Three More Thoughts on Time
I couldn’t fit everything into Four Thoughts About Time. Time draws my attention in moments of deep contemplation.
Time is a Pointer
- In computer science, a pointer is a reference - a label referring to a location in memory that stores useful information. Time is also a pointer: a way of referring to a moment other than the present. That moment doesn’t exist, except as the pointer. The pointer exists as a symbol in our minds, in the present moment, and can be used as shared understanding about a not-yet-existing moment - perhaps to coordinate our actions. Time is a mental model. A collection of symbols.
Time is Integrity
- If time doesn’t exist except as symbols referring to future (or past) moments, then its primary use is making commitments - coordinated with someone else, somewhere else, in some future moment. Making and fulfilling those commitments is how we express integrity. Time itself is an expression of integrity.
Time is the Multiverse Branching
- Perhaps time is how we experience multiverse branching. The present moment: quantum probabilities collapsing into one branch. The “past”: probabilities that have already collapsed, the path through the multiverse “I” have taken. The future: probabilities that haven’t collapsed yet, branches not yet chosen. Time is how we experience this branching in the continuous now.
I wonder: if we’d grown up never being taught the concept of time, would we experience reality differently? A continuous now of “stuff happening.” We’d detect repeating patterns like sunrise and sunset, make predictions, begin to infer a notion of time. Maybe our minds can only exist as they do - with time built in.