» Time and Becoming: The Experimental Metaphysics of Time and the Observing Self

The speakers and audience in this proposed interdisciplinary conference will discuss several focused questions concerning the nature of time. We will bring together leading researchers in physics, philosophy, psychology, religious studies and neuroscience/complex systems.

The proposed conference is a natural follow-up to the previous conference on free will, and will take place on Monday, April 28, 2014.

Our intuitive view of physical reality, the outgrowth of everyday experience, often conflicts with the world-view described by physics. Indeed, many of our core beliefs about the physical world lack a firm scientific foundation. 

One such example concerns the nature of time. Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has tried to understand the meaning of the inexorable flow of time. We experience that time has a certain direction: we are born, grow old, and die; our offices tend to get more disordered - not the other way around. Yet remarkably, in physics time has no such built-in direction and both classical and quantum theories mostly work just as well from past-to-future as from future-to-past. 


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