On Change And Time

Is time an illusion?

So, if R changes position, R experiences time because of that but R also doesn't experience time because it has durability-based properties that don't change. R is both inside and outside of time. Contradiction?

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it. There is no special variable ‘time’, there is no difference between past and future, there is no spacetime. We still know how to write equations that describe the world. In those equations, the variables evolve with respect to each other. It is not a ‘static’ world, or a ‘block universe’ where all change is illusory. On the contrary, ours is a world of events rather than of things.

This was the outward leg of the journey, towards a universe without time.

The return journey has been the attempt to understand how, from this world without time, it is possible for our perception of time to emerge. The surprise has been that, in the emergence of familiar aspects of time, we ourselves have had a role to play. From our perspective - the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world - we see that world flowing in time. Our interaction with the world is partial, which is why we see it in a blurred way. To this blurring is added quantum indeterminacy. The ignorance that follows from this determines the existence of a particular variable - thermal time - and of an entropy that quantifies our uncertainty.

Perhaps we belong to a particular subset of the world that interacts with the rest of it in such a way that this entropy is lower in one direction of our thermal time. The directionality of time is therefore real but perspectival: the entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. We see the occurrence of things ordered in this variable, which we simply call ‘time’, and the growth of entropy distinguishes the past from the future for us and leads to the unfolding of the cosmos...

Change implies time: Makes sense. Whenever change occurs, time elapses. Is there any change that occurs without the passage of time? The simple fact that change can be numerically ordered as, for example, 1st the apple was green and 2nd it became red would mean that the order must occur in some context and that context, to my reckoning, is time.

1. I think that it is possible to be inside and outside of time. It is both subjective and objective. I think that this possibility arises because it is a dimensions rather than a material construct. Material reality changes, but consciousness arises within the material nature of it but is able to go into the non materialist dimensional reality, in which 3. time can be subjective.

I am afraid that I am going back into areas related to the questions of 3. determinism, but it may be that so much about how we see reality hinges on this

You’re assuming that R experiences

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:entropy

Is 'increasing from minimum disorder to maximum disorder of a closed system (e.g. universe)' an illusion?

There is change and then the measurement of change, which is time. How long did it take for the apple to turn from green to red? Seven spins of the Earth on it's axis. Time is using change to measure change.

You’re assuming that R experiences
— Possibility

What exactly do you mean by "experiences"? I hope not in the sense like a human experiences, subjectively?

1. Change implies time: Makes sense. Whenever change occurs, time elapses. Is there any change that occurs without the passage of time? The simple fact that change can be numerically ordered as, for example, 1st the apple was green and 2nd it became red would mean that the order must occur in some context and that context, to my reckoning, is time.

Consider now, that R is moved i.e. its position is changed. According to 1 above (change implies time), since the position of R has changed; ergo, R has experienced time too.

Entropy is not time. It's change and while, yes, change implies time, some things don't change or if that doesn't suit your worldview, imagine a changeless object, say C. C would appear to be trapped in a moment/instant - as if time didn't elapse. Many movies depict the stoppage of the time as objects freezing at one spot and in one position and this, to me, is indicative of the intuition that if no change takes place, the effect is the same as time stopping or becoming nonexistent.

Entropy is not time.

St. Augustine:What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

2. Time implies change: There are issues with this. For instance, imagine a red ball R, made of, for the sake of argument, an infinitely durable material. R at time T1 would be the same as R at time Tn where n > 1. In other words, R didn't change even as time flew by. In short, that there's time doesn't mean that change should occur.

Whenever change occurs, time elapses.

Not so fast. The floor changes from wood to tile between here and the laundry.

Change requires a dimension, perhaps...

I didn't claim or imply that it is.

The problem here is that an "infinitely durable material" is not physical possible. So how is an example which asks us to assume something impossible, of any use for demonstrating something about the reality of time?

We’re not saying that entropy is time - it’s the ignorance of change that occurs when we assume an ‘object’ to be changeless, simply because we don’t experience change.

Let's get to the heart of the matter.

Suppose someone claims the red ball, R, moved i.e. changed position but then you inspect it, it's still in the same position. Two possibilities: 1. R hasn't moved or 2. space has no effect on R i.e. R lies outside of space so to speak. If there are other ways of making sense of this, please feel free to make me aware of them.

Likewise, if a person asserts that the red ball, R, has experienced time then there must be some way of determining that, right?

...and the first thing that crosses my mind is change for without it, as I've been saying, time can't be perceived and/or experienced. Why? Well, if R doesn't change then there's no difference between R at time T1 and R at time Tn where n > 1 and another way of putting it would be that time is stuck at T1 or that time didn't elapse at all - the bottom line is that for R time no longer matters.

