It’s a quandary. There may be scientists who take the simulation hypothesis seriously but I rely on my friend Occam and his sharp razor.
I can’t mean anything by “ever-changing” without time, indeed. Just as I can’t measure the speed of a moving object without using numbers. But numbers are mere mathematical objects that don’t exist in the physical world, aren’t they?
If, as you say, it’s a category of mind without which we can’t understand or describe reality, then how could we know whether there’s an aspect of reality it corresponds to? It’s not like you can understand reality without it, and then compare that to our usual experience, and say, “welp, it sure does” or “huh, nope”; there’d only be the Without-Which-We-Cannot-Understand-Or-Describe stuff, regardless of whether or not something else is going on that we can’t understand or describe, right?
Repeating the same thing again without responding to arguments achieves nothing.
Infants have an inbuilt concept of time… and space… and sound… and vision… and many things. That certainly doesn’t prove that they are illusions. 
“The universe is just an entropy generating labor that exists strictly in the present.”
‘entropy’ implies time
‘generate’ implies time
‘labor’ implies time
‘the present’ implies time
“If existence unfolds…”
‘unfolds’ implies time
Anything that happens or changes implies time. Perhaps at some level, ‘life, the universe, and everything’ is an illusion, but if so, you are not going to be able to prove that from within the illusion.
Your original question goes back to the argument of immaterialism by Bishop Berkeley, but focusing particularly on time.
You can’t seem to say anything about time without using words, but words don’t exist in the physical word either.
Physicists often talk about toy universes, models deliberately simplified almost to nothingness so that they can investigate hypotheses without the tremendous complexity of computation that reality involves. You appear to be using a toy philosophy, simplifying the universe to a single conjecture.
But toy universes only are helpful if they lead to answers that can be applied to complex reality. Your conjecture doesn’t answer any question, however simple.
Wolfgang Pauli once dismissed a conjecture as “not even wrong.” Wikipedia explains that by “‘Not even wrong’ describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but is based on faulty reasoning or speculative premises that can neither be proven correct nor falsified and thus cannot be discussed in a rigorous and scientific sense.” Your conjecture seems to me to be a philosophical analog. There’s nothing there to be grappled with, merely sophistry about the word “present.”
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned the Hartle-Hawking hypothesis which may shed some light on this. There is a short Wikipedia article about it here and a slightly longer article here.
Unfortunately neither of these articles is as clear and succinct as the text from Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge Lectures, which was published in book form as The Theory of Everything. The general idea is that one can hypothesize a model of the universe involving “imaginary time”, the important point here is that the term “imaginary” comes from the use of imaginary mathematical numbers to construct the model, not that it isn’t necessarily real and, indeed, the true reality. The key concept is that spacetime is Euclidian, and that any point in time – anything that ever happened or ever will happen – is merely a coordinate in this four-dimensional Euclidian spacetime. The last line of the second link sums it up: “The Big Bang, for example, appears as a singularity in ordinary time but, when modelled with imaginary time, the singularity can be removed and the Big Bang functions like any other point in four-dimensional spacetime.”
Hawking himself made the analogy that “what happened before the Big Bang”, which we know is a meaningless question, is meaningless because it’s equivalent to asking what happens if you try to move south past the South Pole. The Hartle-Hawking universe may well be what the “real” universe looks like – finite but unbounded – and if so, the perception of the “arrow of time” and increasing entropy is, in fact, a function of our perception. IOW, the imaginary time model is real and independent of any observer, but the perception of the “arrow of time” really is in some sense anthropocentric.
Right. Common language and thinking must be relatively useless when it comes to describing and understanding a universe where time behaved differently from what we have evolved to deal with. But the scientific method has not emerged and developed naturally whereas mathematics is a completely artificial language.
I myself lack the ability to formalize a model of the universe where time as we know it plays no role, but if scientists reached the conclusion that “real time” is way different from what our mundane perception of time I think people would be willing to try to grasp the new concepts. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. In antiquity, human groups believed in a type of circular time – there were natural cycles that seemed to organize their daily living, their own biology showed a circadian cyclicality, and their entire culture and civilization celebrated the cyclic nature of existence.
The introduction of the linear model of time was revolutionary. Some say this new, groundbreaking perspective on time stems in the teleological approach of the Bible. It is clear that by the Age of Enlightenment, Europeans had already abandoned the idea of circular time and had begun to regard time as both linear and irreversible. And that is when people started to believe in the idea of social progress and human perfectibility as well.
With the development of science, the idea of absolute time was established. Time was an objective aspect of reality, completely separate from space and independent from physical events or observers.
The way people viewed the universe changed radically again when Einstein put forth the idea that time and space were relative and closely interrelated. Suddenly space and time were no longer fixed. Instead, they appeared different depending on one’s physical perspective. Time did not flow at the same pace all over the universe anymore, and the point of view of the observer played an essential role on one’s perception of time.
Whenever such paradigm shifts occur in our understanding of reality, most people will have difficulty grasping and accepting the new concepts. Many will fiercely reject the new ideas and refuse to adopt them. People’s creeds may have to be shattered once again now that physicists like Max Tegmark and Carlo Rovelli are beginning to beginning to believe that time is an illusion.
