Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe > Status Update

But can we think in this way and do justice to the reality of our lived experience? I guess this is a deeply phenomenological question and is where you could go on to the work of figures such as Merleau-Ponty etc. The problem is that later, this field becomes reified from ontology, when really at its source, this is an ontological debate about what is fundamentally real, in which perhaps wrong choices have been made

As a result, if you are stuck within that ontological view point of space-time you tend to dismiss real time as somehow a mere appearance, as if our phenomenologically lived real experience of time that we are immediately and intimately aware of could be inferior to some mathematical, platonic idealisation, in which there is no free asymmetrical development of time, only a predetermined symmetrical structure.

Very intriguing critique of the block Minkowski space-time model of special relativity. It fails to account for the real experienced passing of time as duration. This is very similar to the idea Lee Smolin takes up in the book I was reading before this. Space-time is a Platonic, mathematical idealisation of time, that loses something from real time, and does not correspond to it adequately.

At this point, where appeal to argument runs out, the next step is to merely point to the empirical verifications. But if a theory is inconsistent in itself, surely this will not do. This confounding and mystification of the intellect surrounding the mysterious emergence of asymmetrical time dilation out of nothing is probably the source of many more problems since in the pursuit of GUT's and the like.

based on acceleration effects that have no place in the special theory but come to prominence in the general theory. A strange jump is made here from one theory to another, like jumping off a sinking ship onto another one. As if an inconsistency in one theory can be removed by appealing to another theory that actually depends first on the truth of the former.

Bergson sees the reciprocity in special relativity as a reason to see these time dilation effects as merely phantasmal and virtual, and under a correct reading of relativity this could be the case, but relativity is not completed in this way because an asymmetry is introduced to allow for more time dilation of one who moves through "more" supposed space-time. This "more" and asymmetry being determined..

THere is also in this section a hinting of space as being degrees of remoteness, rather than a real thing, with his example of the two artists and their different perspectives on painting an individual from two places. This is akin to the notion of space explored in more technical depth recently by Lee Smolin in Time Reborn, and his attempt at a true relational account of space.

..As a source of the asymmetry and non-reciprocity in time dilation between a moving observer and a non-moving observer. Of course if such distinctions between moving and non-moving can be made we are talking about some level of reinstatement of either privileged perspectives or of an aether, because the only way to avoid this would be a pure relationalist account of space as in Machs proposal, which remains absent.

The problem is then how to account for the real effects of time dilation, given when things are reunited there is a disparity in their simultaneity. Clearly this is not just a virtual effect. However Bergson is right to criticise because special relativity itself does not have a consistent account of this point, it instead appeals to general relativity, and accelerations that one object undergoes ..