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Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion
- neom 8y agoThe World Science Festival has a slew of episodes on the flow and illusion of time: https://www.youtube.com/user/worldsciencefestival/search?query=time https://www.youtube.com/user/worldsciencefestival/search?que... One of the thoughts I've been having recently about "human time" is the effect that the observance of changing seasons and the circle of life over an evolutionary period has had on how humans think about things like time and permanence. Unfortunately I don't have anything particularly insightful to say other than I've been wondering about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 7373737373 8y agoThe word 'illusion' should be removed from every dictionary. It's one completely unspecific, indeterminate and misleading word and most subjects or patterns of discourse in which it appears have the same properties. The title of this post also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime Just searching for "* is an illusion" returns - consciousness - choice - spacetime - the world - physical reality - certainty - memories It makes me feel disgusted.
- RugnirViking 8y agoThe word is used to describe large and unknowable concepts as well as optical tricks? Its possible for a word to have more than one meaning.
- fouronnes3 8y agoillusion - noun, an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience.
- 7373737373 8y agoA misinterpretation always requires a context, or direction. Its use implies the existence of a 'true interpretation'. The word illusion doesn't give either, it just signifies that there is one. But then I have to ask, how can a subjective experience be something truly or falsely interpreted?
- goatlover 8y agoThere's all sorts of optical illusions. If you're seeing a color that isn't in the image, then your subjective experience is that of an illusion. Perceptual illusions are where the term originates.
- n4r9 8y ago> The title of this post also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime I don't understand what the title has to do with avoiding forms of "to be"? It contains the word "is".
- 7373737373 8y ago"Is" is (heh) one of the forms of "to be" and can signify many different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Different_functions_of_%22to_be%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Different_functions_of...
- lisper 8y ago"Illusion" is perfectly well defined: it is a perception that does not correspond to any objective reality outside your brain.
- simonh 8y agoThe problem is, that just punts the issue down to what is considered objective reality. If that's in contention, as in this specific case, then referring to things as illusory can be ambiguous. I happen to disagree with the comment you are responding to, but I do accept that the term illusion is often used ambiguously, especially in relation to notions of objective and subjective reality.
- lisper 8y agoYes, that's true, but it's not because "illusion" is not well-defined. It is, and claiming that time is an illusion is a perfectly coherent claim. It might be a controversial claim, and its truth might be difficult to resolve. But it's not ill-posed.
- goatlover 8y agoYeah, but illusion was one of the foundations upon which philosophy got started. People noticed that things were not always as they seemed, and this started a lot of questioning about the nature of things, perception and the mind.
- Falling3 8y agoNo, that's the definition of a hallucination. Illusions are misinterpretation's of objective reality by the brain (and I agree that's not a well-defined thing).
- simonh 8y agoOn it's own in a sentence perhaps yes, but in the context of an in-depth interview in which the author explains exactly what they mean by it I think it's ok. We just need to be aware that many of the words we use can have a variety of meanings, but once that meaning is clear it's useful to be able to continue using the words on their own.
- empath75 8y agoAn illusion is simply a state where the model of the world created by the mind differs from the world as it exists. In a pedantic sense, it’s all an illusion, but there are particular illusions where the difference is readily demonstrable — when the magician shows what was hidden in his sleeves, as it were. In some sense, most of science is exposing the method of various tricks our own consciousness plays on us. We want to know, for example, why metal appears to be shiny— when the phenomenon we’re studying ‘shininess’ only exists in our own minds. There’s no innate ‘shiny’ property in nature. Time is one of those things where there is a persistent feeling that it must be illusory (which is to say, something created by our minds), but we’re not quite sure exactly in what way or how to prove it.
- vinceguidry 8y agoIllusion can be tricky to understand, but not impossible. It means that the referent is not the same as the representation. When something isn't an illusion, it means the referent is the same as the representation. We have different words for different kinds of illusion. I can show you an actual, physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while the second is. You watch a real television show on a real television. The television is designed to create visual illusions of real things. But the television is itself real. The show is a dramatic rendering, an illusion, of real-life situations. So there's three elements needed to make illusion. A referent, a representation, and a type. Consciousness is real, but its contents are illusory, thought represents things that are not those things.