Yes, it does. Your initial objection was that my approach suffered from circularity. Now one can easily see it is not the case.
My question has nothing to do with Berkeley’s immaterialism. I have repeatedly mentioned Kant and his perspective on the phenomenal world and noumenal world. Berkeley found the existence of the phenomenal world illogical. In this thread, I have proposed the idea that time may only exist in the phenomenal world whereas the noumenal world lacks time, or time as we know it.
True. I am a layman and all I can do is discuss issues with the layman’s critical and logical apparatus I am equipped with. Do you suggest I shouldn’t?
A solution to the problem I refer to in this thread would be to formalize a scientific or mathematical model of the universe where time no longer existed. It looks like certain scientists have already achieved that, at least in part.
No. This thread is organized as a thought experiment, which I have already mentioned or alluded to. What you name “a toy universe” is my schematic response to the question I have initiated. In answering that question, my purpose was to only refer to time, not to put forth an entire (although simplified) model of the universe.
And even if I accidentally proposed an oversimplified model of reality, which in your opinion makes no sense or deserves no judgment, at least I had the decency to give an answer to the question in the OP and risk being ridiculed, whereas your posts focus on merely criticizing my hypothesis and fail to offer a personal version, that is specific answer to the question in the OP, which I think could count as a substantial contribution to this thread.
Thank you for your input.
There is a fascinating book by Julian Barbour called The End of Time. It considers the very question OP considers, and reaches a similar conclusion. Very early in the book he writes “I am not denying the powerful phenomenon we call time. But is it what it seems to be? … the true phenomenon is so different that, presented to you as I think it is without any mention of the word ‘time’, it would not occur to you to call it that.”
At the beginning of the paperback are very complimentary quotes from John Archibald Wheeler and Lee Smolin, so Julian Barbour is not a crackpot — he seems to be a respected physicist and philosopher. AFAIK he proposes no experiment to test his theory. Perhaps he offers an “Interpretation” rather than a testable hypothesis.
One concept he uses is “time capsules.” What we think of as a sequence of events in time is actually recognized by us via a single moment — a moment in which we have memories or other evidence of past events.
The book is written for laymen, and has no equations, etc. But it isn’t light reading. A short summary wouldn’t do it justice; but for me to offer a long summary would be difficult, and error-prone. I’ll leave it to the Board’s professional physicists to comment on Barbour’s views.
A correction is necessary. In one of the posts above I should have said that Berkeley rejected the existence of the noumenal world, not the phenomenal one.
I’ve carried out a fast research and found this quote: “For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist.” It looks like I have to order it.
But how can we perceive change occurring if there is no time?
How can we perceive one thing… and then… perceive another if there is no time?
How can our perception or memory move to a different state if there is no time?
Care to explain?
Also, since time is not separate from space, but part of one thing - spacetime - denying that time exists surely implies that space also does not exist?
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe you should have had the “decency” to directly answer the questions I put to you far back in post #5. That you avoided doing so , and have avoided answering any other questions about physical consequences of your hypothesis, speaks much louder than your words.
Before you do that, look up the word “deepity”. Because that is a prime example, right there.
Answering such questions is not an easy feat. I am afraid the model of the universe lurking in the back of my mind is not a clear, coherent picture. I was hoping that people answering the question in the title of this thread might help clarify these things together.
Now, it is true that the moment I wrote that time (as we know it) may not exist in reality I realized that I had to deal with the issue of space as well. It is no wonder, then, that Julian Barbour’s The End of Time starts by hypothesizing that the notion of spacetime as put forth by Minkowski and Einstein is incorrect.
Carlo Rovelli claims that the stuff that the universe is made of is pure events. If time is mere change, then what we perceive as space might be the field of action of the pure evens Carlo Rovelli refers to. I don’t really know. I am reading the first 40 pages of Julian Barbour’s book on line before I receive the physical copy. I was surprised to see that the author claims things happen only now, and he supports the idea that what we perceive as time consists of independent “nows”.
I will continue reading various sources and if I think I am able to answer questions I may intervene. Otherwise, I’ll be watching. I wonder what other people actually think of this topic.
Here’s a long interview with Julian Barbour.
I’ve read it, but I don’t find his ideas coherent or convincing.
He published his book 20 years ago, and it doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.
In a previous thread, I listed some of the theories about the ontology of time that might or might not be relevant to your inquiries.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22154079&postcount=21
To reiterate, the main theories are Eternalism, including the Block Universe concept and the Growing Block Universe concept, which are different from each other in some details;
Presentism, in which the past does not exist neither does the future, but only the present exists as a fleeting and ever-changing moment;
and the Multiple Timelines concept, which allows for the creation of new timelines through free will and/or random events.
It seems to me that the concept of Presentism allows for the idea that time is an illusion that does not exist when there are no observers, but the other concepts do not. So your idea has some support, but only among those who accept some kind of presentism.
My current favoured model is a five-dimensional Block Universe, which incorporates both Eternalism and the Multiple Timelines concept. As the timelines diverge they form a branching tree-like structure. But I have to say that I can’t find many others who agree with me.