Reductionism

[Angra Mainyu]

But I don't know enough about the matter to be sure, so I'd like to ask whether I'm getting this right, or there is another way of keeping the A series? (or you just aren't concerned with the A series at all, and your theory is not related to metaphysical growing block theories defended by A theorists?).

Me, I don't see what would necessarily be wrong with a theory of time that would indulge our sense of time.

Well, I wasn't suggesting the A theory was necessarily wrong, since one might posit that there are possible worlds where it's true (and all of the worlds accessible from them), even if it's actually false...then again, that might also be another theory, since the A theory is meant to hold necessarily!

But seriously, I was just asking about Bomb#20's theory, because I think it's very interesting but I wasn't sure I was getting it right. The way I'm reading it, on a theory like that, what actually exists is the bumpy growing block, and the A theory is false even though it's a reasonably good approximation in daily life or even when one does not need to consider relativity - sort of like pre-relativity physics is false if taken literally, but still is a good approximation for most purposes.

Still, the A theory would probably not be good enough for the purposes of a number of metaphysical arguments (e.g., in philosophy of science or philosophy of religion).

Anyway, as I said, I'm not sure I'm reading this right, so I was asking Bomb#20.

 

[ryan]

Except that mind is something the universe is doing in the form of an active brain....it being the brain that interprets the complex relationships of the universe at large as being the 'flow of time'

There is no "doing" or "activity" in an eternal universe. There is just observation of different parts of a 4d universe.

If so, how do you account for your remark? - ''In other words, the present in an eternal universe is something moving through the universe, like a ghost, like a consciousness.'' - Ryan.

Observation, apparently, is an activity?

Are we getting stuck in semantics? The universe would remain static in an eternal universe. But sure, of course there is the activity of something observing all of the non-activity. The activity that I was referring to is about brains and everything that is observed.

 

[Bomb#20]

How does a growing block universe assume the existence of a universal now? It's basically a crystal growth model -- new spacetime gets added to the surface of the block of existing spacetime. So a "universal now" would presumably be a (hyper)plane that has block of spacetime on one side, and does not yet have any spacetime on the other side, that can serve as a preferred reference frame. Which is to say, it's a face of the crystal. So why would a flat face have to exist anywhere on the growing block? Who says the crystal has to grow uniformly?

That sounds good as near as I can tell (though I admit, on this it's quite near actually ), but I'm not sure it keeps the main characteristics of the growing block in philosophy - namely, that the A theory holds, and that the past and the present are real, but the future is not - unless perhaps one relativizes also existence, but that too might cause trouble for those metaphysical theories. But I don't know enough about the matter to be sure, so I'd like to ask whether I'm getting this right, or there is another way of keeping the A series? (or you just aren't concerned with the A series at all, and your theory is not related to metaphysical growing block theories defended by A theorists?).

I don't know enough about the matter either; but it seems to me the growing block model is in some sense orthogonal to the A-vs-B dispute. According to eternalism, future events already exist, and this doesn't conflict with conscious beings perceiving an illusory present even while embedded in the middle of a B-series. Well, assuming that's true, the same principle would apply to conscious beings embedded in the past, in the frozen interior part of a growing block. I.e., if the universe is a growing block with a 2018 growth surface, there could still right now be conscious people, immobilized in a 4-D crystal, perceiving themselves caught up in active WWI battles. They'd have no way of knowing they aren't at the surface of the block any more. And by the same token, we'd have no basis for assuming the block ends at 2018. Maybe the block is growing at 2118, or for that matter at 46,091,002,118, and we're every bit as much the frozen blocks of consciousness that eternalism says we are even though eternalism is wrong about the present existence of the year 1 trillion. We need more categories of times than just past, present and future -- we need to subdivide "the future" into the already fixed future, the currently being fixed future, and the yet to be determined so not currently existing at all yet future. If that's the case, the A series and the B series are both real -- but almost all observers who feel they're experiencing the A series in real time are mistaken.

