Waves, particles, and the arrow of time

Light acts like a wave and like a particle, a paradox that turned Physics into Alice in Wonderland. A shock they have not recovered from nearly 100 years on.

Yet isn't the same true of time, of our lives...?

Every moment feels unique, and individuum. Yet days feel like waves of moments, time harmonises, crescendos. The very activities we engage in glue moments seamlessly together.

So maybe the same is true of light as time, perhaps light and time are more closely related...

So...

The stuttering machine gun fire of moments transpires, or is experienced...
It feels like Time's Arrow, true, but if space and time are part of the same thing, then all times must exist at once...

Everybody knows the tale of how, when one of his close friends died, Einstein consoled his widow by saying, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. We convinced physicists know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” 

Not very diplomatic but clearly a strongly held conviction. And if time is ever present, then our experience of it must be unreliable - right?

As we experience time, we create a narrative. We create 'false' narratives... We retrospectively fit explanations of the million events to include cause and effect, despite our unconsciously driven behaviour and despite therefore the fact we none of us choose more than a tiny fraction of our actions. 

Heavens, we don't even think before we speak - that is, almost nobody does .... So, if almost all our behaviours are unconscious, then the weaving of a false narrative, contrived after the fact, and the way we introduce our rationale into the narrative, must necessarily be almost universally untrue.

In other words, when we say "why" Fred did this and "why" George then did that, these are by definition almost always fabrications. Not least because they imply free will and intention.

In fact - "why" not only implies intention as a linguistic device, it also - in so doing - invents the fiction of intention.

Perhaps "why" is therefore an unhelpful concept, peculiar to our physiology.

After all, free will is a non debate. Kahneman and Tverski's findings help us understand how people make decisions, but they also indicate we have no knowledge ourselves of the true drivers of our own decisions. They can only be discovered from the outside, by experiment, and, as such, are predictable into the future.

And, as Daniel Dennett confirmed, we have no introspective access into our own cognitive processes and therefore our own reports of such things are a "treacherous incubator of lies". 

Instead, time happens, is always happening. All the slices of bread are there, and it is us who move through them, with no knowledge even of our own purpose.

In this way, we experience time as a series of moments - each moment leading to the next, each action inexorably causing the future in an imaginary  causative way, yet seen from the outside in Einstein's model, time is not a stuttering series of minutely interlinked moments. 

But I just wonder if all things have different emergent properties when grouped together, and if so whether these are in some way analagous to the duality of light.

Take animals that swarm, birds that flock, humans that crowd. Any natural phenomena that takes a new shape when joined with more of it's kind.

This may not tell us much about each of these 'waves', but, inevitably, leads us to an idea about the sum of all things, and the phrase 'in my Fathers' house, there are many mansions'.