More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Universe does not change, but it exists, as a fixed block of spacetime that contains all the things that have ever happened, and all the things that ever will happen. The flow of time is an illusion.
Swapnil Deshpande liked this
according to spacetime physics, the openness of the future is an illusion, and therefore causation and free will can be no more than illusions as well . . . In reality, we make no choices. Even as we think we are considering a choice, its outcome is already there, in the appropriate slice of spacetime, unchangeable like everything else in spacetime, and impervious to our deliberations.
Consciousness, Hoyle says, is like a light dancing around the stack, illuminating one little box at a time, but, crucially, not in any particular order. The box that is illuminated is the present, as far as you are concerned.
The image that emerges from quantum physics is similar in some ways to the way that the illusion that air, or water is a continuous fluid emerges. Myriad tiny particles separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth fluid. Myriad quantum states separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth flow of time.
