Time is a broad concept with many applications and interpretations. Our human sense of time, or Psychological Time, is constructed to make sense of the world in a way that is relevant to our organism’s evolved form of neurons and bodies. In physics we use time in a more rigorous fashion as part of a four dimensional spacetime coordinate system. Neither of these interpretations is an accurate, all encompassing truth, yet both are relevant to their domains. In seeking to bridge the gap between human experience and physics, we take a look at the shortcomings of the physicist’s model of time and introduce the concept of abstract time, the creation of physical time, and the notion of partial reality, a domain where time is only half formed. This perspective opens a line of inquiry into how numerous metaphysical concepts can comport with the demands of Scientism.
Psychological Time
Our human experience of time is one of flow, a passage from moment to moment, each a little different but largely the same. If there were no differences between moments, there would be no passage, no distinction to be aware of. If, on the other hand, there was nothing of our experience that remained the same, there would also be no passage to note because each moment would be disjoint, without a frame of reference, leaving only an eternally present moment of experience. In either extreme we wouldn’t know that time is passing even though we may be embedded in a cosmology that has a temporal dimension.
In the middle between these extremes there is a tension between a stable continuity and an unstable dynamism. This tension exists over vast scales of time that far exceed our human capacity to directly experience. Here in our neck of the temporal woods our senses and sensibilities span time scales from about 25 milliseconds - the point at which the lowest audio frequencies begin to sound like distinct beats - up to our lifetime - the scale beyond which we can only extrapolate. Within our temporal domain are the quick movements of physical activity, heartbeats, the cadence of speech, our breath, and longer scales of diurnal and annual cycles, rites of passage and the arc of life.
Yet we also have access to temporal processes that occur outside of our direct experience of temporal extent: audible vibrations, photonic emissions, evolution, plate tectonics, and the lifetimes of stars. These processes don’t show up in our experience as having duration, but rather as a projection onto our timescale in the forms of pitch and harmony, color and warmth, the diversity and similarity of species, the frozen geologies of sediments and upheaval, and the spectacular images of similar stars at different points of their evolution. Beyond even these projected perceptions are the processes we can become aware of through the implications from our scientific methods and the systems of reason and logic by which we make sense of them. As well we can learn of multi-generational social processes through the stories we pass along, reinforced by the traces left by those changes, similar to how we are aware of geologic movements.
However these processes come to our awareness, we organize them into what can loosely be characterized as narratives. Here the term narrative means a sequence of events that tend to occur in the same order. A narrative can describe anything that falls into what we usually consider to be a causal chain, for example the movement of a ball after it is hit with a bat. This type of narrative has a one-to-one correspondence with a physical process. But a narrative can also be a meta-sequence of events such as a description that binds the properties of an object to it, for example the narrative that death cap mushrooms will kill you. Either sense of narrative can show up in our experience as a temporal flow - the tracking of the baseball or the mental unfolding from the first image of the toadstool to remembering that it is lethal. But more subtly, these narratives can also be experienced atemporally. The fielder already knows where the ball will travel from observing the timing and arc of the batter’s swing. The mycologist’s danger flags are already raised before the details of the mushroom are catalogued in their mind, recognition coming all at once. And importantly, these narratives are all communicated between us at the particular pace of human speech, no matter in what timescale the actual processes referred to by the narratives play out.
This last point shows how temporality of any duration makes its way into our psyche to be resized therein into a fairly limited scale of time and an abstract objective extent that occupies a limited area within our mindscape. We create shorthand versions of complex narratives, a sort of thumbnail if you will, that fairly contain similar numbers of elements. For example, a lifetime may be compressed into a narrative of birth-growth-aging-death. We experience this narrative in just a second or two. It occupies about the same amount of mental time and space as a baseball narrative of pitch-swing-hit-catch. If we want to expand our experience of a narrative, we could either fill in finer detail such as many more stages of a life or a slow-mo playback of the at-bat. In either case, there is an extra amount of mental energy that we must apply to achieve an extended narrative. In contrast, the original short-form narratives are almost effortless to call up. This indicates that there is an optimum size for these narratives, not so long and detailed that we lose our sense of the overall story, and not so short that we lose our sense of beginning, middle, and ending.
