Here & Now, re-experienced*

Another new year just arriving, it might be a fitting opportunity to re-explore a subject we last did in July 2021 when live contacting towards the end of the COVID pandemic was just beginning to resume, although we were still obligated to hold that meetup outdoors in order to avoid the prescribed maximum of 8 participants when indoors. Since then, life has "normalized" again, and, thinking back, it might even be now almost difficult to imagine how that pandemic period, back "there and then", was experienced during that time as a "here and now"...

How "here and now" is related to "there and then" is indeed one of the questions we might wish to explore during our next session...

This subject I believe is one of the most interesting ones we've covered in Brussels Philosophy so far, inviting us to re-examine how we phenomenologically experience space and time, and in the process (literally!) to critically re-think how we habitually conceptualize space and time in our everyday lives.

So here's the intro:

Why, when we look in a mirror, are left and right reversed but not up and down? Might this pseudo-paradox ("para-paradox"??) (not) be a clue, if at least only by analogy, as to why we typically seem to have a clearer concept of what we can identify as an "eternal now", but seemingly have much more difficulty conceptualizing an "eternal here"?

When it comes to experiencing and conceptualizing moments in time and places in space in relation to change, we habitually, almost instinctively, believe that moments flow by (in the one stream of time) independent of our will, while places always remain the same places (independent of the fact that they gradually become different as time goes on), and moreover, remain subject to our will: we can choose to move (or not move) from one place to another. We can travel in space but not in time. Change, therefore, we tend to view as a phenomenon that is temporal, not spatial: "things may change in time, but it is time itself that causes change".

On the other hand, we do seem able to perceive and conceptualize an "eternal now"... while seemingly finding it more difficult to experience an "eternal here" (the pseudo-paradox).

Newton indeed conceived of time as a dimension separate and independent of the 3 dimensions of space, and of all events in the universe as occurring in one singular uniform flow of time, whereas Einstein, as we all now understand, conceptualized spacetime as one unified phenomenon, neither space itself nor time itself being absolute or independent of the other.

In this meetup we will attempt to explore and find out if there is a phenomenological counterpart to Einstein's spacetime.

The thesis proposed here is that there is indeed, and that it is in fact found centre stage in our consciousness - but perhaps because of survival pressures that have operated on humans collectively and individually for most of our history, and the resultant ways in which language and culture have evolved, our consciousness of the "eternal here" has remained under-developed. (Language and culture mirror consciousness, and how consciousness develops mirrors existent language and culture.)

A key corollary-claim in this thesis is that change can also be experienced and explained primarily in terms of space, without reference to time, and moreover, such a manner of perceiving and conceptualizing space-driven change arguably remains compatible with both Newtonian (tweaking it slightly, perhaps!) and Einsteinian models of reality.

Our session will provide an opportunity to consider and examine phenomenological experiences that could be referred to as "eternal now", "eternal here", "everywhere here", "everywhen now", "everywhere now", "everywhen here", "flowing time", "flowing space" ...

We will be guided through several different thought experiments designed to support the idea that change can be attributed to space rather than time, paying special attention to developing the concept of "flowing space".
These thought experiments will then hopefully invite animated and open discussion.

So let's enjoy being able to meet up with no restrictions this time. Looking forward to seeing you then & there!

*without ever having truly left