Kesh,

Maybe we just don’t understand time?

As mobile organisms, we have a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate, then tell stories to one another and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so this narrative interpretation of time is pretty elemental, but the actual fact is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Causality and conservation of energy.

Time is asymmetric, because the particular actions measured are inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both.

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of perception. Frequencies and amplitudes.

The fabric of spacetime, as physical explanation for General Relativity, is a bit like crystalline spheres, as physical explanation for the math of epicycles. Before we realized the sun and stars moving east to west were only an effect of the earth turning west to east.

The problem is that maths are pattern. Process generates pattern, not the other way around. So process goes past to future, while patterns rise and fall, future to past. Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. The feedback is the patterns define and direct the process.

Think energy and form. Since energy is “conserved,” thus always and only present, time is an effect of the forms it is constantly manifesting. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system processes the distinctions, divisions and definition of the forms precipitating out. Even galaxies are essentially energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.

So while maths are all about extracting order from the chaos, the rest of us are just surfing this ever present energy, trying to steer between too hot and too cold, etc.

Even the three dimensions of space, the xyz coordinate system, are a mapping device, not foundational to space. No more than longitude, latitude and altitude are foundational to the surface of this planet.

If we take all physical properties away from space, it still has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinity, because there is nothing to define, thus limit it and equilibrium is implicit in General Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum, the unmoving void of absolute zero.

So space is the absolute and the infinite.

What occupies space, energy and matter/form, fluctuate between these parameters, as energy radiates toward infinity, while form coalesces toward equilibrium.

So we are just a convection cycle, between the absolute, where everything sums out, and the infinite, where everything fades out.

The head and the heart. The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement, but that’s a whole other discussion….

Cheers,

John