Time is Illusory

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Some Schmo
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Time is Illusory

Post by Some Schmo »

Everyone who ages has had the experience of time seeming to speed up as we get older. I've formulated several hypotheses about this phenomenon over the years:

- The longer you've been alive, the smaller a percentage of your life each day is
- The older you get, the more of a daily routine you have
- People tend to drift/stare into space and lose time more often as they age
- People pay less attention to what's happening around them as time goes by
- If gravity affects the perception of time, perhaps feeling the weight of the world is speeding it up
- Etc.

But really, I think it comes down to one fundamental fact about our consciousness: The more often we think about the time (or look at a clock), the slower time will appear to go.

When you're young, you think about time constantly. How long is this going to take? When will we get there? Are we there yet? How long am I grounded? When's bedtime? How long is recess? I have six more weeks of summer vacation. Five days until my birthday.

With age comes some measure of patience, at least with respect to how long things generally take. We've had countless experiences of things we are excited about coming and going. Actually, it's all kinds of experience that make us obsess less and less about time the more of it we've had. I just think that as you get older, you don't care about what time it is as much as you used to.

What say you?
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Gadianton
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Re: Time is Illusory

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I always figured it was your first and second option.

Included in 2, going on autopilot when driving long distances (commuting) and focusing on tasks.

I've wondered if kids these days who have been raised by computers feel like their childhood whizzes by; maybe that's why at age 20 they're where a normal person is at 10. (okay not really the last part).
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Re: Time is Illusory

Post by honorentheos »

I have never seen a study on it as qualifier that this is just my speculative musings. I postulate it has to do with the capacity to loss ones sense of self and self-importance. Narcissism is inherent in childhood when everything takes foooooorrrrttteeeeeeevvvvvveeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...and the longest night is Christmas Eve when one anticipated what they might find under the tree just for them. Yet even as a kid time flew by when one was gratifying ones wants. Time wasn't only slow when young ...

On the other hand, flow comes when one loses oneself in a task. With age, one first develops a theory of other minds, empathy, and other developments that blunt the hard edges of childhood self-importance. And eventually situates themselves in one of the varying degrees of meaninglessness of ones importance that is perspective.

But I don't know. It's an interesting thing to speculate on.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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I'm wouldn't say time is illusory. Our relationship with time is illusory. We live within the fabric of space/time. There is no escaping it. It's not just age. When there are no more children to take care of, or no job to work, your life becomes more your own. You can take the time to do the things you want to do without rushing.

This may be an off-the-wall example, but I used to ride a racing bike. I had a cyclometer. For my exercise regimen, I had to ride X miles in Y minutes. Now that I'm older, I ride an E-bike. I don't care about how fast I go downhill. I care about staying in shape and enjoying my ride. When I ride now, it's not just about spinning the pedals, it's about enjoying the ride. I'm never going to be as fast as I used to be. Just feel the wind.

When you're younger, you're always thinking about the future: about your job, about your family. After a certain age, the future has pretty much taken care of itself. You stop trying to control the future, and start to live more and more in the now.
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Re: Time is Illusory

Post by Gunnar »

Gadianton wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 2:32 am
I always figured it was your first and second option.

Included in 2, going on autopilot when driving long distances (commuting) and focusing on tasks.

I've wondered if kids these days who have been raised by computers feel like their childhood whizzes by; maybe that's why at age 20 they're where a normal person is at 10. (okay not really the last part).
I'm with you on this one. I have long ago concluded that the first option SS mentioned is probably the most important cause of this phenomenon, with option 2 being second. In my opinion, the other options mentioned in this thread very likely contribute as well, but are not nearly as determinative as the first 2
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Re: Time is Illusory

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This may not be quite the concept of time that y'all are discussing but it might be a sidelight. Physics seems ambiguous about what exactly time is.

In quantum mechanics time is a measure of change. "How things are" is a vector in unimaginably many dimensions, and as time proceeds the vector rotates around through those many directions. It's as if you're watching a movie as it plays. However things used to be, that no longer exists; however they may be going to become, that does not exist yet. Only the present is real.

The perspective of Einsteinian relativity, on the other hand, says that time is just like space, only different. In particular the speed of light is really just a unit convention, like the way there are special units of length associated with horses. A furlong is nothing but a certain fraction of a mile, a hand is nothing but so many inches, but horse heights are in hands and horse races in furlongs. In the same way that a hand is four inches, a nanosecond is about a foot.

The reason for using our traditional time units, of course, is that if you're dealing with a situation in which lengths are a few feet, then a foot of time (being a nanosecond) is probably far too short a time for convenient use. You're probably dealing with durations of at least several seconds, so billions of feet. If you're going to be using feet for all your lengths and Gigafeet for all your times, well, those are different words for the units anyway, so you might as well call the Gigafeet seconds—as we do.

If a foot is a nanosecond, then what distance is a year? A light-year, of course. The speed of light is simply the conversion factor between our units for space and for time. It's not really a number that God had to choose.

Anyway the implication of time being just like space is that past, present, and future are all always there, the same way New York and LA and Chicago are all always there. We just move from one to the other. We've left the past behind (and we won't go back there again); we haven't yet arrived at the future. But those other times beside the present are still real and still there, like Paris or Tokyo, even when we don't happen to be there as well.

Which perspective is right? I don't think anyone can really say right now. Perhaps in the future.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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The longer you've been alive, the smaller a percentage of your life each day is
I think it's this above everything else.

