Realism
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I read that Consciousness is the one that is not real, and the Universe is alone, dancing with the stars...
To put it into perspective, we are 93 million miles away from the Sun. A couple of close encounters have happened lately with the passing of a comet at 7.1 million miles away and an asteroid at 1.8 million miles away. On the other end of the spectrum, Voyager 2 has found itself beyond the heliosphere at more than 11 billion miles away. Distances are everything. They help us expand our horizons by adding new objects to our Consciousness. Slipping out of the reach of the solar winds, Voyager 2 reminds me of the foretelling picture of the missionary lifting the sky veil in the footsteps of the greatest 15th century’s explorers sailing off the seas.
Instead of horizons where Earth and Sky touch each other, the heliopause is the gateway to the interstellar space. That's where we cross over the four corners of reality determined by new properties that already exist prior to our discovery. Beyond our bubble of dynamic solar winds, elements of reality are waiting to be measured and their properties to be determined.
If the Universe were a macro-state, new comets and asteroids would be "hidden variables" coming into play, whose measurements are pieces of a puzzle. Consciousness is set to understand whether those encounters are the result of true randomness or the outcome of a deterministic pattern. The first interstellar object ever to be detected, Oumuamua, is a perfect example of an element of reality that seemed to come right out of the realm of infinite possibilities. Its discovery last year in the data from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope - involved with its twin telescope Pan-STARRS2 in surveying the sky in the search for near-earth asteroids - made it an actual entity, a macroscopic object whose properties have yet to be determined. It is fascinating to think that we do not know Oumuamua’s system of origin given how difficult it is to retrace its footsteps but we do know that it has an existence independent of our measurement process. Realism is when properties of objects have a definite value even if we don’t measure them.
Time seems so slow when launching a spacecraft to a faraway destination. It took 41 years for Voyager 2 to reach the outskirts of the heliosphere across time and Space. We're told that time is a convenient tool to view the Universe and that the Universe might be a "global coordination" whose underlying structure is nonlocal across time and Space. But like a House of cards made of two colors, one Time and the other Space, wouldn't the entire House come tumbling down if Space is removed? And if we only knew of the Universe's boundary conditions, would the beginning and the end be superposed on each other in a chain of manifold cycles run through by a complex information system that reboots at every transition stage? Time is perceived through infinite ontic states that carry information from the past to the future.
...the actual initial state of the world is chosen arbitrarily and the allowed kinematical set is then simply equal to the maximal set of states into which this state can be taken by allowed dynamical evolutions
How to conciliate macro-realism with the quantum world where “the later measurement results depend directly on earlier measurement settings and outcomes without being mediated via information carried forward in the state”? Could the Universe as a whole act as a quantum system? According to Helmut Fink and Hajo Leshcke, “Since the universe is the total domain of physical experience, it cannot be copied, not even in a thought experiment. Therefore, a quantum state of the whole universe can never be made accessible to empirical test. Hence the existence of such state is only a metaphysical idea”. Why then is quantum mechanics what it is if it has no bearing on our reality? One wonders how spooky actions at a distance translate in a chain of macroscopic events. Can we imagine a cosmological scenario in which the Universe is made of an infinite number of microstates linked by “hidden variables” that are not conceivable yet?
Such variables evolve in so called “hidden time”, which is not equivalent to physical time as well. Hidden time is mathematical notion only. Then, elementary events are “sewing” points between hidden time and physical time.
In theory the definition of a physical Universe as “empirically accessible in principle” does not preclude any future observation, dependent upon the technological advance of measurement-device techniques, of interstellar objects such as Oumuamua. The information carried by Oumuamua has now become an observational evidence, a window into what lies beyond our solar system. Given the approximated number density of interstellar objects within the Earth orbit, one wonders why Oumuamua and not any other object was the first to be spotted. Its elongated, or maybe flat oval, shape reminds me the story of the “long white cloud” named Aotearoao that was revealed to the great Maori seaferers above the location of New-Zealand shores.
In my own narration of an action at distance, I imagine a spacetime event such as the passing of Oumuamua through our solar system to influence across time and space its sequential manifestation in another star system. Sprinkled with solar wind dust it would trigger the interest of some far away planet into the whereabouts of our own solar system.
The dynamics which we will derive can be regarded as a process of “cosmological accretion” or “growth”. At each step of this process an element of the causal set comes into being as the “offspring” of a definite set of the existing elements – the elements that form its past. The phenomenological passage of time is taken to be a manifestation of this continuing growth of the causet. Thus, we do not think of the process as happening “in time” but rather as “constituting time”, which means in a practical sense that there is no meaningful order of birth of the elements
What is the underlying reality that quantum states represent knowledge about? Maybe time, as we experience it in multifold ways through conscious and unconscious forms, “varies along with the distribution of matter”.
