We have a subject that is deeply connected with laws of physics here, even though it looks philosophical. What is time, past and future? In this post, i will give 2 videos as examples about these concepts from physical point of view. Then i will write about my own deductions. Today, we have 2 major opposing view on this manner. Eternalism and presentism. Both these approaches have physical and philosophical conclusions. This subject seems important to me because it gives rise to the question of reality after just one step. There is one common implication among these two views: They both agree on the concept of "now". After that, you would eventually end up in quantum physics. So yeah, this post is physics in philosophy disguise :) Therefore i would recommend you check out the blog posts about advanced physics before reading this one.
Let me begin with summarizing these two concepts. Presentism is a mindset of believing only current moment of time is real and present. It also appears in philosophical views and according to this logic, the past and the probability of future is not guaranteed. We only have the moment right now in this universe. The past accumulates and creates today and the tomorrow will emerge by the changes of today. If we accept this view, you can't exactly explain the flow of time in a meaningful way and it looks like there is no time in this picture. But time is a fundamental concept that we can all agree on, right?
Eternalism proposes that the past, the future and the present are all present right now at the same time, individually. According to this view, the events of the past and the future are all stored somewhere in this universe or in a super-universe. Therefore they believe that even though the concept of time is an illusion, we jump amongst these possible universes and experience it as time. But this view also has a bug. You can't explain why the time flows in a certain way that we call, arrow of time. Because laws of physics are technically valid if we reverse the time, they are time invariant.
These two approaches are not verifiable philosophically. They seem they are diverging on the concept of time. They are also not verifiable with our physical knowledge today. Because we have questions about time and its flow. So it is time to ask this: What is time?
I have couple of question about this matter. For example, think about a strange universe. Let's keep everything we know, the earth, solar system, our languages and actions all the same. Now only reverse the time. This means stars are not exploding with a supernova, rather fusing with a superfuse or something. This would also reverse all the languages are spelled backwards. And reverse everything else you can imagine. You can even think entropy is increasing rather than decreasing. Even though this scenario is impossible in this universe, suppose these are happening in another universe. Would you be able to tell the time is going backwards? Would you be able to realize if the time is going backwards?
Now you would probably say, of course i would realize it. That world look like the one in the movie Tenet and seeing the cars going reverse would be weird. But actually we are not observing the time there, we are witnessing the events occurring in time. In other words, the concept of time emerges from our perception. If we had a reversed perception, we would see the reversing cars normal. This explanation would not satisfy you and you would ask this: Are we going to live the life of Benjamin Button and be born as old person and get younger over time? No :) You would start the life from death and weirdly end up inside your mothers uterus. Only to turn into some DNA molecules in our parents biology. I think it is perfectly normal for you to be confused here. My brain exploded the first time too.
So how about the things we now or like in this world? Am i going to exists as a person who likes lahmacun (a traditional turkish food) and knows 2 languages from the start in that world? Yes. And then you will forget those languages and the meaning of the lahmacun. The idea that bothers you here is this: The flow of a system that has a beginning and an end is from the beginning to the end. That's how we feel it. If we accept this presumption, we need to ask, what is the beginning and the end? From your point of view it is basically you observing an event for a while. When our observation or our knowledge ends, we point it as the end.
Bottom line is there is no mandatory rule for the time to flow in a certain way and the universe doesn't even have to start in a big bang. I don't think we can tell the time is moving backwards in a reversed system while we are in it. Because we are perceiving this flow with our own experience. That is our human nature. And 2 videos down below are explaining these subjects with physical laws.
The videos in this channel are sometimes quite heavy but it is usually informative. Let me put the video down below and explain what it basically means here.
This video basically shows how our perception is shaping the past, present and the future. According to Einstein's general relativity, time can slow down or speed up under certain circumstances. Therefore in some cases one person's past is another one's future or vise-versa. For example, a star blew up in a supernova in a remote corner of the galaxy but that information is not yet reached us. We will be in the past until we realize it.
The video asks whose reality are we talking about while we are looking for the actual reality and the concept of now. What is now? If we have only 1 present now, whose now is it? I have a deduction in this life, reality is the thing that exists independent of your perception. And the video down below is actually asking for this kind of question. Is there a concept of now independent of everyone in the universe?
