Tl:Dr:
Is time really something that can be traversed or manipulated, or is it just an idea, a perception, a memory, a measurement of a series of events?
Question Detail:
In response to a question of time paradox for a movie, a user explained away the time paradox as follows:
Consider two walls on a road, traveling like vehicles, spaced apart from each other about 3 feet (1 meter), moving down the road. You are between the walls, and must move with them down the road. You do not have the ability to go around or over the walls, nor visibility to see what's beyond them - only what you see in the 3 feet of ground, and what's above and to the sides. You suspect that the walls aren't infinite, but you don't have the tools or ability to climb over or around the walls. So you are pushed forward, and you can't go "back" to places you've already been, nor "forward" to places you'll eventually come to.
Now change it slightly. Put the walls in the ocean, and put a fish there. It doesn't even perceive the need for tools or techniques to go over the wall - it just swims up and over. In fact the wall isn't an obstacle at all. It can fully utilize all three dimensions, and even when resting there's no need for it to move at all along with the walls.
The walls are irrelevant to the fish.
We perceive time as these walls. We can't travel to the past or the future. We don't have the ability to stop the walls or move outside the walls.
But a being that perceives time in the same way we perceive places can go to anywhen, the same way we might travel to anywhere.
In the same way that you have the monitor placed on your desk in a certain position so you can use it - it belongs there - the wormhole is placed in a certain when. That when is neither "before" or "after" any other when. It's just a when, exactly the same as your monitor is not "before" or "after" any other where. It's just a where. All where's exist without an ordering. You might perceive two monitors, one in "front" of the other as having an order, but if you move yourself around them, the order changes and isn't any less or more relevant.
So all whens exist. Some beings perceive whens in a particular order, but that doesn't mean that these whens actually have an ordering anymore than we see wheres as having an ordering. - Adam Davis
My response to this was as follows:
You describe "when" and "where" as being comparable, however, I find this concept problematic. My perception of "where" is a location of matter relative to other matter. My perception of "when", however is very different: I perceive time not to be a dimension or "thing" to traverse at all; time is instead a measure or memory of a series of events. Subatomic particles move around, but their movement states don't exist as a trillion units of time, they just happen and there is nothing except for "now".
So my argument is that there is no navigable "time", only "now". For time to be traversable or manipulatable, like space, there would have to be an infinite number of states of the universe, a new one for every unit of time that passes; only there are no units of time, because physics work at an infinitely divisible "rate", which would mean that an infinite number of states of the universe exist for every moment of time. Time is just a perception of a series of events happening in chronological order.
I was so intrigued by this argument (which is just my thought, open to argument) that I decided to ask it as it's own question:
Is Time? More specifically, "Is time more than a more than a measure / memory of a series of events?"
Is time really something that can be traversed or manipulated, or is it just an idea, a perception, a memory, a measurement of a series of events?
