Time. It haunts physics, philosophy, and everyday thought alike. We argue about whether it flows, whether it exists independently, whether it is an illusion. Entire frameworks of metaphysics and science are built around it. And yet, despite centuries of attention, the debate rarely resolves. Why?
This post shows that the problem is not a lack of insight or measurement, but a structural misalignment: the persistence of a thing-based ontology when the phenomena themselves demand a relational view.
The Question
“Is time real?” or, more dramatically, “Is time an illusion?”
Presented sympathetically, this is urgent. We feel the world passing around us; we sequence events, remember the past, anticipate the future. Physics tells us that clocks measure intervals, that entropy increases, that relativity warps simultaneity. The question feels legitimate — almost unavoidable.
Why It Feels Legitimate
Several pressures give rise to it:
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Human experience: We perceive succession and change, so it seems time must exist independently.
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Physical theory (classical intuition): Newtonian mechanics treats time as uniform and absolute; events are stamped along a universal timeline.
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Everyday coordination: Societies, schedules, and routines assume a single flowing temporal medium.
All these pressures converge to make the question of time’s reality seem foundational.
The Hidden Commitments
The question silently assumes:
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Time as object: That there is a “thing” called time, with existence independent of events.
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Universal simultaneity: That there is a privileged frame from which all events can be ordered absolutely.
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Substantiality of passage: That “flow” or “passing” must correspond to something intrinsic, not emergent from relationships between events.
These commitments are rarely articulated, but they anchor the debate. Without them, asking whether time “really exists” becomes nonsensical.
The Endless Loop
Once these assumptions are in place, debate loops endlessly:
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Realist camp: Time exists independently; physics only measures it imperfectly.
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Anti-realist / illusionist camp: Time is emergent, subjective, or a convenient abstraction; it has no intrinsic reality.
Neither position can escape the same foundational assumptions. The debate is bound to oscillate, because it is framed to demand a binary answer from a phenomenon that refuses binaries.
The Structural Diagnosis
The problem is not physics, philosophy, or perception individually — it is the thing-based framing itself.
Relativity shows the structural issue: intervals between events are not absolute; simultaneity is perspectival. What persists across frames is relations between processes, not a universal temporal metric. The very language of “time” as a thing is already misleading.
Once we shift the unit of analysis from “things in time” to relations between events, the traditional metaphysical question dissolves. Time is not a thing to be found or denied; it is a pattern of relations actualised perspectivally. Clocks, memories, and causal sequences are phenomena, not evidence for a substrate called time.
What to Ask Instead
A relational perspective does not leave us aimless; it points to questions that actually move inquiry forward:
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How do relations between events constrain and shape perceived intervals?
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Under what conditions do temporal patterns stabilise and persist across perspectives?
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How does the actualisation of events from structured potential generate the appearance of flow?
These questions are actionable because they stay within the relational frame: they describe how temporal phenomena emerge, rather than demanding an impossible verification of “time itself.”
Closing
Time ceases to be a metaphysical puzzle when we stop treating it as a thing. It is not that the world loses structure or consistency; it is that our question shifts from seeking a verdict about existence to tracing actualisation within relational patterns.
Seen through this lens, many of the debates that have haunted philosophy for centuries are not failures of reasoning — they are artefacts of the wrong frame. The moment we adopt the relational ontology outlined in the origin story, the question “Is time real?” stops being meaningful. And in its place, inquiry moves toward understanding the structures that make temporal phenomena appear as they do.
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