Contrariwise, maybe frozen blocks of B-theory spacetime can't contain consciousness, and the perceived present has to be identical to the growing surface. If so, then the growing block model means the future is really nonexistent, the past really exists and is still with us but is as dead as a mammoth in Siberian ice, and the A series is the right way to think about time. What do I know?

Finally, I should add that my point was to challenge bilby's criticism of growing block theory, not to endorse it. Corresponding to the bumpy growing block model there's a bumpy presentism model, which accepts A theory whole hog while avoiding the non-relativistic preferred reference frame that comes from assuming "the present" is a flat slice through spacetime. Then we only need one more category of time: past, present, future, and "space-like separated": a category for all the events that might exist, or might have recently existed, or might be about to exist, which the cosmic speed limit guarantees we can't tell apart. As far as I can see that model is a live possibility too.

Does any of that help?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

How does a growing block universe assume the existence of a universal now? It's basically a crystal growth model -- new spacetime gets added to the surface of the block of existing spacetime. So a "universal now" would presumably be a (hyper)plane that has block of spacetime on one side, and does not yet have any spacetime on the other side, that can serve as a preferred reference frame. Which is to say, it's a face of the crystal. So why would a flat face have to exist anywhere on the growing block? Who says the crystal has to grow uniformly?

That sounds good as near as I can tell (though I admit, on this it's quite near actually ), but I'm not sure it keeps the main characteristics of the growing block in philosophy - namely, that the A theory holds, and that the past and the present are real, but the future is not - unless perhaps one relativizes also existence, but that too might cause trouble for those metaphysical theories. But I don't know enough about the matter to be sure, so I'd like to ask whether I'm getting this right, or there is another way of keeping the A series? (or you just aren't concerned with the A series at all, and your theory is not related to metaphysical growing block theories defended by A theorists?).

I don't know enough about the matter either; but it seems to me the growing block model is in some sense orthogonal to the A-vs-B dispute. According to eternalism, future events already exist, and this doesn't conflict with conscious beings perceiving an illusory present even while embedded in the middle of a B-series. Well, assuming that's true, the same principle would apply to conscious beings embedded in the past, in the frozen interior part of a growing block. I.e., if the universe is a growing block with a 2018 growth surface, there could still right now be conscious people, immobilized in a 4-D crystal, perceiving themselves caught up in active WWI battles. They'd have no way of knowing they aren't at the surface of the block any more. And by the same token, we'd have no basis for assuming the block ends at 2018. Maybe the block is growing at 2118, or for that matter at 46,091,002,118, and we're every bit as much the frozen blocks of consciousness that eternalism says we are even though eternalism is wrong about the present existence of the year 1 trillion. We need more categories of times than just past, present and future -- we need to subdivide "the future" into the already fixed future, the currently being fixed future, and the yet to be determined so not currently existing at all yet future. If that's the case, the A series and the B series are both real -- but almost all observers who feel they're experiencing the A series in real time are mistaken.

Contrariwise, maybe frozen blocks of B-theory spacetime can't contain consciousness, and the perceived present has to be identical to the growing surface. If so, then the growing block model means the future is really nonexistent, the past really exists and is still with us but is as dead as a mammoth in Siberian ice, and the A series is the right way to think about time. What do I know?

Finally, I should add that my point was to challenge bilby's criticism of growing block theory, not to endorse it. Corresponding to the bumpy growing block model there's a bumpy presentism model, which accepts A theory whole hog while avoiding the non-relativistic preferred reference frame that comes from assuming "the present" is a flat slice through spacetime. Then we only need one more category of time: past, present, future, and "space-like separated": a category for all the events that might exist, or might have recently existed, or might be about to exist, which the cosmic speed limit guarantees we can't tell apart. As far as I can see that model is a live possibility too.

Does any of that help?

Yes, thanks.

Btw, even if you weren't endorsing the growing block model, you made a pretty good argument for preferring it to the eternal block theory.