Another aspect of our sense of time as expressed in narratives is the repetition of familiar patterns. Our narratives and the ongoing stream of our experiences have a close correspondence. We see many lifetimes play out among our friends and family. We watch countless repeats of the pitcher-batter duel. The repetition of narratives usually leads to a cyclic experience of reality. We talk of the endless cycle of birth and death, the seasons, the at-bats, innings, and games. Our everyday lives are experienced primarily in this mode where our sense of the present moment is of a place and time we have been before and will again occupy in the future. The narratives that are active in the present moment will again be active when we return and the story lines that are stitched together out of our narratives loop back in seemingly endless, yet still evolving grand cycles. It is interesting to note that even though our natural state is to be within these narrative cycles we often find ourselves outside of the present moment, dwelling on bygone days or thinking about the future. We may even be existing in an abstract emotional space far removed from our present circumstance. It takes an effort to engage in mindfulness practices to return us to the here and now. This is a clue that we exist within our own mindscape of narratives and that that mindscape is only guided, informed, and grounded by the physical reality we occupy.
Most of the form and pattern of our narratives match the form and pattern of our experiences. But what we find interesting are the differences - the unexpected baby or 100th birthday, the bad strike call or pitcher hitting a home run. We live in these differences against a backdrop of predictability, so much so that we don’t normally even notice that things mostly stay the same. Until of course, they stay too much the same. Just like the way we pack temporal experiences into similar sized narratives, we also organize our attention to contain an optimum amount of dynamism - too little and we grow restless, too much and we are overwhelmed.
The primary feature of psychological time is that it operates in bite sized chunks of temporal experience. While these chunks are of similar temporal and abstract extent within our minds, they represent wide ranging scales of time and space. We do not merely work with reality one bite at a time. On the contrary, we take in reality from all manner of scales and condense it to fit within our internal nutshells. It is important to understand that this is a mental process as it has been elucidated here. It does not necessarily follow that reality outside of our mindscape operates in the same manner. Rather we should be aware of our biased approach to organizing, understanding, and experiencing time.
Physical Time
If you were to ask any theoretical physicist what the true nature of time (or of space) was, most would answer that we do not have an adequate understanding of it to give a definitive answer. We do have an innate sense of time and space, but that may not be the way reality is organized. From a physicist’s point of view, space and time start as a coordinate system for locating events and for describing physical laws via the equations of motion and such. A coordinate system does not have to have any physical reality for it to be useful. Just as the way our minds organize time into narratives and use those to make sense of the world and operate within it, physicists organize physical laws with respect to spacetime coordinates and use those to make sense of the world and make accurate predictions about how it operates. It does not necessarily follow that time and space are the real substrates of reality, only that they are useful concepts.
The primary theory covering space and time is General Relativity. This theory describes a fairly simple relationship between matter/energy and the density or curvature of spacetime around it. Since spacetime is our coordinate system, we can, using the tools of the relativity equations, rewrite the classic, non-relativistic equations of motion of particles to include this relationship by burying it in the coordinate system of those equations. The resulting equations are notoriously difficult to calculate. Scientists simulate approximations to the equations, refining those simulations for whatever accuracy is needed for a result. This lack of an exact answer is a key problem for our understanding of spacetime. The relationship between matter/energy and the coordinate system is as simple as most other physical relationships, and yet we do not know of or expect to uncover a simple way to directly describe the motion of particles under a combination of classical and relativistic theories. In fact, when the predominant theories of General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), two of the three pillars of modern physics (the third being the Standard Model), are combined, the results lead to absurd outcomes and cannot describe reality as we know it. The theories are fundamentally incompatible even if they are highly accurate for predicting measurements within their own domains.
The basic incompatibility comes down to whether the coordinate system of spacetime is continuous as is required for General Relativity to make sense, or discrete as is required for Quantum Mechanics to make sense. General Relativity can work with discrete particles, but its continuous substrate predicts infinite density for those particles. Quantum Mechanics can be written as equations based in continuous coordinates, but its Uncertainty Principle predicts a breakdown in that continuity at the Planck scale at which reality looks more like a seething foam of virtual particles.
