Sometimes a change in perspective is all that is required to know and understand the world. Some questions drive people crazy. Sometimes they lead people to believe in ridiculous fantasies. Scientists used to be tried in court for witchcraft. When people first encountered printed Bibles, they thought it was the works of the devil because each copy was similar to the other. That was actually the whole point of printing. It was an act of making perfect clones. People shouldn't have bothered with writing stuff faster. They could have made a machine that make exact copies of something.
The concept of time is something that even scientists can't wrap their minds around. But we can't solve these problems with the state of mind and kind of thinking that created these problems in the first place. Scientific knowledge is a mere instrument. It doesn't necessarily contain objective truths about the universe.
Instrumentalism is a view in philosophy of science that claims scientific theories are merely useful tools for predicting phenomena instead of true or approximately true descriptions of the physical world. Instrumentalism can best be understood as a position against scientific realismhttp://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Instrumentalism
For additional reading please visit https://steemit.com/philosophy/@vimukthi/2-thought-experiments-to-forever-change-the-way-you-look-at-the-world-philosophy-discussion where I talk about "Constructive Relativism" which is like a far more developed and advanced evolution of Instrumentalism. I've expanded the discussion on this post: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@vimukthi/chintana-the-socio-psychological-force-that-guide-the-fate-of-nations-cultures-and-all-sorts-of-groups-an-explanation-of-the
You can check out the file extension. That's not what I'm trying to point out. If you take your phone and pause a video and show it to a person, how is that person going to determine whether it's a paused video or an image? Let's take things further. What if the above image is a GIF and what if you edit a video to play with a freeze frame and show it to a person? Just think about that for a moment.
We don't perceive a flow of time unless something have changed. If fact "Time" is change itself.
Show me the Present and I'll show you the Past.
You can never capture a present. You have things that has happened and things that has not yet happened. Past-Present-Future is a mental classification that has great utility like our economic activities. Where does cryptocurrencies get their value? They don't really have any value. Some individuals are willing to exchange another something for something like Dash, PIVX, NEM. An electronic medium of exchange is useful. Making a distinction of Past and Future has immense value.
Try to simulate being blind and explain me the experience. I want you to describe the difference between the two kinds of sensory perception of being blind and not blind. How does your senses feel while you are blind and while you are not blind?
What if the blackness get replaced by any of the above 3 colors? What if we hack someone's nervous system to make sure it only feed one Wavelength (color) into the brain via electric impulses? Would it be any different from the simulated blindness of yours? Without change, there are no thought instances. Without thought instances, there is no time. This is an extremely simple and elegant explanation of what time is. I see no holes in my understanding and this is what I stand by.
A radical difference in the way of thinking does force us into a whole new paradigm and this time (accidental pun) we can rely on no equipment. In certain meditation texts I've read that meditating upon the subject of time leads to the understanding of the nature of the universe. The thing is that the Universe is HUUUUGGEE. So don't let the thinking make you go mad :-)
