Mike,
I’m not sure we’ve really left the old world. More like it’s in its death throes.
For one thing, as mobile organisms, we evolved a sequential perception process in order to navigate and with civilization built out of the collective knowledge from narrating our journeys, we are educated to the premise of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which theoretical physics codifies as measures of duration.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical state, as events form and dissolve.
Different clocks run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. In fact much of history has been about synchronizing the various narratives of different cultures.
There can be no 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 past for it to be left in, or future for it to arrive from, as it is the changing configuration of this dynamic which creates the effect of time. The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, but the configuration of this energy.
As an effect, time is similar to temperature, pressure, color, etc, rather than space. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our environment, bodily functions and emotions, not the sequential processing of thought.
That different events can be observed in different order from different locations is no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It’s the energy being conserved, not the information it expresses.
The future is not determined, because the input hasn’t arrived to be computed in the present and that is what determines. As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
The energy and the information effectively go opposite directions of time. Energy amounts to a process, churning along, past to future. While the information is pattern, rising and falling like waves. Think of a factory; The product goes start to finish, being in the future to being in the past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
As with life. Individuals go birth to death, while the species goes onto new generations, shedding old ones. As consciousness goes from one thought to the next, as these mental forms coalesce and dissolve.
The dichotomy of energy and form is elemental. Galaxies are essentially a cosmic convection cycle of energy radiating out, as mass/form coalesces in.
Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system sorting through and distilling the information being created, in order to navigate. Motor and steering.
We associate the emotion and instinct driving us with the heart and gut. The mind mostly just referees. Curiosity is a desire and thus emotion.
Our social dynamic is the conflict between organic social energies bubbling up, as civil and cultural forms coalesce in, giving us the political polarities of liberal and conservative.
The problem is that as linear, goal seeking creatures, we have this ideals based culture, in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback oriented reality. So in seeking that ideal state toward which we must be moving, we try to avoid the tension and friction which makes reality real. As sentient beings, we can’t modulate this reality without understanding it.
Without the ups and downs, it would be a flatline. It’s all educational.
