My usual Block Universe analogy is a book. What time is it right now in Middle Earth? That question does not make much sense, although we coherently ask a reader, “What point are you at?” A page is a time-slice of that universe. We stand outside that universe the way a hypothetical observer stands outside time in a Block Universe.
I have trouble putting myself back in a frame of mind where some questions sound coherent. To take Eliezer’s haunted mine example, it is like asking, “But where do the gnomes go? If they have been emptied out of the mine, they must have gone somewhere. That’s simple conservation of matter.” There is a fundamental problem with the question.
Note that, once we start talking meta-universe, our words only have meaning as analogies. What does “outside time” really mean? Time is not the sort of thing that you get outside of, any more than you get to the left of it. You also do not get before time or outside space. There is no before without time, nor anywhere to be outside space. It would be like being faster than the number three. The syntax is right, but that is not how those words work.
My usual Block Universe analogy is a book. What time is it right now in Middle Earth? That question does not make much sense, although we coherently ask a reader, “What point are you at?” A page is a time-slice of that universe. We stand outside that universe the way a hypothetical observer stands outside time in a Block Universe.
This is a really old comment to be replying to, but the intuition pump presented here is so good (for me, anyway) that I marvel that I didn’t think of it myself! I guess that’s what separate merely understanding something and understanding it well enough to explain it.
My usual Block Universe analogy is a book. What time is it right now in Middle Earth? That question does not make much sense, although we coherently ask a reader, “What point are you at?” A page is a time-slice of that universe. We stand outside that universe the way a hypothetical observer stands outside time in a Block Universe.
I have trouble putting myself back in a frame of mind where some questions sound coherent. To take Eliezer’s haunted mine example, it is like asking, “But where do the gnomes go? If they have been emptied out of the mine, they must have gone somewhere. That’s simple conservation of matter.” There is a fundamental problem with the question.
Note that, once we start talking meta-universe, our words only have meaning as analogies. What does “outside time” really mean? Time is not the sort of thing that you get outside of, any more than you get to the left of it. You also do not get before time or outside space. There is no before without time, nor anywhere to be outside space. It would be like being faster than the number three. The syntax is right, but that is not how those words work.
This is a really old comment to be replying to, but the intuition pump presented here is so good (for me, anyway) that I marvel that I didn’t think of it myself! I guess that’s what separate merely understanding something and understanding it well enough to explain it.