Sublime

But the gist of the solution he suggests is that time is subjective: time is in the human mind, which expects, considers, and remembers.II It follows that there can be no time without a created being,III and that to speak of time before the Creation is meaningless.

scientific knowledge is not what we can verify directly, as positivists expected. On the contrary, it is based on theoretical constructs that can be contradicted by empirical observations. We hold valid a theory that offers predictions that are corroborated as long as it has never been contradicted (“falsified”) by reality.

This wasn't consciousness, but it was a start. Matter could think without brains or electronics or molecular switches. It might even be a fundamental property of matter itself.

Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, said that the universe as it truly is must be unknowable, and all we ever know is the world through our senses: he made a clear distinction between phenomena , our perceptions of objects, and noumena , the things in themselves.5 More than that, he foreshadowed the Bayesian model of the brain: he argued that

não poderia também haver nem “sujeito em si”, autônomo e livre, nem “fatos em si”, objetivos e absolutamente verdadeiros.

The role of agents and their subjectivity (i.e., the so-called “interior” world of beliefs, emotions, identities, perceptions, etc.) in consciously shaping physical and social worlds has long been a source of tension between realists and idealists. Very generally, realists maintain that there is a world out there that is separate and distinct from

because space and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding. They are part of the mental logic of the animal organism, the software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

But what physicists do so well, and most of us do so poorly, is that they carefully delimit what Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are able to explain. They know down to many decimal places where those maps are useful guides to reality, and where they aren’t. And when they hit uncharted territory, like quantum mechanics, they explore it carefully i