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Time might only exist in your head
- augustt 9y agoNot AMP link: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/arrow-of-time https://www.wired.com/2016/09/arrow-of-time
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tiuPapa 9y agoWait, I always thought time existing only in human conception was the accepted scientific explanation for time.
- Santosh83 9y agoIt can't be a scientific explanation, as far as I can see. That needs experimental testability of concrete predictions. It can be a reasonable philosophical speculation however.
- mrfusion 9y agoOr does your head only exist in time?
- rytill 9y agoThis is more likely.
- danbruc 9y agoThat's a bad article not really worth reading. The author either did not understand what he is talking about or did a quite bad job communicating the ideas. There are huge gaps in the article and you won't be any wiser after reading it.
- jmkni 9y agoWant to fill us in?
- danbruc 9y agoI can not, I am just an interested layman. I know enough to recognize the article as badly written, I know not enough to provide something better. I can not even point you to further resource because frankly I was unable to figure out what the central idea of the discussed research was supposed to be. At best I can suggest to try to read the actual paper but I didn't myself.
- roywiggins 9y agoIt seems that way to me as well. I'm not a physicist but it seemed to do a very bad job yoking the research in question to the larger question of time. The research seems simple enough- gravity alone can't explain decoherence, and decoherence is a way that quantum mechanics is granted an arrow of time (other quantum processes can be run backwards indistinguishably). But the whole "time doesn't exist without an observer and observers create time" just seems to be begging the question. An observer with a brain has an arrow of time, because otherwise the brain doesn't have a past and can't make memories- how can you make a memory without an arrow of time? Observation seems to be an irreversible process. But brains are made of stuff, that stuff obeys the laws of physics, so where do observers come from in this theory?
- coldtea 9y agoSo, like this comment? Which doesn't give any counter-argument at all...
- danbruc 9y agoThose are two different things, a badly written article failing to communicate a theory well on the one hand and and a bad theory on the other hand. I wrote the comment because of the former so that people coming to the comments first can decide to not read the article if they believe my comment. And while I tend to dismiss the idea of time being fundamentally linked to brains because of what I know and don't know about the inner workings of the universe, I did not express any opinion about the theory itself because the article left me pretty clueless what exactly the theory is and I also did not dig any further, for example read the actual paper.
- vog 9y agoThe argument is deeply flawed. 1) A term doesn't become imaginary just because it turned out to be physically more elaborate than its initial meaning. The concept of time never vasnished. It just changed a bit. It is still one of the axes of spacetime. 2) The logic itself is flawed. Saying "Time might only exist in your head ... because of spacetime" is like saying: * "Magnetism might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism" * "Electricity might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism" * "Atoms [meaning: individable parts] might only exist in your head ... because of electrons/protons/neutrons" 3) Even from a purely philosophical view, pointing out time here is meaningless. Every word describes a concept, a model, so anything including spacetime might exist just in our heads. Pointing that out specifically for time makes no sense.
- saimiam 9y agoI thought the point was very clear - if gravity is too slow (not sure what this means) to force decohered particles to move in a single time direction, then the notion that a decohered particle is moving forward in time must come from our personal predispositions. I'm just a layperson reading this article - happy to be corrected.
- vog 9y agoThat might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself. But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions. Yet, isn't it strange that all human cultures have developed the same notion of the forward time direction? Wouldn't we expect some islands to have developed the other convention, just like there are some places where cars drive on the left rather than right side of the road? Or, is it our human brain? Then, shouldn't we observe some animals or plants with an apparently different perception? More importantly, however, this disagrees completely with physics, ancient as well as modern physics, because of, well, experiments. [1][2] The forward/backward time directions are more comparable to up/down space directions (in a gravitational field), which are very distinct from each other. The direction of time can be measured in so many different ways, almost none of them really connected to our personal perception. It's the whole world around us that makes a clear difference between forward and backward time direction, not just we in our heads. [1] Those led to the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, which modern physics does question in its fine-grained details (as with gravitation, etc.), but not in principle, because it is so clearly visible in experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics [2] See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoIt's always been a puzzle to me about what makes time different from other dimensions. In the article, it mentions that Lanza has "a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations." This implies that by shifting the dimension that the biological systems run along, you can either change the dimension considered "time," or even reverse the direction. I'm not sure this is possible, though, because of entropy. Movement along any directional dimension doesn't determine the position or reversibility of chemical or physical processes, but movement along time does.
- msky 9y agoPersonally, I would say it's possible that "time" only exists as a construct to explain matters' location(s). It was here, now it's there. time passed It's like the z axis on for the x&y; mater and space. It certainly doesn't exist solely 'in my head'.
- ianai 9y agoI think time is a fundamental part of spacetime, but it’s constrained by the second law of thermodynamics. Order always decays and therefore changes in one direction.
- uoaei 9y agoThe effects are a little subtler than "everything decays" however I'm with you that entropy should play a large part in determining our answer to this question since it is seemingly the only law in our universe which prevents the reversibility of any reasonably macroscopic phenomenon (putting an egg shell back together, etc.). It is this distinction from which I believe people learn to differentiate forward v. backward in time. This is only a hypothesis and I invite other perspectives to introduce themselves.
- idlewords 9y agoIn an important sense, everything only exists in my head.
- _0ffh 9y agoIf time didn't "exist", then there could not be any advantage in taking time into consideration in anything. But there clearly is. At the most one could argue that our definition of time is not perfectly aligned with some observations me make, which is a different claim entirely.