- davebryand 8y agoAn enlightened yogi, Hindi, or Buddhist would say that the physical chair is also an illusion.
- 7373737373 8y agoWhy, do you think? Because they reasoned that in the mind, everything can refer to anything else?
- vinceguidry 8y agoEnlightenment is the destruction of the perception that there is a separate watcher apart from the watched. Non-duality. Not-two. Just one. Since illusion requires three elements, the non-dual is just one element, there is no illusion. Any time you step 'outside', like if you look at a chair, you're dwelling in illusion. Mind generated a 'tag' for the thing you're seeing. It's not really a chair, it's a bundle of atoms. But there's no bundle of atoms, that's also a tag generated by mind. The mind itself isn't what you think it is. Everything is an illusion. Tricky to understand until you realize there's no such thing as enlightenment, it's just a religious dogma. Enlightened yogis are no different than the rest of us. One can train the mind to perceive fewer distinctions, this is yogic practice. You can even arrive at a state of mind that you can call enlightenment. But the lie is revealed any time you open your mouth. The state of mind that is being trained is an illusion like everything else. Real yogis understand this and do it anyway. Fake yogis try to fool you into believing that you can truly get rid of everything and 'merely exist'. It's not an illusion at this point, it's a lie.
- barking 8y agoWhat would magicians do without illusions, mere tricks, that's what. Shame on you.
- 7373737373 8y agoThe association of the word with mystery in particular doesn't help to bring clarity in discussions with a scientific context. If I said "semiconductors are an illusion", "programming is an illusion" etc. it doesn't contribute any information. It just confuses.
- goatlover 8y agoBut if one said magicians use sleight of hand to fool the brains of audience members into the illusion that magic has been performed, then why doesn't that bring clarity? Illusions are perceptual errors the brain creates when misinterpreting data from the senses, often because of some unusual condition in the environment. This idea has been extended to say things like reality could be an illusion (Matrix scenarios), or something we take to be fundamental to reality such as the flow of time could be an illusion, in that our mental experience of it is misleading us into thinking it's fundamental. That we can be fooled by our experience of the world is not controversial. People thought the world was flat and that the moon and sun rose around a still Earth, which was the center of the cosmos. Because that's how it appeared to them.
- EGreg 8y agoThe map is not the territory. To say something is an illusion means that something is a map that doesn’t match the territory. But it assumes there IS a territory to map! While often simultaneously denying its existence. That’s the contradiction.
- criddell 8y agoWords aren't used because they are in the dictionary, they are in the dictionary because they are used.
- hunta2097 8y agoI live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles: a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future. b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.
- zikzak 8y agoThis is true. You also need to take into account how each day is a smaller and smaller percentage of your life which might be why kids think summer vacation lasts forever but it flys by for parents.
- Falling3 8y agoThis explanation comes up frequently in these discussions. It makes a certain amount of sense on its face, but is there any evidence that this actually affects our perception of time?
- akiselev 8y agoWe don't even know if our brain even has a uniform perception of time (outside of the cultural definition), let alone what that might be. It's all guesswork anyway.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoSee Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older, a book that seeks to explain the work done in psychology and neuroscience on this issue to a popular audience.
- frenchy 8y agoThis isn't really evidence at all, but it's well known that as people age, it becomes more difficult to new memories, than it is to keep old ones[1], which is why you regularly get old people mixing up their current loved ones with old, dead people; and why "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". If the passage of time in the human experiences is largely a function of the memories we make. It's not at all surprising that things seem to go faster as we age. [1] There's common-sense explaination for this, but I don't think the exact mechanism is understood. It is widely observed though.
- lm28469 8y agoIf you zoom out far enough everything is just your brain tripping balls trying to process electric signals from faulty/limited sensors.
