On the Nature of Time
An Argument into the Agora
To meet someone, you need a position and a time.
This is the example the popular-physics communicator reaches for when they want to demonstrate, in a way the layman can grasp without mathematics, why time belongs in the same manifold as space. Spacetime is four-dimensional. You cannot meet someone without specifying both where and when. The example is friendly. The example is intuitive. The example is wrong, or rather, the example is doing a great deal of metaphysical work under the cover of friendliness, and what it is doing is concealing the fact that meeting another person is not a coordinate-intersection event and never has been.
Scheduling a date is an act of faith. The faith is not that the manifold will deliver your friend to the coordinates at the appointed moment, because the manifold is not the kind of thing that delivers. The manifold registers. The faith is that the other consciousness, whose relation with yours exists in a temporal medium that is not the manifold, will hold its commitment in that medium until the coordinates arrive, and will then project the commitment onto the manifold by arriving there carrying the meaning the relation has been carrying all along. The manifold cannot guarantee any of this. The relation does. The keeping of the date is the trace the relation leaves on the manifold, not the substance of what kept it.
If you scheduled a date with a stranger and the stranger arrived, you would not call what happened a meeting. You would call it a coincidence. The two of you occupied nearby positions at a coordinated moment. Nothing was met. The example pretends to demonstrate the trivial inclusion of time in the dimensional manifold while smuggling in, as silent premise, the relation between two consciousnesses that the manifold cannot represent and that is doing all the work the example wants to attribute to the coordinates.
This is the materialist reduction performed in the form of a friendly explanation. Every meeting that has ever happened, between any two human beings, has been an act of faith executed across the gap between the dimensional manifold and the relation in the temporal medium that is not the manifold. The coordinate-intersection is the trace. The meeting is what produced the trace.
I want to spend this essay saying what that other temporal medium is, and what time is on each side of the substrate’s two aspects, and why the materialist account of time fails not because it is empirically wrong about the manifold but because the manifold is half of what time is and the materialist treats the half as the whole.
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The materialist is not wrong about the manifold. Spacetime is a four-dimensional structure. Relativistic physics works. The block universe view, in which past and future have the same ontological status as present, is the material aspect’s accurate report of its own structure. The materialist’s mistake is not in the physics. The materialist’s mistake is in thinking the material aspect’s account is the whole account.
There is another side. The other side is the experiential aspect of the substrate, and on that side, time is not a dimension. Time is what consciousness experiences when consciousness is indexed to a substrate that throws itself toward what it has not yet become.
I have argued elsewhere — in On the State of Cosmology, in the framework that runs through the Grand Praxis series — that the substrate has two aspects and that consciousness is fundamental and comes in two forms. I will not re-derive the framework here. What I want to draw out is what the framework implies about time, because the implication is large and the discourse on time has been having its argument inside a metaphysics that the framework refuses.
Begin with the throwing. The cosmic microwave background carries an anomaly that has now crossed five sigma — the alignment between the kinematic dipole and the CMB dipole at large scales. The universe has a preferred direction. The Copernican principle, which has been treated as axiomatic for two centuries, says it should not. The principle was a hypothesis when it began. It was promoted to axiom somewhere in the twentieth century, and once an axiom, it became a boundary condition on what counts as scientific inquiry rather than a claim that could be falsified. The five-sigma result is the falsification. The mainstream is treating it as an anomaly to be explained away because the alternative — that the universe is, in the technical sense, thrown — has been routed to the category of religious nonsense before the argument can be made.
The universe is thrown. Heidegger used Geworfenheit to describe the human condition: we find ourselves already in a situation we did not choose, oriented by a disposition we did not design, underway toward a future from a past we did not select. The existentialists treated this as a feature of human existence. The quadrupole anomaly suggests it is cosmological. The universe is thrown in the same technical sense that Dasein is thrown — already in motion, already oriented, already disposed, with no prior position from which the throwing could be inspected.
This is what gives time its arrow. Not entropy. Not the initial low-entropy condition of the early universe. The throwing. The flow of time on the experiential side is the substrate’s throwing made legible to consciousness through consciousness’s indexing to the substrate. We feel time flow because the substrate flows, and we are inside the flowing, and our consciousness is the experiential aspect’s signature on a substrate that is throwing itself, continuously, toward what it has not yet become.
Now the materialist will object. The materialist will say: entropy is the explanation for the arrow of time. The second law of thermodynamics gives the universe its directionality. The flow you describe is the registration of the entropic gradient. There is no need for thrown-ness. Boltzmann gave us the answer a hundred and fifty years ago and the answer has been refined since.