Time suffers even more than space in the tension between GR and QM because unlike space, time is also fundamental to our understanding of causality - the ordering of events when one event precedes and participates in another event at a later time. Special Relativity tells us that as particles approach the speed of light, time slows down with respect to objects remaining at rest. For photons and other particles that travel at the speed of light, time is at a standstill, which leads to the conclusion that the two events of emission and absorption that demark the photon’s lifetime occur at exactly the same time from the point of view of the photon. This bizarre result leads us to imagine a confusing topology for events in spacetime where every connected pair of events must be somehow brought together while at the same time staying apart.
How does one draw a causal chain of events in this network? We might imagine that a non-relativistic particle travels from one photonic event to another, which, unlike the case for a photon, can have spatio-temporal extent. This looks like a network of particles bound together at photonic events of emission or absorption in something that would look like a very interconnected fishnet. Each segment of string is a particle existing between events and each knot is a pair of events associated with a photon transfer. However, this network does not occupy spacetime the way we imagine it. It does not look like a macrame hanging in an orthogonal coordinate space. The knots of the net are normally far apart when experienced in our familiar spacetime coordinates. This depiction becomes mind-boggling-ly complex when we consider the path of a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. According to Quantum Electrodynamics, a particle follows a curved path because of a constant exchange of photons between the particles that create the field and the particle following a curved path. With this in mind, what looked like a fish net comes to look more like a system of seams in a fabric, a massively twisted, interlocking, and interpenetrating mess of a substrate.
All of this should guide us to the conclusion that what we experience as objects in spacetime might somehow be an emergent reality instead of the ground substrate. It suggests that reality operates in a different manner than we have posited in our physical laws, but that creates a projection that appears to us as a four dimensional spacetime. Just like the way in which our psychological experience of time is not necessarily the true way in which reality is organized, so too our theoretical structure, based on the curved spacetime of General Relativity and the Planck foam of Quantum Mechanics is not necessarily the true way in which reality is organized.
Abstract Time
So far we have considered time as having a definite character, even if we are unsure of what that character is exactly. We think of time as either a property of something we are contemplating or not. Time’s existence is binary, it is either there or it isn’t. We don’t normally consider time to be something that may be only partially in existence the way we might consider a thought to be not fully formed or lava to have not fully solidified. It is not an easy thing to consider because our conception of things coming into being is as a process embedded in time. There would seem to be a categorical paradox to think of time evolving, for in what space does that occur but time itself? The key to this understanding lies in how time has different characteristics depending where in relation to the present we consider it, and that there are elements of the cosmos that exist outside of our normal conception of time, elements whose substrate is quantum entanglement and superposition.
One of our foundational notions of time is that it proceeds from a future via a present into a past. We generally think of the past as immutable and the future as either undetermined or at least unknowable. This asymmetry between past and future is our first evidence that time’s arrow points in one direction only. On closer inspection we attribute the immutability of the past to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that the Universe tends towards disorder, towards an increase in entropy. A simple example is an explosion which transforms a highly ordered explosive material into a random gaseous cloud that cools as it expands. In order for time to move backwards, that tendency towards an even distribution of heat would be broken. Our cooled gasses would have to recollect into a dense, hot volume, undergo statistically unlikely chemical reactions, and settle into a stable, again cool mass. All of our experience of reality tells us that this won’t occur.
There are however some interesting experiments, so called quantum erasers, that show that the past is not entirely immutable. There is a distinction to be made however between an experimental setup that is designed to enable the eraser effect and the general processes of reality that don’t provide the hooks, so to speak, to undo past decisions. That said, it should be noted that these experiments demonstrate that in principle any event in the past is contingent on the future.
There is a cosmological argument that can be made as to why this is true. From what we understand of the Big Bang, the early universe was extremely dense with pure energy. From this extreme potential were born particle pairs that were quantum mechanically entangled. These entanglements limit the possible states the universe can occupy. As the Universe expanded, these entanglements spread out across space and remain entangled today. In an extremely complex and intricate web of transitive coupling across the fish net of events, these entanglements must be maintained through every event-knot that occurs. What this means is that any event may look a certain way right now, because it is statistically favored to take that form given all that feeds into it, but at some point in the future a reckoning will occur with all of the entanglements leading through that event coming into interaction with the offspring of the long lost siblings formed in the early Universe, and those resolutions may alter the statistical favorability of the event. This is the mechanism that provides the hooks in the quantum eraser experiments. In these setups, the statistical favorability of a past event is arranged so as to be strongly contingent on subsequent events, specifically through the use of entanglement.
