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I personally have long accepted the scientific view on time as part of a physical continuum called spacetime consisting of coordinates and events. But I want to rethink time as more of a metaphysical irreducible than as a physical epiphenomenon. What is time in ESSENCE? What is the more foundational principle of temporality that time is an instance of? Well one major trait of it is this tendency to split up into 3 domains or ectases as Heidegger called them: past present and future. What is the nature of this trifecta of eventhood?

Furthermore, temporality is essentially self-transcendental. It always goes beyond itself into moreness. In this sense it is like a property of infinitude, which always keeps going beyond no matter how much you try to contain it. Is temporality an indication that Being is essentially infinite and ongoing, without limit or cessation?

The block time of physics conceives of all events in one simultaneous immediacy. So does Buddhism. Is temporality the "all at the same timeness" of Being itself, illusorily splitting off here and there as this moment and then that moment?

What does temporality say about the nature of consciousness, that it too requires transition and duration to occur at all? Is temporality the reason all Being is also self-consciousness? And what of emergence? Isn't emergence the essence of time itself? That surging crystalline crest towards ever more novelty and creativity.

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Since the light we perceive is from further in the past the further away it originates, and the present is here, it may follow that the future is literally inside of us.

With all the expansion going on I'd say the universe is still under construction. There's a future for it as long as it doesn't suddenly disappear.

(Jan 2, 2017 08:31 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ][...] Is temporality the "all at the same timeness" of Being itself, illusorily splitting off here and there as this moment and then that moment? What does temporality say about the nature of consciousness, that it too requires transition and duration to occur at all?

Linguistic "thinking" is temporally extended -- that kind of cognition certainly doesn't fit into the tiny duration of a subatomic "now" (yoctosecond, etc) and unfolds over or would superimpose on a sequence of moments.

If there is such a thing as a mystic experience of "one's whole life simultaneously" it is pretty rare. So otherwise, the rest of human cognition also seems broken down into a sequence of discrete events (of irregular, giant millisecond-long units). Each "cognitive now" doesn't allow apprehension of anything but itself, thus their own self-contained, spurious claim to being all that is "real". Each is relationally connected, ergo the sense of them happening in turn rather than as simultaneous integration. In an offbeat kind of way, the experience of transiting from one to the next might be the relationship itself rather than the usual type of connection treated as spanning a spatial distance discerned from a 3rd-person POV outside itself.

Quote:[...] Is temporality an indication that Being is essentially infinite and ongoing, without limit or cessation? The block time of physics conceives of all events in one simultaneous immediacy. So does Buddhism.

Though almost never brought up... "Infinite" is one potential problem of eternalism, when it's realized as a hyper-structure (time as a substantive 4D existence rather than as the ephemeral 3D output of a metempirical process [presentism]). Such a static condition is accordingly complete and finite, no matter how staggeringly vast or impossible to measure it would be. Which is to say, perpetually "adding or dividing" to introduce "more" to that manner of "hyper-being", in an open-ended way, would be introducing a process version of change; and thus a violation of eternalism's static character.

So if there's no thermodynamic heat death or any other notion of homogeneous equilibrium in store for a distant era of the cosmos that might terminate the changes, then eternalism would probably have to scrap the already naively simple or straightforward, deterministic block-universe.

Only my opinion, but I suspect any successful merger of relativity and QM in the future would probably also crank out something roughly along the line of Julian Barbour's so-called "Platonia". He claims to eliminate "time", but all he actually seems to be getting rid of is a fixed and pre-established path (the traditional framework of time). Instead, the journey of "past to future" in his scheme is through a topology of all possible configurations of the universe (from primitive stages to complex ones) that co-exist with each other.

We'd experientially find ourselves in one or another of those cosmic configurations (parallel worlds) according to which one wins out as being the next "now". In terms of which prevails as being lawfully or logically consistent with the previous nows or perhaps with our own memories. In that respect, all the future possibilities of the universe already exist, but the path we'd take through that jungle would not be pre-determined (a wandering path, instead). To avoid the dilemma of infinity (when that's perversely treated as a concrete condition), eventually some of the configurations could be repeated. Perhaps yielding either a reboot or a leap to a series of dysfunctional versions of the universe [extreme option]. But never or rarely would the same path be taken; they'd be multi-themed "journeys" in contrast to the single-theme "history" of a block-universe which never varies.

Quote:[...] Is temporality the reason all Being is also self-consciousness?

To even make the judgement that "this recent series of events is different from a former sequence" requires memory and intellectual or computational abilities. So the anti-panpsychic world of conventional materialism couldn't even discriminate its existence into such human coordinates. It might be contended, however that spacetime or whatever edifice is still foliated in a physical manner, minus those psychological distinctions.

Quote:And what of emergence? Isn't emergence the essence of time itself? That surging crystalline crest towards ever more novelty and creativity.

In a Platonia-like timescape (not necessarily Barbour's), a progressive ascent of the wandering path to ever more complicated versions of the world (and civilization) would encounter / expose continuing novelties. Perhaps, again, including those dysfunctional chains. When we finally reach our last "now" of complete brain death there might or might not be a relational "leap" to a disjointed version of the cosmos where the rules are crazy and allow consciousness and preservation of one's memories to continue due to that radical departure from this world's conventions.

It would just depend upon how many "crazy" versions of our bodies or whatever are possible, just as in regard to how many "crazy" versions of the universe are possible. And whether or not there's enough consistency between them (to constitute a string of changing moments) so that the cognitive transitions from one to next are coherent for long stretches. Or are instead just the jumbled nature of dreams.

If the latter, the memories of one's previous life could become revised, garbled, and eventually blank to the point that another radical "leap" / relational connection could take place to a sane version of the world again. Amounting to reincarnation, I suppose. But since no information would be conveyed (no memories survive), it's just generic subjectivity that really continues (the capacity for experience, etc). But generic subjectivity itself doesn't require "migration". It's basic attributes are already distributed hither and thither -- already "there" in the particular conscious agents still alive.