Is Time Truly an Illusion or a Tangible Reality?

[inflector]

I might misunderstand you, but my view is that a non-local entanglement, as thought of in EPR, would look like two events on opposite sides of the same light cone, or branch-lets of the same bough in your analogy.

That makes sense. I was viewing the light cones of the two measurements as two separate light cones.

Clearly, the light cone of the entangling photon generating event contains the two photons as they are measured.

In your analogy, if one bough touches another (the equivalent of an observer measuring the spin of one particle) then branchlets over the far side of the bough also shiver with that touch.

And indeed, this would be an accurate portrayal I would think. Decoherence would travel in timeless fashion to constrain everything within the light cone. The tree branch analogy might even have the advantage of giving the image of the path by which things "travel all the way back to the fork and back up the other side" rather than the alternative view of a constraint acting "instantly" across the current breadth of the light cone.

I'm just thinking of possibilities for the observed nonlocal behavior. So the tree analogy gives two separate potential approaches, touching branches and decoherence traveling up and down the branches in some superluminal fashion.

So nonlocality can either be seen as a constraint that "jumped instantly" across the lightcone, or instead - using the branching analogy - that the nonlocality is written into the branching structure itself. The entirety of the branch was decohered - all the way back in time to its origin - at the "moment" of observation (the brush of one branch against another).

Either one of these options is one that merits further thought. The possibility (however slight) that there could be some realistic explanation is what keeps me working on these sorts of ideas.

 

[Descartz2000]

I have seen several responses here that claim the present is all that is real and true. I agree with this, but every state is a present state. So, more accurately I can't claim that this particular 'now' state is only real and true. When any state is in a physical form and in a specific set of configurations, it is physically present and real. But, this logic applies to all states. So, when I claim, "my present moment 'now' as I write this is most real", I am in error because the same logic applies to all observed states. So, the viewpoint of 'now' carries no extra value than the viewpoint of yesterday's 'now' observation. So, inherently all 'now' states are equal. Therefore, I can't claim this 'now' state is more real than a perceived 'past' or 'future' state, because they all carry the same value and logical principles.

 

[Descartz2000]

If you believe that the state of things has to be crisp and definite - something either is or it isn't - then you indeed face a logical bind. Past and future are either states that are - which ends up in the deterministic block time view where the now is an illusion - or instead only the now is real, which makes past and future the illusion.

So yes, think that way and you are trapped into mutually contradicting positions, neither of which feels right.

Which is why I stressed the further dimension to reality, the dimension of development that runs from the vague to the crisp, from becoming to being, possibility to actuality, etc. This is a traditonal idea in metaphysics even if it has become largely lost in physics.

So the past is definite (it cannot be changed) while the future is indefinite (it is still full of vague potential, a capacity for change, while also of course highly constrained because of a weight of accumulated history).

The best kind of model of this could be a scalefree network or other "edge of chaos" model where the "now" is a mix of past and future - a powerlaw mixture of the changed and the changing, islands of stasis and flux.

Look inside the "now" of the universe - which can be measured in a general way by its current temperature - and you will be able to see that it is in fact an average of local "nows".

This follows from the transactional interpretation of QM, a la Cramer, I believe.

I don't understand where the contradiction lies. Why shouldn't things be crisp and definite especially when we are talking about the macro world? Leaving QM aside, I think on the large scale most things and events are deterministic, maybe not predictable, but deterministic. So, where is this area of non 'crispness' that you talk about especially when we are referring to everyday real world events? The future is not 'open' so to speak, at least no objectively. It is open from your perspective of 'now', but this viewpoint is not preferred over any other viewpoint. If it is 'open', then your viewpoint of 'now' is more valid of a perspective, than your viewpoint in the future. yet, this is incorrect. According to Relativity, no 'now' state is more valid than any other.

 

[apeiron]

I think on the large scale most things and events are deterministic, maybe not predictable, but deterministic. So, where is this area of non 'crispness' that you talk about especially when we are referring to everyday real world events? The future is not 'open' so to speak, at least no objectively. It is open from your perspective of 'now', but this viewpoint is not preferred over any other viewpoint. If it is 'open', then your viewpoint of 'now' is more valid of a perspective, than your viewpoint in the future. yet, this is incorrect.

Take a seed. It could turn into many different potential trees - different branching patterns depending on the vagaries of soil, weather, disease, angle of sun and wind, competition from other trees. So its future state is relatively unconstrained in some regards. Its future is broadly determined (by its genetic history, an accumulation of past information) but is open, indeterminate, in its detail.

According to Relativity, no 'now' state is more valid than any other.

Yes, but this is just because time is modeled as a locally reversible or symmetric dimension. It leaves out any attempt to represent an arrow of time, a gradient. So relativity may tell the truth, but not the whole truth!