The shortest event ever literally measured may have been in
zeptoseconds, though there are supposedly subatomic modifications occurring in yoctoseconds. Planck time is arguably only relevant if spacetime is grainy or quantized -- composed of discrete units.
The consequences of relativity, of course, banished a universal "present" or privileged moment.
Julian Barbour asserts that he can smuggle "Nows" into the situation as a set of all possible configurations of a developing universe theme, from simple to complex. (The most "fit" or consistent configuration selected from that reservoir of static parallel universes supplies the next moment or Now.) But each one would apparently have to internally feature contents that were changing much slower or faster relative to each other, over a sequence of such Nows.
As a reputed historian of physics, he also contends that traditional conceptions and Newton's outdated, absolute version of time were recruited for some of the formalism of quantum physics, to facilitate its probability-based predictions. Others like Philip Ball have likewise pointed out that QM fell out of useful, motivated considerations rather than an impartial, innovative orientation. Thus, the incompatibility between it and general relativity may have been unintentionally or negligently engineered.
In order to validate that change is even the case with respect to an experience of time, a specious "current state" must be computationally compared to a past one that is stored in memory (to register the differences). Accordingly, those conscious units of time are measured in milliseconds, and are ridiculously "slow giants" in contrast to the non-conscious "rate of change" inferred for mind-independent subatomic events (and the rate of many macroscopic changes as well).
Ergo, the blatant "solipsism" of projecting one's own irregular perception of time upon an objective version of the world. Our milliseconds long "snake" (conscious present moment) would have to stretch over an astonishing multitude of molecular, atomic, and subatomic level changes (or co-existing differences). That's why our sense of "time flowing" is occasionally construed as just another
quale -- like the phenomenal meaning of color, sound, odor, etc that are subjective properties rather than attributes of matter in a scientific account of the world.
Ironically, in
presentism, there is no existing past state or future state for "the present" to transit to (i.e., flow). And in eternalism, some mysterious "substance moving through the higher dimensional structure" seems to have to be posited in order to explain a flow. That is, if one doesn't go the conventional route of the illusion falling out of individual islands of brain cognition that are interlinked by their shared memories. Each instance of cognition is separately only about its own limited information content -- not the whole of one's entire lifetime, from fetal awareness to the last iota of experience before death.
Apr 11, 2024 12:50 PM
