Sten Odenwald

The experience that we have of time is the way that the brain works.

enhances now by remembering something from the recent past, which is already stored in our brain, and then trying to predict what's going to happen in the next few seconds.

So our experience of now is sort of imbued with a sense of what's about to happen and what has already happened.

So that's why we have a sense that the present moment is part of a continuum.

And this continuum is what we call time.

So that physiologically is what's going on with the brain.

But the thing is that all of these processes are embedded within a universe where we claim time has some kind of an objective reality.

The only thing that we can identify that has any objective reality is the idea that things

change from simple to complicated because that's the direction that entropy moves in our universe you know you have to chase this literally all the way back to the big bang you know why did our universe start out with having three dimensions of space and then this fourth dimension where entropy seems to increase along it and um

we're beginning to think that that's analogous to the problem of why are we here?

Existentially, if the universe had started out slightly differently, we wouldn't be here to really perceive the differences.

So the fact that we're asking the question, what is time, is rooted in the fact that

Our universe started out with this thing as part of its initial conditions.

It could have started out with something else, in which case we wouldn't be here to argue the differences.

So you see, we get into these really complicated sort of cycles of what seems to be circular reasoning.

Well, that's an excellent question.

That's the question of sort of practicality, of what practical use is this?

It's also the issue of...

you know, sort of completing the circle.

You know, we know a lot about the parts of our universe.