Cosmologic philosophy: what is time II (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 23, 2018, 14:42 (2253 days ago) @ David Turell

Another take by Ravelli. It is how we humans experience reality:

http://nautil.us//issue/64/the-unseen/the-end-of-time?utm_source=Nautilus&utm_campa...

"This is the image of time that is familiar to us: something that flows uniformly and equally throughout the universe, in the course of which all things happen. A present that exists throughout the cosmos, a “now” that constitutes reality. The past for everyone is fixed, is gone, having already happened. The future is open, yet to be determined. Reality flows from the past, through the present, toward the future—and the evolution of things between past and future is intrinsically asymmetrical. This, we feel, is the basic structure of the world.

"This familiar picture has fallen apart, has shown itself to be only an approximation of a much more complex reality.

"A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist. Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only “partially” ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” in a far-off galaxy. The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

"The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations that govern events in the world. It issues only from the fact that, in the past, the world found itself subject to a state that, with our blurred take on things, appears particular to us.

"From our perspective—the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world—we see that world flowing in time. Our interaction with the world is partial, which is why we see it in a blurred way. To this blurring is added quantum indeterminacy. The ignorance that follows from this determines the existence of a particular variable—thermal time—and of an entropy that quantifies our uncertainty.

"We human beings are an effect of this great history of the increase of entropy, held together by the memory that is enabled by these traces. Each one of us is a unified being because we reflect the world, because we have formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because it is a perspective on the world unified by memory. From this comes what we call the “flowing” of time. This is what we are listening to when we listen to the passing of time.

"In the end, therefore, instead of many possible times, we can speak only of a single time: the time of our experience—uniform, universal, and ordered. This is the approximation of an approximation of an approximation of a description of the world made from our particular perspective as human beings who are dependent on the growth of entropy, anchored to the flowing of time. We for whom, as Ecclesiastes has it, there is a time to be born and a time to die."

Comment: Basically we create our own concepts of time while at a fundamental level, time, as understood by physicists, is different in each place in the universe.