Hence, the subject moves into the quantum realm. The universe that we know is emerging by subatomic particles' probability functions are collapsed. This way, this explanation can agree with deterministic and materialistic approaches in the universe. They infer that there can be a universe unbound of my observations. But there is a caveat here. Because quantum particles have unpredictable behaviuors and there are problems while observing these particles. For example, can your reality be different than mine even if we are looking at the same thing? In other words, how can we synchronize at the consciousness level? This question also brings a weird concept called quantum consciousness.
Actually, it looks like both eternalism and presentism agree on the concept of the past. One of them says, past happened and became insignificant. Time is moving forward as the universe evolves. The other one says what happened and will probably happen is all present at the same time. These subjects can lead to strange question if you look at them philosophically. For example, if i committed a crime 1 week ago, can i claim that i am a different person now? Or as i mentioned in an older post called the concept of once, can i say that past is in the past, that person was not me? Let's take a look at the eternalism perspective. Can i be held accountable and guilty of a crime that i have a possibility of committing in a possible future, even if i haven't done it yet? I am having these weird questions :)
Let's just agree on something at this point. Even if we accept eternalism or presentism, we can have a universal time-slice with quantum physics and call it present reality. Does this help us to explain the concept of past and the future? There is no obligation of time in quantum physics and some particles don't even experience time at all. But according to the copenhagen interpretation, there are only possibilities in this universe and they emerge as we observe (live through) them. In other words, we can say that the universe is in motion as long as there are observers around. This can kind of explain a grand scale universe independent of my perception. We perceive time as the universal motion, well, moves.
Does this explanation satisfy you? This is called the "block universe" and the past and the future is sort of intertwined here. All these possible pasts and futures already exist and the universe jumps between them. We call this as "time". The thing that i notice here is we think the concept of time exists and it moves towards a direction, which is a very self-centric thought.
There is something that bothers me. The explanations of eternalism and presentism is mainly trying to define time from the perspective of our own observations. For example, if one galaxy is moving away from the other one, they say these two are travelling to their past. Because moving away basically means the information needs to travel more in order to reach the destination. But why are we basing this on the observers here? Because it results in 2 different pasts or something. Also, according to quantum physics, our observation can cause things to change and this brings us the consciousness problem. What i mean is, can we completely remove the human from the picture?
I feel like the eternalism kind of makes more sense. But the people who supports this idea may say the free will is just an illusion. I have another explanation for this. Yes, i think that the universe is realized again and again for maybe trillions of times in a second like a video on my computer or a movie in the theatre. I also think that the past and the probable future configurations can exists somewhere right now. As a matter of fact, i would say that if the past is as real as "now", the future probable configurations are as well and awaiting us. Our free will is hidden in the auditing mechanism between our conscious and subconscious activities. I think we are accompanying the motion of the universe here.
The reason i have began this post with the concept of time is that both approaches emphasise on time and i think this is meaningless. Time is just the continuum of our perceptions. We can't count time or measure it. We can just witness some certain periods flowing or passing by. For example if we watch a car passing by and it takes 5 seconds, we are observing the universe for a while and defined this flow in seconds. Moreover, we can think of another exaggerated example, if the universe's motion slows down or stops and starts moving again, we wouldn't even notice it. We can't feel the time is slowing down if we get close to a black hole. We would realize it later when we return, just like in the movie Interstellar.
We are just observing the consistent course of events happening. Note that this consistency never fails. So if you ask me, i can deduce that there is no thing called time. Now you can ask me if the motion of the universe has some sort of time. This is a logical question but i don't have an exact answer. But i can say this: Looking for a fundamental concept of time in this motion of the universe is specific to us humans who are tied to the concept of time. So in other words, i guess i can say the question is wrong :D
Lastly, i can't say that presentism is completely nonsense. As i mentioned, i have written a post about the concept of once and it had this mindset. I don't think the concept of time moving forward or backward means much so i see both approaches could make sense. But the laws in this universe has a very high consistent nature. Since i have a theist belief, this looks like a form o art from god. Therefore a universe model that has no foreseeable future (due to quantum dynamics) seems illogical to me. I feel like there are all the possible configurations could be out there somewhere and we have a little will in the jumps among these possibilities. I don't know where you would jump from this post. See you at the next post :)
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