I know how you feel. I keep running up against reality denialists all the time.
For instance, there is one group, I’ll call time dimensionalists. Now me, I’m normal. I grew up on a farm and for me, physics was not getting too hurt, too often. Since I was fifth of six kids, there wasn’t much attention to my education, but I took to reading a lot. Since the world is so large and confusing, I tried to figure out the patterns and processes that seemed to manifest in all sorts of different ways. Which led me to read up on this field of science, called ”Physics.”
There they have this belief that the narrative effect, of a sequential process of perception, obviously a function of having to intentionally navigate, as plants don’t seem to need it, is some sort of fundamental reality. Then they take measures of duration, between events and use the speed of light and some fancy math, to correlate with measures of distance, to project this field called 4 dimensional spacetime. Really.
Obviously those of us who have some experience outside a classroom can understand that time is an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.
Change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.
We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequencing of thought.
There can’t be a physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Energy is “conserved,’ because there is no physical past for it to recede into, or physical future for it to arrive from. It’s the changing configuration of this energy which creats the effect of time.
Because they have somehow convinced themselves the measurement, duration, is more real than what is measured, an action, their argument is that the direction of time is only evident in the relative order of a system, its entropy. What bosh(bs, in farmer’s terms). What is measured is action and action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not either. The order of the system is not what’s measured and is irrelevant.
Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. No space travel necessary.
Another argument they put up for why this “fabric of spacetime” and therefore all events are equally real and any simultaneity of the present is an illusion, is that different events can be viewed in different order, from different points of view! Really. We see the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. Don’t they know it’s the energy that’s conserved, not the information? It’s the changing configuration of this energy which creates time!
They tell people that eventually we will time travel through wormholes in the fabric of this spacetime, but I’m thinking it comes from breathing too much chalk dust.
Then they trying saying that space really is just the three dimensions. Obviously dimensions are a tool to describe space, like with maps. Are longitude, latitude and altitude foundational to the biosphere of this planet, or a mapping device?
Math is an abstraction. That means it is abstracted from some more fundamental state, not the basis for it. Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our perception of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, because the model didn’t take all factors into account.
Suffice to say, the believers in this idea that diagrams are the reality are quite a club and don’t accept any questioning of their orthodoxy.
Actually once you get past the narrative basis of this system, time is an interesting effect. Basically processes go past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
Think of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
Like life, as the individual goes from birth to death, while the species goes onto future generations and shedding old.
As our brains and consciousness churn onto the future, while our thoughts and minds fade into the past.
As Alan Watts put it, in refuting determinism; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
There are lots of other denialists out there, but those are other rants.
For instance, with monotheism, does it occur to anyone that confusing the absolute with the ideal promotes cultural narcissism and that’s all too natural anyway? Heck, it was the pantheists that invented democracy.
As you say, logic comes a distant third to tribe and authority, because we are bound to our group.
Hopefully you are not one of those ensconced in this belief, as I may have caused offense.
