Physical time and human time

DOI10.1007/S10701-023-00738-2MaRDI QIDQ6152099zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors George F. R. Ellis

Publication date 12 February 2024

Published in Foundations of Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10107

zbMATH Keywords

arrow of timeblock universeevolving block universepassage of timebroken symmetriesage of the universe

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General relativity (83Cxx) General and miscellaneous specific topics (00Axx) Astronomy and astrophysics (85Axx)

Abstract: This is a comment on both Gruber et al (2022) and Bunamano and Rovelli (2022), which discuss the relation between physical time and human time. I claim here, contrary to many views discussed there, that there is no foundational conflict between the way physics views the passage of time and the way the mind/brain perceives it. The problem rather resides in a number of misconceptions leading to the representation of spacetime as a timeless Block Universe. The physical expanding universe is in fact an Evolving Block Universe with a time-dependent future boundary. This establishes a global direction of time that determines local arrows of time. Furthermore time passes when quantum wave function collapse takes place; during this process, information is lost. The mind/brain acts as an imperfect clock, which coarse-grains the physical passage of time along a world line to determine the experienced passage of time, because neuronal processes take time to occur. This happens in a contextual way, so experienced time is not linearly related to physical time in general.

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