http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/618

The discussion about time starts Feb 25, 3:51.

It takes a bit of unpacking. Tom is a good example of someone who has put a great deal of effort into mastering the box and isn’t about to think outside it.

It does go both ways. Relativity, you might say. That’s how I originally intuited it, but in unwrapping it further, I see one as the physical reality and one as the perception. Much like we perceive the sun moving across the sky from east to west, but the underlaying physical reality is of the earth rotating west to east. Although relativistically they are moving about the same center of gravity, it just happens to be located near the center of the sun.
I don’t know why that link didn’t work for you. I clicked on it and it loaded. Damn pipes. I tried their archives, but it didn’t come up that way. I’ll try posting it email.

“The linear concept of time is focused, reduced to one clock, but reality consists of many clocks, operating at different speeds.”

“Time… is the physical reality transforming from one event to the next, so that neither past or future exist…”

“How do plants interrelate with their environment? Where we relate mechanically, they relate chemically…We are the perception of cause and effect. They are cause and effect. We make distinctions. They are connections.”

“The reality isn’t the present traveling from past to future, but what exists creating and replacing those events which go future to past.”

Though, for our sake, I’d say it’s both the present traveling into the past and the future unfolding from the present.
BTW, would you be interested in letting me feature this comment as a post here? With full attributions, of course.

I’m almost thinking of time as more of a scalar, emergent effect, where the past/present is constantly peeling away from the present/future in much more of a non-linear, cumulative effect, with different sectors moving at different speeds. The linear concept of time is focused, reduced to one clock, but reality consists of many clocks, operating at different speeds. A good example of our tendency to reduce the many to the one is that months are based on the cycles of the moon and have no particular alignment with years, but civilization has converted them into sections of the year, that have only a passing relationship to lunar cycles.

This is just how our minds function. We take enormous amounts of information in and reduce it to digestible, serial snapshots, called thoughts. This freeze faming of reality creates the impression that reality is a series of digitized instants, but the mental alternative would be total white noise of information overload. (Of course, some of the narratives constructed are fantastical, bizarre and delusional, but that’s just my perception of what others must be thinking.)
We, as mobile organisms, move in a subjective linear direction and our brains are navigation organs functioned with preserving our singular selves and larger communal bodies. What if we were not mobile? Would we even need the focal perception of a brain?How do plants interrelate with their environment? Where we relate mechanically, they relate chemically. The thermal function controls the temporal function. We are the perception of cause and effect. They are cause and effect. We make distinctions. They are connections. Both a tree and a lightning bolt are a connection between the sky and the earth.

So in this sense, you might say I see the arrow of time as a construct, those flashes of thought as we move about. Reversing it, time travel, etc. isn’t a physical reality because time is not some meta-dimension along which events exist and if we were to find a way to fold it, could travel it. Rather it is the physical reality transforming from one event to the next, so that neither past or future exist, as the energy to manifest them is currently manifesting the present. The reality isn’t the present traveling from past to future, but what exists creating and replacing those events which go future to past.

Actually there is a lot of precedent in eastern thought, which is more contextual and it is said they view the past as in front, since it is visible and the future as behind, since it is not. Also we are only seeing information of past events, whether it’s across the room, or across the universe. They also are not monotheistic, which is an idealization of the individual, but tend towards ancestor worship, which is a reverence for the past.

This is an essay I wrote last summer, trying to tie divergent thoughts into a larger whole:

http://www.exterminatingangel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=479

“…if we view it as the events coalescing out of future probabilities and receding into past circumstance, then the individual is integral to the events.”

I’m wondering if complex systems are non-reversible… and if this, as you suggest, in some way challenges the arrow of time (or does it reinforce the forward continuum?).

I think you can put Einstein at the top of that list of those endorsing a myopic linearity, with the idea of four dimensional spacetime.

Time as a dimension extending from the past into the future is really just the narrative construct. The reality is a changing energy configuration which creates events and replaces them. For example, the earth doesn’t travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Time is a consequence of motion, not the basis for it.

Now yes, you can use the speed of light to say it takes a certain amount of time to cross a certain distance and the faster you go, the slower the rate of change and this relation is mathematically precise, but the same argument could be applied to the relationship between temperature and volume. Given that a certain amount of energy in a certain volume will be a certain temperature and if the volume is changed, the temperature will change proportionally, so it could be argued that temperature is another parameter of volume.

The issue of the direction of time is fundamental to our conception of reality. When we view it as the series of events, it is the individual moving relative to their context, but if we view it as the events coalescing out of future probabilities and receding into past circumstance, then the individual is integral to the events.

Now obviously our entire concept of human history and narrative, at least the western version, is based on the linear concept of time, in which the present is a point moving from past events to future ones, much like ones reads a book, but then for much of human history, we viewed the earth as the center of the universe and the sun revolving around that and this model is the basis of mechanical clocks, which evolved from sun dials and so the hands represent the motion of the sun, but it is actually the opposite. The earth rotates west to east, while the sun is stable, just as the hands of the clock represent the present and it is actually the units of time going future to past/counterclockwise.

Then we get to the idea of space being represented by three dimensions, which are in reality just the coordinate system of the centerpoint and are no more the basis of space than longitude, latitude and altitude are the basis of ones location on earth, but are simply an extremely reductionistic model of it.

Not a popular argument in physics discussions, but I find it makes sense to people for whom spacetime is not the heart of the Holy Canon.

Absolutely! Great post, thanks for pointing things out. People are increasingly relying on models that are oversimplified. Bad news.