Time is fundamental, space and causality are not?

A very interesting new cosmological theory of the fundamental nature and origin of space-time has been developed by Lee Cronin, and is described in a new article at https://iai.tv/articles/time-existed-bef...-auid-2402 . This idea that only time is absolutely fundamental of course totally ignores traditional metaphysical/philosophical insights into the probable true nature of the world, that what is absolutely fundamental and comes before all else, is Mind.

"(Cronin) I think that time is the most misunderstood aspect of reality. This is because physicists have concluded time is emergent and the universe somehow exists in a timeless state. According to this view, time is a dimension to be travelled in backwards and forwards, but we have no evidence this is true. We have only experienced time travel in one direction, from the past to the future. We cannot go back in time. Whilst we appear to be able to imagine being frozen in time, or going back in the past, the thing is, we need time to go forward and do any of these things. Time is the resource that allows things to happen.

The problem with a universe in which time is frozen is that it requires four assumptions to be made. The first is that the origin of the universe is required to be almost perfectly ordered at the Big Bang. The second is that the second law of thermodynamics must emerge from this order at the beginning. The third is that time must be an emergent property. Finally, causality itself must be emergent.

We have no reason to believe any of these assumptions are correct, but all four of these assumptions can be replaced with just one, more intuitive claim: that time is fundamental. Fundamental time removes the need for order at the Big Bang, it removes the need for an explicit second law of thermodynamics or for causality itself to emerge. Generally speaking, a theory is stronger the fewer assumptions it needs to make. That is the great advantage of time fundamentalism. Moreover, seeing time as fundamental has the advantage that it tallies with our own experience.
..............
The difficulty in imagining a universe where only time existed first is very hard, but I wonder if it is worth playing with the idea. If time is a thing, an entity, a kind of virtual escalator that keeps producing an infinite number of steps all going in one direction, would that explain our reality? Is the basis of reality time? Could reality just be time? A universe that is built from time could certainly help explain many things. If it is space that is emergent, then the origin of the universe – the Big Bang – is merely the point in time where space emerged from time. But it was not the beginning of time itself, something much harder to make sense of.
..............
The consequences of time being fundamental are far-reaching. The expanding region of space we call the universe might not die in a heat death, as thermodynamics tells us it will, but space itself will cease to exist once all matter is spread out, in countless of trillions of years. Once time ceases to measure events in space, or, more precisely, when events that rely on the past no longer occur, then space itself will cease to exist. Causality is evidenced by the existence of space. When we reach a point in the universe when nothing is happening, when there are no longer any causal connections between events, the physical universe ceases to exist."

More on the flaws in the now prevelant "block Universe" theory, in particular that it, unlike the conception that time itself is what is absolutely fundamental, is entirely deterministic and denies the existence of true free will. This alone should be enough to disqualify the block universe from any plausibility:

"The idea of the block universe that dominates contemporary theoretical physics, a timeless universe as I like to call it, confronts us with a profound problem because it is entirely deterministic and allows no room for novelty. What I mean by this is that in principle, if you had a large enough computer and could input the initial conditions then the universe would automatically unfold as predicted and you could slide forward and backwards in time in the universe just by moving on the time axis. According to the concept of the block universe, the past, present, and future all exist equally and simultaneously as an unchanging and eternal "block" of time.  From this point of view, time is not something that flows or passes by, but rather is an unchanging dimension that already contains the entirety of the past, present, and future. Every event, from the Big Bang to the end of the universe, already exists within this block, and our perception of time as a linear progression is an illusion.
................
The biggest problem with a timeless universe is that it’s not able to predict the emergence of life, and more broadly, has no room for the generation of true novelty. Novelty cannot be predicted even in principle and hence cannot exist in the block universe. 

I think even pure mathematics can give us hints about the fundamental nature of time. For instance, I wonder if the fact that the discovery of prime numbers, as we enumerate through integers, is related to time? We cannot know if the next number in the sequence is prime ahead of time until we check. This is because to find new prime numbers you must count through number space, and this requires resource, time. So, can prime numbers exist independent of the time required to produce them? I think this is not possible. I would say that prime numbers are mathematical objects that have a depth in time and that depth is related to the resource i.e., the time required to generate that prime number.
................
I think the existence of novelty and life in the universe is a strong indication that time is fundamental.

Could it be that evidence of novelty is evidence of the reality of time? The fact that our small region of the universe is able to generate seemingly endless novel forms and creations, from evolutionary forms to culture, technology and social systems. My hypothesis is that novelty requires time to be real such that the future is intrinsically open as there are simply more options for new things in the future than the past."

but space itself will cease to exist once all matter is spread out, in countless of trillions of years.

That sounds awfully like a contradiction - either space exists or matter can't be spread out in it.

I wish the article were not behind a paywall.

David

That sounds awfully like a contradiction - either space exists or matter can't be spread out in it.

I wish the article were not behind a paywall.

David

Yeah I find once we are negating either space or time we've allowed mathematical abstraction to replace the concreteness of the actual experienced world.

That said, I do think this particular view is at least better than the block universe...