#909 Relativity and Synchronized Consciousness

Dr. craig’s response

This is a wild and fascinating question that deserves to be taken very seriously! Before I try to answer your question, Uriah, let me make a correction. When Fred returns from Miller’s planet, he would be seven years behind everyone else. That’s why in the movie when the hero returns to earth, he finds his little daughter now an old woman on her deathbed. According to the General Theory of Relativity, clocks in a strong gravitational field run slowly, so Fred’s clocks (including biological clocks) did not run as quickly as did those back on Earth, and so he aged less.

Similarly, according to the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) clocks in motion run slowly relative to clocks at rest. Since either one of two hypothetical observers in relative motion can be assumed to be at relative rest in relation to the other, this strange time dilation is actually reciprocal! This, too, can result in all sorts of strange scenarios.

Your question about the synchronization of conscious states also troubled the early 20^th century French philosopher Henri Bergson. In the spring of 1922 Albert Einstein delivered a lecture on Relativity Theory to the Société Française de Philosophie in Paris, and Bergson was among the French scholars invited to give some response. Their exchange was subsequently published in the Society’s Bulletin.[1] In this exchange Bergson declines to enter into a discussion of his own peculiar (and mistaken) understanding of STR but instead concentrates on a defense of absolute simultaneity and the unity of time based on the synchronization of consciousness. I have actually published an article with the cheeky title, “Bergson Was Right about Relativity (well, partly!).”[2] I won’t try to summarize the contents of the article here, but leave it up to you to read it and reflect upon it.

Bergson's argument for the unity of time based upon the synchronization of consciousness is insightful, defensible, and, I think, sound. It does prove that there exists an absolute present, irrespective of reference frames, light signals, clock synchronization, and the rest. We are far more certain and far more warranted in believing that our inner experiences are present than we are in thinking that simultaneity is to be defined along Einstein’s operational lines in terms of clock synchronization via light signals. Indeed, Bergson showed that Einstein’s re-definition cannot displace the intuitive notion of simultaneity because the re-definition itself employs the intuitive notion of simultaneity. The desperation of Einstein’s response to Bergson at the conference – denying, in effect, the mind-independent status of the external world – only serves to underline the power of Bergson’s argument.

All this goes to show that relativity theory is about our physical measures of time, the behavior of clocks, not about time itself. So in answer to your questions, yes, we have good reason to believe that our conscious experiences are necessarily synchronized, precisely because of the presentness of conscious experience, and no, there is no reason to reject the theoretical possibility of Miller’s planet because it is not about time itself, but about the slowing down of physical clocks, including biological clocks.