“But change in itself, or the process of becoming or of being created and destroyed can be compared to a growing heap of sand. The future is nothing and the past gets bigger and bigger as it’s filled with changes, some of which we remember or can discover. In any case, this is the subjective flow of time which is bound up with memory.’
Actually the pile of sand really isn’t growing. It’s just being constantly rearranged. Conservation of energy.
Think in terms of a baseball game, where the batter hits the ball and then runs the bases. These two events can’t co-exist, because the energy manifesting the first is transformed into the second. The ball couldn’t be flying away, if the energy of the swinging bat hadn’t been transferred to it. While the batter couldn’t still be standing at home, if he is running the other bases.
If past events continued to exist, it would require the energy to manifest them and so that energy would be left in the past and not conserved.
While memory, as well as physical configurations, are a consequence of past events, they still only exist in the present.
“Does the house come from the future? No, it’s like that heap of sand: the particles come together, rearrange themselves and produce a new form, a house. That is, labourers and materials are assembled, the construction process takes time and the end result, in the future compared to the start of the process, is the house. So the process itself seems to go forward in time.’
That’s what I say, the process goes forward in time. It’s the patterns being generated by this process that recede into the past. Before the house is built, it’s in the future, then while it is standing and being used, as part of the process of life flowing through it, it’s in the present. Then when it’s fallen down and only the foundation remains, it is in the past.
Just as before we are born, our lives are in the future, then while we are living and part of the process, we are present, then when we die and our particles are scattered back across the cosmos, we are in the past.
“Given the conservation of energy, forms are only transformed rather than really destroyed, so the house that’s torn down becomes something else (its materials are recycled or reused).”
Yes. The energy is conserved. The forms are transformed into new forms. The process goes past to future, while the patterns being generated go future to past.
“To say the house goes into the past is to say it enters a fixed position in memory.”
And eventually memories fade.
“Otherwise, the destruction/transformation process is another shifting of the elements and a process that moves forward in time.”
Yes.
