Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Does time flow?

I doubt that our subjective sensation that time "flows" from the future, to the present moment ("now"), to the past is much more than a perceptual illusion. The sticking-point for me has always been, how do we define the "now"? I am much more comfortable with the block-universe idea, in which our existences are plotted as worldlines (you can google either "block-universe" or "worldlines" for more insight). Although anti-intuitive at first, this seems to me to be a much more natural way of thinking of time's true nature. (Side note: I own the most celebrated work on the philosophy of time, THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE by J.M.E. McTaggart, but have never gotten around to reading it. Maybe one of these years...hey, wait a minute...)

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