Hello Prof. Mikovic,
while i'm particularly sympathetic to the general premise here, because i am sympathetic to the cause, there are a couple of aspects here i think i'd like to see taken a little more deeply in their consideration.
re:
The ideas stored in our brain can be of two types: the ideas which are records of our interactions with the environment and the ideas which are not this, i.e. the abstract ideas.
while i may be misinterpreting the intent here, this strikes me as slightly facile. we're part of the environment, cannot be separated from it (try as we may, and we do indeed try mightily to achieve this these days). any thoughts occurring, even abstractions, are a subset of 'environment'. even our abstractions have arisen in some way from interactions with the environment and constitute further interaction with the intimate environmental subset we call 'self'.
even mathematics cannot actually isolate itself from the context from which it emerges.
perhaps taking it backward:
abstract thought not describable in mathematical terms is a capacity of consciousness in human beings.
human beings are a feature in the universe.
some aspects of the universe are not describable in mathematical terms.
in your discussion with Dr. Stanfield above, re: "How to specify non-mathematical ideas is an interesting problem, but the simplest approach is to use a human language to describe their relations to other ideas."
ya. very interesting problem. even language falls short. we only have so many words, we become dependent on them, they come to limit our perceptions - if we can't name it, we have a hard time acknowledging its existence. "table" for an elaborately carved and inlaid Louis XIV piece of furniture hardly cuts it. not to mention the dynamics that lead to the table being used as a work bench in a shed in southern Illinois. the topic of 'requirements of infinite computational resources' came up in a paper elsewhere here. it's part of what got me interested in fine arts years ago - as a communications medium with a potentially much broader spectrum of expression.
in differing cultures, there have been different ways of communicating some very ethereal concepts.
in Zen, there is a mind state of which it is said, "however you describe it, that's not it."
yet it has been communicated in fidelity down through the generations and can't be faked.
the above paragraph is both entirely true and patently false.
such abstractions beyond expression in terms of systematized symbolic language of any sort are typically considered as 'nonexistent' in physics or math.
that's a problem.
re:
The ideas in observer's brain could be then pictured as colored graphs attached to the hooks.
The number of ideas on a hook is increasing with time(2), corresponding to our increasing
memory and knowledge.
well, "increasing"... this is an anthropocentric convention for the depiction of the process, but it may not be entirely accurate to say 'increasing', so much as a continuously varying frame of reference.
within a couple of days, my conscious recollection of having written this and your recollection of ever having read it will likely be gone forever. but there may be left a faint 'something' like a hint of the aroma of a cup of coffee lingering in the air.
if one could actually recollect in detail all of one's experiences, 'increasing' might be appropriate, but this does not appear to be what actually happens.
re:
In theories with global time, the conflict with relativity can be avoided if one postulates that the label t is not the same as a clock reading and that a clock reading
depends on the clock trajectory.
yes. this would help a lot.
re:
On the other hand, it is clear that t is related to the age of the universe. Since t always increases,
this is not so clear here.
't' always 'increases' because this is the convention of how we 'count' 't' (on occasion, 't' actually diminishes. i remember watching launches of astronauts when it was a novel thing - "four, three, two, one, ignition, lift-off), not necessarily an inherent quality of 't' itself. increase or decrease coupled with the word 'time' is largely a subjective valuation. it might be much more appropriate to say that the age of the universe is related to 't' rather than the other way around. i'm far from convinced of any commutative property involved in this relationship between time and events -in- time. it is clear from most of the papers here that time frequently gets confused with the metric. akin to taking measurements of the front entrance to the Taj Mahal, presenting the measurements as a set of numbers on a sheet of paper and saying, 'This is the Taj Mahal'.
"That's the Taj Mahal?" "Well, I only had an hour before the tour bus left and they wouldn't let me go up on the roof or inside." "What color is it?" "Oh. That's right here... 6."
re:
then the time travel will be impossible within our framework.
i'd appreciate it if this were a little more specific. time travel in consciousness is indeed demonstrably possible. using a very simple technique for minimizing imaginative interference, it is more than likely that you yourself could experience perception and verifiable data acquisition of distant past, future and distant elsewhere now events in explicit violation of the speed of light information transmission limitation. this has some very interesting implications for our concept of the nature of time, suggestive of a very space-like quality. while physically verifiable feedback for very great distances in time or space is obviously problematic, clock time and physical distance are apparently irrelevant in that it doesn't seem to take any more or less time to access the intended target if it is far away in time or space than if it is more close at hand. this suggests an 'i'-like quality involved in both time and consciousness.
thanks for your paper,
glad to meet you,
:-)
matt kolasinski
