Article The only two “arrows of time” we have don’t match

[C C]

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ont-match/

EXCERPTS: . . . This idea is now known as Maxwell’s demon, and it enables you to decrease the entropy of the system after all, but only at a cost: the cost of expending the energy required to monitor the system and open-and-close the gate separating the two sides.

Following this procedure, however, doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, as the box is no longer a closed-and-isolated system. Instead, you’d have to consider the total entropy of the box plus the entropy of the demon (or the actions of the demon), both added together, in order to find that their combined entropy always increases, just like you’d expect. It’s only if you look solely at a part of the system, like the box alone (while ignoring the demon and its actions), that you perceive a decrease in entropy.

But the situation inside this box is exactly what we need to disprove the hypothetical connection between the thermodynamic arrow of time and the perceptive arrow of time. Even if you lived in the box and the demon was undetectable — similar to what you’d experience if you lived in a pocket of the Universe where the local entropy of your not closed-and-isolated system decreases — time would still run forward for you. This is sufficient to draw the big conclusion: thermodynamic arrow of time does not determine our perceptive arrow of time.

[...] What many don’t appreciate, however, is that these two types of arrows — the thermodynamic arrow of entropy and the perceptive arrow of time — are not interchangeable.

During the period of cosmic inflation that set up and preceded the hot Big Bang, where the entropy remains low and constant, time still runs forward. When the last star has burned out and the last black hole has decayed and the eventually-empty Universe is wholly dominated by dark energy, time will still run forward.

And everywhere in between, regardless of what’s happening in the Universe or the entropy of any system within that Universe, time will still run forward at exactly that same, universal rate for all observers: one second-per-second. If you want to know why yesterday is in the immutable past, tomorrow will arrive in a day, and the present is what you’re experiencing right now, you’re in good company; nobody knows why time has these properties. What we do know, however, is that thermodynamics, interesting though it may be, doesn’t hold the solution to that puzzle... (MORE - missing details)
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But the brain actually experiences or identifies change in terms of milliseconds, not seconds. And it's an irregular rate that varies from person to person, and different circumstances (i.e., is not universal). What further destroys this belief of one's mental Now and the supposed "flow" to the next Now being external or independent of neural processes, is how various drugs can accelerate or slow down perception of change, and even induce a sense of timelessness. (How drugs can warp your sense of time)

If there really was such a thing as an objective unit or measuring stick for time (non-invented), it would have to be in the order of septillionths of a second and beyond, so to accommodate subatomic changes and the most rapid EM frequencies and electrical oscillations. Again, our brain's "slow-poke" or vastly "lengthier" cognitive version of a single Now would have to extend over those countless increments of "speedier" change transpiring in the universe.

And for Pete's sake, even if the specious "flow" of consciousness (time) somehow did temporarily flip directions, you would never know such had occurred after it flips back. Any more than the characters in a movie remark "Oh, my! We traveled in the opposite direction of time for a while!" when the operator plays the scenes in reverse, and then switches back to playing the normal way. Even if cognition had two arrows, neither of those orientations could validate the other as being the case.

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life-line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

[Magical Realist]

I came across this same article on Forbes a few weeks ago. It makes perfect sense. Even if there is no detectable change in anything from moment to moment, no increase of entropy in a system at all for example, we still experience the smooth and unvarying succession and seriality of events which assumes a constant transitioning from past to future. Even a state of changeless and simultaneous existence, such as is assumed by the physicist's eternalism, requires the barren passage of duration to conceive of all those events being the same and not moving or changing. IOW constancy occurs over time just as variation does. The very property of self-identity, in which things cohere and remain the same thing, only makes sense over time, where there is a fluent repetition of the same as before only as the same again. We cannot escape this absolute and ceaseless continuity of now into more nowness, and so on and so on interweaving our state of consciousness into one interconnecting and interrelating state of wholeness.