How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Such a model is speculative, like all cosmological hypotheses (and the metaphor of the “block” is too, well, blocky), but it is seriously maintained by numerous physicists and cosmologists, is supported by Einstein’s relativity theory, and has received major philosophical attention.63 In the block universe cosmology, developed after the work of Einstein and his teacher Hermann Minkowski, all of time or history—past, present, and future—already exists within an immense cosmic block or space-time continuum that extends from the big bang to however the cosmos finally ends (or “bounces” back). Temporality or our sense of linear time (and so all of “history”) is, in effect, a neurological illusion or phenomenological apparition that our brains produce as we experience ourselves “moving” through this eternal and unchanging spatiotemporal block. We are back to Wolfson’s metaphor of the entire musical score being present as we hear individual notes or movements.