>>12128695Time might just be one of the brain’s ways of making sense of reality. We feel time progress one second at a time, but other organisms like trees live on vastly different time scales and may feel it pass much more quickly (if they’re conscious). If you look at the universe as a 4-dimensional block of spacetime, the past present and future exist simultaneously, and time is just our way of experiencing causality subjectively.
Causality itself might be an illusion, or an emergent phenomenon. You might ask, how can causality be an illusion when it appears so fundamental? If I drop a glass of water and it shatters, the shattering was caused by me dropping it, right? Well not necessarily. This image from the Mandelbrot set provides a useful metaphor. When you look at this image, your brain naturally interprets it as spirals “growing out of” other spirals, similar to how tree branches grow from a tree trunk. Fractals appear to be causally dependent on their source. But if you look at the underlying math that generates this image, it’s just a matter of plugging coordinates into an equation and seeing what pops out. Meaning, I can compute one of the smaller spirals without knowing anything about the larger spiral, just by mindlessly following an algorithm. The smaller spiral is not dependent on the larger spiral in any way, and the fact that it appears to grow out of it is a purely emergent phenomenon.
