"Spend time" is metaphorically coherent, but "make time" is used in an incomplete way. We use the phrase to mean zero-sum reallocation of time across activities, or via outsourcing, using $ to reallocate it across people. But there's a sense in which time is created like wealth.
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In a way, the future doesn't exist until you literally create it, via desires/intentions/aversions/debts that create a visceral current sense of it. This is not figurative. You can literally stop "making" time in this wealth-creation sense by killing yourself.
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Subjective time seems ephemeral and insubstantial compared to objective time in most discussions. To say that time has sped up or slowed down for me seems more like poetry than fact. Out-there clock-time feels like the "real time". Except in one kind of discussion: of death.
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There is a very non-poetic sense in which time only exists in the form of the subjective experience of sentient beings. A thread of this experience ends in a hard-edged way with death.
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You don't notice philosophical implications if you're talking about 1 death in a universe with 1 zillion sentient beings/points of view/experiences of time. But what if all sentient beings died. In what sense would time continue to pass if nobody experiences it passing?
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This is the "universal death" argument for the reality of subjective time and ephemerality of objective time. I don't know if there's an academic philosophy version of it, but that's what I call it. Universe going from in-parts sentient to a p-zombie universe.
Replying to
The classic Nagle "what is it like to be a bat" question is actually not very different from "what is it like to be the universe". I adopt the hard position, which requires a label, that time only exists if there is something it is like for a universe to be a universe.
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Yep. Healthy people don't realize that they're literally producing time-wealth by choosing to live. Suicidal people get it, because the possibility of stopping producing time is actually a live one for them.
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Replying to @vgr
So you're saying people don't know how correct they really are when they use the phrase?
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Toy example. Imagine a universe with just 1 sentient being. His time experience is 100% of subjective time experience that exists. He kills himself, subjective time goes away.
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Forget about physics complexities or whether sentience is required for quantum wibbly-wobbly to decohere etc. Assume it's a classical dualist newtonian universe where the subjective is ontologically independent and not the result of some sort of speculative entanglement crap.
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In this universe, the one living being, call him Dent, experiences the future on two levels:
a) as an abstract model of "empty" experience flow coming at him that he will fill up with "living"
b) visceral sense of time passing
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The argument is that b can actually collapse entirely if you stress information flows, agency, etc. enough. And with b collapsed, a will seem as unreal as angels dancing on a pinhead.
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So even if he does not die, in this universe, subjective time can almost cease to exist if Dent is under sufficiently severe material stress. Time will be close to an abstraction like God for him.
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This has been your irregular random update and outtake from my ongoing thinking about temporality. Please refer all your questions to your friendly neighborhood clock.
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One highly loaded/charged definition of time I've been playing with is: time is change in the NPV of all the pain and pleasure expected by sentient beings.
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