 

[DBT]

If so, how do you account for your remark? - ''In other words, the present in an eternal universe is something moving through the universe, like a ghost, like a consciousness.'' - Ryan.

Observation, apparently, is an activity?

Are we getting stuck in semantics? The universe would remain static in an eternal universe. But sure, of course there is the activity of something observing all of the non-activity. The activity that I was referring to is about brains and everything that is observed.

What does an eternal block time universe entail in practical,physical terms ? You as a baby still being born? The toddler, Your teenage self, etc, frozen for eternity because conscious attention is focused on your perceived current self?

And your so called future self....all configured in an infinity of frozen poses waiting for the ghost of consciousness to provide an illusion of life and movement?

Th infinite events of so called history frozen like frames in a movie reel? The future also frozen like a infinite collection of stills, like statues in a Museum, awaiting to be defined by passing consciousness?

 

[ryan]

If so, how do you account for your remark? - ''In other words, the present in an eternal universe is something moving through the universe, like a ghost, like a consciousness.'' - Ryan.

Observation, apparently, is an activity?

Are we getting stuck in semantics? The universe would remain static in an eternal universe. But sure, of course there is the activity of something observing all of the non-activity. The activity that I was referring to is about brains and everything that is observed.

What does an eternal block time universe entail in practical,physical terms ? You as a baby still being born? The toddler, Your teenage self, etc, frozen for eternity because conscious attention is focused on your perceived current self?

But what's the difference between this eternal universe and the universe we are in (except for the possibility of an undetermined universe, which you never seemed to believe in anyways)?

And your so called future self....all configured in an infinity of frozen poses waiting for the ghost of consciousness to provide an illusion of life and movement?

Why not?

Th infinite events of so called history frozen like frames in a movie reel? The future also frozen like a infinite collection of stills, like statues in a Museum, awaiting to be defined by passing consciousness?

I am surprised that you don't like this. Einstein told us about this already, and you have always had ontological trust in science.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I confess I'm always a bit confused with these 'block' models. The way I see it is nice and simple: time is organisation. I have a simple diagnostic thought experiment: Consider the sentence 'All change in the universe stopped for a thousand years'. If this sentence makes sense to you then I reckon you are a time dualist - there's something more to time than just organisation; something outside of the universe keeping score. At that point I have nothing to say.

If however, that sentence makes no sense and that there is no time in a stopped universe, then you are a time monist. At which point, the questions get easier to answer. The future and the past are here right now, they are just organised differently. It's the changing organisation that we call time. There are a rather large number of timebases out there, human and natural, swirling and dripping and swinging and buzzing and falling and decaying away to themselves. It's all organisation, changing organisation following the imperfectly understood organisation of the laws of physics. What we use as a clock is as much a matter of convention and convenience as anything else. Sure, it's all relative, but that's just recognising that there's no master clock out there, no Greenwich mean time beyond convention.

As for the past and future, if you really want to grasp the issues play with Conway's life and rapidly you will realise that while, at least in this deterministic sandbox, the future can be predicted from the past, but retrodiction is impossible - there's only one possible T5 state given any T4 state, but there's a multiplicity of states at T3 that could lead to T4. That doesn't mean that the past doesn't exist, just that the details of the organisation of it isn't implicit in an overdetermined manner. In short, I think time is, like so many things, something quite simple in principle, if complex in action that we desperately overthink.

I'm quite keen on time. Perhaps unhealthily so. I do things like this:



to relax. Mind you, they often end up like this:

 

[DBT]

What does an eternal block time universe entail in practical,physical terms ? You as a baby still being born? The toddler, Your teenage self, etc, frozen for eternity because conscious attention is focused on your perceived current self?

But what's the difference between this eternal universe and the universe we are in (except for the possibility of an undetermined universe, which you never seemed to believe in anyways)?

If what we call time is merely relative rates of change within any given system, there is no past. Past events are gone. Unlike block time, they exist no more. Nor does the future. The only reality being the relative rates of change within any given system,.

