From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Dec 19 1999 - 14:18:24 MST
At 03:48 PM 18/12/99 -0500, Madame Sequential wrote:
>If time is an illusion, then you can pretty much give up studying physics,
>chemistry, biology...just about everything that relies on motion or
>reactions, because if time is an illusion, they are as well by extention.
I'd have thought `time' is the term we use to describe the experience
arising from orderly transition from one state to an immediately adjacent
one in some phase space. Something like that. So these `snapshots' (to
borrow Julian Barbour's term) can be all present at once (as it were) in
some vast combinatoire that is literally timeless - what the early
relativists called the block universe, but perhaps with a Many Worlds
relative state amplification to account for quantum evolution.
Does that account make `time' a quale? If it's valid, maybe it has to,
since there's no *ontological* condition underpinning the term `time'
*except* experience of such transitions. (But I would hate it if that led
to some brainless New Age formulation of the `wow, you make your own
reality, man' type.)
Damien Broderick
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