quantum physics. They also occasioned a debate about epistemological foundations of mathematical physics that resulted in an attempt by Edmund Husserl to eliminate or obviate the correspondence problem by grounding this physics in human subjective reality. Since, to that place is a direct line as dissenting from Husserl to existentialism to structuralism to constructionism, the linkage between philosophical postmodernism and the debate over the foundations of scientific epistemology is more direct than we had previously imagined.

A complete history of the debate over the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics should probably begin with the discovery of irrational numbers by the followers of Pythagoras, the paradoxes of Zeno and Gottfried Leibniz. Both since we are more concerned with the epistemological crisis of the later nineteenth-century, beginning with the set theory developed by the German mathematician and logician Georg Cantor. From 1878 to 1897, Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities that eventually became a mathematical discipline. ‘A set’ as he defined it, ‘is a collection of definite and distinguishable objects in thought or perception conceived as a whole’.

The present time is clearly a time of a major paradigm shift, but consider the last great paradigm shift, the one that resulted in the Newtonian framework. This previous paradigm shift was profoundly problematic for the human spirit. It led to the conviction that we are strangers, freaks of nature, conscious beings in a universe that is almost entirely unconscious, and that, since the universe is strictly deterministic, even the free will we feel considerations of concern, in feeling of deferential approval and liking to the account on mindful or thoughtful attention, as to the apparent movement of our bodies is an illusion. Yet going through the acceptance of such a paradigm was probably necessary for the Western mind.

The present, however, has no duration, it is merely the demarcation line between past and future. And yet we do have an awareness of periods through the intermittent intervals of time: We have an awareness of something taking a long time, and something else taking only a short time. How is such awareness possible? If that which exists, namely, the present, has no duration, how can we be aware of ‘a long time’? How can we be aware of something that not exist? St. Augustine’s response to the question is an insight into the nature of time. As we experience ‘a long time’, he writes, ‘It is not future time that is long but a long future is a long expectation of the future, the past time is not long, but a long past is a long remembrance of the past’. St. Augustine concludes: It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time, I must not allow my mind to insist that time be something objective’.

Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.

More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.

The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, … as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.

In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.

Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favours reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.

The mechanistic paradigms of the late in the nineteenth century where the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, ‘relativistic’ notions.

Space, is an extended manifold of several dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the number of variable magnitudes needed to specify a location in the manifold in particular, the three-dimensional manifold in which physical objects are situated and with respect to which their mutual positions and distances are defined.

Ancient Greek atomism defined space as the infinite void in which atoms move, but whether space is finite or infinite, and whether void space exists, have remained as a finite plenum and reduced space to the aggregate of all places of physical things. His view was preeminent until Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Copernican revolution, and the revival of atomism reintroduced infinite, homogeneous space as a fundamental cosmological assumption.

Further controversy concerned whether the space assumed by early modern astronomy should be thought of as an independently existing thing or as an abstraction from the spatial relations of physical bodies. Interest in the relativity of motion encouraged the latter view, but Newton pointed out that mechanics presuppose absolute distinctions among motions, and he concluded that absolute space must be postulated along with the basic laws of mot ion (Principia, 1687). Leibniz argued for the relational view from the identity of indescernibles: The parts of space are indistinguishable from one another and therefore cannot be independently existing things. Relativistic physics has defused the original controversy by revealing both spac e and spatial relations as merely observed-dependent manifestations of the structure of space-time.

While Kant shifted the metaphysical controversy to epistemological grounds by claiming that space, with its Euclidean structure, was neither a ‘thing-in-itself’ nor a relation of things-in-themselves, but the a priori form of outer intuition. His view was challenged by the elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, by Helmholtz’s arguments that both intuition and physical space are known through empirical investigation, and finally by the use of non-Euclidean geometry in the theory of relativity. Precisely what geometrical presuppositions are inherent in human spatial perception, and what must be learned from experience, remain subjects of psychological investigation.

