Sep 26, 2022 09:40 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 26, 2022 10:50 PM by C C.)
https://psyche.co/ideas/time-doesnt-flow...wept-along
EXCERPTS: As you read this article, time will seem to pass. Right now, you are reading these words, but now you are reading these ones. What was present just an instant ago seems to have already slipped into the past. You will carry this feeling with you – as objects change and move, as thoughts run through your head, as feelings ebb and flow – until you fall asleep tonight.
Heraclitus thought that time was like a river: ‘Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Our experience of the world seems to back this up. It certainly feels as if time is sweeping us along.
Yet, physicists and philosophers will tell you that Heraclitus was wrong. Time, they say, does not actually pass. In his book The Order of Time (2018), the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:
So, what is the real structure of time? Well, it’s complicated. Some think that time is like space: the past, present and future are all equally real locations. Some, like Rovelli, think time emerges directly from the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
Physicists and philosophers may have different approaches to the structure of time, but what unites them is a rejection of the notion that that there is a ‘now’, a present moment, that moves from the past toward the future. If that is true, and time does not really move, we are left with a question: why does it seem to pass? We would never mistake a frozen river for a running one, so, if nothing flows and everything abides, why does it feel as if time is rushing by?
Perhaps it’s just an illusion. Our senses tell us that time is passing, but we are perceiving something that isn’t really there. To see an illusion is to see a way the world could be, but isn’t: the Earth looks flat when it is actually round; optical illusions can make identical lines appear to be different lengths. These illusions present real possibilities – it’s easy to find places in the world where you could experience something flat that wasn’t an illusion, or experience one line that really was longer than another.
But if Rovelli and others are right, there is nowhere you could go to truly experience the flowing time that Heraclitus talked about. It is not a real possibility. Just as the world is not set up for someone to hallucinate a square circle, the world is not set up for the illusion of time passing. So if the flow of time is not an illusion, what is it?
Some philosophers say that time seems to pass due to the way we perceive change. They argue that moving objects appear ‘dynamic’, and that we mistake this dynamism for time passing. To see what they mean, imagine watching a movie where each frame was shown for two full seconds. [...] Now, imagine seeing those frames at the speed they would be played in a cinema: 24 frames per second. Suddenly, the sense that you are looking at a series of static scenes disappears, and you can’t see where one frame ends and the next begins. ... the flowing ‘dynamism’ you see in a cinema is a quality added by your perceptual system.
What does this have to do with time seeming to pass? Our perceptual systems do not just add a dynamic look to things we see in movies, but also to the things we see in the real world.[...] Because we fail to recognise that this is a product of our minds rather than a feature of reality, we have come to believe that the world is dynamic, and that time really flows. That’s one theory, anyway... (MORE - missing details)
The static frames of a movie are not conscious, though. Nor do they possess knowledge of the others, apart from "some" of those frames replicating the content of previous ones, but with slightly developing differences.
In contrast, a particular electrochemical configuration of neural tissue does correlate to awareness. But there is no single brain state corresponding to an experience of all the events of your life from birth to death existing as an integrated whole. (Or if there is such an overarching manifestation, there is no brain state available that comprehends and validates in that 4-dimensional like manner.)
Instead, each brain state (slice) of the 4D worm of your body is only about the limited information it holds, its isolated version of a single conscious moment, which alone manifests as "real" to it. But each of those mental or cognitive islands is still tied to each other in orderly sequence -- a particular brain state remembers those in the "past" direction, it is aware of them thanks to stored memory patterns.
The very last, coherent brain state before death can have a fuzzy, summarized knowledge of most events of one's life (barring the various effects of senility and mitigated amnesia). But those past states likewise don't manifest as "real" to it, either. That life is recalled and represented in an immensely generalized manner.
Actually an individual increment of experience spans over a chunk-series of many different states of the brain, and cognition itself or language-based understanding stretches through many increments of experience.[1] But that complicates the initial apprehension or introduction with regard to what's going on here. The idealized scenario above of treating each manifested moment of consciousness as corresponding to a single accompanying brain state is easier to grasp at the start.
- - - footnote - - -
[1] It takes more than a second to fully think: "That ringing must be Cathy calling as usual on a Sunday afternoon." Cognition is extended, whether the manifested kind or the non-manifested (subconscious processes) kind.
