Apologies if this has been pursued elsewhere in this forum (I looked but couldn't see).
Strictly speaking, I have in mind 2 topics under this heading.
First off, local means local to you alone (ie in your head, in your perception). The obvious example of this is the experience of deja vu (which I think has been touched on indirectly in other discussions).
This non-sequential experiencing of time, a disjunction of cause and effect, has probably been experienced by most of us at some stage to varying degrees of immediacy or vividness. This could be viewed as a looping in time, a repeat of time and is a form of travel. Such an experience causes us to question what the nature of time might be but it resolves little, as it is only the personal perception, unverifiable.
However, point two expands outwards from this somewhat. What I was wondering was, is it conceivable or possible that time is, or could be considered as, a purely local phenomenon? The film 'Groudhog Day' illustrated the principle: time looped but only for a section of the populace.
What if time does not just loop, but alters within a narrow geographical area? Would the people know or recognise it and, if it could be conceived as happening, is it possible then to conceive of time itself as a purely local effect?
Following from this, if time is something local and independent of anything else, why is it not possible to have small eddies of time swirling around and altering things, or is that happening and we are unaware of it?
A possible analogy would be that of the 'collective unconcious' which is within us all but not really something of which we are, or choose to be, aware. In other words, is our conception of time the real restriction on our understanding of it and are we inevitably bound to it so tightly (possibly through our own mental constructs) as to make it impossible to move (mentally) outside it and study it in the same way that we can, for instance, study language, creating new ones, studying old ones etc..
I realise I have thrown up a large number of questions but hope they will go in interesting directions.
Strictly speaking, I have in mind 2 topics under this heading.
First off, local means local to you alone (ie in your head, in your perception). The obvious example of this is the experience of deja vu (which I think has been touched on indirectly in other discussions).
This non-sequential experiencing of time, a disjunction of cause and effect, has probably been experienced by most of us at some stage to varying degrees of immediacy or vividness. This could be viewed as a looping in time, a repeat of time and is a form of travel. Such an experience causes us to question what the nature of time might be but it resolves little, as it is only the personal perception, unverifiable.
However, point two expands outwards from this somewhat. What I was wondering was, is it conceivable or possible that time is, or could be considered as, a purely local phenomenon? The film 'Groudhog Day' illustrated the principle: time looped but only for a section of the populace.
What if time does not just loop, but alters within a narrow geographical area? Would the people know or recognise it and, if it could be conceived as happening, is it possible then to conceive of time itself as a purely local effect?
Following from this, if time is something local and independent of anything else, why is it not possible to have small eddies of time swirling around and altering things, or is that happening and we are unaware of it?
A possible analogy would be that of the 'collective unconcious' which is within us all but not really something of which we are, or choose to be, aware. In other words, is our conception of time the real restriction on our understanding of it and are we inevitably bound to it so tightly (possibly through our own mental constructs) as to make it impossible to move (mentally) outside it and study it in the same way that we can, for instance, study language, creating new ones, studying old ones etc..
I realise I have thrown up a large number of questions but hope they will go in interesting directions.