The Order of Time

In the elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time—only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate probabilities and relations

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say that time “passes”? What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity?

What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?

We think of the world in terms of stones, mountains, clouds, and people, and this is “the world for us.” About the world independent of us we know a good deal, without knowing how much this good deal is.
Our thinking is prey to its own weakness, but even more so to its own grammar. It takes only a few centuries for the world to change: from devils, angels, and witches to atoms and electromagnetic waves. It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realiz

When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound: it’s because the problem is false.

are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory.

temporal structure of the world is different from the naïve image that we have of it. This naïve image is suitable for our daily life, but it’s not suitable for understanding the world in its minute folds, or in its vastness. In all likelihood, it is not even sufficient for understanding our own nature, because the mystery of time intersects with the mystery of our personal identity, with the mystery of consciousness.

present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist (chapter 3). Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only “partially” ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” in a far-off galaxy. The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

ours is a world of events rather than of things

Locally, time passes at different speeds according to where we are and at what speed we ourselves are moving. The closer we are to a mass (chapter 1), or the faster we move (chapter 3), the more time slows down: there is no single duration between two events; there are many possible ones.

7

The single quantity “time” melts into a spiderweb of times.