Well we certainly seem to believe that time exists. You could consider it part of a broader question: Do any of the concepts we attribute to the universe exist objectively, or is the universe simply a random collection of data, with all meaning arising solely from human interpretation? I personally reject this; I challange anyone to stand in the middle of a freeway, watching a semitrailer speeding towards them, and insist that it’s only a human convention that an “object” is “moving” “towards” the observer.
Logic is an a posteriori entity derived from the ambient topos. Classical logic derives from the assumption that the relevant topos for the mathematics describing the observed world which obtains is that of sets. I think it’s rather evident that this isn’t good enough for the real world, partly because of the notions of temporal logics (which as I pointed out destroy reductio arguments) and because at the very small scale the relevant logic is evidently quantum in nature; that is, more related to the subspaces of a Hilbert space than the (measurable) subsets of a set-theoretic universe.
I don’t know about serializations, but I believe the short story is in Year’s Best SF 4. (And yes, I have a lot of those, because they make for great reading while traveling.)
I always understood that tie exists as it is linked to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Basically that the Universe, overall, moves from low entropy to high entropy. As far as I know this is pretty much a one way street which gives you a “past” and “future”. Lower entropy in the past. Higher entropy in the future.
Time as us humans view it however is offbase. There is no absolute frame of reference for measuring time such that two observers may measure it passing at different rates. They will, however, agree on the direction time moves.
The problem is that Liberal wants to use a notion of logic connected with time to make his argument. Ignoring the obvious objection that he may be begging the question, his argument is a “reduction to absurdity”: an disproof of the negation of what he wants to prove. In classical logic this is a common valid technique, since (not (not P)) is equivalent to P, so disproving (not P) is equivalent to proving P. In a temporal logic, however, (not (not P)) is generally different from P, so reductions to absurdity aren’t valid arguments.
There is no choice but to assert (implicitly: begging the question; or explicitly), or deny real existence, to fundamental entities. There is nothing one may derive them from, else they are not fundamental. For most, time is a fundamental thing. It is not derived from something else. I see no evidence to the contrary here.
Well, as I said, there’s a group in Toronto deriving the spacetime manifold as an epiphenomenon of a spin-network, and there are other groups considering “Minkowskian manifold objects” in topos theory. I don’t think the evidence us all in on either side of the debate.
I’m not a scientific realist (which, hilariously, is a form of idealism, but let’s not trouble ourselves with labels), so science is not as metaphysically persuasive to me as it might be to some. Sounds like a fun theory.