~*~Tassie~*~
Senior Member
This is my input, and I'm willing to accept that I may be wrong.
There's this general opinion that time is only a continuum of minutes, of days, of light graduating to darkness, etc. IMO, the general image of what time is, isn't conveyed accurately-- time only exists, it doesn't progress. The universe is sitting in a stillness, time does not shift. Yet, what causes progression? The earth rotates, sun and moon give us day and night-- we know how it goes-- yet it is only our progression and not time. We move, we make these clocks electrically-generated, or battery-powered, or whatever, for the hands to tick away the so-called progression of time. It is the universe, and the masses that occupy it, that live, that cause progression. We're all born, we live till our phase is over, then we die and end our progression. In the same way, natural progressions of the universe cause "time" to exist as we imagine it. As time just exists as a stillness, the earth rotates, facing the sun, giving us day and night, and, hence, the illusion that "time" is somehow continuing. The progressions of nature cause leap years, cause natural disasters, etc, but it is not the progression of time as we think of it.
In this way, if time does not actually progress-- it just exists as a stillness, and we are the beings who actually progress, causing the illusion of a continuum of time, then how can time travel be possible?
Anyways, the question wasn't time travel.. If that^^ is true, then a "history" of time does not actually exist since time does not have any progression-- therefore, the theory that the past is but a memory, or something kept in the mind, is correct.
Obviously, the past exists-- we can't deny what happened before we were born-- but it existed in the same stillness that we live in today. Someone was contradicting something close to this that BGK said earlier, and I want to make my point clear-- of course all the events of time could not have possibly occurred simultaneously-- but, they all occurred in an unmoving, uncontinuing (<is that a word lol?) that holds the universe. By the progressions of the universe, there is the general illusion that many years have passed, and even that there exists an alter-universe of the past-- but there is only one universe with a progression of events and generations.
Basically, the past does exist, of course, but not as a "history of time" or even an "alter-universe" but as a sequence of events that occured before we came into existence, and as a memory, as you guys said earlier^^