Extended Special Relativity & the ‘Now’ of Observation

Abstract

In our daily experience, our minds perceive every observation as happening ‘now’ while time flows through past, present, and future. Some neuroscientists believe that a human being’s brain and his/her phenomenal consciousness are in relative motion and that the relative movement generates the ‘now’. Some physicists involved with precognition and remote viewing experiments concluded that the speed of thought is infinite. Obviously, while both proposals hypothesize a relative motion between conscious thought and the brain that hosts the thought, the latter proposal includes an additional hypothesis that the relative speed is infinite. In this article, using superluminal Lorentz transformations formulated in an Extended Special Relativity theory developed some time ago, we show that the hypothesis of the infinite speed of thought explains why ‘now’ is perceived in all our conscious experiences and why the phenomenal content of any experience of the world is ‘projected’ into the space outside the brain that constructs the experience. Empirical verification of our proposals would be feasible by taking into account modified Lorentz transformations (replacing the maximum speed of light with the maximum propagation rate between cognitive levels of processing) used by some cognitive scientists to analyze space and time aspects of perceptual phenomena.