Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa
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Re: Time is Illusory

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ajax18 wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 2:11 pm
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?
I love to try to figure this stuff out, even though I don’t have a good grasp of the physics. I wonder if time passes for a photon. At the speed of light, distance contacts to zero on the direction it is traveling, so it’s like being everywhere along its path once.

Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Some Schmo wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 2:14 pm
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.
I’m not sure I follow why this makes time illusory? Why isn’t it a real thing that is affected by gravity?
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:23 am
Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
That's one way of looking at it. The very fact that you exist at all in this timeline proves that no one, including you, ever went back and killed your own grandparents before you were born in this timeline. But, it doesn't preclude the possibility that there might be some parallel timeline in which, because those who might otherwise have become your grandparents, were killed before your parents were born, neither your parents nor you ever existed. Some have speculated that at every possible random decision point, timelines bifurcate into parallel universes in which one possible outcome happened and its opposite didn't, resulting in there being an infinite number of parallel timelines existing simultaneously, but inaccessible and unknowable to each other.
Last edited by Gunnar on Fri Oct 22, 2021 4:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Gunnar wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 4:33 am
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:23 am
Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
That's one way of looking at it. The very fact that you exist at all in this timeline proves that no one, including you, ever went back and killed your own grandparents before you were born in this timeline. But, it doesn't preclude the possibility that there might be some parallel timeline in which, because those who might otherwise have become your grandparents, were killed before your parents were born, and in consequence neither your parents nor you never existed. Some have speculated that at every possible random decision point, timelines bifurcate into parallel universes in which one possible outcome happened and its opposite didn't, resulting in there being an infinite number of parallel timelines existing simultaneously, but inaccessible and unknowable to each other.
Yeah, I used to be a fan of the many worlds hypothesis. But I get hung up on where the mass and energy to create all those universes comes from.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 4:39 am
Yeah, I used to be a fan of the many worlds hypothesis. But I get hung up on where the mass and energy to create all those universes comes from.
Understandable. I get hung up on that too. But on the other hand, there is the idea of zero point energy which holds that at any given moment at every given point in spacetime there exists an infinite number of virtual particles of mass and energy constantly popping into and out of existence, some of which occasionally and randomly become real enough long enough to become a part of what we perceive as reality.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Interesting Idea about God.
I think your idea about light and objects travelling at the speed of light is a good start to explaining how time can be something much more than what we are capable of experiencing as human beings. Perhaps that's why I find impossible to conceive of time not passing.

But at the same time, even physics professors at BYU admit that the light spoken of in the scriptures is just a metaphor. It takes light a full 8 minutes just to travel from the sun to earth. There's no way God could be limited to that speed. The idea of people skyping across many galaxies in Star Trek is impossible. You'd have to wait hours to get a response in such a conversation.
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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After you brought it up, I tried to imagine time not passing. I couldn’t do it either. If, as physics guy said, time is change, then I couldn’t move or breathe. I’m not sure I could notice it happening, as the neurons in my brain would be frozen in place.

It’s tough to imagine what a God that is not bound by the laws of physics would look like, or what it would be like to be such an entity.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:05 pm
After you brought it up, I tried to imagine time not passing. I couldn’t do it either. If, as physics guy said, time is change, then I couldn’t move or breathe. I’m not sure I could notice it happening, as the neurons in my brain would be frozen in place.

I’m betting that you can imagine it. You’d just not ever be able to observe it.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:27 am
Some Schmo wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 2:14 pm

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.
I’m not sure I follow why this makes time illusory? Why isn’t it a real thing that is affected by gravity?
Real things can be illusory also. A TV can give the sense you're watching a live football game, but what you're really looking at are colored dots of light which combine to create the illusion of a football game.

Certainly, time is real, but our perception of it is our own, and our perception of how long an hour takes varies from hour to hour, depending on what we're doing. An hour sleeping seems much faster than an hour awake, for instance. My perception of time is slightly different than everyone else's at any given moment, and that would really change if I were in a different location in the universe (with more or less of a gravitational pull).
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:05 pm
After you brought it up, I tried to imagine time not passing. I couldn’t do it either. If, as physics guy said, time is change, then I couldn’t move or breathe. I’m not sure I could notice it happening, as the neurons in my brain would be frozen in place.

It’s tough to imagine what a God that is not bound by the laws of physics would look like, or what it would be like to be such an entity.
You do realize "time" doesn't actually exist, correct? Look at it this way. As we live our mortal lives we are free to physically go wherever we want. Up, down, right, left forward, backwards and so on. But we can never actually go back in "time" because it doesn't exist. Time is just an illusion for us HUMANS because we are operating on a very limited knowledge of our eternal existence while living here on Earth.
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