What we see here is that the past is not categorically immutable but instead is a mixture of a strong measure of determinism and a modicum of superposition. This implies that the present is not a diaphanous boundary between past and future but rather something more blurred. But what does it mean for time to not be monotonically increasing, for it to have overlapping regions, for it to not have the properties we expect coordinate systems to have? Here we have a couple notions about time bumping into each other, that of time as flowing from future to past and time as a coordinate system undergirding the laws of physics.
Turning to the future, we must ask how time exists beyond the present moment. Our normal conception of the future contains a fairly well determined near-term course that the cosmos will follow. We expect that the usual laws apply and we are confident the sun will come back around in the morning. Our projections into the future become less precise the further out we go, but we tend to ascribe that uncertainty to an imprecise knowledge of our present state rather than a fundamental indeterminism, quantum mechanics notwithstanding. And so it seems to us that time proceeds into the future the same as it has in the past and our present moment is just another coordinate point on the temporal axis. This is the view of the Block Universe theorists.
But we know from quantum mechanics that at the very least the future is not preordained, but remains undetermined if only randomly so in the tiniest of ways. While it is mostly defined, there is wiggle room. Our human scale perception of this condition is that of a stable universe with free will. Of course there is a world of philosophy over the relationship between quantum indeterminism and free will, but the salient aspect for the discussion of time is that there are a range of possible outcomes for any process, not just a single path. The stability of the world is only maintained at a macro scale. On very close inspection we find matter to be seething with possibility, never following the canonical rules. It is only as we scale back that we can see the bulk properties that have persistent form and structure. The stability of the world is grounded in statistical likelihood.
At the quantum level however, we are working with potentials and events. Potentials are the as yet undecided possibilities and events are the collapse of those possibilities into singular outcomes. The point at which the collapse occurs we consider to be the moment when the future transitions to the past. In other words the present is defined by the creation of events. The moment events are created is the moment of their death into the past. Everything in the past of this moment has a causal order to it. When we measure reality, we are measuring the hardened residue of the event creation process. From these measurements we derive our natural laws and posit the coordinate systems the world exists within.
On the future side of this moment are potentials only, a vast, possibly infinite set of events that are unrealized. It is in this realm that likelihoods are determined, entanglements resolved, and the die cast. What is important to note is that these processes do not occur in a temporal fashion. Temporal processes are marked by a chain of events that occur in an order. But the processes of potential occur instantly, without time, without deliberation, without regard to light cones or world lines. Those are all characteristics of the residue, the temporal sequence created as the events are created in the present moment.
However, it is not as if the future does not undergo change. We can see this by noticing that were the future to be static there would be no difference between the future of one moment from the future of a different moment which would imply the two moments are identical, but we know that moments are all different. So there is a temporal component to the future and the future undergoes change so as to remain coherent with the present moment. However, the future holds many, many possible outcomes for any given moment and it is in that vast expanse of possibility that the atemporal processes of event guidance and selection take place.
Because these processes do not play out in time and yet give rise to it, we can consider them to exist in an abstract temporal realm that can contain infinitely many possible temporal flows. This realm is abstract because it is not represented in the spacetime we experience as the real world. In abstract time are both a singular temporal ground that binds to reality and an atemporal field of possibilities and processes. In the real temporal realm we find adherence to the laws of physics. In the abstract temporal realm we find coherence and the reconciliation of entanglements.
We have now noted that the past is not immutable, that the present is somewhat fuzzy, and that the future is primarily atemporal but with a temporal reference surface. It should be clear that the temporal and the atemporal components intermix, starting as primarily atemporal in the future, transmuting through the present, and primarily temporal in the past. At the microscopic scale we find some of reality forming early and some delayed until later. This process creates the events that make up our reality and our experience of time from the atemporal realm of possibility. In the middle of this process we see reality half formed and time only partly determined.
