You don't need determinism…
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer 5 days, 17 hours ago.
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January 19, 2026 at 8:47 pm #59666
No, you feel you have a certain amount of agency.
What I’m saying is, we treat ourselves and each other as if we have agency, whether we “really” do or not. It’s on this level that we’re held accountable.
See, you can’t talk about agency without implying agency where there really is none. And I mean you you, not the general “you” one uses when talking about everyone.
January 20, 2026 at 4:56 pm #59672Fellow Unbelievers:
Trump tells Iranian protesters against Islamist tyranny that “Help is on the way” two weeks after the uprising starts and after anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 Iranian citizens are dead. I’d say time and agency are pretty damn real. Can you relate?
January 20, 2026 at 8:07 pm #59673“Now” is already gone the moment you say it. The instant you think now, neural processing time in your brain has already elapsed so the concept of “now” is reconstructed after the fact. “Now” immediately becomes a memory, not an event. The Andromeda Paradox destroys the idea of a universal cosmic present. Even two people standing a meter apart do not share a literal “Now” because the light would take nearly 4 nanoseconds to cross that distance. “Now” is just a human construct, a utility or hack to make sense of our evolved sense of time.
January 20, 2026 at 9:27 pm #59675Reg:
“Now” is already gone the moment you say it. The instant you think now, neural processing time in your brain has already elapsed so the concept of “now” is reconstructed after the fact. “Now” immediately becomes a memory, not an event. The Andromeda Paradox destroys the idea of a universal cosmic present. Even two people standing a meter apart do not share a literal “Now” because the light would take nearly 4 nanoseconds to cross that distance. “Now” is just a human construct, a utility or hack to make sense of our evolved sense of time.
Maybe words fail in fully capturing the nature of time, but we know it exists, it both marches on and flies, and waits for no one.
January 20, 2026 at 11:45 pm #59678Time “marches on,” “flies,” “waits for no one” are not ontology. They are just descriptors of how humans feel but not how the Universe works.
Here are my thoughts on “Time and Momentum”. It is not Time…but Momentum that counts. Without the latter, i.e. relational events, the former is not required. Time would not have been conceived of without observed motion. I am making a statement about how the concept of Time arises and not about how the Universe behaves (i.e. I am not talking about a “Steady Sate” (Fred Hoyle) universe). Time was invented by humans because motion demanded a bookkeeping system. Yes, invented, not discovered. Maybe another way of putting it is to say that even if the universe has a history, time is not the thing that makes it so. Change is. Change is only the occurrence of relational events and observation of them is optional.
By relational events, I mean two or more structures interact. Rusting is not caused by time. It is caused by sustained relational events between water and iron. Rust forms so long as those interactions persist. Time merely indexes the accumulation of those interactions; it does not cause them. Rust is the result of interaction and not the effect of time. The iron will never rust if it does not have a relational interaction with water, no matter how much “time” passes.
A prisoner in the darken cell has no light source. He observes no motion. He loses his (human evolved) sense of time as he has not had any “relational interactions”. Then a skylight opens and he sees a patch of sky. He regains a sense of time as he observes night and day, clouds, an occasional airplane and the “movement” of stars. These relational experience give him a sense of time again, even if he misrepresents what the structures he sees are (a la Plato’s Cave). He is then moved back into “gen pop” and has many more “relational interactions”. At first, he finds time speeding up but after a few weeks the banal existence of “jail time” slows his perception of time down again as the “relational interactions” are repetitious. Then he is freed and when back in society the same thing happens. All his new “relational experiences” speed his perception of time up again, until they become routine. This almost “proves” that Time is just an evolved human concept. It is the “relational experiences” (and sequences of events) that make it so. But those “relational experiences” only happen because of motion, or the interaction of structures. The “passing” of time lives entirely within the layer of human cognition but not in the Universe. Properties change. We count the changes. Counting feels like Time.
“Now”, before we go any further…Spacetime is not Space+Time in the temporal sense. It is not a universal clock or a flowing medium. It is just spatial coordinates that encodes the relations between events. Nothing moves through spacetime. Nothing traverses the block. The slice does not move through the loaf. We do not travel through Unseen’s loaf of bread. We are just a pattern extended across many slices, locally aware of only a thin cross-section at any “moment”. And “now” isn’t a place the universe visits. “Now” is just a bookkeeper’s entry on today’s ledger page. The block universe is not growing. It is complete. The universe does not keep a ledger. Human brains do and there is no master copy. Different brains keep different ledgers. Most of us just mistake this bookkeeping for motion and think “Now” is an event when it is only an accounting reference.
