Book Reviewed: Beyond the Dynamical Universe: Unifying Block Universe Physics and Time as Experienced, by Michael Silberstein, W.M. Stuckey and Timothy McDevitt

A journey into the heart of physical reality

The idea that nature is made up of physical entities that evolve over time from an initial state is not explaining the full nature of physical reality. The mind and matter discussions have created more questions than offer solutions. One of the problems is from the theory of relativity unifying space and time into 4-dimensional spacetime. In this reality, there are no preferred dimensions, and there's nothing special about time. It is like a block universe. Just as space exists in the block and so does time. General relativity says that if we know the conditions at one instant in the block universe, then we can predict the entire future because this chunk of spacetime is deterministic. The future is written, but it's just not accessible to us living inside the block. From this block-time perspective, time-experience is an illusion and not a real property of nature. This introduces the concept of time, and flow of time, is a mind and consciousness phenomenon.

In this book, the authors offer an entirely new paradigm called relational block universe in non-dynamical approach in which the past does not determine the future, and it eliminates the experience of the passage of time by invoking philosophy similar to neutral monism that explains the experience of time without consciousness.

The authors have proposed an unorthodox and untested idea which would be a hard sell. But the philosophical underpinnings are familiar in Hindu and Buddhist philosophical systems. The nature of mind and matter, the essence of physical reality has been widely discussed. According to the school of Vedanta philosophy, the ultimate reality is indefinite and indescribable of which no transformation is predictable. The appearance of the world is due to the imaginative activity of manas, which is also an unreal phenomenon. There is no perceiver, and none perceived. In the early phase of Buddhist metaphysics, there was a system of pluralistic phenomenalism with neither matter nor mind as abiding entities. The doctrine of the unsubstantiality and the impermanence of all elements of existence was a consequence of nihilism.

The early versions of classical neutral monism proposed by physicist Ernst Mach, and philosophers William James, and Bertrand Russell reflect the empiricist outlook which leads to conscious experience that the authors like to avoid. But abstract entities like information processing and mathematical reality have been proposed by Thomas Nagel as the neutral basis of this metaphysical realm.