When I am talking about time, I am talking about now. We exist at a moment, so-called now. So, now exists. Therefore, time exists.
Of course. But it would be the time stamp for your talk about an appoint tomorrow.
I never said time doesn’t exist. But what I said was, time exists in your perception, not in the world. In the world, only the objects, movements and changes exist.
But time exists. It accommodates the whole universe in each instant.
“Outside of spacetime” - something like another realm or prior to it in the structural dependency order ?
Do you know whether Suarez himself distinguishes between those two readings ?
Yes, it does exist. I confirm it does. But it is in your mind. The universe appears to your mind accommodating in each instant, because time exists in your mind. If not, you won’t notice it.
In the Twenty Questions game, I see a progressive closure structure where each yes/no answer adds a constraint. At the end, we have an object which is not revealed but is rather the accumulated result of every constraint that didn’t exclude it. Answers can’t be arbitrary; each one has to cohere with what came before. From there, what gets generated is real and determinate while remaining open until the constraints close it.
If we are among the constraints that close the world into determinacy, what closes us?
The universe has existed for a long time. There was a period when the universe existed, but I didn’t. The universe was changing during this period, and time was needed for that change. So, no, time does not exist in my mind.
That’s right. I explained earlier in the thread how relativity theory in general, denies truth as irrelevant, making truth, within the precepts of the theory impossible. So if we want to know the truth about simultaneity we need to reject relativity theory.
I interpret all the particles of the standard model as convenient fictions, for reasons beyond the scope of this thread. The “correct” view doesn’t interpret activity which is wave activity as particles. But as long as the necessity for an aether as the substance for the observed waves is denied, the “correct” view will not be developed.
Yeah sure. But all that thought is in your mind. The universe don’t know and don’t care about it.
That is close to where I stand too.
Cause makes a difference to its effect and that asymmetry is irreversible. Time unfolds forward because cause precedes effect structurally, not because anyone remembers or constitutes it. Time is the unfolding of cause and effect relations.
The universe does not store cause and effect relations as representations. It instantiates them. The past is not remembered by the universe — it is written into what the universe currently is.
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“Ontologically prior” rather than temporally prior or spatially separated, meaning the world we know emerges from a more fundamental non-spatiotemporal level of being. Suarez specifically favors this interpretation.
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Agreed. But we are talking about time here rather than thoughts.
This is the “bootstrap problem” I mentioned earlier. Wheeler addresses this issue by proposing that the cosmos is a “self-excited circuit.” The circuit would drop out of what Suarez sees as the non-spatiotemporal “ontological prior.”
This is not to say that Wheeler’s “agents” have any special status – his was an attempt to eradicate any such interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rather, agents are emergent entities within the self-excited circuit, but entities that can ask these questions.
In 1970 the German physicist Heinz-Dieter Zeh introduced the notion of decoherence – the process by which the classical world emerges from the quantum foam by a process of quantum information dissemination out into the environment by virtue of interactions.
I’m inclined to regard Wheeler’s agents as smeared-out all around his self-excited circuit – objects in the emergent (i.e. decohered) classical world. The picture I have is of agents being classical world “conduits” through which the cosmos itself is asking these questions. Hence the name of his interpretation (taken from Brandon Carter’s original 1973 Anthropic Principle) – the Participatory Anthropic Principle.
Wheeler depicts his view in his famous icon of the universe – represented as an upper-case ‘U’ – looking back at itself. He made the comment “We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.”
Notice – “participators” – there is no implication of libertarian free will here, but there is genuine novelty entering the cosmos via quantum uncertainty (Heisenberg indeterminacy). The question I have failed to resolve is that of creativity. We end up with something that looks surprisingly similar to Bergson’s Creative Evolution, without being able to account for his Elan Vital.
It is not exactly thoughts. From Kant’s idea, time is intuition, and also precondition for perception. It is mental in nature.
OK, what is time for you, if not perception? Wherein the world can you see time?
I already mentioned that we live in each moment of time. Time accommodates us. It is not something that we can see or experience.
Self-excited circuit and smearing the agents around the circuit rather than privileging them is good stuff.
I will pause with:
As for novelty, it might not need an engine if genuine openness is the default. Why does anything close into determinacy at all?
But it sounds incorrect to say something you cannot see or experience exists.
Novelty is not the issue. Quantum indeterminacy has been evident since Heisenberg’s flash of inspiration on retreat on the island of Helgoland in 1925. The residual problem I can’t fathom is why the evolution of the cosmos should appear to be directed.
It is this apparent ‘creativity’ (that the agent assumes credit for in its misconception of libertarian free will). Genuine novelty is a necessary but insufficient condition to account for it.
Wheeler attempts to address the issue in his paper “Law Without Law” in which he says that even the laws of physics themselves are emergent, but it leaves me with reservations. In short, how to account for the proposition that the universe is asking questions.
Is there an implied teleology here? Or do we need to implicate Everett’s relative state hypothesis (the Many Worlds Interpretation)? I’m uneasy about both options, so are there others?
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We deduce the existence of things that we do see or experience all the time!