THE ILLUSION OF TIME
In an essay in Scientific American (Sci.Am. 302,6; p 59-65; 2010) Craig Callender reports that some theoretical physicists suggest that time does not exist. Their conclusion comes from quantum mechanical considerations. I am presenting some observations of our macroscopic world that lead to the same suggestion.
The three domains of time are future, present and past. The future contains all events that do not yet exist, the present contains the events that exist, and the past the ones that do not exist anymore.
It seems obvious that as I am writing these words I am in the present. However, this moment will be in the past and not exist anymore, when you will read what I am writing now.
When we shake hands we feel our hands touch. The moment, we feel each others hand, the touching is already in the past. Our sensory receptors need time to react, our nerves need time to send a signal to our brains. Our brains need time to process the information, and time is needed to informing the seats of our self-awareness that a touching is happening. Well, our system is slow. However, if we could register an event within a fraction of a picosecond, even then this event would be in the past when we witness its existence. That means everything we do, feel, see, or hear is already in the past and has ceased to exist.
As all events that we can witness are already in the past when we become aware of them, the time that we experience is in the past also. Thus, time is a dimension of the imagined world of the past. It is an illusion.
Time measures the distance that separates a past event from the present. In our imagination, we can go back to the time of ancient Rome, and than we can move forward again to the discovery of the Americas. We can let time run forward or backward, and we can define an arrow of time in our virtual world of the past.
We do not know if there is some equivalent in the present to what we call time. If there is, it cannot have duration.
Events are real only as long as they are anchored in the present. As soon as the connection to the present is lost an event ceases to exist. Time comes into its virtual existence the moment an event becomes detached from the present.
As long as we live, we are connected to the present. However, everything we experience is already in the past.
When we die we stop to exist. We lose our connection to the present. Our body may exist a little longer while connected to the present, however, eventually, it also will cease to exist until in the end there are only atoms and finally sub-atomic particles as traces of our former existence.
Everything that changes moves from the reality of the present into the illusion of the past. The changed state remains in the present and the old state, which does not exist anymore, is in the past.
The future is what we think might happen or what we predict to become reality. Our predictions are based on our experience and knowledge of our world of the past. As the past, the future is not real. We are imagining the future as a mirror image of our world of the past.
To become real a future event must become part of the present first. That is the reason why we cannot "remember" the future. We can only remember events that once had been real. In other words we only can remember what had been in the present.
As the time we experience does not exist in the present, we cannot assume time to be running continuously from the past into the future. It rather seems as if the present generates time as the fourth dimension of our virtual world of the past.