Every
civilization is blind to some things, while others are seen more clearly. This
has the consequence that there are problems that a civilization strives to
solve, although it is possible to show that they have no solution. This
happened, for example, to the Greco-Roman civilization with the problem of squaring the circle with ruler and compass. It
fell to the next civilization (ours) to show that it cannot be solved.
On
the other hand, we have an evident tendency to deny the existence of what we
don’t understand. This is happening to our civilization with two concepts with
which we’ve got stuck, that we insist on explaining (away), but don’t have an
obvious solution: the flow of time and human self-consciousness.
In both cases, many thinkers of the last two centuries have said that both
concepts are illusions; that they don’t really exist. Let’s look at it in more
detail:
