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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When I turn over the CD I am holding in my hands, and look at the rainbow pattern of light coming from the overhead lamp, hitting the CD, and being reradiated back into my eyes, isn't the rainbow diffraction pattern pretty strong evidence that the photons spread out over all space and all time (with some amplitude) on their journey from the CD to my eye? Isn't that difficult to reconcile with a temporal structure in which some things "were," other things "are," and still other things "will be," and in which the "are" becomes "were" and the "will be" becomes "are"?
Brad DeLong
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