Does time "pass" -- or is it just "there"?

Posted this on cosmology/physics but decided to post it here too because I think it could have philosophical ramifications.

It seems that we define the direction of time flow by generally decreasing energy states, along with generally increasing accumulation of information.

After all, at the Big Bang, we had extremely high energy, and things have been going downhill ever since. However, with supersymmetry, there was also very little information, things were very uniform. As energy has been released, lots of particles have come into being, galaxies and solar systems have gotten organized, life has evolved, suddenly there is lots of "stuff" and information, in exchange for all the energy that's been sacrificed.

So we lose energy and accumulate information, the "now" is pretty much defined as the point up to which information has been accumulated -- even if the future already exists we can't "know" about it now because it would require us to have a higher informational state that exists and this point in the spacetime continuum.

So what if the "past" is just a place in the continuum of higher energy and less information, and the "future" is just a place of lower energy and more information? Then maybe "now", or even our "lifespan", is not a time that we 'move' through, but simply a place on a spectrum, like yellow sitting between green and orange in the visible spectrum. Then 'death' is not an end of existence, but simply a boundary of existence, in much the same way that the edge of your body is.

And what happens to this spectrum if in the deep future, all particles disassociate and all the 'information' in the universe gets presumably lost? Might the 'energy' component somehow be 'reset' in this process by means we haven't yet figured out?

Thoughts?

Father Merin is on his way.

What if you were a quantum particle, such as a photon?

Then the past and present are one in the same. The information has accumulated instantaneously and the energy has not dissipated because the beginning and now are one in the same time. The past is the present because then and now are one.

I feel the answer to quantum action at a distance involves this lack of time. We wonder if quantum particles can communicate backwards in time. Why should they have to when then is the same as now, even in the future? How does a photon perceive the order in which events take place when there is no passage of "time". For a photon time does not seem to "stop everything from happening at once."

(And yes this is a refreshing thread. I love to discuss quantum mechanics and relativity because none of my friends are into it and they all think I'm nuts.)

Daryl

Stanley Feather wrote:

"BTW, some pretty cool ideas have been presented by physicists over the past few years around consciousness and space-time. But most of that’s not testable, so it sort of borders on PRP."

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It's funny you should bring consciousness into this as it's one of the things I've always wondered about and tried to figure out how to define as I've never found a satisfactory definition elsewhere.

In talking about time, energy and information, it occurs to me that consciousness is really the 'moment' when energy is effectively converted to information, or forces matter into an organized state such as constitutes organized information in the brain.

In other words, through the ages men have tried to define consciousness as a 'thing' whether through some abstract concept like a 'soul' or something as concrete as brain cells -- whereas maybe it's more of an 'event' -- like a phase change of 'something' else.