Quantum events could create a time like ours but a generated world needn’t reflect its source, so a movie can fast forward to future events, or flashback to past events, even if what displays it can’t. That quantum events could create a time like ours doesn’t mean that they do, but reverse engineering doesn’t require that. It just chooses the simplest option, which is that time passes in our world as quantum events create physical events. No other theory explains our time and why it changes, so it is accepted.
In presentism, only the present exists. It implies that no past or future entities exist, so to worry about the past or future is to trade reality for imagination. We deduce that time extends, but only know the past from the present, and the future is the same, so creating a time like ours only requires the now, and we will infer the rest. A quantum network that is constantly active can do that, it can generate the present moment, but what it can’t do is save it. It can’t save what it does because it is too busy doing it (2.1.4).
Quantum reality, as described by quantum theory, can’t lay down memories, but the physical world may be its answer to that. Every observation, like a database query, is a query of quantum reality. Every physical event is a quantum reality update. To get the latest report, based on the latest choices, we need only observe it. This report also contains the past, as today’s brain memories remember yesterday’s events, and dinosaur fossils todaytell us what happened long ago. Our DNA records not just the choices of our ancestors, but of all life on earth. Genes (Dawkins, 1989), norms (Whitworth & deMoor, 2003), and memes (Heylighen, Francis & Chielens, K., 2009) remember past biological, cultural, and ideological choices, so physical events are a record of past quantum events.
It has been proposed that our universe began as four equal dimensions, until the first event broke that symmetry by turning one into time and the rest into space (S. W. Hawking & Hartle, 1983). But if four dimensions became three of space and one of time, what were they dimensions of? Physics has no abstract dimensionality that can separate into space or time, but the connections of a network allow this.
A network of points connected in a plane implies two space dimensions, and a connected cube of points implies three. It follows that a network can connect to allow four of what we call dimensions. A quantum network with four degrees of connection allows four dimensions, three for space and one for time. These degrees of connection are equivalent, so it doesn’t matter which became space or time. Our space can then arise from three orthogonal network rotations, and our time from another rotation transverse to that. Time and space are thus results not causes, so space can contract and time can dilate, as relativity experiments confirm.
The quantum network has no absolute time, only network cycles that imply time. It has no absolute space, only network transfers that imply space. Time passes because light has to complete some number of network cycles to reach us, and distance extends because it also has to complete some number of network transfers to reach us.
We deduce time and space, but all we know for sure is the here and now. The quantum network creates the here and now, and we do the rest. This implies a Physics of Now (Hartle, 2005), p101, and also a Physics of Here, where every point has its own space and its own clock, as relativity demands. When absolute space and time are abandoned, all that remains is the ever-present here and the eternal now.