Yes, our view of time is obsolete.

The future can affect the present, it's just that WE don't know about it. 

Dear Herb,

 It the future exist NOW then it is not the future.  How can a by definition non-existent  future influence anything? The only thing that we may call an existing future is a prediction that may come or not that exist NOW of how the NOW may become.  

Dear Alexev,

Wheeler interpreted the delay-choice experiment in a way that said that we can today influence what have happend billion of year ago when a photon was emitted in a far away galaxy.   This interpretation goes against the common sense notion of the what the past is, a reality that was and is not anymore.  I suspect that there exist interpretation of quantum mechanics do do not demand such revision of our common sense notion of the past in this particular dealyed-choice experiment.

Louis, the future does not exist NOW to us.  It's in OUR future: time is localized - not universal; that is a very Old View of time.  

WE are not the center of time; our NOW is a short duration for each of us. 

TIME does not exist because real things exist IN time.

So, how could Time exist in Time?

You are making a category error as Kant would say. 

Dear Herb,

I am old fashion.  I never believe in the reality of time.  All that exists is NOW.  But we invented all kind of time in order to synchronise our activities and to index the past events.  I know about Einstein's new type of time.  I does not exist in itself more than the ancient forms of time.  It is a usefull fiction like all of mathematics.  NOW has no duration.  It is not a little span of time.  It is all that exist. Remember Kant said that we do not have access to the reality as it is.   Talking of the mathematical fictions as if you are talking of what is is equating the fiction with reality, it is what Kant said we cannot do.   Einstein never could accept quantum mecanics exactly because Quantum Mecanics is Kantian in spirit and Einstein is a Platonist who equate mathematics with the hard reality behind things.  

TIME is a concept, concepts occur in our heads.  Material objects persist (for a while) across time before they fall apart.  Thus, objects are NOT the basis of reality but RELATIONSHIPS. Unfortunately, Greek thinkers obsessed on 'naming people and things'; quite simplistic ideation that has persisted for too long.  I make a strong distinction between our mental representations and externally existing 'objects' that persist even when I stop thinking about them. 

Since physics admits that Past events impact the present, then take the symmetric view that the interaction is a dynamic exchange, so we are influencing the past. 

Dear Herb,

I agree.   But I take our experiential reality the only part of reality that we have access.  It is not conceptual but purely experiential.   There is only the NOW. The past is NOW, this is the structure of the NOW.  If I look at you, I received light that reflected onto your skin on my retinas and this I touch NOW. I am aware of your recent movements NOW, the structure of what I received reflect the recent past.  But I am also aware of all your body growth because the structure of the surface of your body is analyse now and this whole ontogenic process is available now, and this one reflect the whole philogeny of our specy and this one is available NOW.  So although I interact with you NOW, I get part of your past NOW.  Every structure is a fossil and its past is its structure.  All sciences proceed that way, our senses proceed that way, our thought and imagination proceeds that way.

Dear Louis!

I think that quanum mechanics can be explained without interpretations - on the basis of the existing theory. In particular, the postulate of the wave function collapse can be removed from the basic postulates of quantum mechanics as a natural consequence of its other key provisions.

See, for example, Melkikh A V 2015 Comm. Theor. Phys. 64 issue 1 47.

Article Nonlinearity of Quantum Mechanics and Solution of the Proble...

Alexey,

I quickly browsed your paper.  It does involve an interpretation.  Personnally (an amator) I do like Bitbol's Kantian way of seeing the quantum theory as a generalized probability calculus.  

Dear Alexey:  I skimmed quickly through your paper and found it little more than a defense of Orthodoxy (did I miss something?).  It is based on the mathematical ideas of fields, measurements without interaction (a self-contradiction) and standard linear math.  So, what's new here?  Standard QM seems to be an abstraction seeking reality.  The wave-function (psi) is simply the eigenfunction of an artificial math model based on sheer human invention (infinite Euclidean Vectors = Hilbert spaces).  In QM, we have created a math generator method for analyzing ALL possible solutions of the atomic hydrogen atom, if we were to do an infinite number of measurements of an infinite number of possible atoms.  This has nothing to do with ONE single hydrogen atom because the 2-body model of CM is itself a math fiction, based on the false idea of potential energy (see my new question).  

Dear Herb!

Dear Louis!

The new is that quantum mechanics indeed is nonlinear, because the main equations are equations for particles and fields. Schrodinger equation is only an approximation of this system.

This nonlinearity leads to the fact that creation and annihilation of particles naturally solves measurement problem.

