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vog

The argument is deeply flawed.

1) A term doesn't become imaginary just because it turned out to be physically more elaborate than its initial meaning.

The concept of time never vasnished. It just changed a bit. It is still one of the axes of spacetime.

2) The logic itself is flawed. Saying "Time might only exist in your head ... because of spacetime" is like saying:

* "Magnetism might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism"

* "Electricity might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism"

* "Atoms [meaning: individable parts] might only exist in your head ... because of electrons/protons/neutrons"

3) Even from a purely philosophical view, pointing out time here is meaningless. Every word describes a concept, a model, so anything including spacetime might exist just in our heads. Pointing that out specifically for time makes no sense.

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It seems pretty clear to me from reading the article that the headline is simply using "time" as a shorthand for "the arrow of time," and the article tends to refer to the arrow explicitly. This is a common usage (e.g. "if I could turn back time"), so I don't feel like it's particularly objectionable.

Even with that interpretation, the article is flawed, which I explained in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424006

You've missed the conceptional shift in the article -- it's not that time doesn't exist at all as a phenomenon, it's that the phenomenon that we perceive as the direction of time is just that -- a perception.

Think of it in the same way that there's no green and red (the colors), just frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, that we just perceive as green and red.

I thought the point was very clear - if gravity is too slow (not sure what this means) to force decohered particles to move in a single time direction, then the notion that a decohered particle is moving forward in time must come from our personal predispositions.

I'm just a layperson reading this article - happy to be corrected.

That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself.

But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions.

Yet, isn't it strange that all human cultures have developed the same notion of the forward time direction? Wouldn't we expect some islands to have developed the other convention, just like there are some places where cars drive on the left rather than right side of the road? Or, is it our human brain? Then, shouldn't we observe some animals or plants with an apparently different perception?

More importantly, however, this disagrees completely with physics, ancient as well as modern physics, because of, well, experiments. [1][2] The forward/backward time directions are more comparable to up/down space directions (in a gravitational field), which are very distinct from each other. The direction of time can be measured in so many different ways, almost none of them really connected to our personal perception.

It's the whole world around us that makes a clear difference between forward and backward time direction, not just we in our heads.

[1] Those led to the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, which modern physics does question in its fine-grained details (as with gravitation, etc.), but not in principle, because it is so clearly visible in experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

According to these two lines in the article -

The question of time's arrow is an old one. And to be clear, it's not whether time exists, but what direction it moves.

Lanza is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations.

- everything we see in universe is essentially because of a personal predisposition towards seeing time a certain way. Even the 2nd law is because we see time the way we do.

If time is a lie, then all physics becomes a lie.

Btw, I'm going to stop digging now. I have no idea of what I'm talking about except what I read in the article.

> is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations

This "theory" is old and well-known.

However, we are not merely limited by our (biological) sensors, but by our sensors+actors.

That is, we can't see too far in the sky, but we can build telescopes. And microscopes. And other strange machines with whom we interact mostly by looking at numbers those spit into some computer. Science has long overcome our biological limitation, and is more driven by our technological limitations: What if our computer programs which evaluate our experiment's sensory data are wrong? What if the CPU is defect? Or the wiring with the sensors is bad? Better take some more computers and let them calculate the stuff again. And take some more humans to evaluate everything. And better repeat whole experiments from time to time. But that's what we are doing (or least: know we ought to be doing) all the time.

There's a lot to criticize here with design of studies and repeatability of experiments, but our biological limitations play a fairly small role here.

If energy cannot be created nor altered, only change forms, then time seems to be quite arbitrary.

Take money. Think of money as your economic energy. It can change from coins to bills to T-Notes. It can be dematerialized into an accounting entry or a whole lot of Satoshis but ultimately money is just your economic energy.

To track it in your head, you timeline it - my employer/customer owned N units of money earlier, now it belongs to me as a banking entry, later I will convert it to bills to buy a goat etc etc. You may create all sorts of elaborate theories regarding money. There may be tight mathematical rules governing the transformation of money from dematerialized form to bills e.g., your ATM demands a PIN to do the transform which is completely arbitrary as far as money is concerned.

All through these changes, money hasn't changed form at all.

To tie it back to the original piece, energy is mass. Your electron waveform which we interpret as mass is energy. Once we started tracking it, we had elaborate rules (laws) to describe its behaviors but ultimately, it's just energy.

While we are observing the energy, it behaves a certain way which follows all the rules of physics..but much like the ATM and PIN rule, the rule is not relevant to the energy.

Likewise, your need to understand a before and after state for energy forces you to invent time. For example, if you never transformed your money in the bank into bills, as far as your bank account is concerned, no time has elapsed.

</layperson>

> That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself.

> But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions.

Isn't just the whole Prigogin/Einstein argument ? (small scale gives the illusion events are rewindable vs higher scale givea the illusion events aren't rewindable).

Well some tribes have different time concepts tho

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13452711

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