Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

In spite of our current physicalist worldview of seeing time as an absolute and objective property of the world, a sort of space where events are imagined to objectively occur in sequence, we seem to never get around its fundamental presupposition of subjectivity. At the heart of time lies this "gaze", a self-same phenomenal experience of past, present, and future all at once and interrelated to each other. This is not the eternal staticity and simultaneity of events proposed by physics, like a role of film containing the entire movie at once. Nor is it the flow of some brain-generated hallucination. Rather, as beings constantly engaged and embedded in the world, time happens inseparably from our own experience. In its unique qualities of duration and change and concurrence and contingency and possibility it saturates the world with dynamic creativity and a transcendent coalescence that both involves us and expresses itself thru our conscious being.

“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”— Martin Heidegger

“We must not say that our body is in space, nor for that matter in time. It inhabits space and time...I am not in space and in time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and of time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of my existence; however, it can never be total. The space and time that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain other points of view. The synthesis of time, like that of space, is always to be started over again. The motor experience of our body is not a particular case of knowledge; rather, it offers us a manner of reaching the world and the object, a 'praktognosia,' that must be recognized as original, and perhaps originary. My body has its world, or understands its world without having to go through 'representations,' or without being subordinated to a 'symbolic' or 'objectifying function.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

"A new wave of quantum experiments is bringing one of physics’ most profound ideas into sharper focus. Time may not be a built-in feature of reality. It may arise from relationships within it.

Recent studies published in Physical Review A and Nature Communications, including work by Alessandro Coppo and collaborators, have demonstrated this concept in the lab using carefully designed quantum systems. Researchers created a simplified “universe” composed of two entangled parts. One system, made of tiny interacting magnets, served as a clock. The other, a vibrating quantum oscillator, acted as the evolving world.

When scientists observed the oscillator through the clock, the system behaved exactly as expected. The familiar flow of events appeared. The Schrödinger equation described a clean, continuous evolution. From within this relationship, time was present and measurable.

The deeper insight came when the full system was examined as a single whole. Without isolating the clock as a reference, the sense of progression disappeared. The entire system existed as one unified quantum state with no unfolding sequence. No past, no future, just a complete configuration.

This is the essence of what’s known as the Page–Wootters mechanism. Time takes shape through entanglement. It appears when one part of reality is used to track change in another.

The “tick” of a clock is not revealing an external river of time. It is creating a frame through which change becomes meaningful.

This reframes something most people take for granted. The universe does not carry time as a background dimension. It expresses patterns of correlation, and from those patterns, time is experienced.

The implication is both subtle and immense. What feels like motion through time may be the result of how information is structured and observed within a larger, already-complete whole.

The flow is real to the observer because the relationship is real.

Time, in this light, is not something the universe moves through.

It is something the universe does."

Video explaining the Page-Wootters Mechanism

https://www.google.com/search?q=page-woo...-AMKk,st:0