This is the sense in which time is an emergent property of the universe. If this is so, then our theoretical physics only covers the latter half of the true cosmology, the measurable and testable residue of a greater reality. From the odd results obtained in quantum experiments we have become aware that our physics has nothing absolute to say about the course of existence, only a good approximation under bulk conditions. When the atemporal realm of possibility is expanded deep into the process of the present and given agency through the amplifiers of life and humans in particular, then the hard determinism of the temporal grounding of the future is broken through. Life has created a path for the energy of potential to flow into reality. How that path has been created and what are its implications are further questions for study of the concepts presented.
Psychological Time
Our human experience of time is one of flow, a passage from moment to moment, each a little different but largely the same. If there were no differences between moments, there would be no passage, no distinction to be aware of. If, on the other hand, there was nothing of our experience that remained the same, there would also be no passage to note because each moment would be disjoint, without a frame of reference, leaving only an eternally present moment of experience. In either extreme we wouldn’t know that time is passing even though we may be embedded in a cosmology that has a temporal dimension.
In the middle between these extremes there is a tension between a stable continuity and an unstable dynamism. This tension exists over vast scales of time that far exceed our human capacity to directly experience. Here in our neck of the temporal woods our senses and sensibilities span time scales from about 25 milliseconds - the point at which the lowest audio frequencies begin to sound like distinct beats - up to our lifetime - the scale beyond which we can only extrapolate. Within our temporal domain are the quick movements of physical activity, heartbeats, the cadence of speech, our breath, and longer scales of diurnal and annual cycles, rites of passage and the arc of life.
Yet we also have access to temporal processes that occur outside of our direct experience of temporal extent: audible vibrations, photonic emissions, evolution, plate tectonics, and the lifetimes of stars. These processes don’t show up in our experience as having duration, but rather as a projection onto our timescale in the forms of pitch and harmony, color and warmth, the diversity and similarity of species, the frozen geologies of sediments and upheaval, and the spectacular images of similar stars at different points of their evolution. Beyond even these projected perceptions are the processes we can become aware of through the implications from our scientific methods and the systems of reason and logic by which we make sense of them. As well we can learn of multi-generational social processes through the stories we pass along, reinforced by the traces left by those changes, similar to how we are aware of geologic movements.
However these processes come to our awareness, we organize them into what can loosely be characterized as narratives. Here the term narrative means a sequence of events that tend to occur in the same order. A narrative can describe anything that falls into what we usually consider to be a causal chain, for example the movement of a ball after it is hit with a bat. This type of narrative has a one-to-one correspondence with a physical process. But a narrative can also be a meta-sequence of events such as a description that binds the properties of an object to it, for example the narrative that death cap mushrooms will kill you. Either sense of narrative can show up in our experience as a temporal flow - the tracking of the baseball or the mental unfolding from the first image of the toadstool to remembering that it is lethal. But more subtly, these narratives can also be experienced atemporally. The fielder already knows where the ball will travel from observing the timing and arc of the batter’s swing. The mycologist’s danger flags are already raised before the details of the mushroom are catalogued in their mind, recognition coming all at once. And importantly, these narratives are all communicated between us at the particular pace of human speech, no matter in what timescale the actual processes referred to by the narratives play out.
This last point shows how temporality of any duration makes its way into our psyche to be resized therein into a fairly limited scale of time and an abstract objective extent that occupies a limited area within our mindscape. We create shorthand versions of complex narratives, a sort of thumbnail if you will, that fairly contain similar numbers of elements. For example, a lifetime may be compressed into a narrative of birth-growth-aging-death. We experience this narrative in just a second or two. It occupies about the same amount of mental time and space as a baseball narrative of pitch-swing-hit-catch. If we want to expand our experience of a narrative, we could either fill in finer detail such as many more stages of a life or a slow-mo playback of the at-bat. In either case, there is an extra amount of mental energy that we must apply to achieve an extended narrative. In contrast, the original short-form narratives are almost effortless to call up. This indicates that there is an optimum size for these narratives, not so long and detailed that we lose our sense of the overall story, and not so short that we lose our sense of beginning, middle, and ending.
