Magic Primate

You could never have have not existed. Your existence is a necessary condition for you to be considering the matter. I believe the Anthropic Principle applies to individuals and to individual moments.

What an amazing enormous coincidence that all the atoms in the universe should conspire to produce you, even to produce the train of thought and awareness that lead you to think about this? No? Each moment a whole new astronomical coincidence. No?

No.

jafosei

Time is an interesting subject, and one I'm not sure I've ever gotten a really good handle on. Basically, I believe time is a measurement; specifically, time is a measurement of change.

The universe is contingent; that is, everything happens based on something that has already happened in the past. Events play out in series, with one thing leading to another.

We use the concept of time to understand this flow of events and contingencies.

So to answer your question directly, no, I don't believe that time has physical qualities (at least, not in the way I generally conceive of material things having physical qualities). I think time 'flowing' is a descriptive term but not a literal one.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the passage from past to future being an illusion. Events continue to play out, the world continues to change, and we'll continue to measure that change as time. In that sense, I don't perceive it as illusion; it's a good concept that helps explain the world in a useful way.

crocodile deathroll

I believe the "present" is a space time frame of reference that comes to one's conscious attention, as there is no truly objective and absolute Greenwich Standard Time at all for the universe as a whole.

All events in it are all equally real, and only appear real to us as we witness them. The physical particle like a carbon atom being measured in a lab in 2003 has identical physical properties to one that is measured in 1953 of 2053. So if you do not exist the frame of reference for your context in history will also not exist until you do

You could just as easily reemerge back in say the time the Great Wall of China and your events only be perceived be continued to play out from there as it is the only frame of reference for the reality that you know of.

CDR