“Let us begin stressing the fact that according to Prigogine time leads us to man and not vice versa; man be not the creator of time. This position is totally different from what the physicist John Archibald Wheeler thinks: for him, man, the observer, his consciousness, creates time, which would not be there nor exists in a world without men and their consciousness. On the other hand, Ilya Prigogine thinks of man as being part of this flow of irreversibility which is one of the essential elements, consubstantial to the universe (Prigogine 1988: 21) and finds its essential role along the path followed by Henri Bergson.
Time is a subject of science just because it has a fundamental and main role in an evolutional universe, irreversible, and complex, in which reversibility and simplicity are just particular cases. Man himself comes from time: time, if it was created by man, would be a screen between nature and man himself. This idea of time prior-to-man belongs to a vision of continuous evolution of the universe, where gravitation and thermodynamics are in continuous dialectic.”
[I know I’m putting out a lot of stuff about Prigogine and Time but I’ve wanted to grasp his perspective for a long time, just never took the time to do so until now -Ken. Also: I did _not_ expect to see Wheeler mentioned. I’ll be pondering that for a bit]