Another aspect of our sense of time as expressed in narratives is the repetition of familiar patterns. Our narratives and the ongoing stream of our experiences have a close correspondence. We see many lifetimes play out among our friends and family. We watch countless repeats of the pitcher-batter duel. The repetition of narratives usually leads to a cyclic experience of reality. We talk of the endless cycle of birth and death, the seasons, the at-bats, innings, and games. Our everyday lives are experienced primarily in this mode where our sense of the present moment is of a place and time we have been before and will again occupy in the future. The narratives that are active in the present moment will again be active when we return and the story lines that are stitched together out of our narratives loop back in seemingly endless, yet still evolving grand cycles. It is interesting to note that even though our natural state is to be within these narrative cycles we often find ourselves outside of the present moment, dwelling on bygone days or thinking about the future. We may even be existing in an abstract emotional space far removed from our present circumstance. It takes an effort to engage in mindfulness practices to return us to the here and now. This is a clue that we exist within our own mindscape of narratives and that that mindscape is only guided, informed, and grounded by the physical reality we occupy.
Most of the form and pattern of our narratives match the form and pattern of our experiences. But what we find interesting are the differences - the unexpected baby or 100th birthday, the bad strike call or pitcher hitting a home run. We live in these differences against a backdrop of predictability, so much so that we don’t normally even notice that things mostly stay the same. Until of course, they stay too much the same. Just like the way we pack temporal experiences into similar sized narratives, we also organize our attention to contain an optimum amount of dynamism - too little and we grow restless, too much and we are overwhelmed.
The primary feature of psychological time is that it operates in bite sized chunks of temporal experience. While these chunks are of similar temporal and abstract extent within our minds, they represent wide ranging scales of time and space. We do not merely work with reality one bite at a time. On the contrary, we take in reality from all manner of scales and condense it to fit within our internal nutshells. It is important to understand that this is a mental process as it has been elucidated here. It does not necessarily follow that reality outside of our mindscape operates in the same manner. Rather we should be aware of our biased approach to organizing, understanding, and experiencing time.
Physical Time
If you were to ask any theoretical physicist what the true nature of time (or of space) was, most would answer that we do not have an adequate understanding of it to give a definitive answer. We do have an innate sense of time and space, but that may not be the way reality is organized. From a physicist’s point of view, space and time start as a coordinate system for locating events and for describing physical laws via the equations of motion and such. A coordinate system does not have to have any physical reality for it to be useful. Just as the way our minds organize time into narratives and use those to make sense of the world and operate within it, physicists organize physical laws with respect to spacetime coordinates and use those to make sense of the world and make accurate predictions about how it operates. It does not necessarily follow that time and space are the real substrates of reality, only that they are useful concepts.
The primary theory covering space and time is General Relativity. This theory describes a fairly simple relationship between matter/energy and the density or curvature of spacetime around it. Since spacetime is our coordinate system, we can, using the tools of the relativity equations, rewrite the classic, non-relativistic equations of motion of particles to include this relationship by burying it in the coordinate system of those equations. The resulting equations are notoriously difficult to calculate. Scientists simulate approximations to the equations, refining those simulations for whatever accuracy is needed for a result. This lack of an exact answer is a key problem for our understanding of spacetime. The relationship between matter/energy and the coordinate system is as simple as most other physical relationships, and yet we do not know of or expect to uncover a simple way to directly describe the motion of particles under a combination of classical and relativistic theories. In fact, when the predominant theories of General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), two of the three pillars of modern physics (the third being the Standard Model), are combined, the results lead to absurd outcomes and cannot describe reality as we know it. The theories are fundamentally incompatible even if they are highly accurate for predicting measurements within their own domains.
The basic incompatibility comes down to whether the coordinate system of spacetime is continuous as is required for General Relativity to make sense, or discrete as is required for Quantum Mechanics to make sense. General Relativity can work with discrete particles, but its continuous substrate predicts infinite density for those particles. Quantum Mechanics can be written as equations based in continuous coordinates, but its Uncertainty Principle predicts a breakdown in that continuity at the Planck scale at which reality looks more like a seething foam of virtual particles.
Time suffers even more than space in the tension between GR and QM because unlike space, time is also fundamental to our understanding of causality - the ordering of events when one event precedes and participates in another event at a later time. Special Relativity tells us that as particles approach the speed of light, time slows down with respect to objects remaining at rest. For photons and other particles that travel at the speed of light, time is at a standstill, which leads to the conclusion that the two events of emission and absorption that demark the photon’s lifetime occur at exactly the same time from the point of view of the photon. This bizarre result leads us to imagine a confusing topology for events in spacetime where every connected pair of events must be somehow brought together while at the same time staying apart.
