Beyond Biocentrism

But now consider a trip to the countryside on a moonless night. Strictly on a logical level, nothing is particularly beautiful. It’s visually a matter of white points on a dark gray backdrop.

but logic and perception are two very different animals.

Even as long ago as the fifth century b.c.e., Antiphon the Sophist, in his work On Truth, wrote, “Time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure.”

Or just a continuum of present moments?

The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now—they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but also that all moments are equally real.

Philosophers generally agreed. After all, the past is just a selective memory; your recollections of an event are different from mine. Both memories are simply that—signals from brain cells, neurons firing in the present moment. If the past is an idea that can only occur in the here and now, and the future is also just a concept happening strictly in the present, there seems nothing but now. Always. So is there really a past and a future?

you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it.

Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now—they are like a map

As Craig Callender wrote in 2010, in Scientific American2:

The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future,

pendulum makes 1,800 swings, a candle might burn down 1 inch, and Earth would turn one-forty-eighth of a full rotation. Certainly, one could call the elapsing of all these events “a half hour,” but that didn’t mean that the time period had some independent reality, like a watermelon.

Through it all, however, the fact of pendulum swings, mechanical balance beam oscillations, and quartz vibrations was still no evidence of time. They all merely provided regular repetitive motions. One could then compare some repetitive events with others. One could notice, for example, that while a grandfather clock pen‍

time. Rather, it’s a framework devised by human observers as they attempt to give organization and structure to the vast labyrinth of information whirling in their minds.

If this latter view is true, and time is only a kind of intellectual framework along the lines of our numbering systems or the way we order things spatially, then it certainly cannot be “traveled,” nor can it be measured on its own.