Time and Time Again
After a careful reading of the May 28 piece in George's blog I'd like to put my own spin on this time thing.
The paradox at hand pits the growing evidence that time must not exist against the apparent sequence of time. My answer is it depends on where you put your stick in the ground. In other words: whats your frame of reference?
Ever since the my heady days of psychedlic contemplation I've had a strong sense that, from a more distant vantage point (closer to God or the Pleides or schizophrenia) time has no meaning. The moment is all there is. But it is difficult and perhaps undesirable to carry this frame of reference around with us becuase we have two properties of our operating system that bring us back to a time-based view. One: we have memory. Two: our penchant for hope and dread and planning requires that we gander into the future. One interesting twist on this is that I suspect we could not have a sense of future without a sense of past. I don't have any supporting evidence but I suspect without memory we would live in the moment.

So my theory is that time is a convenience necessary for memory to function. Without memory, there is no time. In a twist on the proverbial tree falling in the forest, time does not exist without a memory to capture it.

The time paradox is a subset of a larger conundrum that is The Big Picture. Reality is what it is. There may be some absolute view or perhaps it never escapes relativism. Along comes a life form with consciousness. It could not possibly survive by adopting the rules of the Universe (if you carried around a sense of timelessness, would you pay your electric bill?). So, as part of it's survival strategy, it's necessary to carve out a contrived reality that includes time, a sense of goodness, among other things. But part of our nature is to expand our consciousness (red states notwithstanding) and so we attempt to jump outside our framework for a better view. The result is inevitably paradox.