As an effect of action, time would be more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude. It is just that while amplitudes en mass expresses as temperature, frequency en mass expresses as noise and thus from a physicist’s point of view, chaos and disorder. Therefore to measure time, only one oscillation is isolated and its frequency measured. Yet the overall effect of change is still cumulative, like temperature. It is potential, to actual, to residual. With time as an effect of action, we don’t have to reject the present as a state of simultaneity, nor dismiss its inherent asymmetry, since the inertia of action is not bipolar. As action, a faster clock will simply use up its available energy faster and so fall into the past faster, or require more energy to sustain it. The tortoise is still plodding along, long after the hare has died.
Keep in mind that narrative and causal logic are based on this sequencing effect and therefore history and civilization. Yet it is not sequence of form which is causal, but transmission of energy. Yesterday doesn’t cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this effect we who exist at one point on this planet experience as days. Thus we tend to rationalize narrative connections between events that are not always as clear as we think.
There are various philosophical debates around this issue, such as free will vs. determinism, yet if we look at it as future becoming past, it makes more sense, as probability precedes actuality. There is the classical deterministic argument that the laws of nature will provide only one course of action, determined by the eternal laws of nature, therefore the future must ultimately be as determined as the past, or the quantum Everrittian argument that the past remains as probabilistic as the future and so must branch out into multiworlds with every possibility. As for the first, while the laws might be fully deterministic, since information can only travel at a finite speed, the input into any event only arrives with the occurrence of that event and so cannot be fully known prior to it, therefore the outcome cannot be fully determined prior to the event. As for the Everritt view, while the wave doesn’t fully collapse, the past does not physically exist anyway and that energy is just being transmitted onto other events in the physical present and the connections that are made, simply divert the energy in other directions. Essentially the future is being woven from strands pulled from the past, in cosmic feedback loops.
To will is to determine. We put our intellectual capacities into distinguishing between alternatives and that process decides our actions. To simply randomly chose would be a complete lack of expression of will. We affect our external world, as it affects us. If that feedback didn’t exist, we would have no connection, or effect on our world. We are part of the process. Both cause and effect. It is these feedback loops which really power the process. Consider that in the factory, the creation of profits and jobs can be more important to some than the actual product. Reality is not fundamentally linear, as it is that tapestry being woven from strands pulled out of what been woven. It is energy, not form, which determines the future. Energy is cause, form is effect.
While western thought tends to objectivize and thus atomize every aspect, eastern thought tends to be more contextual, so while we in the west pride ourselves in being individualistic and eastern beliefs as more conformist, this quantification works to separate entities from context and so lose broader meaning. As a singular object, a brick is interchangeable with any other, but in context, it is unique in its place in the universe and supports the wall around it, giving meaning to it.
The wave also goes to the function of our brain. It is divided into two hemispheres, with the left being the linear rational/rationalizing side, while the right is the emotional, intuitive, non-linear, essentially scalar function. Think heat or pressure and how these concepts are often applied to our emotions. One side is a clock and the other is a thermostat. So one side reacts cumulatively with our environment, while the other side necessarily plots a course through it. This navigational function translates to narrative and explains why plants don’t need that sequential strobe light of cognition and operate thermodynamically.
Basically I see reality is the dichotomy of energy and form. Energy manifests form and form defines energy. For instance, waves are an expression of energy whose primary descriptive properties are frequency and amplitude. We have evolved a central nervous system to process information, divided into those two hemispheres to process these two attributes and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy to thermally grow and dynamically move us.
Then at the universal level, there are galaxies, in which structure forms out of energy and falls inward, becoming ever more dense and radiating out enormous amounts of energy, which feeds back into more structure. It is a convection cycle of expanding energy and collapsing mass.
Meanwhile if space is stripped of all physical attributes, it simply retains the non-physical properties of infinity and equilibrium and so doesn’t need a causal explanation. It is the absolute and the infinite.
None of which really explains the essential nature of awareness, so possibly we can accept it as an elemental axiom of nature, with thought and organisms as the form it manifests. Thus life constantly radiates onward, as the forms it manifests are born, live and die.
Admittedly I’m a bit cautious posting this, since I’ve covered a lot of topics in a short space and am mostly used to dealing with questions to only parts of this, so I suspect the immediate reaction, at least from my experience, is that it will be automatically rejected, as the tendency is to go into short circuit mode from tmi. But this site does promote logic over models, so here goes...
Ach! comment too long. Even the program doesn’t like tmi. Try cutting it in half.
Regards, John Merryman
My post seems to have vanished. I guess it was too much.