I’m trying to find a way to explain why this freaks me out so much...
If time is just another dimension in our model then that’s no big deal: here we all are cruising along the time dimension, t = 76 and then one second later t = 77 and so on. Saying that time is the t parameter which is a dimension is just mathematical notation; it doesn’t actually get rid of time. Intuitively, we can think of the value of t increasing over time, and thus we haven’t actually defined time at all, we have only represented it by t.
If we switch to this “static crystal” view of things, time is now just a relationship between things along one of the dimensions. There is no “now”, nor a “future”, nor a “past” and time doesn’t “flow”. We can’t even talk about “moving” along the time dimension because movement would be a change over time. We have stepped outside of time and completely defined it within our model. Inside the model it feels like we are moving through time because of the properties of the time dimension relation: one effect of which is that the “past” is partly represented in the current state, for example as memory, as well as the expected “future”. It all simply and naturally comes from the relation on the structure of the crystal.
I’m no physicist, however when something mysterious can be brought into a model in a way that is simple and makes it no longer mysterious, well it has a certain ring of truth to it.
But to accept this at an intuitive level, for example, the way in which the mystery of the present “now” can be seen as a natural illusion deriving from a simple relationship… I’m not joking when I say that thinking about this makes me feel a bit weird.
You make an interesting point that I hadn’t even considered. In my “current” mind, I have representations of past configurations stored as “memories” and representations of future configurations stored as “expectations”. Both memory and prediction are incredibly imprecise so… if it weren’t for us constantly updating our mental models of past configurations from external sources (observations of the effects of “past” causes), there wouldn’t be all /that/ much difference experientially if: snap causality is now reversed, time now moves backwards, arrow of time *= −1, however you want to describe it.
I’m trying to find a way to explain why this freaks me out so much...
If time is just another dimension in our model then that’s no big deal: here we all are cruising along the time dimension, t = 76 and then one second later t = 77 and so on. Saying that time is the t parameter which is a dimension is just mathematical notation; it doesn’t actually get rid of time. Intuitively, we can think of the value of t increasing over time, and thus we haven’t actually defined time at all, we have only represented it by t.
If we switch to this “static crystal” view of things, time is now just a relationship between things along one of the dimensions. There is no “now”, nor a “future”, nor a “past” and time doesn’t “flow”. We can’t even talk about “moving” along the time dimension because movement would be a change over time. We have stepped outside of time and completely defined it within our model. Inside the model it feels like we are moving through time because of the properties of the time dimension relation: one effect of which is that the “past” is partly represented in the current state, for example as memory, as well as the expected “future”. It all simply and naturally comes from the relation on the structure of the crystal.
I’m no physicist, however when something mysterious can be brought into a model in a way that is simple and makes it no longer mysterious, well it has a certain ring of truth to it.
But to accept this at an intuitive level, for example, the way in which the mystery of the present “now” can be seen as a natural illusion deriving from a simple relationship… I’m not joking when I say that thinking about this makes me feel a bit weird.
You make an interesting point that I hadn’t even considered. In my “current” mind, I have representations of past configurations stored as “memories” and representations of future configurations stored as “expectations”. Both memory and prediction are incredibly imprecise so… if it weren’t for us constantly updating our mental models of past configurations from external sources (observations of the effects of “past” causes), there wouldn’t be all /that/ much difference experientially if: snap causality is now reversed, time now moves backwards, arrow of time *= −1, however you want to describe it.