No Past, No Future, Only Now!

Sometimes in physics you see those time-space diagrams, where space is horizontal and time is vertical. They may be called 'Feynman diagrams', but that might mean something else. Anyway, you hear a lot about space and time being this one four-dimensional continuum, and there seems always to be this implication that, if you had the ability to see in four dimensions, and could stand outside the universe, that you could look at the universe and see everything just laid out. And so, where does the concept of 'free will' fit, if your future is as solid as your past? And for that matter, where, in this static 4D hypercube of everything-ness, is there room for your perception that there is a past, present, and future?

Sometimes people will say that now-ness is like a 3D cross section that 'slides through' the 4D snapshot of everything. Well, when does that happen? This is as unsatisfactory as the homonculus theory was for explaining consciousness. The static 4D interpretation just trades away the in-universe concept of time for some hypothetical, outside-the-universe being's sense of time. That, AND you're still stuck with 'destiny'. And besides, how can anyone be 'outside' the universe?

So, the particular problem is, how does the 'sense of now' work? Why is 'now' special? It seems either that the static 4D everything view (with its implication of destiny) precludes a sense of now, and we're just deluded, or that there is some mechanism by which now-ness is extracted from it. Supposing it's right, and that somehow, now-ness happens, is there only one?

To see what I mean, imagine you have a paperback book, and oh say, 100 friends that all read at exactly the same speed. Read the first page of the book. Now, tear it out and give it to one of your 100 friends. When you finish the 2nd page, pass it to your friend, who passes the 1st page to someone else. In this analogy, the book itself is like the 4D static universe; there's no inherent 'now' in it, the entire history of the story is there all at once. In the act of reading it, you create a 'now' that passes through the history of the book. But so does your friend, and your 2nd friend, and so on. In this way, you could have an arbitrary number of 'nows' applied to the same history. No particular 'now' is better than any other. Our experience of 'now' is the most direct experience we have of the world, and in this scenario, there would be an infinite number of other 'nows' in which YOU would be happening; in which YOU would be experiencing; in which you would be as real as your are, well, now.

And that's just creepy!

So what if there isn't this 4D static construct? What if there is only NOW. Well, that would leave the future open, which probably makes a lot of us feel better about getting out of bed in the morning, but it would also mean that there's no past, wouldn't it? But, "I remember the past!" you say. Well, you think about the future, too, right? What if they're both just, well, not there? Predictions of the future get less accurate the further out you go, and data on the past gets less trustworthy the further back you look. It's like there's just this cloud of probability surrounding the now.

And since the speed of light is finite, if I stand 670 million odd miles away from you, I am in effect 1 hour in your past. Now even without relativity, imagine two flashbulbs go off simultanesouly, halfway between us, but one is red and 1 foot closer to you, and the other is green, and 1 foot closer to me. You see the red flash and then 1 ns later, the green one. I see the green one first, then the red one. Your history and my history aren't even the same history.

Maybe those zen guys have it right. Live in the moment. Time is an ineffable mystery. Don't just have a donut, really enjoy it.