EXCERPTS: As you read this article, time will seem to pass. Right now, you are reading these words, but now you are reading these ones. What was present just an instant ago seems to have already slipped into the past. You will carry this feeling with you – as objects change and move, as thoughts run through your head, as feelings ebb and flow – until you fall asleep tonight.
Heraclitus thought that time was like a river: ‘Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Our experience of the world seems to back this up. It certainly feels as if time is sweeping us along.
Yet, physicists and philosophers will tell you that Heraclitus was wrong. Time, they say, does not actually pass. In his book The Order of Time (2018), the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:
"What could be more universal and obvious than this flowing? And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The Sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing."
So, what is the real structure of time? Well, it’s complicated. Some think that time is like space: the past, present and future are all equally real locations. Some, like Rovelli, think time emerges directly from the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
Physicists and philosophers may have different approaches to the structure of time, but what unites them is a rejection of the notion that that there is a ‘now’, a present moment, that moves from the past toward the future. If that is true, and time does not really move, we are left with a question: why does it seem to pass? We would never mistake a frozen river for a running one, so, if nothing flows and everything abides, why does it feel as if time is rushing by?
Perhaps it’s just an illusion. Our senses tell us that time is passing, but we are perceiving something that isn’t really there. To see an illusion is to see a way the world could be, but isn’t: the Earth looks flat when it is actually round; optical illusions can make identical lines appear to be different lengths. These illusions present real possibilities – it’s easy to find places in the world where you could experience something flat that wasn’t an illusion, or experience one line that really was longer than another.
But if Rovelli and others are right, there is nowhere you could go to truly experience the flowing time that Heraclitus talked about. It is not a real possibility. Just as the world is not set up for someone to hallucinate a square circle, the world is not set up for the illusion of time passing. So if the flow of time is not an illusion, what is it?
Some philosophers say that time seems to pass due to the way we perceive change. They argue that moving objects appear ‘dynamic’, and that we mistake this dynamism for time passing. To see what they mean, imagine watching a movie where each frame was shown for two full seconds. [...] Now, imagine seeing those frames at the speed they would be played in a cinema: 24 frames per second. Suddenly, the sense that you are looking at a series of static scenes disappears, and you can’t see where one frame ends and the next begins. ... the flowing ‘dynamism’ you see in a cinema is a quality added by your perceptual system.
What does this have to do with time seeming to pass? Our perceptual systems do not just add a dynamic look to things we see in movies, but also to the things we see in the real world.[...] Because we fail to recognise that this is a product of our minds rather than a feature of reality, we have come to believe that the world is dynamic, and that time really flows. That’s one theory, anyway... (MORE - missing details)
The static frames of a movie are not conscious, though. Nor do they possess knowledge of the others, apart from "some" of those frames replicating the content of previous ones, but with slightly developing differences.
In contrast, a particular electrochemical configuration of neural tissue does correlate to awareness. But there is no single brain state corresponding to an experience of all the events of your life from birth to death existing as an integrated whole. (Or if there is such an overarching manifestation, there is no brain state available that comprehends and validates in that 4-dimensional like manner.)
Instead, each brain state (slice) of the 4D worm of your body is only about the limited information it holds, its isolated version of a single conscious moment, which alone manifests as "real" to it. But each of those mental or cognitive islands is still tied to each other in orderly sequence -- a particular brain state remembers those in the "past" direction, it is aware of them thanks to stored memory patterns.
The very last, coherent brain state before death can have a fuzzy, summarized knowledge of most events of one's life (barring the various effects of senility and mitigated amnesia). But those past states likewise don't manifest as "real" to it, either. That life is recalled and represented in an immensely generalized manner.
Actually an individual increment of experience spans over a chunk-series of many different states of the brain, and cognition itself or language-based understanding stretches through many increments of experience.[1] But that complicates the initial apprehension or introduction with regard to what's going on here. The idealized scenario above of treating each manifested moment of consciousness as corresponding to a single accompanying brain state is easier to grasp at the start.
- - - footnote - - -
[1] It takes more than a second to fully think: "That ringing must be Cathy calling as usual on a Sunday afternoon." Cognition is extended, whether the manifested kind or the non-manifested (subconscious processes) kind.
![[Image: vQSHODo.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/vQSHODo.jpg)