January 21, 2026 at 3:19 am #59679Fellow Unbelievers: Trump tells Iranian protesters against Islamist tyranny that “Help is on the way” two weeks after the uprising starts and after anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 Iranian citizens are dead. I’d say time and agency are pretty damn real. Can you relate?
The problem of agency regarding free will isn’t about whether a person can make a decision and act accordingly. We all experience that sort of thing. The problem is that unless you can miraculously disconnect a decision or action from antecedent events and the laws of the universe, it sure seems that once you decide something and do something, you couldn’t have decided or done otherwise.
January 21, 2026 at 4:05 am #59680The senses are a poor source of evidence. Our senses tell us that the world is colorful. In fact, color is in the brain, not the external world. We experience gravity as a force. We know it’s not. We experience deja vu which is a well known trick of the mind that seems real.
Some years after my mother died, I was standing on a street corner waiting for the crosswalk signal to change and as I waited a car went to turn in front of me and I could swear I saw her in the passenger seat looking right at me as the car slowly turned. A real goosebump moment. But having buried her ashes, I knew it was a trick of the mind.
I’m diabetic and now and then find myself in a hypoglycemic crisis during which I can hallucinate. Once, I woke up and saw a fire on my bedside table but I knew there was nothing flammable there so I realized I was hallucinating. On another occasion, I woke up on the floor next to my bed and was sure I was trapped with a black panther because I saw its tail above me. Well, the tail was that of my domestic cat. In retrospect, the hallucination consisted of reliving a scene from the movie Cat People.
Still, I favor presentism because it has what the block universe notion lacks: some plausible account for the experience we all have of moving through time.
January 21, 2026 at 5:58 pm #59683Reg and Unseen:
As the Host and Robot Friends of Mystery Science Theater 3000 sometimes ask at The End of the film:
“…Or Is It???”
If all this is just a “seems,” why not the thoughts and pronouncements about it as well? 🤔🤨
Meanwhile, Atheist Zone will be back in: Newhart, Dallas, Altered States, and Everything, Everywhere, and All At Once.
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This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by
TheEncogitationer. Reason: Correcting an italic
January 21, 2026 at 10:29 pm #59686The block universe gives an unbelievable account of experience. If you take it seriously, nothing actually happens, however experience consists of a cluttered stream of experiences.
That the account of experience it gives is counterintuitive and implausible can be explained in terms of the unreliability of experience.Nevertheless, the entire concept of experience—forget experience itself—presupposes change, does it not? And change presupposes time.
The Andromeda Paradox is irrelevant to everyday life. It’s not a problem to two people meeting on the street.
Presentism explains things we care about. The block universe does not. I’m sticking with presentism.
January 21, 2026 at 11:55 pm #59687The block universe gives an unbelievable account of experience. If you take it seriously, nothing actually happens, however experience consists of a cluttered stream of experiences.
Yet, we travel through spacetime at the speed of light. So, the block universe could exist. But I am still unable to connect the “self” with “now”.
January 22, 2026 at 1:02 am #59688Almost. In the block universe, things absolutely do happen. Stars explode or conversations happen. But these only happen locally (within regions of spacetime). What does not happen is a global update of reality. Another way of putting it (I am also explaining it to myself as I write this) is that nothing happens to the Universe as a whole but plenty happens within it, locally. There is no single, universe-level event of the universe itself changing. Globally refers to the entirety of spacetime as a whole system. There is no “cosmic now” sweeping forward towards a future. The 4D structure of spacetime does not evolve. So, globally nothing happens to the block. The block just is.
I will have another go at it. A star bigger than our sun is born and dies every second (human time) without any change to the block. I type this sentence without any change to the block. None of these events add to, update, or modify spacetime in any way. They are features of the block, not changes made to it.
These events are real because they are in the block. But what is not true is a cosmic “present” being updated. These events, the supernova or my typing don’t happen to the Universe, they happen at a location in spacetime.
Maybe one more……The Universe does not notice events. Events are what the Universe consists of. The universe is not flowing. It is not still unfolding.
As in my earlier post; “Now” isn’t a place the universe visits. Now is just an entry on today ledger page . It is only a utility we humans use.
Time is a human bookkeeping utility, not as a process in the block. For humans the experience of time exists subjectively. For the Universe’s Time as we describe it does not exist. The block universe only has structure, not flow. Time exists in the block universe only as spatial coordinates. There is no “flow” that allow the Universe to single out a present “now”. Again, Time does not exist, only our subjective experience of change which we call time, because locally we see “ a before and after”. The block does not.
