That was an entry in one of FQXI's annul contests;
h ttps://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1344
What interests me about it is an insight into the nature of time I keep trying to start conversations about. Some see it and some don't, but getting any conversational feedback loop going is hard.
It is that as these mobile organisms, we necessarily have a sequential process of perception, which we are constantly sorting and ordering, as a function of navigating our environment. Then, as humanity, we developed the ability to communicate complex descriptions, narratives and lessons. Which makes this narrative flow, from past to future, integral to who we are. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The basic reality though, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events unfold.
So there can be no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is 'conserved," because it is what is present. Its changing form is what creates time.
The dynamic also creates temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.
So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the forms being generated go future to past.
In terms of a wave, the energy is what manifests and drives it, while the fluctuations and undulations, giving us frequency and amplitude, rise and fall, as the energy passes through.
Which pretty much relates processes and patterns. In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Even consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests come and go, future to past.
I could go on, but hopefully this gives you some idea.
Now as these organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the patterns and forms precipitating out. So our minds don't really process the energy, as it would be a white-out of too much information. We just have these screen grabs of perception, like stills of a movie, which we are constantly having to sort and organize, to survive first, then make sense of second. Thus the tendency for people to go along, to get along, rather than seriously being objective.
Sequence isn't causal, energy exchange/transformation is. Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights.
Yet we are constantly trying to explain reality in terms of the forms, then reconstruct the dynamics. We see nouns, then fill in the dynamic with verbs. We see the waves and think, crests/troughs, not energy and motion.
Which gets back to this tricky territory of theoretical physics and the degree to which you have to spend your life studying mathematical forms to become part of the priesthood.
As I like to point out, epicycles were brilliant, predictively accurate math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, but the crysalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
So... The question I would put forth, are photons irreducible point particles, or are they the amount of energy our material detectors absorb? What we can test.
It seems it's only physics, if we can observe and test it, but the philosophy of the metaphysical has been overwhelmed by mathematics.
When we reduce the body to its essence, do we have the skeleton, or the seed? Static map, or dynamic territory.
Here is another interesting article;
h ttp://worrydream.com/refs/Mead%20-%20American%20Spectator%20Interview.html
