Does Time Exist?

This is a follow up to my previous blog post.

The question raised there can be also stated as "so, when does the consciousness exist?". And maybe the most logical (I mean, you should take it with extreme caution), and surely the most shocking answer is—nowhen. Or, if you will, in some specific dimension of no particular significance otherwise.

In reference to the previous blog entry, given a minimal set of subsequent TM states necessary to create the consciousness event, we might say that the set of states is conscious, period. No matter of the  physical mechanism of their appearance, and its properties, like its speed.

Admittedly, this seems absurd, and raises the obvious follow up question: "how is it possible that consciousness can exist without the time flow? Isn't it necessarily perceived within time moments?". I propose to reverse the question: why does our mind create the perception of the time dimension so differently than of the spatial dimensions?

Maybe the answer is: because we can move in the 3D space freely, but we are doomed to follow the arrow of time, running from the past to the future, with the tiny window of the conscious present moment. Why, in turn, this is so? Maybe because at the start of our physical time the Universe was very much ordered, and, moving towards the future, this order dissipates. This is what we call the rise of entropy. Hence, in the macro scale, our travel towards the future is irreversible. The other reason is that the perception of time enabled our survival.

Hence, in any static system complex enough, consciousness may exist. It would experience itself as shifting towards less ordered states, and it could create a perception of this particular move. Maybe just two conditions are necessary:

  • Irreversibility of macroscopic properties relevant for that consciousness (even if the rules are fully reversible at the micro scale),
  • The sense of relevance that could arose from the way how its stability appeared, like e.g. in the process of some evolution.

Note the spooky consequence: from our point of view, the experience of the present moment happens, well, just momentarily, and then becomes the non-accessible past. With the proposed model, that experience still exists—just in the different slice of our spacetime reality.

That would also justify why in the theory of relativity we can so easily mix space and time, or even swap them when postulating superluminal observers.

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