Why not?

Why, because the whole of this block time universe is frozen like frames in a reel of film, and the impression of time and change is merely the illusion of consciousness.

If block time is a reality, you are still there in your cradle as a baby, Nero is still there as an Emperor of Rome, All the wars and killings in history still exist, the swords embedded in bodies, the bullets tearing through flesh, the victims forever screaming in pain. That is your block time universe.

 

[bilby]

If what we call time is merely relative rates of change within any given system, there is no past. Past events are gone. Unlike block time, they exist no more. Nor does the future. The only reality being the relative rates of change within any given system,.

Why not?

Why, because the whole of this block time universe is frozen like frames in a reel of film, and the impression of time and change is merely the illusion of consciousness.

If block time is a reality, you are still there in your cradle as a baby, Nero is still there as an Emperor of Rome, The wars and killings still exist, the swords embedded in bodies, the bullets tearing through flesh, the victims forever screaming in pain. That is your block time universe.

That's right.

What's the problem?

Reality is under no obligation to be pleasant, nor to conform with our preconceptions.

In a block time model, everything is in existence. Time is a dimension, and any location in time is as real as any other; Just as every location in space is as real as any other. We can't see this without taking a higher dimensional perspective, but that doesn't mean it cannot be real.

It's just a model. To refute it, you need to show that it entails a contradiction. There's nothing contradictory about a First World War soldier being shot in 1915, or about that event being part of reality just as much as the guy typing a TFT post in 2018. It might not be so - the past and/or future may be different in ways that render this model impossible. But until we demonstrate that, we can't justify rejecting the model just because it seems strange to us - lots of reality seems strange to us.

 

[ruby sparks]

One can't refute the idea, but why accept it? Why even give it consideration? Does it change anything? Can it be used to make any predictions?

To me, it has a whiff of.....something odd, namely the idea that 'something' (consciousness?) moves through these 'time locations'. Why should consciousness do that? I do hope it's not another case of reifying misteeriousss consciousness. Wouldn't there be by far the vast majority of 'time places' concurrently existing with no consciousness to experience them?

No, I'm preferring the usual model. Time passes with or without us and doesn't give a flying fuck about the fun experiences we have naturally and comparatively recently evolved to have. We're not that important.

 

[Subsymbolic]

If what we call time is merely relative rates of change within any given system, there is no past. Past events are gone. Unlike block time, they exist no more. Nor does the future. The only reality being the relative rates of change within any given system,.

Why not?

Why, because the whole of this block time universe is frozen like frames in a reel of film, and the impression of time and change is merely the illusion of consciousness.

If block time is a reality, you are still there in your cradle as a baby, Nero is still there as an Emperor of Rome, The wars and killings still exist, the swords embedded in bodies, the bullets tearing through flesh, the victims forever screaming in pain. That is your block time universe.

That's right.

What's the problem?

Reality is under no obligation to be pleasant, nor to conform with our preconceptions.

In a block time model, everything is in existence. Time is a dimension, and any location in time is as real as any other; Just as every location in space is as real as any other. We can't see this without taking a higher dimensional perspective, but that doesn't mean it cannot be real.

It's just a model. To refute it, you need to show that it entails a contradiction. There's nothing contradictory about a First World War soldier being shot in 1915, or about that event being part of reality just as much as the guy typing a TFT post in 2018. It might not be so - the past and/or future may be different in ways that render this model impossible. But until we demonstrate that, we can't justify rejecting the model just because it seems strange to us - lots of reality seems strange to us.

Where's the stuff that makes 1915 and 2018? In the case of space, as you travel you move, leaving the matter that makes, say New York, behind and moving towards the matter that makes Washington. When you deploy this as a metaphor for travelling through time, this aspect simply doesn't work. The matter that makes 1915 isn't left behind and the matter that makes up 2018 moved towards. The commonsense fact that changes is change in organisation seems hard to square with this movement metaphor.

