Timelessness is one of the first things I grokked after accepting physicalism. After removing magic from my ontology, but before encountering Kolmogorov/Solomonoff, I intuitively had the feel that the idea of a line called the ‘present’ that is constantly ‘moving forward’ and destroying everything before it and creating everything just ahead of it seemed astonishingly complicated and unnecessary. Minkowski spacetime doesn’t need time to be ‘moving’; that’s an unnecessary additional hypothesis. Our brains can ‘see’ the past and not the future because of the way memories are constructed in brains, which are part of the timeless physics.
This can’t be the right answer. Time does flow, whether or not you understand how that can be. This approach is like being troubled over why the universe exists—how can existence itself have a cause, when such a cause must already exist? - and obtaining relief by convincing yourself that nothing actually exists.
That things happen is bedrock knowledge about the world, up there with the knowledge that anything exists at all. You reject the idea that the present is a moving line which erases the past and creates the future? Fine, so do I. Past, present, and future coexist “in eternity”, but they all have the character of “becoming”, not just of “being”. There is a flow of time inside each world-line; the experience of your life is the feeling of the flow interior to the world-line of the conscious part of your brain. There is no point of awareness that moves along the line, erasing the past and creating the future; the line itself is the flow that occurs within the “eternal now” of your consciousness, from the moment it begins to exist, until the moment that it ceases to exist.
Maybe this is what you already meant by timelessness, but I don’t think so, especially since, in this post, Eliezer is advocating Julian Barbour’s ontology, in which the very idea of a world-line is an illusion, because there is no notion of space-time history as such, just a set of static, mutually detached spatial configurations.
I think you are close but still wrong. past and future only exist in the mind, not in reality. the past is just data about where stuff got recorded by you and has moved on to where it is now. the future is just an educated guess as to where that stuff will move to from here. NOW alone is real, NOW alone contains mass and energy. the only way we can experience and evolving time is because stuff is in motion and we have the capacity to record and project its locations. Time is a measure of changing relationships between matter and energy that exists and is in motion. 5 years ago means that the stuff of the universe has changed relationships and one of those relationships was the rotation of our planet around our sun 5 times. if the past present and future all exists then there is NOTHING moving and no way to notice anything change unless by some entity beyond it all, like a person watching a static film that moves via an external projector. if you accept that possibility that we are part of reality and not beyond it, then you cannot explain our perception of motion without actual motion involved.
TIME is not moving, its the measure of stuff like matter and energy moving. to say we can see the past but not the future because of the way memories are constructed implies motion which your blockhead universe sorely lacks. timeless physics ignores the implicit motion required for anyone to notice anything changing. if all moments were equally real that there is no way to say any moment is the present moment, the past or the future. no one would be moving to notice any other changes because there are not any actual changes going on. if all moments are real, you would have to be outside looking in on them to make the required motion.
Timelessness is one of the first things I grokked after accepting physicalism. After removing magic from my ontology, but before encountering Kolmogorov/Solomonoff, I intuitively had the feel that the idea of a line called the ‘present’ that is constantly ‘moving forward’ and destroying everything before it and creating everything just ahead of it seemed astonishingly complicated and unnecessary. Minkowski spacetime doesn’t need time to be ‘moving’; that’s an unnecessary additional hypothesis. Our brains can ‘see’ the past and not the future because of the way memories are constructed in brains, which are part of the timeless physics.
This can’t be the right answer. Time does flow, whether or not you understand how that can be. This approach is like being troubled over why the universe exists—how can existence itself have a cause, when such a cause must already exist? - and obtaining relief by convincing yourself that nothing actually exists.
That things happen is bedrock knowledge about the world, up there with the knowledge that anything exists at all. You reject the idea that the present is a moving line which erases the past and creates the future? Fine, so do I. Past, present, and future coexist “in eternity”, but they all have the character of “becoming”, not just of “being”. There is a flow of time inside each world-line; the experience of your life is the feeling of the flow interior to the world-line of the conscious part of your brain. There is no point of awareness that moves along the line, erasing the past and creating the future; the line itself is the flow that occurs within the “eternal now” of your consciousness, from the moment it begins to exist, until the moment that it ceases to exist.
Maybe this is what you already meant by timelessness, but I don’t think so, especially since, in this post, Eliezer is advocating Julian Barbour’s ontology, in which the very idea of a world-line is an illusion, because there is no notion of space-time history as such, just a set of static, mutually detached spatial configurations.
I think you are close but still wrong. past and future only exist in the mind, not in reality. the past is just data about where stuff got recorded by you and has moved on to where it is now. the future is just an educated guess as to where that stuff will move to from here. NOW alone is real, NOW alone contains mass and energy. the only way we can experience and evolving time is because stuff is in motion and we have the capacity to record and project its locations. Time is a measure of changing relationships between matter and energy that exists and is in motion. 5 years ago means that the stuff of the universe has changed relationships and one of those relationships was the rotation of our planet around our sun 5 times. if the past present and future all exists then there is NOTHING moving and no way to notice anything change unless by some entity beyond it all, like a person watching a static film that moves via an external projector. if you accept that possibility that we are part of reality and not beyond it, then you cannot explain our perception of motion without actual motion involved.
TIME is not moving, its the measure of stuff like matter and energy moving. to say we can see the past but not the future because of the way memories are constructed implies motion which your blockhead universe sorely lacks. timeless physics ignores the implicit motion required for anyone to notice anything changing. if all moments were equally real that there is no way to say any moment is the present moment, the past or the future. no one would be moving to notice any other changes because there are not any actual changes going on. if all moments are real, you would have to be outside looking in on them to make the required motion.