BE the ball...

If R is incapable of experiencing change, then it is incapable of experiencing time

Incorrect. For there are cases when no change occurs but time still passes by. However, it seems, on such occasions, a case can be made that time is no longer relevant (to the object that doesn't change) i.e. it would be as if time didn't exist at all.

Have you provided examples of these cases?

Then your post is, has to be, irrelevant, no?

Well, they seem to be thought experiments. Shouldn't that do the trick?

Right! :ok: but imagine an infinitely durable material is, there's no logical contradiction, is there?

For there are cases when no change occurs but time still passes by.

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’: The ‘quantisation’ of time implies that almost all values of time t do not exist. If we could measure the duration of an interval with the most precise clock imaginable, we should find that the time measured takes only certain discrete, special values. It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something which flows uniformly but as something which in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another.

In other words, a minimum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist - even in its most basic meaning...

The substratum that determines the duration of time is not an independent entity, different from the others that make up the world; it is an aspect of a dynamic field. It jumps, fluctuates, materialises only by interacting, and is no to be found beneath a minimum scale...So, after all this, what is left of time?

...None of the pieces that time has lost (singularity, direction, independence, the present, continuity) puts into question the fact that the world is a network of events. On the one hand, there was time, with its many determinations; on the other, the simple fact that nothing is: that things happen instead.

The absence of the quantity ‘time’ in the fundamental equations does not imply a world that is frozen and immobile. On the contrary, it implies a world in which change is ubiquitous, without being ordered by Father Time; without innumerable events being necessarily distributed in good order, or along the single Newtonian timeline, or according to Einstein’s elegant geometry. The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.

They are events, indeed: change, happening. This happening is diffuse, scattered, disorderly. But it is happening; it is not stasis. Clocks that run at different speeds do not mark a single time, but the hands on each clock change in relation to the others. The fundamental equations do not include a time variable, but the do include variables that change in relation to each other. Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change; different variables can be chosen to measure that change, and none of these has all the characteristics of time as we experience it. But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.

That's a different kind of change, not the kind I'm talking about.

Change implies time: Makes sense. Whenever change occurs, time elapses. Is there any change that occurs without the passage of time?.

Is there any change that occurs without the passage of time?.

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:If we could measure the duration of an interval with the most precise clock imaginable, we should find that the time measured takes only certain discrete, special values. It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something which flows uniformly but as something which in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another.

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.

I see this as a baseless assertion. Since we have no indication of exactly what time is, there is no reason to considered it to be discontinuous rather than continuous. And if we conceive it as continuous, despite the fact that Rovelli says this is not possible (it is possible because we have no indication of what time is, therefore there are no such restrictions on how we conceive it), then there is no such "jumps" as described.

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:It is not possible to think of duration as continuous.

Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’:But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.

But I will point out one thing with your comment: in declaring this a contradiction, you seem to be equating ‘duration’ with ‘change’.

No I don't equate duration with change, that's why I suggested a short duration of time when no physical change occurs.

What I said is contradictory is the notion that time is discontinuous, along with the notion of a "ceaseless process of change'. "Discontinuous" implies a stopping and starting, which is contradicted by "ceaseless".

I didn’t think so, which is why I posted this quote. You’re interpreting QM with a linear concept of time as a given, but it’s possible (and arguably more accurate) to interpret QM without time: from the perspective of the world consisting of events (rather than objects) that change in relation to each other. Because the idea that we can “keep the conception of time separate from the conception of space” is an attempt to cling to the continuity of ‘time’ despite General Relativity.

As pointed out by the op, "events" implies time. (1. Change implies time). So interpreting QM from the perspective of "events" does not remove time from the interpretation.

There is change and then the measurement of change, which is time. How long did it take for the apple to turn from green to red? Seven spins of the Earth on it's axis. Time is using change to measure change.

This interpretation simply fails in its analytical extent, because it does not separate an activity (which is a description of what things do) from the thing which is engaged in the proposed activity. A proper analysis recognizes that an event cannot be fundamental because of this conflation of the description with the thing being described. The description (activity), is a product of human understanding and cannot be fundamental. That's why I said we need a proper separation between the features of space and time, regardless of what general relativity gives us.

So it isn’t 1) that change implies time, but 2) that time implies change. But, as Rovelli points out, this doesn’t mean time is an illusion.

I never said it was. I did say that time is a measurement which means that believing that time exists independently of your mind would be an illusion. Change is more fundamental than time. Time is a type of change.

So, what exactly is the relationship between the two, change and time?

Possibilities:

1. Change implies time

2. Time implies change

Is time an illusion?

Thanks goes to all who've contributed to the thread. I'm out of my depths at the moment. Will get back if I think of anything interesting.