Time might not exist - and we're starting to understand why

[C C]

A scattering of excerpts or random highlights for this isn't possible without losing overall coherence or the consistency between items. Have to read the whole article for the latter.
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Time might not exist - and we're starting to understand why
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/the...er-it-gets

EXCERPTS: Could it even be that time itself is an illusion? What makes time so confounding is that we have three very different ways of defining it, which don’t easily fit together.

The first definition comes from the equations that describe how things change over time. We have many such equations describing everything from the motion of tennis balls to the decay of atomic nuclei. In all these equations, time is a quantity, referred to as ‘coordinate time’. Time is no more than a mathematical label to which we can assign a particular value.

The second definition of time comes from Einstein’s theories of relativity, where it’s a dimension in addition to the three we’re familiar with. It’s a direction in four-dimensional spacetime.

Our picture of reality then becomes one in which all times - past, present and future - are equally real and co-exist, just as all points in space are equally real. More than that; time has a deep connection with gravity according to General Relativity, where the shape of spacetime is influenced by gravity.

Much of the effort at the forefront of theoretical physics over the past half-century has been devoted to unifying General Relativity with the strange world of quantum mechanics. Mathematical frameworks that attempt to do this are known as theories of quantum gravity.

But how do we reconcile these two notions of time - the quantum mechanical idea, in which time is a mere parameter, versus the relativistic idea that time is a dimension in spacetime?

[...] Early attempts at unifying a quantum description of reality with the 4D spacetime of General Relativity led John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt to come up with an equation – the Wheeler-DeWitt equation – in 1967, in which time no longer appears at all.

[...] In 1983, Don Page and William Wootters first suggested a link between time and quantum entanglement, rescuing time from the timeless Wheeler-DeWitt equation. [...] For us, embedded within the ‘everything else’, perceiving a particular time amounts to measuring the clock at that time, so we perceive reality – the clock’s environment, aka the Universe – at that moment. But, viewed from ‘outside’ the Universe, all times co-exist and there’s no ‘passage’ of time, as Wheeler and DeWitt argued.

[...] This brings us to the third definition of time, stemming from thermodynamics, which describes the properties of large numbers of particles treated in terms of macro quantities like heat, temperature and pressure. Here, time is neither a dimension nor a label, but a direction - pointing from the past to the future. This is typically phrased as being in the direction of increasing entropy: our unwinding Universe, balls rolling downhill, ice cubes melting in a glass of water and so on. However...

[...] According to General Relativity, this would mean the two clocks tick at slightly different rates, due to the slight difference in the gravitational field.

[...] And if we can’t determine which events are in the future and which are in the past, we arrive at the possibility of events acting backwards in time to cause events in their past. If, at the quantum level, events in the past can be affected by events in the future, then all bets are off.

While some physicists argue that causality is sacred and must be preserved at all costs, others have argued in favour of the idea of retrocausality (the future affecting the past) and even of quantum time travel. It may well be the case that even if we find our true theory of quantum gravity, time will turn out not to be one single concept, but rather a multi-faceted, complex thing... (MORE - missing details)
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COMMENT: But mentally, you don't have direct contact with the world. Your brain constructs representations from incoming sensory data, and that product is what you're actually experiencing and pondering.

In that context, time is the perception of change, or the perception of those co-existing different states of the environment. Resulting from each distinct brain configuration comparing its "current" data to the last installment information now stored in memory, and thereby detecting the differences between the two. The result consequently interpreted and objectively projected as "change", and yet another "moment" being added to the history of the world.

So even if that time perception could temporarily switch directions, you wouldn't know that such had occurred after cognition returned to "normal". Because you would simply be re-experiencing the same events again. The specious "flow of your consciousness"[1] (or "spirit" in mystical jargon) would not modify your body or the external world in either direction, anymore than playing a video backwards and then forwards alters the content of the video.

So the negative assertion that "time never goes backward" can't be confirmed, anymore than the positive assertion that "it does intermittently go backward" could be confirmed.

Due to the inherent bias of our language being built around ancient folk belief in temporal presentism (rather than eternalism that this area of physics ontologically reflects) you can't elaborate on much of anything without using verbs and tense. We'd have to develop a radically new language to describe eternalism without that corruption from presentism.