- egjerlow 8y agoWhat exactly is 'tripping balls' if it is not comprised of electrical signals? Saying consciousness is 'just' this thing or another is, in my mind, making trivial the most profound riddle in all of existence.
- bookofjoe 8y ago"Time doesn't flow, we flow."—Michael Crichton
- jatsign 8y agoEven a skeptic philosopher, who would say most things can't be proven beyond the self, would probably agree that one of the things we have direct experience of is change.
- JdeBP 8y ago"How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" -- The Man In The Shack, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
- jatsign 8y agoTrue, but that's why I said "probably agree". You can be a solipsist and disagree with the existence of time, but that doesn't seem to be a very useful philosophy.
- rc_mob 8y agoTime is just a measurement that we haven’t quite nailed down the definition of yet.
- GuB-42 8y agoWe have a very precise definition of time: a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom". It is used in a lot of physical equations which are very accurate at describing the universe as we observe it. There are some philosophical questions regarding time. Questions about the arrow of time, entropy, causality, etc... For instance we may have trouble relating time and entropy, but it doesn't mean both of these concept are not well defined by themselves.
- lm28469 8y ago> We have a very precise definition of time > a second is Well that's a very precise definition of a second (unit of time), but not of time itself.
- Koshkin 8y agoYet, historically and practically the notion of 'time' has always been tied to a clock - the daily cycle, the change of seasons, etc. For example, when people said, "time has passed," they meant a certain number of natural cycles - days, seasons or years. The abstract, "theoretical" time, untied to any clock, is a relatively recent invention and, in fact, very well may be a fiction.
- Nasrudith 8y agoOf course relativity also complicates things with time as well. Whose second? Even if you have two different caesium-133 atoms monitored, one on earth and one on a satellite they won't rise at the same rate although both are defined the same. I guess the real "illusion" would be that if there is truly nothing to be a frame of reference there is nothing for time to "flow" relative to.
- slackfan 8y agoConsidering that the first post isn't "Lunchtime is doubly so" consider your geek cards revoked.
- stronglikedan 8y agois?
- Circuits 8y agoAs a coworker of mine would say: "A watched pothead never toils." I have always found it amusing when people talk about time's existence. It has always seemed like a ruler or a measuring stick; t = d/v, to me. Some people disagree as to it's existence but I think perhaps the problem isn't with our concept of time but with our definitions of existence.
- jasim 8y agoWhen his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving letter to Michele’s sister: ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’ ... ... Many times in the past we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise: if we had kept to these we would still believe that the Earth is flat and that it is orbited by the sun. Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience. When we look a little further ahead we discover that the world is not as it appears to us: the Earth is round, and in Cape Town their feet are up and their heads are down. To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one which he has always known. -- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli
- state_less 8y ago"Dr. Manhattan: There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet." -Alan Moore, Watchmen To me, this idea looks like we have a set of measurements of things (X, Y, Z, T) and a function F that maps from the set of measurements to a future set of measurements. You can generate the future from the past. You could take the view that all these measurements exist, and we just can't see them (well) because we are only able to jump from Tnow to F(Tnow). In other words, we exist in one place and one time at a time.
- wwarner 8y agoIt's interesting, because usually people/physicists that space is the emergent thing, and time is the fundamental dimension. I'm also glad that people are trying to reduce the number of dimensions rather than adding to them.
- KingFelix 8y agoI mentioned this in a previous discussion, some really interesting fringe research going in. Retrocausation https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-traveling-in-time https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-trav...
- JdeBP 8y agoFor an interesting book on the subject of time in the philosophy of physics, see Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point. It does a fairly good job of laying out what the problems are. * http://prce.hu/w/TAAP.html http://prce.hu/w/TAAP.html
- cobbzilla 8y agoI find this quote fascinating: "What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." I am not a cosmologist, but if all of space reached thermal equilibrium, if space does have any mass (perhaps a tiny amount from the dark energy it contains?), and the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce? If that is true, then time never really ends, it just "slows down" a lot (not much can happen, and not terribly quickly) until the next sparkup, whereupon time speeds up dramatically (inflationary theory).
