I think it might be useful to think about what it would mean for the sentence “time is an illusion” to be true, or to be false.
There’s a certain contrarian perspective I find it useful to be able to take, by applying that perspective to this question I generated a few scripts:
“Of course a timeline is defined as a static object – if you take time out of the world-in-which-your-model-is-embedded and put it directly into your model you’ll find that there’s no time left over for your model to change in. There’s only one dimension of time, so you can’t have a model of time that changes, because if you did then I would have to ask exactly what your model changes over, if not time; once you take time and put it in the model, you can’t have time that operates outside the model!”
“A couple of your other confusions (if time doesn’t pass, how can you do anything? isn’t everything useless?) seem to be related to the free will/determinism conflict (if everything we do is already determined, what use is it making any decisions?). I occasionally find people that think that determinism constrains and prevents free will, because if your decision is just the result of initial conditions of the things you’re making the decision over, then how do you have the freedom to choose either option?, to which I reply, if you weren’t able to make the decision just based on everything you knew, what else would you posit is affecting it? What third-party source of noise has affected the process by which you are making decisions, so that all options are somehow possible?”
“The feeling-of-time-passing and the feeling-of-yourself-thinking are one and the same – you couldn’t alter one and not affect the other; the feeling-of-time-passing is the result of you moving to new mental states over new thoughts and new memories, as a result of being part of a chain of cause-and-effect that includes yourself as an element and as a subject. The feeling of making decisions and resolving sensory input into data, the feeling of entropy ratcheting forwards, is the feeling of time passing.”
“What would it mean for there to be a now that isn’t ‘subjectively’ defined by the you at each moment? Would that posit a perfect, timeless crystal that also happens to have a little arrow that says ‘you are here’, that moves forward at the rate of one crystal-second per second?”
“The time-that-is-now is the current position of the you within that timeless crystal, and all of them are correct – you can’t have a timeless crystal that has a ‘current time’ on it for the same reason that you can’t have a locationless map beamed onto the moon that also has a ‘you are here’ arrow on it.”
“There is no arrow of time – the more we understand physics, the more timeless our understanding becomes, but there IS an arrow of entropy (defined by taking a given starting state and running physics in either direction), and asking ‘what would it mean for use to go in the opposite direction from entropy, remembering our future but not our past’ yields a contradiction; the direction we experience entropy in is the direction we experience time passing in, because that’s what it means to be affected by entropy.”
I can’t put full epistemic emphasis on any of these individually, but I hope you can see the general line that I’m working from.
Interestingly regarding the first paragraph in the perspecitve that outcome is not a neccecity. It is not a given that time is 1D. Not every time dimension needs to be ontological time.
Say that you produce a movie that has a plot that takes place in 2020-2024. Say that the production of the movie happens 2019-2021. Then say at 2022 a censor demands a change to make it more morally acceptable. Even if we remove the “24 fps” time then pre and post censor still makes sense.
If we try to import “surrounding time” in our models we usually fail to do it in one jump. What is more usual that we continually import it in a way that we expect to be compatible with the future. On the set of the movie if you have film roll, the roll of the film is changing. It goes from totally empty to having more and more of the pictures burned in.
It’s part of a statistical mechanics textbook, so a couple of words of jargon may not make sense, but this section is highly readable even without those definitions. To me it’s been the most satisfying resolution to this question.
I think it might be useful to think about what it would mean for the sentence “time is an illusion” to be true, or to be false.
There’s a certain contrarian perspective I find it useful to be able to take, by applying that perspective to this question I generated a few scripts:
“Of course a timeline is defined as a static object – if you take time out of the world-in-which-your-model-is-embedded and put it directly into your model you’ll find that there’s no time left over for your model to change in. There’s only one dimension of time, so you can’t have a model of time that changes, because if you did then I would have to ask exactly what your model changes over, if not time; once you take time and put it in the model, you can’t have time that operates outside the model!”
“A couple of your other confusions (if time doesn’t pass, how can you do anything? isn’t everything useless?) seem to be related to the free will/determinism conflict (if everything we do is already determined, what use is it making any decisions?). I occasionally find people that think that determinism constrains and prevents free will, because if your decision is just the result of initial conditions of the things you’re making the decision over, then how do you have the freedom to choose either option?, to which I reply, if you weren’t able to make the decision just based on everything you knew, what else would you posit is affecting it? What third-party source of noise has affected the process by which you are making decisions, so that all options are somehow possible?”
“The feeling-of-time-passing and the feeling-of-yourself-thinking are one and the same – you couldn’t alter one and not affect the other; the feeling-of-time-passing is the result of you moving to new mental states over new thoughts and new memories, as a result of being part of a chain of cause-and-effect that includes yourself as an element and as a subject. The feeling of making decisions and resolving sensory input into data, the feeling of entropy ratcheting forwards, is the feeling of time passing.”
“What would it mean for there to be a now that isn’t ‘subjectively’ defined by the you at each moment? Would that posit a perfect, timeless crystal that also happens to have a little arrow that says ‘you are here’, that moves forward at the rate of one crystal-second per second?”
“The time-that-is-now is the current position of the you within that timeless crystal, and all of them are correct – you can’t have a timeless crystal that has a ‘current time’ on it for the same reason that you can’t have a locationless map beamed onto the moon that also has a ‘you are here’ arrow on it.”
“There is no arrow of time – the more we understand physics, the more timeless our understanding becomes, but there IS an arrow of entropy (defined by taking a given starting state and running physics in either direction), and asking ‘what would it mean for use to go in the opposite direction from entropy, remembering our future but not our past’ yields a contradiction; the direction we experience entropy in is the direction we experience time passing in, because that’s what it means to be affected by entropy.”
I can’t put full epistemic emphasis on any of these individually, but I hope you can see the general line that I’m working from.
Interestingly regarding the first paragraph in the perspecitve that outcome is not a neccecity. It is not a given that time is 1D. Not every time dimension needs to be ontological time.
Say that you produce a movie that has a plot that takes place in 2020-2024. Say that the production of the movie happens 2019-2021. Then say at 2022 a censor demands a change to make it more morally acceptable. Even if we remove the “24 fps” time then pre and post censor still makes sense.
If we try to import “surrounding time” in our models we usually fail to do it in one jump. What is more usual that we continually import it in a way that we expect to be compatible with the future. On the set of the movie if you have film roll, the roll of the film is changing. It goes from totally empty to having more and more of the pictures burned in.
There’s a more elaborate walkthrough of the last argument at https://web.stanford.edu/~peastman/statmech/thermodynamics.html#the-second-law-of-thermodynamics
It’s part of a statistical mechanics textbook, so a couple of words of jargon may not make sense, but this section is highly readable even without those definitions. To me it’s been the most satisfying resolution to this question.
There are at least two questions here.