Dmitry67 said:
1
3
Here is an example:
0000000000000000000000000
0000000000000111111111111
0000011111110000000001111
0001100011001100001110000
1001010101011001010101001
The picture above is static. But it becomes more and more chaotic if you move from the top to bottom.
This doesn't work as you are in fact requiring a time-like motion to "see" this fact. I could instead say read this pattern by jumping randomly about it, rather than moving from start to finish. And a "timeless" reading would be to average over the whole pattern at once (a non-local act).
The only way to get spacetime straight, I believe, is to understand that it is a dichotomisation. We are separating existence in two contrasting directions. Into its locations and its "space" of changes. We are looking for what does not change - constraining existence to locales, spatial co-ordinates - and then providing a global metric for the changes the locales then construct. The local freedoms of action that can still be expressed.
In the Newtonian system, these freedoms were inertial - straight lines. And deterministic. The global backdrop of time was constructed accordingly. Giving us a block time view, a globally symmetric arrow of time.
Then different physical models - which still need to dichotomise change from lack of change - all do it somewhat differently. So we have GR as modified Newtonian view - one that more correctly pins itself to c, instead of "massive particles at rest". QM dichotomised further into local vs nonlocal aspects of locality, and intruding uncertainty at the extemes of scale. Then thermodynamics as yet another wrinkle, one where time gains an asymmetry at the global scale because it has a memory, a history.
Cosmology adds even further concrete constraints to the modelling - wiring in expansion and cooling as features of the local stasis~global change dichotomy.
We actually have a clashing collection of models of space~time, or stasis~change. The way to unify them would seem to be to generalise, to reduce the features of the many to some deeper level of description. So instead of worrying about the true nature of time (or indeed space) we need to worry about the true definition of change (and stasis).
Your illustration of a set of bits makes the usual mistake of wanting to treat one aspect of things as real, the other an illusion. So locality, stasis, is real for you, therefore time or the global motion of the reader is an illusion - or same thing, emergent.
The big change in thinking is instead to see that the dichotomising of reality is what is real. The effort of separating. So it is how this symmetry breaking occurs that we want to understand. The static part of reality can only exist to the extent it separates itself off from the realm of change. And likewise, the realm of change develops from all the local actions that happen, and equally, all the actions that could have happened but didn't. The causal light cone view.
Existence is created by a process of separation, of symmetry breaking. And a good way to model that is by measuring all that did not change against all that could have changed. And put that way, it should be clear that neither aspect of what happened, what emerged (the space or the time) is illusory.