January 22, 2026 at 1:10 pm #59689Some more thoughts……The human concept of Time is difficult to shake off. It feels intuitive but this is only because we feel an innate sense of Time because we have evolved a hard-wired temporal sensitivity. Marking the seasons and changes in the weather helped us survive. We even have a circadian rhythm to a natural light-dark cycle (as do all mammals) which enforces our belief that Time is “real”. But this is about recurring cycles, not “time”. Our ability to predict based on “past” events is mostly pattern recognition. We were good at it and survived. It feels like it is fundamental to being human. But really it is just a highly evolved survival utility. Natural selection doesn’t care about metaphysics. It selects for successful prediction of events. It requires pattern recognition plus memory.
When we say “the past informs the future” we are talking about our brain remembering interactions. Searching for patterns and using that to anticipate outcomes. Calling it “the past” makes it feel like a place, but it is just data storage in our brain.
“The past is a foreign country.”
Hartley nailed it….to some extent. The past is not a “earlier time”. It is a record of relational events we experienced. These records are interpreted with a user interface we call “time”. But there is no return ticket to it. Not because “time flows” but because the configuration no longer exists “now”.
The “past” is not behind us. It is elsewhere in the block, and we can only visit it via our ledgers. Memory is a passport, not a time machine. History is a map, not a territory.
The past is a foreign country not because time carried us away from it but because we are no longer the structures that we were. The border between now and then isn’t temporal. It is relational. If I open a folder on my computer dated “Last modified date June 2019” I am not accessing the past. I am performing a present interaction with a present physical system that encodes a record of an earlier configuration. I look at a photo. What happens is that electrons move, memory addresses are read, pixels change on the screen and some neurons fire in my brain. The 2019 label is just a ledger entry. The photo I look at does not contain the past.
The ”past” is not a place I visit. It is a pattern preserved in present matter. A human memory recalled or a photo viewed again on the computer are just their current arrangement which correlates with other regions of the block.
That is, the correlation spans the block, but my interaction does not. My folder now has a new modified date, or my memory has become a newer version of the memory I recalled. Earlier configurations exist as regions of the block and later configuration exist as different regions. The later regions contain records correlated with the earlier ones. This correlation is fixed into the structure of the block. At no point did I access anything across time. It is a relation event. I am interacting from “here” with matter as it is and whose structure was shaped by previous interactions.
The ledger grows as the records accumulate but the block remains unchanged. “Now” stays exactly where it belongs…..in the bookkeeping only and not in the Universe.
But “what about entropy”? I will have to think about that, but I don’t think it will rescue “the flow of time” . I think my earlier analogy of “rust” covers it. Entropy is rust, measured.
No superhero time travel as there is nowhere to go as the past is not a location, only a pattern elsewhere in the block that can be correlated with “ledger entries”. There is no stopping time because nothing is flowing to be stopped. Maybe you could halt interactions or freeze processes, but “time” isn’t an independent thing you can grab by the throat. Even if a superhero could, the block would not notice. Fun for comics but bad ontology.
January 23, 2026 at 10:56 pm #59696I’m at the surface level of these philosophies and physics, trying to look in. Is this just one loaf of bread, or is the next slice still unpredictable due to quantum probabilities/improbabilities? Do the ends of the loaf connect, looking more like a donut? In a many-worlds view, do an infinite number of future slices bifurcate into an infinite number of “ends”… until there are infinitely less slices of bread after each infinitely small slice happens? Are there an infinite number of donuts bumping into each other, and is that a testable hypothesis?
We have a really difficult time not defining laws unless they have some kind of absoluteness to them. Brains evolved to make binary decisions, often influenced by the most popular, random thoughts of the day. But now we can make nuclear bombs, and use game theory to threaten our use or elimination of them. While we have no clue about what the thoughts, emotional processes, or qualia are of similar life forms (or AI) in Andromeda or proximal to Sirius in the Milky Way.
But “what about entropy”? I will have to think about that, but I don’t think it will rescue “the flow of time” . I think my earlier analogy of “rust” covers it. Entropy is rust, measured.
We still gravitate toward absolute claims and definitions, because we can’t yet think about or study reality in quantum terms. AI helps us review history and current theories, while it will add increasingly more novel ones, in future slices of bread. We are already curing cancers, even as we debate whether it’s coming about without free will/agency. It’s just easier to discover and document general principles, as if they are absolutely true, at least for the time being or during well documented circumstances.
Entropy is another absolutized and/or generalized human brain construction, as useful to understanding and predicting processes, along with other human brain constructions like time, double slit experiments, love, and donuts.
January 24, 2026 at 1:31 am #59697I have so much more to write on this. I will try over the weekend. Just finalizing a project for work tomorrow, so maybe Sunday.
January 25, 2026 at 5:30 pm #59708Question for block universe supporters. If moving forward through time is an illusion, why can’t we have the illusion of moving backward through time? It should make no difference, right?
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