Benjamin Cain
2 min readMar 4, 2020

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What is time on your view? Is it something different than in standard physics?

When you say “the events are being created and destroyed by the process. Going future to past,” this sounds like you’re talking about memory. In so far as we remember something, the thing seems to go from future to past, since we remember only what’s past. But change in itself, or the process of becoming or of being created and destroyed can be compared to a growing heap of sand. The future is nothing and the past gets bigger and bigger as it’s filled with changes, some of which we remember or can discover. In any case, this is the subjective flow of time which is bound up with memory.

To say that whatever’s created and destroyed goes from future to past is a little strange, isn’t it? Take a house which is built and eventually torn down. Does the house come from the future? No, it’s like that heap of sand: the particles come together, rearrange themselves and produce a new form, a house. That is, labourers and materials are assembled, the construction process takes time and the end result, in the future compared to the start of the process, is the house. So the process itself seems to go forward in time.

Given the conservation of energy, forms are only transformed rather than really destroyed, so the house that’s torn down becomes something else (its materials are recycled or reused). The only way I can see the house going from future to past has to do with the formation of memory. To say the house goes into the past is to say it enters a fixed position in memory. Otherwise, the destruction/transformation process is another shifting of the elements and a process that moves forward in time.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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