The application through which ‘relativity’ is related is accredited to Einstein’s theories on electrodynamics (special relativity, 1905) and gravitation (relativity 1916) because both hold that certain physical quantities, formerly considered objectively, are actually ‘relative to’ the ‘state of, motion’ of the observer. They are called ‘special’ and ‘general’ because, in special relativity, electro dynamical laws determine a restricted class of kinematical reference frames, the ‘inertial frames’ in general relativity, the very distinction between inertial frames and others becomes a relative distinction.

The four-dimensional continua of a space-time combine the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point in the location of an event, all of which together represent ‘the world’ through time, paths in this continuum of space-time lean toward the world line as to present the dynamical histories of moving particles, so that straight world lines correspond to uniform motion; three-dimensional sectors of constant time value (space like hypersurfaces, or simultaneity slices) present themselves towardly or represent all of the space at a given time.

The idea of space-time was foreshadowed when Kant presented ‘the phenomenal world’ as a plane defined by space and time, as perpendicular axes and when Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1814) referred to mechanics as ‘the analytic geometry of four dimensions.’ But classical mechanics assume a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat spac and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized the absolute simultaneity or motion, thus formulating the velocity of light as a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed in 1908 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions": Observers in relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a four dimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. Minkowski’s model then made possibly the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space-in the presence of mass and the paths of free-falling bodies in space, as the straightest world lines in a curved space-time.

A peculiarity of Newton’s theory, of which Newton was well aware, whereas acceleration with respect to space itself had empirical consequences, uniform velocity with respect to space itself had none. The theory of light, particularly in J.C. Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic waves, suggested, however, that there was only one reference frame in which the velocity of light would be the same in all directions, and that this might be taken to be the frame at rest in ‘space itself’. Experiments designed to find this frame seeming to show, nonetheless, that light velocity is isotropic and has its standard value in all frames that are in uniform motion on the average velocity of light of all the frames that are in uniform motion on the Newtonian sense. All these experiments as were measured only the average velocity of light of the light relative to the reference frame over a round-trip path.

It was Einstein’s insight to take the apparent equivalence to all inertial frames with respect to the velocity of light to be a genuine equivalence. His deepest insight was to see that this required that we relativize the notion of the simultaneity of events spatially separated from one another to the state of motion of an inertial reference frame. For any relationist, the distance between nonsimultaneous events is in frame-relative. Einstein proposed the symmetrical claim that for noncoincidents simultaneity is relative as well. This theory of Einstein’ s later became known as the Special Theory of Relativity. Furthermore, classical mechanics makes no distinction between uniform motion and rest, not velocity but acceleration is physically detectable, to a chosen inertial reference frame. Difference states of uniform motion are physically equivalent. But classical electrodynamics described light as wave motion with a constant velocity through a medium, called the ‘ether.’ It follows that the measured velocity of light should depend on the motion of the observer relative to the medium. When interferometer experiments suggested that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of the source, H.A. Lorentz proposed that objects in motion contracted in the direction of motion through the ether (while their local time ‘dilates’), and that this effect masks the difference in the velocity of light. Einstein, however, associated the interferometry results with many other indications that the theoretical distinction between uniform motion and rest in the ether lacks empirical content. He therefore postulated that, in electrodynamics as in mechanics, all states of uniform motion are equivalent. To explain the apparent paradox that observations with different velocities can agree on the velocity of light, He criticized the idea of an ‘absolute’ or frame-independent measure of simultaneity: simultaneity of distant events can only be established by some kind of signalling, but experiments suggested that light is the only signal with an invariant velocity, and observers in relative motion who determine simultaneity with light signals obtain differing results. Moreover, since objective measurement of time and length presupposes absolute simultaneity, observers in relative motion will also disagree on time and length. So Lorentz’s contraction and dilation are not physical effects, but consequences of the relativity of simultaneity, length, and time, to the motion of the observer. But this relativity follows from the invariance of th laws of electrodynamics, and the invariant content of the theory is expressed geometrically in Minkowski space-time. Logical empiricist’s took the theory as an illustration of how epistemological analysis of a concept (time) could eliminate empirically superfluous notions (absolute simultaneity).

