The "all at once" theory

[C C]

CURT JAIMUNGAL
https://youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs

INTRO: Today we are joined by physicist and philosopher Emily Adlam for her first appearance on "Theories of Everything" to challenge one of the deepest assumptions in science: that time flows. In this thought-provoking conversation, Adlam presents her “all-at-once” view of physics, where the universe is more like a completed Sudoku puzzle than a film playing forward. We explore the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the role of the observer, the illusion of causality, and why these foundational questions demand both philosophical clarity and scientific precision...

VIDEO EXCERPT: . . . So, in that sense, often it will be the case that you can fix any state anywhere on the history, and that will be sufficient to fix the rest. So, it could be the initial state, could be the final state, could be one or more
states in between. In that sense, in that kind of picture, no particular point of time has to be specially privileged. It's just the history as a whole which is selected by the laws.

When speaking about these histories, it reminds me of the transactional interpretation. Have you done any work on the transactional interpretation, or do you have any thoughts on it?

The "all at once theory" ... https://youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6I2OhmVWLMs

[Magical Realist]

I have had the sneaking suspicion that continuity in time, as the flowing together of events from past to future, entails a dynamic whole or gestalt that everywhere and at every moment binds things together. It is a solution to the "binding problem" but as it applies to time instead of consciousness. The problem with the physicalist reductionism of physics is that everything gets atomized, or quantified, with no qualitative properties or essences preserved. Hence the "qualitative" as somehow emergent and magically just appearing along the way. The endlessly hierarchal and absolutely discrete units forbid from the start the sort of phenomenal "feel" or vibe we get from experiencing reality. It is dismissed as little more than subjective illusion. And so we end up with prospective TOEs that are basically just empty mathematical abstractions. A desolate and arid landscape of unqualitative particles and lifeless autonomous mechanisms that while precisely calculable bears little resemblance to our daily experience.

Because if nothing is really connected in the end, then the whole the units make up is purely compositional and incidental to and less real than its components. If otoh time is NOT atomistic, that it is IN ESSENCE "liquified" and fluid like water, then it is the components or events that are incidental and less real than the whole. The drops of water as opposed to the ocean itself as it were. Time becomes the wavelike merging and re-emerging swell of happening wherein all that is takes its transient form and then dissolves back into the formless property-rich whole. So here the whole is not a resultant and reducible composite. It is a preexistent (or omniexistent) and irreducible organism, as the vast churning ocean is to its waves and ripples and droplets and evaporating water molecules. And all these temporary fragments of it are embued with the enlivening and protean properties of the whole. Force, energy, movement, change. Temporal continuity is then in essence the presence of the Whole in all of its parts. I cannot but feel the powerful metaphorical relevance of Taoism as both a scientific and a spiritual model for reality and experience:

"There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before Heaven and Earth.
Soundless and formless it depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao."----"The Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu

Just realized, inadvertently, that this aligns well with Bohm's idea of the Holomovement:

"David Bohm's holomovement ultimately presents reality not as a collection of separate objects interacting mechanically, but as undivided wholeness in flowing movement - a continuous creative process where mind and matter, observer and observed, past and future emerge from and return to a deeper implicate order. While aspects remain speculative and mathematical extensions to quantum field theory prove elusive, the framework offers profound insights for understanding consciousness, non-locality, and the relationship between parts and wholes."

John Wheeler had an interesting thought about the nature of Time:

"Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from an ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future."---John Archibald Wheeler