Time & Consciousness: Two Faces of One Mystery? Part 3

Contextual Division and the Analysis of Linear Time (by Christopher Holvenstot): Abstract: I employ a contextually divided analysis to reconsider the relevance of linear time in biological concerns and its irrelevance in a realm defined by quantum and cosmological properties. Linear time is explored as a necessary byproduct of biological world-modeling; a cognitive construct crafted and utilized by sentient organisms to manage successful narratives of nutrition, procreation and self-protection. Order and disorder are proposed as the fundamental conceptual components of a cognitively constructed linear experience of duration. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/84

How Unconditioned Consciousness, Infinite Information, Potential Energy, and Time Created Our Universe (by Leon H. Maurer)

Abstract: Since the cause and nature of consciousness and its derivation from the universe have never been satisfactorily explained by conventional reductive science, I offer here a rationally imaginative basis for a new scientific paradigm. This new view not only explains the origin of the physical universe, but also that potential consciousness, time, mass/energy and infinite holographic information are rooted in original spin momentum of unconditioned pre-cosmic (empty) space (see appendix) – the absolute source of all relative phenomenal existence. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/85

Whitehead & the Elusive Present: Process Philosophy’s Creative Core (by Gregory M. Nixon)

Abstract: Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) ­– all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/86