If every moment is its own point in space and time, such that it can be revisited, if only we knew how, then I guess I'd want to know where the stuff that makes now, the next moment and the moment before is coming from. Because on this model each moment needs to be instantiated in stuff and that seems to mean you'd need a lot of stuff. The parsiomony of the time is change model is that the past just gets recycled - it's the same stuff only organised differently, following causal rules we understand increasingly well.

On this blocks model I just don't see how you can even motivate causation. Take oxidation or reduction - on the commonsense model you can see a material gaining or losing electrons - a change of state is a change of organisation. On this block model you have one block with electrons in one place and another with electrons in another. However, the loss of electrons and gain of electrons isn't a change in organisation because the two states are co-existent in some sort of timeless transcendental space. The question of how they are ion one place at T1 and another at T2 seems unanswered to me. As a result, I can't see how anyone can ground a theory of causation in this model. In fact I can't see how inductive inference can be grounded here and that means I can't see how science can be grounded. If anyone can tell that story I'm all ears.

 

[ruby sparks]

.... I guess I'd want to know where the stuff that makes now....

I don't see how you would even know when 'now' is. Your 'now', now, might be in the past.

Whoops. Somebody already said that.

 

[Subsymbolic]

.... I guess I'd want to know where the stuff that makes now....

I don't see how you would even know when 'now' is. Your 'now', now, might be in the past.

Whoops. Somebody already said that.

That's why I very deliberately framed it in a relative context.

...now, the next moment and the moment...

Terms like 'future' and 'past' really only make sense locally, conventionally and as a matter of relation, given propagation of effect. As you said earlier, the universe doesn't care about monkeys with an over developed sense of importance.

 

[ryan]

If what we call time is merely relative rates of change within any given system, there is no past. Past events are gone. Unlike block time, they exist no more. Nor does the future. The only reality being the relative rates of change within any given system,.

Where does it all go then? How would you explain what happens to everything? And more importantly, in QM theory, time travel occurs at the microscopic level.

Why not?

Why, because the whole of this block time universe is frozen like frames in a reel of film, and the impression of time and change is merely the illusion of consciousness.

If block time is a reality, you are still there in your cradle as a baby, Nero is still there as an Emperor of Rome, All the wars and killings in history still exist, the swords embedded in bodies, the bullets tearing through flesh, the victims forever screaming in pain. That is your block time universe.

What bilby said.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Where does it all go then?

Past, present and future are states of organisation. They get reorganised into the states that compose the present. The rules of the reorganisation are what we call the laws of physics. Simple.

How would explain what happens to everything?

It gets reorganised into something else.

And more importantly, in QM theory, time travel occurs at the microscopic level.

All the proper physicists I know are very clear that the only language you can talk about QM in is maths and that any translation is misleading bollocks. I'm not a good enough mathematician to say, but it sounds pretty likely.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Well, it's a whole new perspective and again it's just going out on another limb.

On that limb, some very familiar things seem no longer to make sense. Causation, change, gravity, even space. You would have to make a tremendously impossible imaginatory effort to conceive of such a block time universe.

And, you'd have no clue whatsoever as to why in the name of God consciousness should be at all characterised by a sense of the passage of time, the sense that things are always changing. It's not just remembering the past. It's also the sense of change right now. Each instant is change. How could you possibly account for that?

And gravity? If time was a space dimension, then gravity isn't what we think of it, i.e. something that can cause things to move. Because nothing is moving.

Except, somehow, our impression of where we are exactly along this spatial dimension.

And it can't really be spatial since it would have properties different from those of ordinary space.

We could just as well fancy that we're just as many angels dancing on a pinhead. Prove to me that one isn't true!
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

And more importantly, in QM theory, time travel occurs at the microscopic level.

All the proper physicists I know are very clear that the only language you can talk about QM in is maths and that any translation is misleading bollocks. I'm not a good enough mathematician to say, but it sounds pretty likely.

Yeah, exactly, good point.