I believe time only exists in our earthly dimension. It's something God invented for us. For God time is just one eternal now. That's very abstract and impossible to make sense of but that's what I believe.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 9:07 am
This may not be quite the concept of time that y'all are discussing but it might be a sidelight. Physics seems ambiguous about what exactly time is.

In quantum mechanics time is a measure of change. "How things are" is a vector in unimaginably many dimensions, and as time proceeds the vector rotates around through those many directions. It's as if you're watching a movie as it plays. However things used to be, that no longer exists; however they may be going to become, that does not exist yet. Only the present is real.

The perspective of Einsteinian relativity, on the other hand, says that time is just like space, only different. In particular the speed of light is really just a unit convention, like the way there are special units of length associated with horses. A furlong is nothing but a certain fraction of a mile, a hand is nothing but so many inches, but horse heights are in hands and horse races in furlongs. In the same way that a hand is four inches, a nanosecond is about a foot.

The reason for using our traditional time units, of course, is that if you're dealing with a situation in which lengths are a few feet, then a foot of time (being a nanosecond) is probably far too short a time for convenient use. You're probably dealing with durations of at least several seconds, so billions of feet. If you're going to be using feet for all your lengths and Gigafeet for all your times, well, those are different words for the units anyway, so you might as well call the Gigafeet seconds—as we do.

If a foot is a nanosecond, then what distance is a year? A light-year, of course. The speed of light is simply the conversion factor between our units for space and for time. It's not really a number that God had to choose.

Anyway the implication of time being just like space is that past, present, and future are all always there, the same way New York and LA and Chicago are all always there. We just move from one to the other. We've left the past behind (and we won't go back there again); we haven't yet arrived at the future. But those other times beside the present are still real and still there, like Paris or Tokyo, even when we don't happen to be there as well.

Which perspective is right? I don't think anyone can really say right now. Perhaps in the future.
That makes much more sense the way you explain that. What I get hung up on is the fact that time always seems to be passing. I can't really conceive of time not passing. Perhaps if you're somehow everywhere at once?

From a philosophical perspective do you think it's possible for God or any other being to see the future. And if God were to reveal the future to a being in the past and changed his actions according to a warning, would that not be backward causation and illogical? I guess it's similar to the question of is it possible to go back in time and kill your granparents?
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Re: Time is Illusory

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MeDotOrg wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 5:06 am
I'm wouldn't say time is illusory. Our relationship with time is illusory. We live within the fabric of space/time. There is no escaping it.
I thought about this, but it occurred to me that time is only perceived by animals, or consciousness, and the observation of it seems different depending on the state of your mind in that moment.

Plus, I can't get past the concept of time being different depending on the strength of the gravity you're experiencing. If it changes depending on where you are in the universe, it sure seems illusory to me.
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Re: Time is Illusory

Post by Gadianton »

Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 9:07 am
This may not be quite the concept of time that y'all are discussing but it might be a sidelight. Physics seems ambiguous about what exactly time is.

In quantum mechanics time is a measure of change. "How things are" is a vector in unimaginably many dimensions, and as time proceeds the vector rotates around through those many directions. It's as if you're watching a movie as it plays. However things used to be, that no longer exists; however they may be going to become, that does not exist yet. Only the present is real.

The perspective of Einsteinian relativity, on the other hand, says that time is just like space, only different. In particular the speed of light is really just a unit convention, like the way there are special units of length associated with horses. A furlong is nothing but a certain fraction of a mile, a hand is nothing but so many inches, but horse heights are in hands and horse races in furlongs. In the same way that a hand is four inches, a nanosecond is about a foot.

The reason for using our traditional time units, of course, is that if you're dealing with a situation in which lengths are a few feet, then a foot of time (being a nanosecond) is probably far too short a time for convenient use. You're probably dealing with durations of at least several seconds, so billions of feet. If you're going to be using feet for all your lengths and Gigafeet for all your times, well, those are different words for the units anyway, so you might as well call the Gigafeet seconds—as we do.

If a foot is a nanosecond, then what distance is a year? A light-year, of course. The speed of light is simply the conversion factor between our units for space and for time. It's not really a number that God had to choose.

Anyway the implication of time being just like space is that past, present, and future are all always there, the same way New York and LA and Chicago are all always there. We just move from one to the other. We've left the past behind (and we won't go back there again); we haven't yet arrived at the future. But those other times beside the present are still real and still there, like Paris or Tokyo, even when we don't happen to be there as well.

Which perspective is right? I don't think anyone can really say right now. Perhaps in the future.
This is the kind of thing to wake up and get a cup of coffee to, not the nonsense over at Sic et Non, for example. I think with 'time' there is a lot of conflating -- to use a favorite word of Cultellus' -- between logic and physical reality. In logic, the past present and future are equally fixed and you're not going to get anywhere speculating a priori on the future maybe being different. But then you read something like this and it sounds a whole lot like another conversation in logic.

Then there is the 'feeling' of time passing. Is it really a feeling or an ingredient to other basic feelings?

In vision, as part of the rod, there is a 'conjucated' -- alternating single and double bonds -- molecule that directly interacts with light, and the more conjugated, the higher frequency sensed. Getting from that mechanism to what if anything the 'feeling' is, is so far unanswered.

I did look up the aging question though, got to at least see what Google says, and some guy at Harvard has an explanation:

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019 ... get-older/
Focusing on visual perception, Bejan posits that slower processing times result in us perceiving fewer ‘frames-per-second’ – more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. This is what leads to time passing more rapidly.
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