Aug 11, 2024 05:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 11, 2024 06:29 PM by C C.)
The year 1969 is the past to me, but for Mary Shelley it is the future. And from the temporal perspective of a Zefram Chochrane in the year 2063, we are both in the past, but part of his past is also our future. For people who are attending the Woodstock music festival in 1969, certain days of that year are their overall "present".
As McTaggert pointed out in 1908, any segment of time is vulnerable to relational interpretation -- it has no fixed identity or cannot slot into any particular category of past, present, and future absolutely.
It might be more accurate to refer to the passage of consciousness than the passage of time. What's "moving", or what appears to be "moving" is the brain's incremental cognition of its sensory states and its introspective states. There is no single brain configuration available that can provide a global experience of one's entire life from fetal awareness to death. The neural states that are the case are quasi-distinct and in sequence, and thereby that's likewise why one consciously encounters the differences of the world in that way, along its four-dimensional structure (or whatever alternatively complex structure).
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The physics of time doesn't contradict experience (Matt Farr)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-physics-of-t..._auid=2020
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.
[...] 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.
However, tools of representation, like diagrams, need not possess the properties that they represent. For instance, I can depict a three-dimensional cube by drawing it on the two-dimensional surface of the piece of paper in front of me. The fact that the drawing is two-dimensional in no way means that it is somehow depicting a two-dimensional object; on the contrary, the cube it is representing is three-dimensional. Likewise, 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.
Think of what it means for something to be static: static things are unchanging over time. We could in some sense imagine a three-dimensional universe that is unchanging over time: everything in the world simply stays relatively motionless and unchanging for eternity, but this obviously isn’t what static time theorists believe.
Rather they take the universe to be a four-dimensional entity in which time has a similar dimensional status to the spatial dimensions, with past and future things ultimately as ‘real’ as those around us in the present. So, could a four-dimensional spacetime be unchanging over time? Clearly, this would be problematic, since it would require a second time dimension relative to which four-dimensional spacetime is unchanging. Again, static time theorists believe in no such thing.
One such adherent of the static view, philosopher D.C. Williams, noted that passage realists are mistaken when thinking that ‘they alone are “taking time seriously”.’ Williams suggested that the dynamic theorist thinks that there is ‘something extra’ in reality that is missed out by the static theorist’s four-dimensional view, ‘something active and dynamic, which is often […] described as “passage”’ (Williams, 1951).
Williams adds that this ‘something extra’ is a myth, ‘one which is fundamentally false, deceiving us about the facts, and blocking our understanding of them.’ Since Williams, it has been popular for static theorists to suggest that their view of time leaves nothing important out: everything in our experience of a moving, changing, temporal reality is fully accounted for by the ‘static’ four-dimensional view of time... (MORE - details)
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If minds in all eras are conscious, then an option like the growing block universe (GBU) is superfluous (i.e., it might as well be eternalism). And if minds are only conscious at the growing "edge" of GBU, then GBU is still superfluous. Since it functionally collapses back into the same thing as presentism.
As McTaggert pointed out in 1908, any segment of time is vulnerable to relational interpretation -- it has no fixed identity or cannot slot into any particular category of past, present, and future absolutely.
It might be more accurate to refer to the passage of consciousness than the passage of time. What's "moving", or what appears to be "moving" is the brain's incremental cognition of its sensory states and its introspective states. There is no single brain configuration available that can provide a global experience of one's entire life from fetal awareness to death. The neural states that are the case are quasi-distinct and in sequence, and thereby that's likewise why one consciously encounters the differences of the world in that way, along its four-dimensional structure (or whatever alternatively complex structure).
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The physics of time doesn't contradict experience (Matt Farr)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-physics-of-t..._auid=2020
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.
[...] 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.
However, tools of representation, like diagrams, need not possess the properties that they represent. For instance, I can depict a three-dimensional cube by drawing it on the two-dimensional surface of the piece of paper in front of me. The fact that the drawing is two-dimensional in no way means that it is somehow depicting a two-dimensional object; on the contrary, the cube it is representing is three-dimensional. Likewise, 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.
Think of what it means for something to be static: static things are unchanging over time. We could in some sense imagine a three-dimensional universe that is unchanging over time: everything in the world simply stays relatively motionless and unchanging for eternity, but this obviously isn’t what static time theorists believe.
Rather they take the universe to be a four-dimensional entity in which time has a similar dimensional status to the spatial dimensions, with past and future things ultimately as ‘real’ as those around us in the present. So, could a four-dimensional spacetime be unchanging over time? Clearly, this would be problematic, since it would require a second time dimension relative to which four-dimensional spacetime is unchanging. Again, static time theorists believe in no such thing.
One such adherent of the static view, philosopher D.C. Williams, noted that passage realists are mistaken when thinking that ‘they alone are “taking time seriously”.’ Williams suggested that the dynamic theorist thinks that there is ‘something extra’ in reality that is missed out by the static theorist’s four-dimensional view, ‘something active and dynamic, which is often […] described as “passage”’ (Williams, 1951).
Williams adds that this ‘something extra’ is a myth, ‘one which is fundamentally false, deceiving us about the facts, and blocking our understanding of them.’ Since Williams, it has been popular for static theorists to suggest that their view of time leaves nothing important out: everything in our experience of a moving, changing, temporal reality is fully accounted for by the ‘static’ four-dimensional view of time... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
If minds in all eras are conscious, then an option like the growing block universe (GBU) is superfluous (i.e., it might as well be eternalism). And if minds are only conscious at the growing "edge" of GBU, then GBU is still superfluous. Since it functionally collapses back into the same thing as presentism.