And that's obviously true of everyday life as well, except, here, the proper languages are things like English and French, and I suspect Chinese and Russian but I'm not going to list all of them here.

But definitely not mathematics. Sorry, lads, if that's your only language, some of you!
EB

 

[ryan]

Past, present and future are states of organisation. They get reorganised into the states that compose the present. The rules of the reorganisation are what we call the laws of physics. Simple.

Except that objects in time works like shapes the same way they do in other 3 dimensions. We know this experimentally because of time dilation and length contractions. At high speeds, the dimensions of time and parallel spatial dimensions contract/dilate. In other words, things behave as if they are 4 dimensional objects.

And more importantly, in QM theory, time travel occurs at the microscopic level.

All the proper physicists I know are very clear that the only language you can talk about QM in is maths and that any translation is misleading bollocks. I'm not a good enough mathematician to say, but it sounds pretty likely.

What do you mean by translations? Can you give some examples?

 

[Bomb#20]

Imagine yourself a two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional universe. You're familiar with left/right and forward/backward, but you have no concept of up/down and nothing in your experience to give it to you. Now imagine being told the universe is three-dimensional and your world is just one of many slices through a larger reality. You'd feel the same way and ask the same questions: where's the matter that makes these extra slices coming from? Well, obviously not from anywhere you can see, since you can only see in your own slice, but that doesn't mean it's not there. This is what the possible existence of higher dimensions means.

From our 3-D perspective we know a 2-D being wouldn't have an answer, even though there is one: we can look around and see the 3-D matter all those 2-D slices are made from. So we reason by analogy, and recognize that there might be a 4-D world full of 4-D matter that 3-D slices could be made from. The fact that we can't see any or even visualize it with our evolved-for-3-D brains isn't a good reason to conclude it doesn't exist.

With that preamble, consider the following scenario. You have a mass of lava that flowed into a volcano that didn't quite erupt. As the lava cools, it starts to freeze. Freezing is localized -- the whole mass doesn't suddenly change from liquid to solid all at once. Crystals form and then they grow. If you've looked closely at a crystal you've probably seen flaws in the crystal structure, little lines where the molecules don't all line up. Flaws are visible because they're much bigger than rock molecules, because the molecules don't freeze onto a growing crystal at random. Rather, where they fasten depends on what's already there on the crystal's surface that they can fasten onto. So an initial random irregularity at one point on the surface can propagate to layer after layer. Flaws grow along with the crystal, in directions that depend on their initial conditions. Two adjacent flaws can grow in different directions, and may bump into one another as more layers of molecules are added. If you could somehow get into the liquid rock and watch the crystal growing, you'd see a solid surface with little defects on it. And as the crystal grows, the defects would move, not just toward you as the crystal grows, but relative to one another. Study them long enough and you could work out a whole physics of within-surface defect movement. And if the rules were complicated enough, maybe organisms made of moving crystal surface defects could evolve. Presto: from their point of view, 2-D beings in a 2-D world, asking themselves how there could possibly be a third dimension, a dimension of time.


(sorry I accidently hit edit instead of reply - I've fixed it, assuming you are happy - sorry for the mess up.)

 

[Subsymbolic]

Except that objects in time works like shapes the same way they do in other 3 dimensions. We know this experimentally because of time dilation and length contractions. At high speeds, the dimensions of time and parallel spatial dimensions contract/dilate. In other words, things behave as if they are 4 dimensional objects.

I'm not so sure about this. The whole point about time dilation is that it only happens relative to something else - it's about the interaction between two frames of reference. There's no such thing as mere high speed - it's always an interaction between two frames of reference any one of which could be though of as the one moving at speed or the one standing still relative to the other. So no, I don';t think it works like that at all.

All the proper physicists I know are very clear that the only language you can talk about QM in is maths and that any translation is misleading bollocks. I'm not a good enough mathematician to say, but it sounds pretty likely.

What do you mean by translations?

Trying to say in natural language what is described very carefully in the formal language of maths or logic

Can you give some examples?

