27 November 2016

Mental acts in relativity theory


Let's do a genuine thought experiment to ponder mental acts in relativity theory a little more closely, throwing some doubt upon the relativistic axiom (experimentally evidenced) that nothing physical can travel faster than the speed of light.:Is the mind physical? Is time itself physical, as physics unquestioningly postulates? :

Think of the sun. How long did it take you to do so? If this mental act were, scientifically speaking, in reality a physical act, then it should take at least 16 minutes to do so. Why? Because your mental act requires first sending a mental signal to the sun, which takes 8 minutes at the speed of light, and then another 8 minutes for your mind to receive a signal back from the sun confirming that it is really there.

Ah, you say, that's a fallacy, because when you think of the sun, you only have to think as far as the little representation of the sun
stored in your brain. So the signal only has to speed a little way via the ganglions of your nerves at around 1 to 100 m/s to retrieve your very own little memory-stored representation of the sun. 

The next question is obvious and remains unanswered: What is the relationship between the representation of the sun purportedly in your brain and the sun out there in space at the centre of our solar system? 

It must get terribly cluttered up there in the attic that is your brain. If you think of the sun you saw yesterday, how do you manage to go back in time to retrieve its representation? Or does your mental-physical act retrieve the same old multi-purpose representation of the sun that merely has been given a time-stamp?

And when you think of your brain, are you really thinking of your brain, or only of a little representation of your brain stored in your brain? According to modern-day science and its corresponding hegemonic subjectivist metaphysics (the tacit, suppressed foundation of analytic philosophy), you have only representations of the external world stored somehow inside consciousness which itself is conceived as located 
somehow physically in your brain.

Modern science perseveres today in trying to grapple with the problem of consciousness by presupposing that mental acts are 'basically' physical. To put it mildly, this is questionable.


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