Article The physics of time doesn't contradict experience

[C C]

If you encounter a movie by how it seems to exist on a screen (the latter analogous to consciousness), it looks like one state of its world is being replaced (annihilated) by the next one. Or if preference goes another way, slight alterations are incrementally occurring in a supposedly underlying and enduring "substance" of the movie.

But upon inferring that the source of what is manifested is actually a sequence of co-existing frames on a filmstrip, coded data on a disc or thumb-drive, etc -- the role of consciousness becomes apparent.

Mathematicians proposed a 4D view that incorporated time before Minkowski space and GR. Wells used it in the very opening of his "The Time Machine" (1895), and also used their explanation for the specious "flow" of time. (Hermann Weyl adopted such as well.)

Since the brain's largely consensus representation of existence is the only thing that we're ever directly exposed to, that's what the classification of "real" was originally abstracted from. (When a lone person sees or hears something anomalous that no one else perceives, that is excluded from the consensus representation of brains as an individual, isolated hallucination.)

But if you also believe in another world (i.e., what the brain is representing), then obviously the latter has to receive a "real" status as well, but at another level. You merely need to keep the two contexts distinct instead of muddling them up. It's amazing how some materialists champion that the brain is not a passive receiver of information, but then proceed to contradictorily disregard that when it comes to projecting the appearances manufactured by the brain upon what is supposed to be their mind-independent version of the world.
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The physics of time doesn't contradict experience
https://iai.tv/articles/the-physics-of-t..._auid=2020

INTRO: It is often argued that the physics of time contradicts our experience. In response to Avshalom Elitzur, Matt Farr challenges this view by claiming that we need not fear that modern physics gets anything wrong about our subjective experience of time.

EXCERPTS: Does time flow? Do we experience it as flowing? And does physics suggest that, ‘really’, time does not flow? In his recent essay for IAI News, Avshalom Elitzur notes that physics treats the flow of time as unreal and illusory, and suggests that his own ‘spacetime dynamics’ theory offers a way back for the reality of time flow. But I think there’s a simpler way forward.

The idea that physics contradicts our experience of time is certainly common... [...] So what is this special quality of time that is allegedly left out by physics? Is it something that we actually experience? And does our experience therefore provide evidence that our physical understanding of time is seriously incomplete?

[...] Physics has, since the early 20th century, been accused of ‘spatialising’ time [...] This four-dimensional way of representing things in the world has been accused of ‘spatialising’ time in that objects like you and I, ones that persist over time, appear on spacetime diagrams as lines that run from birth to death, with all moments in our life given equal weight in the depiction. There is no obvious animation in such a diagram – it’s just a fixed, static representation of things across time –, nor is any point highlighted as special or privileged.

[...] depicting one’s life as a line in spacetime does not mean that it is depicted as devoid of animation, flow, becoming, and so on.

On the contrary, a popular way of understanding so-called ‘static’ theories of time is in a conciliatory mode: that static time is entirely consistent with our temporal experience. A static universe, after all, still contains the motion of things in space over time, and the change of objects’ properties over time. It just doesn’t additionally confer some special cosmic privilege or motion to some particular point in time -- the ‘moving Now’. In fact, static time theorists don’t take time to be literally static at all.

[...] As I’ve argued elsewhere (Farr 2020), there is a certain ‘what-it’s-like-ness’ to seeing change and motion, what I call ‘temporal qualia’. My suggestion is that it’s this quality of ‘seeing’ moving and changing things that philosophers commonly mischaracterise as an experience of time as passing or flowing. Indeed, in the rare documented cases of ‘akinetopsia’, where subjects have a reduced or total inability to perceive motion, liquid coffee has been described as apparently ‘frozen [. . . ] like a glacier’ (Zeki 1991), implying that a key sense of flow is partially lost in the subject’s temporal experience. Is this flow-like quality of ordinary motion perception responsible for our sense that time passes?

I’m inclined to think it’s at least a large part of the puzzle. And the motion of one thing from here to there, and our perception of it, is certainly retained in the static theorist’s picture of time. Moreover, our sense of motion is ordinarily not any kind of illusion — when we sense motion, it’s typically because we’ve seen it. In this key sense, the ‘feel’ of temporal experience, the ‘sense’ of things flowing and moving in time, are not illusory, since they’re ultimately tracking real change and motion in objects in the world – the kind of motion and change contained within the static time theorist’s picture. On this understanding of our temporal experience, there is no further sense of the passage or flow of time itself to be explained away by the static theorist... (MORE - missing details)
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Due to its very limitations, a single state of the brain or a minimal chunk-sequence of them can't encompass an entire lifetime of events and present them as existing simultaneously. Which would undermine what survival-oriented cognition is to begin with: The discrimination of a whole into separate, identifiable and understandable components, further understood by learned concepts stored in memory.

