SRH + Time

Ideas forming. The SRH depends upon a type of relativity. It says that any entity lives within a unique ontology where it is a given that it exists. In other words it can never be the case that it doesn’t exist within its own “frame of reference”.

This hierarchy is the same as we see with a brain scientist looking at their own brain patterns. Whatever they conclude “objectively” depends a priori upon what they experience “subjectively”. If they find a pattern that corresponds to them thinking they must realise that their conclusions are based upon the perspective of everyone else, not upon their own perspective. Within their own perspective it is rather pointless the conclude that they are thinking from the image, since “thinking” was what they had to be able to identify anyway in order to determine the correspondence between image and “thinking” in the first place.

Now, as is well documented, this is all a linguistic feature since patients can only inform scientists that they are “thinking” through language. The correspondence is between events in the body and things said, between phenomena and mysteriously the meaning of what is said (which is somehow for materialists an unexamined, unexplained, given). Typically scientists rarely question that what they are doing, and how they understand it, is within a prior world of language so they can only imagine that their experiments are somehow mysteriously beyond language. In reality language and culture precedes their enquiries. This hierarchy is the SRH also as above. As an aside I mused recently that “myth” which we attribute to the ancient stories is just as active and important today, it is just that the wealth of phenomena and facts that we weave together with myth today is so much denser. We have facts on everything and so the stories are that much more convoluted to account for all these details.

Finally the relevance to Time. We can never be outside our own time frame. Whichever time we end up in, be that Past, Present or Future for us it will be just our own time frame—it will always be Today in other words. Just as an entity cannot meaningfully make a statement about its own existence, it cannot, it seems, make a meaningful statement about its Time either. Time, like existence, only happens through the eyes of someone else for whom we may be dead or for whom we have been gone a long time. To explain the death of my grandfather to my young sister my parents said that he had gone on a long trip. There is little difference. The point is that these things are only meaningful to someone else, necessarily never ourselves. So the idea of Time travel actually contradicts the nature of Time. If I travelled in time it would mean nothing to me, in reality it would still be Today when I arrived. What would be different would be my memories and expectations. I would have memories of things that hadn’t happened yet and would have the habits of the world I left. I wouldn’t be able to meet the people I remembered and might not know the language or the customs if it was a long time before for example. However while everything might have changed it is still Today and the Time in my frame of reference hasn’t changed. Only by finding out the year from someone else and comparing with my memory of the year (which I was told before I left)  would I be able to say that I had time travelled. But this is just language not reality; it is only what other people would say.

Now does this shed light on the murder paradox? Can’t see it for now…