How does one draw a causal chain of events in this network? We might imagine that a non-relativistic particle travels from one photonic event to another, which, unlike the case for a photon, can have spatio-temporal extent. This looks like a network of particles bound together at photonic events of emission or absorption in something that would look like a very interconnected fishnet. Each segment of string is a particle existing between events and each knot is a pair of events associated with a photon transfer. However, this network does not occupy spacetime the way we imagine it. It does not look like a macrame hanging in an orthogonal coordinate space. The knots of the net are normally far apart when experienced in our familiar spacetime coordinates. This depiction becomes mind-boggling-ly complex when we consider the path of a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. According to Quantum Electrodynamics, a particle follows a curved path because of a constant exchange of photons between the particles that create the field and the particle following a curved path. With this in mind, what looked like a fish net comes to look more like a system of seams in a fabric, a massively twisted, interlocking, and interpenetrating mess of a substrate.
All of this should guide us to the conclusion that what we experience as objects in spacetime might somehow be an emergent reality instead of the ground substrate. It suggests that reality operates in a different manner than we have posited in our physical laws, but that creates a projection that appears to us as a four dimensional spacetime. Just like the way in which our psychological experience of time is not necessarily the true way in which reality is organized, so too our theoretical structure, based on the curved spacetime of General Relativity and the Planck foam of Quantum Mechanics is not necessarily the true way in which reality is organized.
Abstract Time
So far we have considered time as having a definite character, even if we are unsure of what that character is exactly. We think of time as either a property of something we are contemplating or not. Time’s existence is binary, it is either there or it isn’t. We don’t normally consider time to be something that may be only partially in existence the way we might consider a thought to be not fully formed or lava to have not fully solidified. It is not an easy thing to consider because our conception of things coming into being is as a process embedded in time. There would seem to be a categorical paradox to think of time evolving, for in what space does that occur but time itself? The key to this understanding lies in how time has different characteristics depending where in relation to the present we consider it, and that there are elements of the cosmos that exist outside of our normal conception of time, elements whose substrate is quantum entanglement and superposition.
One of our foundational notions of time is that it proceeds from a future via a present into a past. We generally think of the past as immutable and the future as either undetermined or at least unknowable. This asymmetry between past and future is our first evidence that time’s arrow points in one direction only. On closer inspection we attribute the immutability of the past to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that the Universe tends towards disorder, towards an increase in entropy. A simple example is an explosion which transforms a highly ordered explosive material into a random gaseous cloud that cools as it expands. In order for time to move backwards, that tendency towards an even distribution of heat would be broken. Our cooled gasses would have to recollect into a dense, hot volume, undergo statistically unlikely chemical reactions, and settle into a stable, again cool mass. All of our experience of reality tells us that this won’t occur.
There are however some interesting experiments, so called quantum erasers, that show that the past is not entirely immutable. There is a distinction to be made however between an experimental setup that is designed to enable the eraser effect and the general processes of reality that don’t provide the hooks, so to speak, to undo past decisions. That said, it should be noted that these experiments demonstrate that in principle any event in the past is contingent on the future.
There is a cosmological argument that can be made as to why this is true. From what we understand of the Big Bang, the early universe was extremely dense with pure energy. From this extreme potential were born particle pairs that were quantum mechanically entangled. These entanglements limit the possible states the universe can occupy. As the Universe expanded, these entanglements spread out across space and remain entangled today. In an extremely complex and intricate web of transitive coupling across the fish net of events, these entanglements must be maintained through every event-knot that occurs. What this means is that any event may look a certain way right now, because it is statistically favored to take that form given all that feeds into it, but at some point in the future a reckoning will occur with all of the entanglements leading through that event coming into interaction with the offspring of the long lost siblings formed in the early Universe, and those resolutions may alter the statistical favorability of the event. This is the mechanism that provides the hooks in the quantum eraser experiments. In these setups, the statistical favorability of a past event is arranged so as to be strongly contingent on subsequent events, specifically through the use of entanglement.