The tragedy is that some materialists can't cope with the consequences of their own their school of thought or stay consistent with it. If one's version of the "external world" exists in a non-mental and non-conscious way, then one can't then proceed to contradictorily project psychological properties upon it. Which includes the supposed "experience" and conceptual apprehension of one state of a universe being replaced [annihilated] by the next. (There are no manifestations "out there" and no cognition-devoted memory system for distinguishing and vetting anything).

In addition to solipsistcally projecting one's own subjective sense of "now" or "time-flow" upon that "objective" world (is that irregularly varying microseconds sized "elephant" going to accommodate the ridiculously "briefer" Now interval of decay in an atomic nucleus?), it requires memory just to cognitively discriminate that one "antecendent" state of the environment is different from a faux "current state" (both are actually have to be held in memory in order for "change" to be evaluated and judged as the case).

Accordingly, particular brain-states or chunk-sequences of brain-states are only devoted to that relationship. That's what gets subjectively manifested as "now" and consequently regarded as "real" (even though both of those "recorded" configurations of the world would be maintained in the memory system -- both part of the very recent past rather than truly "new" information merely at the point of making contact with sensory tissues of the body).

[Magical Realist]

"Moreover, our sense of motion is ordinarily not any kind of illusion — when we sense motion, it’s typically because we’ve seen it. In this key sense, the ‘feel’ of temporal experience, the ‘sense’ of things flowing and moving in time, are not illusory, since they’re ultimately tracking real change and motion in objects in the world – the kind of motion and change contained within the static time theorist’s picture. On this understanding of our temporal experience, there is no further sense of the passage or flow of time itself to be explained away by the static theorist."

Flowing time then as a sort of reification of change and motion experienced all around us. An empty abstraction, like the moving of the film in the projector, that in reality is nothing separate from our perception of the world and our bodies running or playing out events in our brains.

[Magical Realist]

I wonder how an eternalist interpretation of time escapes becoming a presentist interpretation. The present seems to be the only valid mode of being in both, except that the eternalist sense of the present is extended all the way thru the object's past and future. Both seem to dismiss past and future as illusions. We are conscious beings surveying the world thru the lense of raw immediacy. Past and future are vestigial artifacts of this absolute though ever-morphing perspective.

[C C]

I wonder how an eternalist interpretation of time escapes becoming a presentist interpretation. The present seems to be the only valid mode of being in both, except that the eternalist sense of the present is extended all the way thru the object's past and future. Both seem to dismiss past and future as illusions. We are conscious beings surveying the world thru the lense of raw immediacy. Past and future are vestigial artifacts of this absolute though ever-morphing perspective.

To refer to the whole assemblage as inhering in a "present" or "everything is happening at once" is the result of our erroneously applying the views and biases of presentism to a separate scenario. Different states of the universe simply co-exist in eternalism. Crudely or vaguely akin to the pages of a flip book.

In contrast, existence is ephemeral in presentism. One "now" is replaced/annihilated by another (there's no prior and ensuing maintenance of each state of being, like the frames of a film reel passing over a projector light). A single configuration of the universe or of one's body doesn't survive long enough to even include a complete language-based thought (even one syllable is "too long" a duration for the time interval that particle decay requires).

But since it is commonly taken that the average person is an implicit presentist, that could explain why they'd be "talked down to" or patronized using presentist lingo. It might be assumed that they can't apprehend anything else, despite flocking to time-travel movies and rarely(?) wondering how (even with a magical apparatus) there could be a past or future to visit in the context of such a view of time.

Otherwise, imagine the inconsistency of capitalists analyzing themselves with concepts like class struggle and the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Or Scientology nomenclature being applied during a conference of Christians. That's akin to what's occurring when we append features of presentism to eternalism.

[Syne]

So eteralists just can't fathom how an actual, moving now maintains a semblance of continuity over time?
Like your arguments about free will, that completely dismiss quantum indeterminism, you seem stuck in wanting a 100% classical universe you can more readily digest.
But quantum physics is discrete, not continuous. You can ignore it, but you can't explain how a classical eternalism is maintained by a discrete foundation.

Presentism can be accounted for by quantum discreteness. It just doesn't give you the simple view of time and space as the reified entities of eternalism.