Brad said: > But isn't our intuition wrong--or perhaps it would be better to say > that our intuition does not prepare us to study quantum mechanics > and relativity? It's true that brains that have our intuitions of > space and time tend to help the selfish genes that program them > replicate themselves. But "fitness" is not the same thing as > "truth"...
Indeed not. But, so far as I can tell, Dan isn't saying that we have intuitions about time that may or may not be correct, but that time *exists* because we have intuitions. I presume he means that something in our brain organises sense impressions into a spatial and temporal structure. I don't doubt that this occurs, but like you I think that this structuring only gives us an approximation to what's out there in nature. Furthermore, I think that it presupposes at least some kind of temporal structure (although perhaps I could be convinced that what looks like a temporal structure is in fact a constraint on spatial patterns in some kind of universe without time, or without temporal flow [as, indeed, the universes in some theories of quantum gravity might be, what with the vanishing of the Hamiltonian and all]). Rich
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