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Old 02-January-2009, 04:41 PM
grant hutchison grant hutchison is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gzhpcu View Post
Einstein once said, "For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent".
Rather poignantly, he wrote that in a letter to the family of his old friend Michele Besso, expressing his feelings about Besso's death. The quotation above is preceded by "Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing."

Quote:
Originally Posted by gzhpcu View Post
Our conscious experience seems to sweep through the slices.
And the "seeming" can come from the fact that each space-time instance of our consciousness codes up its "present" interactions and its "past" interactions, but not its "future" interactions. Any moment of my conscious experience contains a sense of an expanding past, as I remember the past, and remember remembering the past.

Grant Hutchison
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