What we see here is that the past is not categorically immutable but instead is a mixture of a strong measure of determinism and a modicum of superposition. This implies that the present is not a diaphanous boundary between past and future but rather something more blurred. But what does it mean for time to not be monotonically increasing, for it to have overlapping regions, for it to not have the properties we expect coordinate systems to have? Here we have a couple notions about time bumping into each other, that of time as flowing from future to past and time as a coordinate system undergirding the laws of physics.
Turning to the future, we must ask how time exists beyond the present moment. Our normal conception of the future contains a fairly well determined near-term course that the cosmos will follow. We expect that the usual laws apply and we are confident the sun will come back around in the morning. Our projections into the future become less precise the further out we go, but we tend to ascribe that uncertainty to an imprecise knowledge of our present state rather than a fundamental indeterminism, quantum mechanics notwithstanding. And so it seems to us that time proceeds into the future the same as it has in the past and our present moment is just another coordinate point on the temporal axis. This is the view of the Block Universe theorists.
But we know from quantum mechanics that at the very least the future is not preordained, but remains undetermined if only randomly so in the tiniest of ways. While it is mostly defined, there is wiggle room. Our human scale perception of this condition is that of a stable universe with free will. Of course there is a world of philosophy over the relationship between quantum indeterminism and free will, but the salient aspect for the discussion of time is that there are a range of possible outcomes for any process, not just a single path. The stability of the world is only maintained at a macro scale. On very close inspection we find matter to be seething with possibility, never following the canonical rules. It is only as we scale back that we can see the bulk properties that have persistent form and structure. The stability of the world is grounded in statistical likelihood.
At the quantum level however, we are working with potentials and events. Potentials are the as yet undecided possibilities and events are the collapse of those possibilities into singular outcomes. The point at which the collapse occurs we consider to be the moment when the future transitions to the past. In other words the present is defined by the creation of events. The moment events are created is the moment of their death into the past. Everything in the past of this moment has a causal order to it. When we measure reality, we are measuring the hardened residue of the event creation process. From these measurements we derive our natural laws and posit the coordinate systems the world exists within.
On the future side of this moment are potentials only, a vast, possibly infinite set of events that are unrealized. It is in this realm that likelihoods are determined, entanglements resolved, and the die cast. What is important to note is that these processes do not occur in a temporal fashion. Temporal processes are marked by a chain of events that occur in an order. But the processes of potential occur instantly, without time, without deliberation, without regard to light cones or world lines. Those are all characteristics of the residue, the temporal sequence created as the events are created in the present moment.
However, it is not as if the future does not undergo change. We can see this by noticing that were the future to be static there would be no difference between the future of one moment from the future of a different moment which would imply the two moments are identical, but we know that moments are all different. So there is a temporal component to the future and the future undergoes change so as to remain coherent with the present moment. However, the future holds many, many possible outcomes for any given moment and it is in that vast expanse of possibility that the atemporal processes of event guidance and selection take place.
Because these processes do not play out in time and yet give rise to it, we can consider them to exist in an abstract temporal realm that can contain infinitely many possible temporal flows. This realm is abstract because it is not represented in the spacetime we experience as the real world. In abstract time are both a singular temporal ground that binds to reality and an atemporal field of possibilities and processes. In the real temporal realm we find adherence to the laws of physics. In the abstract temporal realm we find coherence and the reconciliation of entanglements.
We have now noted that the past is not immutable, that the present is somewhat fuzzy, and that the future is primarily atemporal but with a temporal reference surface. It should be clear that the temporal and the atemporal components intermix, starting as primarily atemporal in the future, transmuting through the present, and primarily temporal in the past. At the microscopic scale we find some of reality forming early and some delayed until later. This process creates the events that make up our reality and our experience of time from the atemporal realm of possibility. In the middle of this process we see reality half formed and time only partly determined.
This is the sense in which time is an emergent property of the universe. If this is so, then our theoretical physics only covers the latter half of the true cosmology, the measurable and testable residue of a greater reality. From the odd results obtained in quantum experiments we have become aware that our physics has nothing absolute to say about the course of existence, only a good approximation under bulk conditions. When the atemporal realm of possibility is expanded deep into the process of the present and given agency through the amplifiers of life and humans in particular, then the hard determinism of the temporal grounding of the future is broken through. Life has created a path for the energy of potential to flow into reality. How that path has been created and what are its implications are further questions for study of the concepts presented.