After reading the talks of J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm on the Krishnamurti site, i saw the truth of my assumption, when i thought that people were aware that time is memories, but of which i was wrong, because a well renowned scientist was battling to understand that time is a creation of the brain. But then this got me thinking of what was going through the ordinary minds of billions that were not as smart as Bohm, when he was strugling with this basic concept; obviously it is not so basic after all if even a brilliant scientist was having a difficulty understanding it!
The only way that the brain can retreave data is by putting marks around whatever data is to be retreaved, and these markers are what we call the beginning and the end, time, even though infact there is no such thing as a beginning or an ending, since the beginning is the end, it is just a convinience of the brain that lives on a planet that rotates at a rate that gives it 24 hours a day; on another planet it would obviously be something else depending on the rate. All there is in life is a timeless movement that is saved in the brain chronologically and then translated as time when it has to be retreaved; so that time is a memory of a timeless movement, what we are! When we look all we see is a movement at different rates, it is all one timeless movement that is saved in the brain whether we intend to or not, and the comparison of what we see and what we saw is movement, which we call time; so that time is a comparison of what is to what was. Psycologically all we have is now, a product of what is no more and what is not yet, there is no other way possible for life but to be a combination of life and death, the beginning and the end, alpha and omega, so that everything is always new but only old as far as the brain is concerned as it constantly compares what it sees to what it saw! Now is a timeless constant movement that is universal and is witnessed by the brain that saves it and this memory it calls time.
If all human beings realised the fact of what they are, a timeless movement, all their problems would be over. It would be the end of religion as we know it, and the beginning of religion as it actually is, finding out the truth of what is! It would be the end of hope, and the beginning of living, dealing with what is rather than holding on to a promise of a bright future. This then is the end of the age that Jesus talked about in the bible, it is not in the future, it is now, timeless, forever, they all mean the same thing! The end of the world is the end of time, what life seems to us, and the beginning of timelessness, life as it actually is.
Like… heavy man 
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No. The passage of time is attended by very real, objectively measurable effects, the most prominent being ever-increasing entropy. This is not a subjective cerebral construct.
Something to bear in mind about David Bohm: he made significant scientific contributions, particularly to Quantum Mechanics (QM), but many of his later speculations in areas of metaphysics (e.g. in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order) did not find much favour with other scientists.
The basic problem with time is that at the QM level, there is no unambiguous “direction” of time, while on the ordinary and large scale it certainly does have one, and this mystery is what Bohm is trying to understand. To illustrate: if you ran an ordinary movie featuring people doing ordinary things in reverse, you wouldn’t have much trouble recognising that it was being run in reverse. Not so with any QM interactions, which are completely time-symmetric. Current thinking is that, like temperature and pressure, the passage of time is an emergent phenomenon. An individual particle has neither temperature or pressure, only a certain amount of kinetic energy, but many of them acting more-or-less together produce the objectively measurable effects we call temperature and pressure.
Do you have a reference to support this or is it your own speculation?
I’m confused. Didn’t you write, in effect, that time is an illusion constructed by the brain? Yet here you seem to contend that the brain compares present experience to past, implying that the brain does recognise a time order outside itself.
How so?
And what might that be?
Again, what might that be?
It all sounds idyllic and, uhm, Eastern, but the Seven O’Clock News still features people dying every day.
'Luthon64
I know this thread is old, but I saw this today with more “deep” reading:
Was it Hawking who wrote about the rabbi whose explanatime of time was that it is simply God’s way to ensure that everything doesn’t all happen at once?
Pardon the finger trouble:
the rabbi whose explanatime..should read "the rabbi whose explanation.."
I enjoyed Hawking’s treatment in “Brief History” of the “arrows of time” (psychological, thermodynamic). When did that book appear? Mid 80’s? Anyway, that was my first exposure to the concept of a singularity, where time can “begin” and “end”, even if only locally. Though I have difficulty grasping more than three dimensions and the spacetime continuum is, to me, an abstraction, I find it much more satisfying and exciting than a universe that is infinite in the three spatial dimensions (a concept that I more or less subscribed to until I read Hawking). An infinite expanse with no “end” in time is depressing. History is much more interesting if there are momentous events like a Big Bang, star formation, novae, colliding galaxies and perhaps and “end” of sorts to our universe.