- negamax 8y agoRead The Last Question if you haven't
- 7373737373 8y agoAnd watch this: Timelapse of the future - A Journey to the End of Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- CharlesColeman 8y ago> Physicists increasingly suspect that there may be multiple universes beyond our own, each with their own unique laws of physics.
- 7373737373 8y agoYeah, it's a bit too dramatized and speculative at the end.
- nikolasavic 8y agoThe Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610X https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610...) is an amazing and eye opening book on the topic of time. Carlo, a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity, slowly peels back the layers of the conceptual onion to get to some pretty strange fundamental truths about time. As a side note, the Audible book is read by Benedict Cumberbach and is a delightful listen.
- jiveturkey 8y agoThis book is a MUST READ imho. I heard him pitching the book on KQED Forum, he seems quite a pleasant, amiable fellow. Books like this deserve a re-read at least once. Now I know to do the audible for round 2 in a few years.
- loblollyboy 8y agoWhatever time is, our favorite way to 'pass' it is by generate entropy. Chemistry explains inorganic things, those inorganic things become increasingly complex, eventually able to reproduce somehow, so you look to biology for explanation. You get evolutionary biology which might kind of explain how we came to be (super-self aware beings, capable of perceiving things, like time for example, or creating the internet to share ideas, or cars to commute). Then social/behavioral sciences attempt to explain us specifically. But even more fundamental than that first step (chemistry) is physics and math. And physics and math tell us that we are moving to a state of more entropy. Sometimes it feels like this is the best explanation for why we behave the way we do (driving to jobs we hate to do nothing important, making nuclear bombs, etc.). End result is we're fked!
- everdev 8y agoI was really impressed by this 4d toys video: https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q Now what if time is an illusion and similar to the video objects in life simply appear to be bouncing in and out of our 3d realm? That would look a lot like time. But if we could see in 4d, we'd see that they're not really coming or going and could see all of their possible states at once. It might be like being able to see an entire movie all at once rather than frame by frame.
- z2 8y ago"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." -Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- gtirloni 8y agoI love these discussions, they make my brain hurt in a good way. However, I've trouble applying them to daily life. Is there something we should change in ourselves because of these new insights?
- hjanssen 8y agoI don't think you really have to apply these things to your daily life. It is merely a question of _why_ is it that you feel time in your daily life like you do. It's as much of a question of philsophy as it is a question of physics.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoI treat it as very base: be glad that we are who we are, that we can ponder these types of questions, and that it's OK that we may never get any hints, let alone answers, to these questions. Feynman has a good answer to something similar to this in one of those interviews from the 80s; he was perfectly okay with not understanding everything about the universe.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago(Not-a-Physics person)Question: If time isn’t linear, can we have perpetual motion machines?
- o_nate 8y agoI liked the example of water spilling onto the floor. I was trying to explain this point to my 7-year old the other day. As crazy as it sounds, the laws of physics don't say that the water couldn't jump off the floor and back into the bottle. The laws of physics are equations and equations are equally true if you reverse the left and right sides. In terms of the equations, that water in the bottle equals the water on the floor (along with the increase in heat energy and other effects), so there's no fundamental physical reason you can't go from one to the other. The reason why you don't ever see it is because it is astronomically less probable to happen in reverse.
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- cairo_x 8y agoHow easy is it for physicists to mistake their models for reality? Equations are ways of representing reality. They are not reality. They are literally abstractions. Yes, it's another way of seeing and thinking about a thing, but it is not the thing... at all. Like a description of 4d space. Isn't a thing in reality, it is an abstraction. The only things that are not abstractions WRT time are movement and matter. Period. When ever you start freezeframing and creating integrations (4d view of time), then you've crossed into the world of the abstract and the non-existent.