∆ The House of Cards.

;

Figure: A borrowed picture of an odd house of cards that actually depicts what I am suggesting quite well.

When we examine the ‘chain of reasoning’ behind the existence of Time, as something more than a notion, carefully I think it becomes worse than a house of cards,

Everything seeming to back everything else up, but in fact everything is relying on everything else to back it up, and there is no real beginning of the chain, or any core proof of anything other than movement and change.

Because the reasoning we have is this...

• ...because we think our 'memories' prove more than just 'that matter can exist and change', we suspect that 'Time' may exist, So we look into the matter, and...

• We think we can see or explain time, as some unusual kind of ‘dimension’, and, it turns out that the mathematics for this idea all works out,

• But for a ‘dimension’ to make sense it has to have some kind of ‘length’, or it has to ‘go’ from one place to another, or, we have to be able to ‘travel along’ it in some way,

• And this idea seems to have some foundation because Galileo showed we could count the beats of a pendulum in an endless one way fashion, 1,2,3,4... as if something were moving steadily along an unseen track.

• But, this aspect of Galileo’s work can really just be seen as a possible over interpretation and over simplification of the fact he was comparing the motion of two objects, and making one example of motion as simple as he could for convenience.

• But, this is also ok, because we accept that time may still exist, and that time may have been what Galileo was ‘tracking’; because ‘time’ may be a very mysterious ‘dimension’, and we can tell that we are constantly travelling along it, like an infinitely long railway track, because we see the past behind us and the future ahead.

• But, we don’t really see the past behind us, we just over analyse the evidence,(the matter existing now in our minds, and the matter existing now outside of us), and think it must prove the existence of the ‘past’... which makes sense, and it may be a ‘representation of the past’, but only if time, has been shown to exist in some other way... (and so our memories aren’t just the only record of events, but also a ‘re-presentation’ of the temporal record[8])

• And, we think time exists, and therefore the past must exist, anyway, because we can imagine or predict the future...

• But in reality when we think we are accurately or inaccurately ‘predicting the future’ all we are really doing is constructing thoughts in our heads, and ‘calling’ them the ‘future’

• But we don’t really see the future arriving or ahead of us...

• But, it’s ok to see these thoughts as predictions of the future, and ok that we can’t actually see ‘into the future’, because we do at least ‘see that the future keeps constantly arriving’,

• But, in fact what we see, and call ‘proof of the future arriving’ can be explained simply as existing stuff, existing matter, and existing energy, moving and changing ‘now’ in orderly or chaotic ways... And it only makes sense to interpret this as ‘the future arriving’ if some other reasoning suggests that time exists – but all the previous reasoning so far, is all depending on this observation.

• but we think that’s ok, because we have deduced that the future and past exist anyway... because, if you drop a vase, it smashes in one way, but the reverse never happens. So this proves that something ‘flows from A to B’, and this thing is time, and the A and B are the past and future...

• but, this only makes sense if there is some other reason to believe time exists... and all the reasoning so far now relies on this current point.

• But, that’s ok, because even without this other proof, It still makes mathematical and logical sense to see time, as an extra dimension[9] that we are travelling along!

• – And if you want to know why, just go back to the beginning of this list!

My apologies for the confusing, and of course ‘circular’ nature of this ‘reasoning’; but that is kind of the point here. Because it is this kind of logic that leads me to believe that perhaps we really are barking up the wrong tree, and that only movement and change in the present exist, because we are accidentally giving ourselves ‘the run-around’ ; the run-around being an excellent expression of the idea that we pass from point to point never getting an answer but assuming the answer exists.