Nope, as I said, I'm not a good enough physicist. I'm trusting physicists who I have known and shared coffee and cake with over many years to be right. I can name drop if you want.

- - - Updated - - -

Imagine yourself a two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional universe. You're familiar with left/right and forward/backward, but you have no concept of up/down and nothing in your experience to give it to you. Now imagine being told the universe is three-dimensional and your world is just one of many slices through a larger reality.

Cool, up to speed on that, Abbot, Rucker and so on.

You'd feel the same way and ask the same questions: where's the matter that makes these extra slices coming from? Well, obviously not from anywhere you can see, since you can only see in your own slice, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

But that assumes, quite incorrectly, that I only have a posteriori resources to play with. That's never true. I always have a priori tools as well and I can imagine and work with as many dimensions as I like in that universe as in this, by, for example defining a logical space with position described indexically, or any other geometrical tool of pure maths I fancy bringing to bear.

This is what the possible existence of higher dimensions means.

I'm not sure it is.

From our 3-D perspective we know a 2-D being wouldn't have an answer, even though there is one: we can look around and see the 3-D matter all those 2-D slices are made from. So we reason by analogy, and recognize that there might be a 4-D world full of 4-D matter that 3-D slices could be made from. The fact that we can't see any or even visualize it with our evolved-for-3-D brains isn't a good reason to conclude it doesn't exist.

But now you are being inconsistent - on the one hand you are assuming we'd lack the a priori tools to think about x dimensions and on the other hand you are assuming we have them to reason about by analogy - sure, but we have far sharper tools than that. As it happens, I suggest you read Rucker's blatantly named The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There. It's a bit of a kerfuffle, but I can assure you that we can visualise four dimensions.

With that preamble, consider the following scenario. You have a mass of lava that flowed into a volcano that didn't quite erupt. As the lava cools, it starts to freeze. Freezing is localized -- the whole mass doesn't suddenly change from liquid to solid all at once. Crystals form and then they grow. If you've looked closely at a crystal you've probably seen flaws in the crystal structure, little lines where the molecules don't all line up. Flaws are visible because they're much bigger than rock molecules, because the molecules don't freeze onto a growing crystal at random. Rather, where they fasten depends on what's already there on the crystal's surface that they can fasten onto. So an initial random irregularity at one point on the surface can propagate to layer after layer. Flaws grow along with the crystal, in directions that depend on their initial conditions. Two adjacent flaws can grow in different directions, and may bump into one another as more layers of molecules are added. If you could somehow get into the liquid rock and watch the crystal growing, you'd see a solid surface with little defects on it. And as the crystal grows, the defects would move, not just toward you as the crystal grows, but relative to one another. Study them long enough and you could work out a whole physics of within-surface defect movement.

Sure, look at the simulated annealing in spinglasses model used as the learning algorithm in Boltzmann machines. It already exists, but...

And if the rules were complicated enough, maybe organisms made of moving crystal surface defects could evolve.

Ok, but you are setting up an immensely complex and baroque thought experiment to get across a simple idea - 2d is a slice of 3d and things that appear unconnected can be connected.

Presto: from their point of view, 2-D beings in a 2-D world, asking themselves how there could possibly be a third dimension, a dimension of time.

Cool. I get it.

Now here's the problem. If we lived in a world like that, then we'd be constantly struck by the consequences of that connection. For example, action at a distance woudl be commonplace - imagine a 3d tree growing through a 2d slice - pull one branch along a 2d plane and other branches would move mysteriously. I could carry on, but once I point out this issue, I assume as many problem cases as you wish will become clear. You know, variable inertia depending on how much stuff we can't see the thing is connected to and so on. If this model was right then physics as we understand it simply wouldn't work. Induction would fail and the world would be much older than it is.

Then of course there's the fact that time isn't a dimension in the same way as a tesseract inhabits the fourth dimension - the traditional model is something like 'at ninety degrees' time isn't like that at all.
Spatial metaphors for time are just a bad idea.