Actual Infinities

[Angrboda]

Anyways, I was going to say something else - imagine the universe were deterministic. This could still be true in a quantum world if there are some mad hidden variables underlying it all, or in a many worlds interpretation - who knows. Anyways, imagine that it is deterministic. In that case, knowing the state of the universe exactly at one point in time gives you knowledge of the universe at all times. In fact, one could argue that philosophically, a snapshot at one point in time + the laws of physics is equivalent to the whole timeline, because the rest of it can be obtained using a uniquely determined procedure - the future and the past are more or less the same as the present, viewed through a different filter (and those who know how the Heisenberg picture in quantum mechanics works, might understand better what I mean).

So, time does not exist, and doesn't pass. All that exists is a static snapshot of the universe in what we would call the distant future, in which all that you and I call time, and events, and experience, is encoded.

Setting aside the fact that physics rather conclusively points towards an indeterminate universe, if time doesn't exist, in what sense am I experiencing it pass from one moment to the next though? Does this static block of being contain "tunnels" of consciousness in which the illusion of motion occurs? And what causes it to have this quality of a continuous, seamless flow in one direction?

One of Wittgenstein's famous examples is of a man walking on a hill. From the snapshot image of the man, it is impossible to tell if he is walking down the hill going forward, or walking up the hill going backward. I think when we imagine memory and experience, we imagine it as a static snapshot of the moment. But this presents us with a problem. How do we determine the direction of things if every moment is just a single image, a snapshot? I think the resolution to this is that we don't just experience the moment, there is also present in mind and in memory, a bit of the past, a trailing image as it were. So while we experience time as consisting of moments, the past is always with us trailing behind an image of the recent now. This is what gives time its arrow, because that arrow is constantly experienced at each moment in time as a composite of the now and the recently now. Thus, matter can exist simultaneously throughout all of time, but because each 'slice' of that existence contains a 'smear' of experience across time, it can be felt as progressing from past to present to future.