Dear Edwin,
Here we are again with essays in another contest. I appreciate very much the stimulating comments you wrote about my essay. Given your comments, I can see that I need to clarify and extend my thinking, and perhaps to modify it, on several matters. Although I do not suppose that believing something (for example, that free will is an illusion, or that it is not) makes the belief true for the person who believes, the relations among truth, belief, and illusion can get complicated when the belief is about the person who believes or about the believing process itself. Then too, I need to think more about the way in which the human predicament, or at least the predicament of an individual human being, is shaped by the thoughts of that individual, including self-referential thoughts about the individual's personal condition and about the human condition in general. And finally, you raise the important issue of degrees of consciousness. You refer specifically to Zen and similar disciplines. The point of Zen might be that the problems of being conscious are not inherent in consciousness as such and therefore do not beset all forms of consciousness. From a perspective like that of Zen, one might say that there is a form of consciousness without any awareness of an individualized subject of consciousness. It would be awareness without awareness of itself, without awareness of any subject having or doing the awareness. I am inclined to believe that this kind of consciousness does exist and that some people sometimes by effort or by accident do attain it. Nonetheless, most people most of the time exist for better or for worse with ordinary human consciousness.
But here I want to comment on your essay. I do not fully understand why you attribute to Einstein a belief in multiple time dimensions. I had thought that in the standard view of physicists there is only one time dimension, although there are three dimensions of space. (We leave aside string-theory speculations about additional spatial dimensions.) Again, according to what I have read, space and time are two different things, although it is not clear, at least not clear to me, what the difference is, and it is not clear whether the full difference between the two is described or explained in the equations of physics.
I had thought that the matter of varying measurements involving time and space, including varying opinions about whether two events are or are not simultaneous, amounted to something like this: There is only one time for the entire universe. This universal time is defined by the reference frame in which the universe is expanding uniformly. Two events are really simultaneous if and only if they are simultaneous when observed in this reference frame. This preserves universal simultaneity as fundamental to the nature of time, which is the principle you assert on page 9 at the conclusion of your essay. The relativity of measurements, including differing measurements of simultaneity, comes into the picture because all measurements are local processes within the universe. No observation process or measurement process occurs from the vantage point of the universe. Hence, all observations are modified by local conditions. One might even say that the modifications are distortions. The modifications apply to all physical processes. The modifications apply to all human observations, insofar as those observations are or rely upon physical processes. My understanding of Einstein's special and general theories of relativity is that they provide, among other things, ways of correlating one distorted local measurement with other distorted local measurements. Using Einstein's procedures one could also correlate local measurements to the the universal perspective, the perspective of universal time, if one cared to do that. However, rarely if ever is there a practical need for that. This at any rate was how I had understood matters. I do not see how to change this view in the light of the considerations you bring forward.
I am not sure whether the distinction between mathematical structures and physical reality is relevant to these issues. In any case, I certainly agree with the statement that you quote from Tim Maudlin at the bottom of page 2. We should not confuse a mathematical structure with physical reality, or even with physical possibility, regardless of how detailed the mathematical structure might be.
Perhaps you have already answered my questions in the essay or in responses to other comments. However that may be, thank you for a very thought-provoking essay.
Laurence Hitterdale