Do physicists think time actually exists? I wonder if someone has reasoned that time is an accounting method that humans have developed to make sense of their experienced change of systems.

Wolfram uses the words progression and computation a lot in his essay, but there’s an implicit bias there of assuming a process is deterministic, or has some state it’s driving towards. But none of these “progressions” mean anything, I think. It seems they are simply reactions subject to thermodynamics.

If no one observed these system changes, then the trends, patterns, and periodicity of these systems would just be a consequence of physics. It seems what we call “time” is more the accumulation of an effect rather than a separate aspect of physics.

For example, I wonder what happens in physics simulations if time is replaced by a measure of effect amplitude. I don’t know, tbh, I am not a physicist so maybe this is all naïve and nonsense.