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+--- Thread: Time may pass even in a universe that doesn't change (philosophy of physics) (/thread-20778.html)
Time may pass even in a universe that doesn't change (philosophy of physics) - C C - Jul 2, 2026
Time may pass even in a universe that doesn't change
https://iai.tv/articles/physicists-are-mistaken-time-is-not-an-illusion-auid-3609?_auid=2020
EXCERPTS: Many physicists argue that time is just physical change, which since Einstein they see as differences and relations between objects in the so-called “block” universe. But philosopher Brian Kierland suggests that this increasingly fashionable view may be too quick. Not only can we imagine time passing without anything changing in the physical world, the claim that time flows independently of physical change may be empirically verifiable, at least in principle. If so, the growing push among some physicists to eliminate time from fundamental physics deserves more skepticism than it gets.
[...] Rather than directly arguing that there could be time without change, Shoemaker argues that there could be empirical evidence that a period of time has passed without any change. This claim is obviously important: if there couldn’t be evidence of time without change, then even if time can exist without change, we could never know about it!
Furthermore, when Shoemaker was writing, it was commonly thought that, if we can’t have empirical evidence that there has been time without change, then time without change is itself impossible. This was due to the popularity, when Shoemaker was writing, of verificationism, according to which if it is impossible to have evidence for a claim, then it doesn’t really say anything, and so can’t be true...
[...] To see why the negative answer is so tempting, imagine that you are in a universe in which everything stops changing—“freezes.” How can you find out about the freeze? You can’t walk around and inspect the hummingbirds frozen in mid-flight, since your body is frozen too. You can’t look out of your frozen body, since your optic nerves are frozen. You can’t even consciously attend to time’s duration, since your brain and mental states are not changing. You cannot have any evidence about the freeze, at least until the freeze is over...
[...] Shoemaker shows that this reasoning is much too quick, for it faces a potentially devastating counterexample involving an imaginary universe governed by different laws of physics. Here is Shoemaker’s argument... (MORE - missing details)
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Well, a thought experiment where a universe is without change implies that such is global. If you fudge that by having different regions being affected heterogeneously, then that just is sabotaging the parameters.
Not to mention that the whole conception of "time is physical change" is dependent upon the choice of presentism, as opposed to time being relationships between co-existing, slightly different states of existence (at least locally -- more radically different deeper along the chain).
And "change" is an endemic property of psychological experience and cognition -- is a fundamental part of the latter's nature. A static or frozen frame of experience isn't consciousness -- since discernment, identification, and understanding have to unfold slash be extended over multiple different brain configurations, especially when language is the backbone of such apprehension and interpreting. The panpsychism of objectifying change is superfluous -- verification of change is dependent upon a memory system that can hold and compare different states, and reciprocally a seeming procession of change also falls out of those relationships, too..
RE: Time may pass even in a universe that doesn't change (philosophy of physics) - Syne - Jul 2, 2026
Philosophers trying to do physics is usually just ultracrepidarianism.
RE: Time may pass even in a universe that doesn't change (philosophy of physics) - Magical Realist - Jul 2, 2026
Philosophers were thinking deeply about time long before physicists ever presumed it was their own domain.
Quote:The panpsychism of objectifying change is superfluous -- verification of change is dependent upon a memory system that can hold and compare different states, and reciprocally a seeming procession of change also falls out of those relationships, too..
OTC, memory presupposes the metaphysical flux of change from future to present to past. Without the ongoing phenomenal manifestation of difference which is basically time, there would be no possibility of memory, nothing to remember, nothing to remember from, nothing to remember towards, and no way of distinguishing the remembered from the immediate moment of its being remembered. The best metaphor for this a priori intuition of change and difference is the experience of music.