- joejerryronnie 9y agoRandom mental musings of a non-physicist after a bit too much coffee: I wonder if we're just playing at semantics and what "time" means to me is not what "time" means to quantum physicists. Clearly events unfold in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind time like a movie and go back to exact events that have occurred in the past. But "time" defined as a fundamental force of the universe may be something entirely different, perhaps intertwined with quantum probability. Maybe this is how we'll eventually solve faster than light speed intergalactic travel. Instead of manipulating space, we'll manipulate time - i.e. travel to a point in time where we probabilistically exist at that location in space. Of course, once we get there, our perception of time moving in a linear fashion will "speed things up" to the current time as perceived by all of us.
- leggomylibro 9y ago>Clearly events unfold in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind time like a movie and go back to exact events that have occurred in the past. I know it's kind of facetious, but we can't flap our arms to fly either, and that doesn't mean that gravity unfolds in a linear fashion and we cannot rewind its direction. Things get a lot simpler if you don't believe in free will. Maybe you could observe the past or future through some experiment that we haven't figured out. But you also wouldn't be able to change it. It just is, like space. A lot of time travel fiction takes that sort of view; plot twist, all of the protagonists' efforts to change the future they saw actually wind up leading them straight to it. Gasp!
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoThis is what Kant said. That space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition.
- mcguire 9y ago"Here's where it gets a bit weirder. Although the equation doesn't include a variable for time (which isn't all that weird. Time is something that can't be measured in terms of itself, in physics it is measured as correlations between an object's location ... over time ... anyway, it's weird). But, it provides a framework for knitting the universe together." "Although the equation doesn't include a variable for time [...]." Really, Wired?
- retrogradeorbit 9y agoFor those interested in the physics of time and the idea of whether time exists or not, you may find Julian Barbour's work more introductory, accessible and less esoteric. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkjXuS_Z1ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkjXuS_Z1ds The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is covered at about 40 minutes in, here.
- dingbat 9y agowhether its about decoherence or "observer time", I wonder how either explanation can explain why Times Arrow seems to exist in dream. ie. if decoherence was the basis, what is being "decohered" in a dream?
- lisper 9y agoHere's another take on the topic: http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of-time.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar... The TL;DR: "The punch line is this: the statement that we can't time-travel into the past is exactly the same as the statement that we can only remember the past. It is not the case that one causes the other, it is that the two things are logically equivalent. Your perception of "traveling through time" emerges from your mental states and not the other way around. You feel like you are "traveling forward through time" because your mental states have this natural order to them. You can remember the past and not the future because whatever you remember is your past. The laws of quantum mechanics (and entanglement in particular) insure that what any given instance of you remembers appears to be a continuous and coherent sequence that behaves according to regularities that we call the laws of physics. But in fact you do not travel through time, because at root there is no you, and there is no time. There is only the wavefunction, from which both you and time emerge as an approximation."
- dingbat 9y agoso how does quantum mechanics explain the continuous and coherent (more or less) sequence that is perceived even in a non-physical dream?
- lisper 9y agoIn exactly the same way. Dreams are just the brain "remembering" internally generated stimuli.
- dingbat 9y agoif it's exactly the same, that would imply that quantum mechanics and decoherence effects are equivalent for both internally generated imaginary stimuli, and external stimuli based on "real" physical objects. but it seems like a stretch to suggest that if i dream that i am flying, that the same quantum mechanical effects that contribute to Time's Arrow in that dream are in play in the "real world", where such a thing would be impossible physically.
- grondilu 9y ago> It's like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger's cat. A faraway corner of the universe might be moving future to past. But the moment humans point a telescope in that direction, time conforms to the past-future flow. Mind blown.
- saimiam 9y agoLayperson question coming up - Say a decohered particle reaches an un-decohered state outside the realms of our detection. Does this mean that for that particle time didn't elapse? As far as the particle is concerned, someone observed it and then someone was unable to observe it. This hinges on whether a decohered particle can go back to being undecohered. If the answer is that particles can stop decohering, then our status as observers is merely a contrivance for us to checkpoint a before decoherence state and a decoherence state.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThe concept of "observer" always bother me. It seems that a light meter, or a thermometer, are equally observers as a brain/body is an observer. WHich then boils down to something like "to interact." Time goes one way because particles/fields interact. Is this right?
- keldaris 9y agoAs a physicist, all this talk about the "meaning of time" (which has been going on for centuries and in the modern form for decades) seems completely meaningless. This article, as far as I can discern, makes no scientific claims or arguments and has no measurable consequences. I guess it might be good material for drunken conversations if you like passing time that way, but I don't really see any other use for it.
- pdimitar 9y agoAgreed. During such a drunken conversation I'd simply say "so when a car hits me because I misjudged the right moment to cross over, the pain is only in my head and it doesn't exist?" and would laugh. That's exactly how much value I see in this article. It says absolutely nothing of substance. It doesn't even have philosophical value.
- johnchristopher 9y ago> During such a drunken conversation I'd simply say "so when a car hits me because I misjudged the right moment to cross over, the pain is only in my head and it doesn't exist?" and would laugh. Well. The physical pain would indeed only exist in your head and your head only :). /pour me another.
- pdimitar 9y agoTouche. /winks and raises a glass.
- coldtea 9y ago>During such a drunken conversation I'd simply say "so when a car hits me because I misjudged the right moment to cross over, the pain is only in my head and it doesn't exist?" and would laugh. Repeating a tired millennia old argument that crudely stops any inquiring talk for anything that's not directly measurable (and/or doesn't translate into money or some direct benefit)... But while the grandparent started with "As a physicist", as if this conveys the consensus among physicists, they forgot to mention that many physicists (including celebrated physicists) are indeed very interested in the meaning and the philosophy behind physics concepts, and there have been excellent forays into such matter, without going into BS Chopra territory.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]