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[1] Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [4D world line] of my body, does a certain 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]

“Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected. The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being. Being homo sapiens, we live on an island –the universe–surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance. But, 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, to close on itself our quartet of questions, is a task for the future."--John Wheeler

Wheeler's prescient claim here is unfolding before our eyes. Spacetime is looking to be more and more a mere epiphenomenon of some deeper underlying substrate. A substrate that seems to be more informational than physical--unfettered by the constraints of laws or causalities. Wheeler even went so far as to say that space and time do not exist at the microscopic level. This has profound implications. That at base the universe, and Reality itself, generates itself at once and everywhere at once, out of that source or thing that everything is a different version or instance of. Everything is thus united at the bottom-most level by this fundamental immaterial identity or "substance" that is everywhere and all at once. Call this source Being or the Big Bang or the quantum vacuum or even God, but it ties everything that has happened and that can happen to one transphysical almost Platonic "theos". And more amazing still, it is directly accessible to the consciousness of all living beings. The boundless Aperion of Greek philosophers. The effulgent Pleroma of Christian Gnosticism. The infinite Brahman of Indian Hinduism. Tillich's Ground of Being or God. And the nameless Tao of Eastern mysticism. Many faces. One unifying Absolute.

[stryder]

This could probably be wrong, but it's worth having considering just to hash it out, it treats time as Linear rather than being an expansive volume:

Earth travels at around 25% of light in relationship to the Galaxy. (There is the potentially of additive speed from the Galaxy travelling too)

If all additive transition was stopped, so there was no movement at all. The question could be asked "would time still flow?".

How I mean is the current inertia likely adds to the magnitude of mass, decay and makes sure that we occupying a different universal space in time when we attempt to occupy a given space.

As a further analogy:
Either myself or yourself could sit in a specific chair at different times and currently we can't occupy the same chair at the same time.

If time was linked to the inert momentum of the our transition through the universe and for the sake of theory it was frozen in place (no more momentum), we'd likely both occupy the same chair at the same time and this would cause a rather interesting problem in regards to how our fields/energy/entanglement would coincide.

I guess I ask the question "Is time Volatile, or Non-Volatile?" (Similar to volatile vs non-volatile memory)

[Syne]

There are interpretations of relativity that do not require the block universe. The non-uniform flow of time in difference reference frames is just as well explained by a evolving/growing block or presentism interpretation. If people weren't ideologically wed to the block universe, they wouldn't have such a hard time reconciling our experience of time with relativity.

[Secular Sanity]

This could probably be wrong, but it's worth having considering just to hash it out, it treats time as Linear rather than being an expansive volume:

Earth travels at around 25% of light in relationship to the Galaxy.  (There is the potentially of additive speed from the Galaxy travelling too)

If all additive transition was stopped, so there was no movement at all.  The question could be asked "would time still flow?".

How I mean is the current inertia likely adds to the magnitude of mass, decay and makes sure that we occupying a different universal space in time when we attempt to occupy a given space. 

As a further analogy:
Either myself or yourself could sit in a specific chair at different times and currently we can't occupy the same chair at the same time. 

If time was linked to the inert momentum of the our transition through the universe and for the sake of theory it was frozen in place (no more momentum), we'd likely both occupy the same chair at the same time and this would cause a rather interesting problem in regards to how our fields/energy/entanglement would coincide.

I guess I ask the question "Is time Volatile, or Non-Volatile?"  (Similar to volatile vs non-volatile memory)

I don't think time would still flow, but our universe would be frozen. 

This guy has a video similar to that idea, but it’s about why we can't travel back in time. Philosophy though...I think.  This other guy criticized one of his other videos about absolute acceleration. He responded in the comments.

Here's the video that's similar to your idea about motion. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/o1ZIZcndO74

[stryder]

This could probably be wrong, but it's worth having considering just to hash it out, it treats time as Linear rather than being an expansive volume:

Earth travels at around 25% of light in relationship to the Galaxy.  (There is the potentially of additive speed from the Galaxy travelling too)

If all additive transition was stopped, so there was no movement at all.  The question could be asked "would time still flow?".

How I mean is the current inertia likely adds to the magnitude of mass, decay and makes sure that we occupying a different universal space in time when we attempt to occupy a given space. 

As a further analogy:
Either myself or yourself could sit in a specific chair at different times and currently we can't occupy the same chair at the same time. 

If time was linked to the inert momentum of the our transition through the universe and for the sake of theory it was frozen in place (no more momentum), we'd likely both occupy the same chair at the same time and this would cause a rather interesting problem in regards to how our fields/energy/entanglement would coincide.

I guess I ask the question "Is time Volatile, or Non-Volatile?"  (Similar to volatile vs non-volatile memory)

I don't think time would still flow, but our universe would be frozen. 

This guy has a video similar to that idea, but it’s about why we can't travel back in time. Philosophy though...I think.  This other guy criticized one of his other videos about absolute acceleration. He responded in the comments.

Here's the video that's similar to your idea about motion. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/o1ZIZcndO74

Thanks for finding those SS. It definitely adds to the subject itself.