Einstein‘s understanding of space and time was given an elegant framework by H. Minkowski in the form of Minkowski space-time. The primitive elements of the theory were point like locations in both space and time of unextended happenings. These were called the ‘event locations’ or the ‘events of a four-dimensional manifold’. There is a frame-invariant separation of events called the ‘interval’ But the spatial separation between two noncoincident events, as well as their temporal separation, are well defined only relative to a chosen inertial reference frame of space: Space separation and time by themselves, to integrated space-time required a subtle rethinking on the subject matter of geometry of a four-dimensional space, as well as temporal spatio-structure. These are well defined only relative to a chosen inertial reference frame. In a sense, space and time are integrated into a single absolute structure. Space - and time is integrated into an infixing unit of singularity and only a derivative and relativized existence.

Whereas the geometry of this space-time bore some analogies to a Euclidean geometry, the transition from space and time by them to integrate of a four-dimensional space, the transition from space and time required a subtle rethinking of the very subject matter of geometry. Straight lines are the straightest curves of this ‘flat space-time’, but they include ‘null straight lines’ Interpreted as the events in the life history of a light ray in a vacuum and ‘time like straight lines interpreted as the collection of inertial lines, and interpreted as events in the history of a free inertial material particle, as well as purely spatial straight lines.

Einstein’s second great contribution to the revolution in scientific thinking about space and time arose from a problem of fitting the theory of gravity into the new relativistic framework. The result of his thinking was the theory known as the general theory of relativity.

Once the concept of space-time had been developed to serve as a framework for relativistic theories. It became evident that space-time notions could play an important role in understanding pre-relativistic theories as well. We note, that one difficulty with the Newtonian theory was that in positing space itself as the reference frame relative to which accelerations were absolute accelerations. It also posited the existence of the absolute, velocities of an object relative to space itself, however, use space-time notions, one can construct a concept of Newton’s own theory. By using space-time notions, one can construct a concept of space-time, called Galilean space-time or neo-Newtonian space-time, intervals, that is to say, that in some ways, more appropriate to the Newtonian theory than Newton’ s own; space itself, and ‘absolute time’. In this new space-time absolute like interval s are retained, such that the theory is nonrelativistic. But while absolute acceleration is definable in both space and time (and empirically observable), the empirically unobservable velocity simply does not exist as a structure in it.

The heuristic basis for the theory rested upon an empirical fact known to be Galileo and Newton, but whose importance was made clear by Einstein, but whose importance was made clear only by Einstein, for that which is gravity. Unlike other theories, such as the theory of electromagnetic forces, such that it acts on all objects as the electromagnetic forces, which act on all objects independently of the material constitution or of the size. The path through space-time followed by an object under the influence of gravity is determined only by its initial position and velocity. Reflection upon the fact that in a curved space that the path of minimal curvature, as from a point, the so-called ‘geodesic’ is uniquely determined by the point and by a direction from it, suggested to Einstein that the path of an object acted upon by gravity can be thought of as a ‘geodesic’ followed by that path in curved space-time. The addition of gravity to the space-time of special relativity can then be thought of as changing the ‘flat’ space-time of Minkowski into a new curved space-time. Using thee new space-time notion s, a ‘curved space-time’ theory of Newtonian gravitation, as it can be constructed. In this space-time, time is absolute, as in Newton. Furthermore, space remains flat Euclidean space. This is unlike the general theory of gravitation, where the space-time curvature can be induced spatial curvature as well. But the space-time curvature of this ‘curved neo-Newtonian space-time; shows up in the fact that particles under the influence of gravity do not follow straight line paths. Their paths become, as in general relativity the curved time like geodesy of the space-time. In this curved space account of Newtonian gravity, as in the general theory of relativity and time, Newtonian gravity, as in this, the general theory of relativity. As of Newtonian gravity, the indistinguishable alternative worlds of theories that take gravity as a force superimposed on a flat space-time collapse to a single world model.

Special relativity made the velocity of light a limit for all causal processes and required revision of Newton’s theory of gravity as an instantaneous action at a distance. General relativity incorporates gravity into the geometry of space-time’ instead of acting directly on one another, masses induce curvature