 This is yet another good sample of the blind alley where you are stuck, when adhering to these fifteen surrepticious postulates of the Göttingen-København pack and their heirs. You remain struggling with false problems.

Every photon has an absorber. A photon is a successful transaction between three partners : an emitter, an absorber, and the space or (at least half-transparent) medium or optical devices between them,

which transfers by electromagnetic means a quantum of looping h,

and an impulsion-energy that depends on the respective frames of the emitter and of the absorber.

End of definition.

The newtonian macro-time of the laboratory has no meaning in microphysics, and no causal power in microphysics.

That's all folks.

Correction. 

One erroneous word : "macro-space" in the sentence where "macro-time" was needed.

@jacques lavau:

Yes but we do not need the space part of your proposed solution; Newton gave us the answer 350 years ago with his theory of gravity: action-at-a-distance between remote particles.  This was rejected by the Deep Thinkers (of his day and since) who are fixated on their direct human experience of TOUCHING.  Please, stretch your imagination, folks. 

 @Herb Spencer : I do not understand you at all.

Read Mary Hesse's "Forces & Fields" for a thorough history of interactions. 

Dear Herb,

I read your document.  Here a few reflexions that arise while reading it.

‘’ Mary B. Hesse was one of the first women to formally study the Philosophy of Science, beginning in the 1950s.’’

I don’t think so but since there were so few women up to 1950, yes she automatically qualified as a ‘’one of the first women’’.

The first few paragraphs about her ideas does make here quite mainstream for that time.

‘’ The biggest change occurred only 300 years ago when the consensus focused down on only one major analogy – mechanism’’

The pre-socratic atomists were primarily about mecahanism.  The Pythagorian were too given that the whole of mathematics is a conceptual mechanic.  The big turn of the greek philosophy occurred at the time of Socrates where the main focus of greek philosophy moved from the physical to the human affairs. Here the dialogue became central in finding truth and natural language became important.  It is a return from a focus on the external cosmos to the human affairs. I would compare our modern period to a stepping back backward of philosophy back to natural philosophy.  It started with the cosmos, astronomy, atoms, and emphasis on mathematics.  It is stepping back from the big neo-platonic aristotlean synthesis to a naturalist focus like the pre-socratic.  The romantics have since tried to return to ourself from this modern moving away from ourself, more and more abstractions, mechanic, mechanic , mechanic, in fact the only thing the ‘’intellect’’ can handled precisely, mechanically while the romantic are about the vague domain of language and imagination and our relations.  The Copernitian revolution, is a move away from ourself, the gaze move outside and try to mechanically built what is there, busying itself and forgetting itself.

You focused on the resistance to Newton’s idea of action at distance.  Note once the problem has been mathematized in space time through the analytical geometry framework of Descartes, and that movement can be characterized by the Archimedian/Leibniz/Newton mechanic of calculus then in that astract mechanical world everything become as local and timeless as the equation written on paper.  It is a new type of concreteness, the concreteness of what can be written on paper and solved on paper and so is necessarily fixed and timeless.  The big step had been done by Galileo: the invention of the time of science, the time of clock.  The fixation onto page of what had never been fixated: dynamic.  Its subsumtion to geometry.  This is the biggest scientific invention of all time and the corollary the biggest illusion: fixation of what change.

The notion of field and a way to relate the equation at a point and the influence away from it.  A return to locality, the local influenced of the point where the equations are expressed. 

‘’ d Leibniz’s religious contention that space must be full of matter (i.e. continuous) as this is more perfect than the idea of voids between atoms’’

While Newton adopted the analytical geometry conception of space, Leibniz went beyond it by.  Leibniz is the founder of the relational program of physics.  It is in line with the relational nature of mathematics.  So for Newton, space nor time do exist but emerged from relations among points where matter exist.  Einstein’s relativity is the realization of only a part of this program of making spacetime as emerging from matter.  On this , he was a few hundred years ahead of Newton.   But that program remained incompleted and impractical leaving these century for Newton. 

Newton the rationalist platonician was the hero of the early modern age.  Kant is a partial return to ourself while keeping Newtonian approach intact.  He subsumed the objective to the subjective but he remained entirely in the page, in the conceptual domain and so in line with the traditional philosophical tradition of assuming the world as totally expressible in principle by concepts on the page.  The evidence that human affairs and our realm of experience had to be explored in the way in continuity with the most ancient human traditions, the common wisdom of people and from what is most evident in our experience , in short the romantic program was about to be re-awaken. Pascal,Vico Goethe will spearhead this return to ourself.