Simple answer: No, time doesn’t exist. Barbour is correct. On the platonic (universal) level (the fundamental level of reality), all is timeless.
The appearance of time is a consequence of partitioning reality into cellular automata: when things take on the appearance of cellular automata they will seem to behave like systems; that it is say, they will seem to have inputs, produce outputs, and processing. Sentience too is closely tied to time, and indeed (as I realized long ago and stated on both wta-talk and ‘Overcoming Bias’), consciousness itself can be considered a special case of the illusion of time; it arises from a coarse-graining of our self-models due our limited introspective capacities. Just as a fundamental ignorance or ‘smearing’ of physical microscopic properties gives rise to thermodynamic properties, so too, lack of complete knowledge about all our internal goals produces the illusion of qualia. So what am I saying in short? Reality at the deepest level is continuous; on that level it’s timeless; but mentally partitioning reality to create a discrete model (cellular automa) results in the illusion of time. Ergo, qualia is a special case of this illusion, whereby goal-directed computational systems (cellular automata with goal systems) are further coarse-grained, and there is corresponding uncertainties in the internal goals of these systems (the smearing or blurring of internal goals manifests as ontologies/categorizations/qualia).
Simple answer: No, time doesn’t exist. Barbour is correct. On the platonic (universal) level (the fundamental level of reality), all is timeless. The appearance of time is a consequence of partitioning reality into cellular automata: when things take on the appearance of cellular automata they will seem to behave like systems; that it is say, they will seem to have inputs, produce outputs, and processing. Sentience too is closely tied to time, and indeed (as I realized long ago and stated on both wta-talk and ‘Overcoming Bias’), consciousness itself can be considered a special case of the illusion of time; it arises from a coarse-graining of our self-models due our limited introspective capacities. Just as a fundamental ignorance or ‘smearing’ of physical microscopic properties gives rise to thermodynamic properties, so too, lack of complete knowledge about all our internal goals produces the illusion of qualia.
So what am I saying in short? Reality at the deepest level is continuous; on that level it’s timeless; but mentally partitioning reality to create a discrete model (cellular automa) results in the illusion of time. Ergo, qualia is a special case of this illusion, whereby goal-directed computational systems (cellular automata with goal systems) are further coarse-grained, and there is corresponding uncertainties in the internal goals of these systems (the smearing or blurring of internal goals manifests as ontologies/categorizations/qualia).