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Time is change, nothing ever stays the same, everything always changes. To try to make time cyclical is to deny the nature of time and uncertainty. It is better to embrace change and uncertainty.

Time is both. An arrow and a circle. From the perspective of the present, time is an arrow moving forward. From a birds-eye view, time is a circle going around and around. From a holistic perspective, time is a spiral progressing ever forward in the same circular pattern but never retreading its path.

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There is a more difficult conversation about entropy that might address the "flowing" of time or the experience of it as sequential. I'm not super qualified to talk about that particular issue though.

My basic understanding is that time and entropy together (with the initial conditions of the universe, hot with low entropy) create a physical universe that includes causality. Then, consciousness relies on causality because it's about recieving information, processing that info, and acting. Then, we can consider natural selection, and think about how our consciousness appeared in this world in the first place.

Sorry that's not rigorous. I don't have a full answer. You bring up some good points. Still, I think entropy is related to the answer about time flow, and I think that how we experience time is a result of both its physical properties and our brains' physical properties.

Edit: the entropy, time, and big bang stuff is a Cosmology topic, btw, for whoever's into this sort of thing

The entirety of everything that we perceive to exist all occurred instantaneously. Everything that was is and will be did not occur in time but all at once it is was and isnt.

Well you can always do oral exams or grade the contribution in class?

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I recently taught a few upper-level sociology courses, and I used essays to try to get students to engage in critical thinking (e.g., analyzing and applying theories). It took an inordinate amount of time and energy grade these compared to a more traditional exam, but I felt it was worth it.

With this, though... I'm concerned that a decently motivated student could take ChatGPT output, modify it in places where they feel comfortable in doing so, and bypass gaining the writing and analytical skills that I try to teach. I would love to incorporate this into an assignment, and I've got a few ideas how, but I'm still worried about how educators will assess the "higher" forms of cognition.

> So here we are in a philosophy subreddit, where we can reasonably expect something more narrow, so as to not automatically apply to any observable.

I ask about physics because physics is what this philosophical article is about. It is NOT overly narrow for this situation; the article is explicitly about the philosophy of time, and misunderstanding what time is (i.e. thinking it's some sort of construct and ignoring physical evidence of its features) makes it impossible to talk about this with any gravitas (ba dum tsss).

Is space physical? Electromagnetism? Your rationale applies to many things that it would be innacurate to say aren't physical, not just time.

If you haven't studied special and/or general relativity with some rigor, then you might not be qualified to answer questions about it.

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By making accomplished bullshit equally available to everyone, this puts the burden onto the people who sniff out the bullshitters & only deal with people who can actually walk the talk.

This will probably be an expensive learning curve for a number of companies.

[[The value in skill-stacking is the ability to see more parameters in your analysis. You can have equal credentials in your field as all of the other highly qualified candidates. The candidate who has a complimentary skill or two in their back pocket can see around corners the others can't. Useful understanding for personal development, and recruiting high-function teams.]]

You're talking about diverse perspectives & broad problem solving skills being more effective than specialization of multiple portions - is that correct?

If so, we find this to be true in many capacities that exceed capitalist matters, and honestly an essential component of evolution to the species - if everyone sees things the same way, they tend to end up with the same blindspots.

So, to answer OP's inquiry, Socrates may have found ChatGPT a most democratic tool, ultimately benevolent if used so, as people learn to look for the meaning in what is said.

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As a colleague, I can completely second your opinion. Time will tell how we can meaningfully react to these new circumstances.

Depends on what you mean by studied. I’m not going for a degree in it or anything, but I have been following research and engaging with physics education for about 15 years. But what does that matter? Let’s say physicists routinely use this extra broad definition of physical- that’s great for them, but their definition does not define it for other disciplines. So here we are in a philosophy subreddit, where we can reasonably expect something more narrow, so as to not automatically apply to any observable.

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The human experience of time is different in some sense though.

Our experience of the three space-like dimensions maps very readily to what we can observe. However, there is no immediately apparent reason why we should experience time as continuous "flow" in one direction only. We can see some properties of movement through time, such as an inexorable increase in entropy, but how this translates to our subjective experience of unidirectional time is, as far as I'm aware, unexplained.

Have you studied physics for long?

Saying time is physical is still a model of sorts, and without an extraordinarily broad definition of physical I would not agree that the experiment outlined suggests physicality.

You're right that general relativity and quantum mechanics aren't compatible at extremely high energies. We can verify that time is physical without using a model by making a physical experiment.

Consider a clock in space and a clock on earth. The clock on earth moves slower from the perspective of space, and the clock in space moves faster from the perspective of earth. That's a simple experiment that has been done plenty, and in fact, we have to account for that in satellites. This difference in time has clear physical features.

Time is physical. Our models about all areas of the universe, time and everything else, are not perfect. So maybe nothing is real and solipsism is the answer. Taking the existence of the physical universe for granted, time is physical, even if our models of it are not perfect.

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More accurately, we can verify the accuracy of a model (general/special relativity) that treats it as physical. But even then, that model is incompatible with another successful model (QFT) which does not treat time as physical. So it continues to be a bit of an open question.

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Time is just our way of explaining what we observe, I believe that 'spacetime' is more like a fluid, when still, it's calm and ordered, but when something disturbs it, it leaves waves and ripples that continue on and on, even the way planets etc bend spacetime and the gravitational field is very similar to objects on and in water... (ever put a sphere in perfectly still water, and taken a close look?)

I'm not saying things are 'exactly' the same, but there is so much analogue it's hard for me to ignore!

I also don't believe it has a direction, it simply... is...

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