Time Is a “Spiritually Meaningful” Concept, Not a Mechanical Phenomenon

Without getting too philosophical, most readers would likely agree that whatever time is, it can’t be created by a “physical machine.”  Yet it’s certainly real enough to contain our inner “spiritual” experiences.  For us, time is made up of learning and memory, surprise and disappointment, growing older and (we hope) wiser, and “moving forward” from the beginning to the end.

Without these human experiences, “time” is something abstract and imaginary, useful only to separate and sequence different “states of the universe.” This can be equated with change, occurring in tiny “steps” at the so-called Planck level, in what theorists call a “dissipative” process that amounts to a downhill entropy gradient.  That is, a process leading to “universal death.”

If we eliminate human experience, the universe moves from a Big Bang to a “heat death,” or from “one universe to the next.”  Science itself (not to mention Western philosophy and religion) tends to view time as a process of universal birth, growth, decline and death—clearly a spiritual concept.  Even in Eastern philosophy, time is often seen as a spiritual cycle of death and rebirth.

All of this makes time “meaningful,” and meaning belongs to life experience, not to physical things as such.  It’s a spiritual concept, not a physical one.  “Virtual roads of time,” along with many theorists of science, sees the dynamics of change as physical, but not time itself.  In VRT, time is meaningful because it’s actually created by the “movement through life” of those who experience it.

If, as strict physicalists insist, we have no true control over what happens, then nothing “out there” has any meaning at all.  But if (as in VRT) time is our selective experience among preexisting potentials, then our lives actually give an “existential” meaning to the universe from which they spring.