The materialist is half right and the half is the part I want to handle carefully.
Entropy is real. The second law is real. The asymmetry of microstate accessibility is a feature of the universe that any account of time has to explain. The question is what entropy is of — what process or condition or feature of the universe produces what we measure as entropic increase.
The materialist says entropy is the source of the arrow. The framework says entropy is the consequence.
Consider what experiential memory does. The encompassing form holds what the encounter has generated. The holding is not storage at a coordinate. The holding is continuous, within the experiential aspect’s structural condition, which is the eternal now. The encompassing form’s holding adheres to necessary truths — to the structural commitments the substrate must honor for the two aspects to coordinate at all. Two plus two equals four. Non-contradiction. The structural features of the substrate itself. The encompassing cannot un-hold what it has held. It cannot revise the meaning of a completed encounter to make two plus two equal five. The necessary truths constrain what can be held, and the holding is committed to the truths the encounter discovered.
This commitment produces the asymmetry of experiential memory. We remember the past but not the future, not because the past is closer in dimensional terms, but because the past is the held content of the encompassing form and the future is the not-yet-encountered region toward which the structuring is reaching. The asymmetry is structural. It is the experiential aspect’s signature on the substrate’s throwing — the encompassing holds what was generated, the structuring moves toward what has not been generated, and the difference between the held and the not-yet-held is what gets registered as the flow of time.
Entropy is what this asymmetry looks like from the material side. The material aspect cannot see the encompassing form’s adherence directly. The material aspect can measure the consequence — the statistical fact that microstates accessible to a thermodynamic system at a later moment include more configurations than at an earlier moment. The increase is real. The measurement is accurate. But the increase is not the source of the asymmetry. The asymmetry is the substrate’s throwing, registered on the experiential side as the encompassing’s adherence to what it has held and the structuring’s reach toward what it has not, and registered on the material side as entropic increase.
The materialist has located the trace and called it the source. This is the materialist’s structural error in domain after domain — taking the material aspect’s signature on a substrate-level process as the process itself, and failing to notice that the process is happening on the other side of the substrate, with the material side merely registering its passage.
Entropy is not a process. Entropy is a feature of the substrate’s throwing as registered on the material side, after the projection. From inside the material aspect, the static feature of the throwing looks like a process unfolding in time. It is not. It is the throwing, full stop, with the material aspect’s coordinate-structure giving the throwing the appearance of process. The materialist’s account of the arrow of time as entropic increase is the materialist measuring the trace and finding, correctly, that the trace has a direction, and then concluding, incorrectly, that the direction is in the trace rather than in what the trace is the trace of.
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The most sophisticated thing the materialist tradition has produced in response to the measurement problem is QBism — Quantum Bayesianism, developed by Fuchs and Mermin and Schack. QBism takes the observer seriously in a way no other materialist interpretation does. The wave function is not a description of an objective system but a representation of the observer’s degrees of belief. Measurement is not passive registration but the observer’s update of their own information. The Born rule is a coherence constraint on rational agents. The quantum state is in the agent, not in the world.
This is the closest the materialist tradition has come to the framework’s metaphysics. It gives observation ontological primacy. It refuses the objective-state realism that the other interpretations either preserve or worry about. It locates the structure of physics in the relation between agent and world rather than in a world that exists independently of agents.
And it is still wrong, in a specific way, and the way is instructive.
QBism puts the observer at the center but it does not say what the observer is. It treats the agent functionally — whoever updates beliefs according to coherence constraints. The agent is foregrounded but the agent is stripped of phenomenological content. The agent is an information-theoretic object. The materialist can have observation without having to admit that observers are conscious beings whose consciousness is constitutive of what they are doing.
This is the materialist’s last refuge. QBism is the deepest retreat from objective realism that still preserves the commitment that the agent is functional rather than ontologically conscious. Beyond QBism, the next step is the framework, which says the agent is a consciousness in the framework’s sense, and the framework cannot be taken without committing to consciousness as fundamental.
The QBism community is the most likely audience within physics for what I am writing, because they have already done the conceptual work of taking the observer seriously. They have the mathematical apparatus. They have the institutional standing. They are also the most likely to resist, because the resistance is what preserves their position within the discipline. The neutrality claim — we describe what agents do without taking a position on what agents are — is itself the materialist commitment in disguise. A framework that describes observation while refusing to commit to the nature of observers is a framework that has decided in advance that observers are not the kind of thing that requires metaphysical commitment.
