Cosmologic philosophy: what is time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 25, 2016, 15:36 (2921 days ago) @ dhw

This neatly follows, an essay on time and does it exist? Not in physics, except as space-time, but time is in our minds and consciousness and for me time is part of the mystery of consciousness: - https://aeon.co/essays/why-doesn-t-physics-help-us-to-understand-the-flow-of-time?utm_s... - "Yet today's physicists rarely debate what time is and why we experience it the way we do, remembering the past but never the future...‘What is time?' - *** - "The Newtonian and Einsteinian world theories offer little guidance. They are both eternalised ‘block' universes, in which time is a dimension not unlike space, so everything exists all at once. Einstein's equations allow different observers to disagree about the duration of time intervals, but the spacetime continuum itself, is an invariant stage upon which the drama of the world takes place. In quantum mechanics, as in Newton's mechanics and Einstein's relativistic theories, the laws of physics that govern the microscopic world look the same going forward or backward in time. - *** - "For most of the past few centuries, conscious awareness has been considered beyond the pale for physics, a problem too hard to tackle, postponed while we dealt with other urgent business. As scientists drove ever deeper into the nucleus and out to the stars, the conscious mind itself, and the glaring contrast between our experience of time's flow and our eternalised mathematical theories, was left hanging. How did that come to pass? Isn't science supposed to test itself against the ground of experience? This disconnect might help to explain why so many students not only don't ‘get' physics, but are positively repulsed by it. Where are they in the world picture drawn by physicists? Where is life, and where is death? Where is the flow of time? - *** - "The phenomenology of experience, such as our internal perception of the passage of time, is an area owned by cognitive science and philosophy. The exterior world is traditionally the playground of physics. Yet to separate the inner and outer realms in this naive way is misleading. It is our brain that does physics, after all. In the end, the two sides strive to find bridges between them, if only through metaphor, to find connections between the myriad ways in which humans experience themselves in the world. - *** - "What language can take us into the heart of the atom and beyond the edge of the galaxy, and describe the passage of time that pulls the world inexorably forward on these scales? Heisenberg argued it is the logical and mathematical language used in modern physics, precisely because that language is so rigid and formalised. When building a bridge into the dark, build using careful, sure steps. But we want to understand our own place in the world, not just how the world is out there; we also want to understand how we come to experience the world as we do. That calls for the more fluid and evocative language of poetry and storytelling. - *** - "Our experience of the ‘now' is built out of a mix of recent memories and our current sense perceptions, what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. Those sensory perceptions are not instantaneous, but signals from stimulated nerve endings. Those signals are sent to the brain, a dynamic network that itself has no global clock. - *** - "It's possible that our experience of the flow of time is like our experience of colour. A physicist would say that colour does not exist as an inherent property of the world... It is only when our eyes intersect a tiny part of that sea of radiation, and our brain gets to work on it, that ‘colour' emerges. It is an internal experience, a naming process, an activity of our brain trying to puzzle things out. - "So the flow of time might be a story our brain creates, trying to make sense of chaos." - Comment: physics will not explain the flow of time in our consciousness. The author quotes several well-known physicists who have theories.