In all this, time is my most difficult concept to grasp. On a large scale, each observer has his/her own time. I accept that. Unless we deal with things that travel near light-speed we needn’t stress about resetting our watches.
In QED, it appears, time is a constant clock against which all events are measured. Feynman gives us these rotating arrows that represent time or, at least, synchronicity.
We speak of the “passage of time”, yet we cannot express the rate of time. That would be a tautology. A circular reference, not so? After some high speed travel, we can compare watches and compare elapsed times, but we cannot express how fast time is “passing” here on earth, right now.
The rate at which entropy increases? No… another circular reference.
Or do we say the rate of time passage for our neck of the woods is the number of seconds that pass when light travels a certain distance? The speed of light being the constant, throughout?
I think anyone who claims to be able to apprehend more than three dimensions is probably deluding themselves. Outside of the mathematical formalisms, we can at best understand the concepts by way of an analogy into, say, two space dimensions and one of time. While the idea of a spacetime manifold started out as a mathematical convenience (Minkowski), probably a more telling question is what makes it so successful as a basic concept in both Special and General Relativity (SR and GR). Does it reflect a fundamental fact about nature, or is it an artefact of the way that we use mathematical notions and notations when analysing observables?
In GR (and QED) we must abandon the postulate of the absolute constancy of the speed of light. As viewed from a GR point of view, SR assumes a spacetime metric that is uniform over the entirety of any given inertial reference frame. (A “spacetime metric” is a quantity that describes the spatio-temporal relationship between two distinct spacetime points anywhere.) In SR, we have the so-called “Interval” defined as Δs² = Δx²+Δy²+Δz²–c²•Δt² (= constant) for ordinary 4-D spacetime where (Δx, Δy, Δz, Δt) is the spatio-temporal separation between said points and c is the speed of light in vacuo. Following Minkowsi, we can use the transformation u = i•c•t where i² = –1 to arrive at Δs² = Δx²+Δy²+Δz²+Δu² = constant, which is simply the “spatial” separation between two points in a 4-D (x, y, z, u) space. This rather simple relationship is, as said, uniform over the whole SR domain and allows us to relate observations taken in different inertial frames to one another.
In contrast, GR is considerably more complicated because in the most general case the metric is pointwise local rather than global. That is, it varies over each point in space and time, depending on the local presence of mass-energy, which affects how light (or anything else) travels in that region at that time. Consequently, in GR the constancy of the speed of light is also only valid locally over infinitesimally small distances because GR consists, in effect, of infinitely many tiny local inertial frames.
The lesson to be drawn from all of the abovementioned technicalities is that it becomes extremely difficult to sustain a dualist approach to space and time: we are far better off accepting that the two are not in any physical sense meaningfully separable, and that it is our very limited experience of the natural world that prevents us from seeing this more clearly than we seem able to. GR and SR are the tools that allow us quantitatively to exchange pieces of space for pieces of time and vice versa. They do not allow us to treat each separately and independently (as the Newtonian conception does), and compellingly suggest that space and time are far more complicated than intuition would at first indicate.
Admittedly, this does not answer the central question concerning the nature of time; the intention, however, is much more to provide some relevant ancillary information.
'Luthon64
Good summary, thanks, 'Luthon. You’ve obviously given it a lot more thought than I have cared to.
I read popular accounts of GR, QED string/membrane theory at a recreational level and I tend to skip the mathematical transformations or equations that contain more than just a few elements. Call me the “Lazy Skeptic”.
Admittedly, this does not answer the central question concerning the nature of time; the intention, however, is much more to provide some relevant ancillary information
Our expectations with regard to the “central question” are of a classical nature and it cannot be answered with much satisfaction in those terms.
Yup, that’s the gist of what I was trying to convey in my own circuitous way. Still, while it is almost trivial to see the mathematical equivalence of space and time, seeing the physical equivalence is a source of profound bafflement compounded by an asymmetry: there is no “preferred direction” – macroscopic or otherwise – in field-free space, while time does have such. This disparity prompts the speculative thought that perhaps the time dimension we are accustomed to always has associated with it some form of universal macroscopic and poorly understood field. In such a view, effects like time contraction/dilatation and the constancy of the speed of light might translate into certain necessary properties of the field.
???
'Luthon64
Yeah, well, I’m glad we sorted that out.