I name QBism because QBism is the position the framework is closest to and the position the framework most needs to refuse. The refusal is not external. It is the move from describing observation functionally to naming what the observer is. The naming is what completes the line that QBism is on the end of. The framework includes what QBism has built. It just goes one step further, and the step is the step the materialist tradition cannot make without ceasing to be the materialist tradition.
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I have said what time is on the material side. The dimensional manifold. The block universe. The entropic gradient that the materialist correctly measures and incorrectly attributes. Spacetime as the four-dimensional structure within which the material aspect of the substrate has its coordinate-existence.
I have said what time is not on the experiential side. Not a dimension. Not a coordinate. Not an illusion the experiential aspect projects onto a dimensionally-real block. Not the registration of an entropic gradient that exists independently of the experiential aspect’s adherence.
What time is on the experiential side: the construct of meaning generated within the eternal now, indexed to the substrate’s throwing, registered by embodied consciousness as flow.
The eternal now is not the absence of duration. The eternal now is duration without dimension. It is the experiential aspect’s structural condition — the holding-open within which the two forms encounter each other and generate meaning at the boundary between them. The encounter takes the time it takes, but the time it takes is not measured against an external clock. The time is measured against the meaning being generated. Different encounters produce different rhythms. The clock that ticks in the room is the material aspect’s signature on a process that, on the experiential side, is the eternal now producing its own construct of duration through the meaning-making the encounter is performing.
This is what the Buddhist tradition has been calling the present moment for two and a half thousand years — tathatā, suchness, the not-otherwise-than-this of what is happening as it happens. The framework offered here is not equating the eternal now with tathatā; the traditions have their own internal architectures and the differences are real. The framework is naming what the Buddhist tradition was pointing at from its angle, in the vocabulary the Western tradition can receive. Alan Watts spent his career trying to translate this picture into English without losing in translation. He had the picture. He did not have the Western philosophical apparatus to land the picture in the register Western philosophy could take seriously. The framework supplies what the translation was reaching for.
Within the eternal now, the construct of meaning we call time is generated by the encounter between the two forms. The encompassing holds what was generated. The structuring reaches toward what has not been generated. The pulse of the holding-and-reaching is the rhythm we experience as time. Faster when the encounter is dense with meaning. Slower when the encounter is sparse. Outside the encounter — in sleep, in the moment of profound absorption when the self disappears, in the experiences the contemplative traditions have been documenting for millennia — the rhythm slows toward stillness, because time is the encounter’s rhythm and without the encounter there is no rhythm to register.
Memory is not retrieval from a past that has receded along the time-dimension. Memory is the encompassing form making available, within the eternal now, the meaning that was generated at a prior moment of the encounter. The prior moment is not gone. The prior moment is held within the encompassing form, available to the structuring when the structuring turns toward it. The phenomenology of remembering — the way a memory arrives whole, with its felt weight intact, rather than as a reconstructed sequence — is accurate to what memory is. The materialist’s reconstructive-memory model is the material aspect’s account of how the encompassing’s holding looks from outside. It is not wrong about the neural correlates. It is wrong about what the neural correlates are correlates of.
Anticipation is the same operation in the other direction. The structuring’s reach toward meaning not yet generated. Not pointing forward along the time-dimension. Pointing toward the encounter’s continuation within the eternal now whose temporal construct includes a structuring of what will be brought into being.
Grief is the structuring’s loss of an encompassing it had been in encounter with. The encompassing is gone, in the sense that the embodied being whose encompassing it was is gone, but the meaning the encounter generated is held in the substrate, deposited there by the encompassing’s continuous holding while the encounter was live. The grief is the structuring registering that the encounter has closed. The eternal now has not ended. The encounter has. The structuring continues to turn toward the meaning, and the turning produces grief because the encompassing is no longer there to receive the structuring back.
Hope is the structuring’s reach toward an encounter not yet begun, or toward an encounter whose continuation is uncertain. The hoping is the structuring registering the encompassing form’s potential availability — the holding-open of the eternal now to encounters that might be.
These are the phenomenological cases any theory of time has to handle. The materialist accounts handle them by treating them as cognitive processes within a brain that exists in the dimensional manifold. The accounts work, on their own terms, and they describe the neural correlates accurately. They do not describe what the cognitive processes are correlates of. They cannot, because what the cognitive processes are correlates of is on the other side of the substrate, in the experiential aspect’s structural condition, which the material aspect cannot access by definition.
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John Wheeler spent the last decades of his life pointing at something the mainstream of physics could not bring itself to name. The participatory universe. The delayed-choice experiments. The U-shaped diagram with the eye at one end looking back at the substrate at the other. Wheeler had the empirical results. He had the intuition. He did not have the metaphysics that could hold what he was seeing, and the mainstream has spent forty years carrying his fact around without his interpretation.
