Temporal Paradigm

Whether this is a hard supposition for you to accept really comes down to your temporal paradigm: your mental schema with regard to time and it's depth. To clarify, if you don't believe time exists, or is ultimately an illusion, or is actually an effect caused by casual information encoded between interactions, just substitute in whatever you consider time to really be and follow-along using whatever you have identified it as.

I have noticed many people who believe the Earth to only be several thousand years old having a harder time grasping natural processes that take millions or billions of years to unfold. The temporal paradigm of deep time, as espoused by James Hutton and popularized by Charles Lyell, completely reshaped our understanding of nature and the mechanics that underpin it's transformations.

It was this insight that the Earth was hundreds of millions if not billions of years old that was enormously influential in Charles Darwin's discovery of evolution by natural selection. Such a theory only makes sense to explain the incredible diversity in nature if it has such vast time scales through which to operate.

In a way similar to how deep time was a revolution in our understanding of how natural processes and forces can create tremendous variety and complexity in nature, an eternal temporal paradigm opens doors far beyond what we can begin to comprehend.

Temporal Paradigm

See Also