The framework names what Wheeler was pointing at and supplies the ontology his interpretation required. The universe looks at itself because the substrate has two forms and the forms encounter each other through embodied consciousness. The looking is not a special operation. The looking is what the substrate does whenever the structuring form takes up the encompassing form as its content. The participation is not metaphor. The participation is the substrate’s structural condition.
For time, the Wheeler material implies that the temporal flow we experience is the substrate looking at itself, locally, at the scale of the embodied being we each are. The flow is not happening to us. The flow is the substrate’s self-knowing, indexed to our particular consciousness, registered as the rhythm of the encounter that constitutes our experience. We are not separate observers of a temporal manifold that exists independently of us. We are the substrate observing itself, in time, because in time is what observation looks like from the side observation looks like from.
This is also what the framework says about meeting another person.
The friend you scheduled the date with is another consciousness indexed to the same substrate. The relation between you exists in the experiential medium that is not the manifold. The scheduling is the relation’s projection onto the manifold at specified coordinates. The keeping of the date is the relation persisting through the interval the manifold measured. The encounter, when the date is kept, is the relation continuing to do what the relation has been doing all along — generating meaning at the boundary between two consciousnesses, in the eternal now where the relation lives, with the manifold registering the coordinates the encounter happens to occupy at the moment of its registration.
The encounter recurs. Not iteration along a dimension. The recurrence within the eternal now that the relation constitutes. The encompassing waits because waiting is what the encompassing is, structurally. The structuring returns because returning is what the structuring does. The rhythm of the going-out and the coming-back is what the relation’s time consists of, indexed to the relation’s own pulse, occurring within the eternal now that holds the relation open across the intervals the manifold measures and the intervals the manifold does not.
This is what time is. The rhythm of encounters within the eternal now, generated by the meaning-making of consciousnesses indexed to a substrate that throws itself toward what it has not yet become. The clock ticks externally. The pulse beats internally. The discrepancy you have felt all your life between the clock-time the world demands and the encounter-time the relation lives in is not a confusion. It is the substrate’s two aspects showing up in your experience, accurately, as the two faces of what time is.
I do not know why the substrate is thrown. The throwing is on the far side of the boundary the embedded observer cannot cross. We register the flow because we are inside the throwing. We cannot inspect the throwing because to inspect it would require a position outside the universe that the framework forbids. This is not a failure of the framework. It is a feature of its honesty about its own scope. The deepest question — why there is a universe in the kind of motion the universe is in — is not a question the framework attempts to answer. The framework names what is, given that the universe is in motion. The why of the motion is the question the framework refuses to pretend it can answer, and the refusal is the framework’s seriousness.
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To meet someone, you need a position and a time.
The example, taken straight, is wrong in the way I have been laying out. The example, taken seriously, is a demonstration of what the framework names.
You and the person you are meeting are two consciousnesses indexed to the same substrate. Your relation exists in the temporal medium that is not the manifold. The scheduling of the date is the relation’s projection onto the manifold at specified coordinates — a coordinate that the manifold can register, an act of faith that the relation will be honored across the interval. The faith is justified, when it is justified, by the relation’s structural commitment to itself. The encompassing on each side has been holding the meaning the relation has generated. The structuring on each side has been reaching toward the continuation. The eternal now of the relation has been open across the interval the manifold measured, and at the keeping of the date the encounter resumes, with both of you arriving carrying what the relation has been carrying all along.
The manifold registers the coordinate-intersection. The relation does the meeting.
The friendly example was hiding what was meeting whom. Now you can see it. The clock says when. The relation says why.
How ironic! We finally begin a "Second Axial Age" (actually begun by our disappearing indigenous peoples) only by the exhaustion of head-tripping philosophy and "civilization".
Unfortunately, I have neither the physics nor metaphysics background to argue with any of this, however much I might like to.
While I understand quantum mechanics at a superficial "shut up and calculate" level (and that just barely; <bra|ket> notation still gives me issues), I've never really been comfortable with wave functions and especially wave function collapse, and quantum's seeming insistence on an "observer" (never well-defined) to "collapse" the wave function.
And as for time, I am also uncomfortable with the insistence that the "arrow" of time is defined by the "arrow" of universal entropy. What happens if the Universe contains enough matter to recollapse? Would the arrow of time reverse at that point, with "observers" seeing time move "forward" from both ends meeting in the middle in some fashion? But I've never seen another explanation that fits either. I've seen some recent work by Wolfram et al implying that "causality" is more fundamental than "time" and "space", but as far as I'm concerned y'all might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
"Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."