6 ms·

Managing time when time doesn't exist

182 points by TMEHpodcast 1y ago

bravesoul2 1y ago
Of course we are cutting close to "god" debates to debate if time exists. It exists! Maybe it an emergent thing sure. But so is a soccer ball.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rukuu001 1y ago
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
m3kw9 1y ago
Our survival is tied to time because things change irreversibly and resources run out as t -> infinity.
roywiggins 1y ago
> We’re not just experiencing time—we’re creating temporal experience through the very act of being conscious, quantum beings embedded in reality’s information processing systems. sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.
  - komali2 1y ago
    Consciousness being a purely physical process comparable to rocks eroding from water or whatever is an unproven and still debated presumption. Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
    - koakuma-chan 1y ago
      > Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either. And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?
      - komali2 1y ago
        One could argue for "emergent" dualism without arguing for an immortal soul, for example - the physical complexity collapses on death, so too does the emergent consciousness with it. Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity). I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically. I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.
        koakuma-chan 1y ago
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  How does that make any sense at all? "temporal experience"? "quantum beings"? "reality’s information processing systems"?
  - TMEHpodcast 1y ago
    Caveat, this is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. The actual science is much simpler than that comedic explanation: recent experiments suggest time emerges from quantum entanglement between particles/systems. When quantum systems interact and become correlated, observers inside those systems experience what we call "time." External observers see the whole system as static and timeless. But that's about measurement and observation in physics experiments - not about consciousness being special or rocks having "experiences" or the universe being some kind of cosmic computer.
    - pharrington 1y ago
      While I think I now understand what you're going for, remember that the overwhelming amount of people who will now read this don't have the scientific knowledge to understand your blog's sarcastic tone. I know I didn't have a clue that your post was a deliberate joke until reading your comments here!
      - koakuma-chan 1y ago
        I understand the post is supposed to be funny, but is the core premise that time emerges from quantum entanglement true?
        TMEHpodcast 1y ago
        The Page-Wootters mechanism (proposed in 1983, experimentally validated by Moreva et al. in 2013-2015) does show that time can emerge from quantum entanglement between subsystems. In their experiments, time exists for observers inside entangled quantum systems but not for external observers viewing the whole system.
b00flyd00f 1y ago
timecube does exist
- labster 1y ago
  Four simultaneous days in one 24 hour day really does help increase productivity. That’s where we get 4x programmers from. (10x programmers are a myth, as cubes only have 4 sides)
jayrot 1y ago
Time does exist though, at least directionally, because of entropy, no?
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Entropy definitely gives time a clear arrow/direction (why we remember past but not future), but entropy itself is statistical/emergent from many particles. So we might have time's flow emerging from quantum correlations while time's direction remains real due to thermodynamic entropy. It's like asking if "up" exists, gravity creates real directional asymmetry even though "up" emerges from mass distributions. Maybe time's arrow is real even if time's existence is emergent? Though honestly this is where my physics knowledge hits its limits!
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Entropy gives us time's arrow (directionality), but modern physics suggests it's the observer-dependent growth of entanglement entropy specifically that generates our subjective experience of time's flow.
groby_b 1y ago
This is a lovely discussion that is best answered with "well, if time doesn't exist, it doesn't really matter when your paycheck arrives, right?"
pharrington 1y ago
"in the rigorous scientific sense where quantum gravity’s most fundamental equations contain absolutely no time variable whatsoever" Immediate BS. Rigorous science doesn't have a model of quantum gravity, because they're trying to find one. edit: did not know that this blog was sarcastic
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Subtly but in this case it’s about Page-Wootters specifically
chipsrafferty 1y ago
This article is acting like it's profound, but it's profoundly obvious that time is durational. Waste of time to read this IMO
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. And yes, in a closed system, time is durational.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
xivzgrev 1y ago
New levels of guilt tripping unlocked! “When you’re scrolling social media instead of working on important projects, you’re not just wasting time—you’re failing to fully participate in the quantum correlations that create temporal reality for yourself and others.”
- wisemang 1y ago
  As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (Thoreau)
TMEHpodcast 1y ago
OP here. This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast, so the science is accurate but delivered with about 47% more workplace humour than you'd find in Physical Review Letters. The core premise is based on real, cutting-edge physics research, though it's still an active area of debate. The Page-Wootters mechanism (proposed in 1983, experimentally validated by Moreva et al. in 2013-2015) does show that time can emerge from quantum entanglement between subsystems. In their experiments, time exists for observers inside entangled quantum systems but not for external observers viewing the whole system. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation really does lack a time parameter, creating what physicists call the "Problem of Time" in quantum gravity. And there is genuine convergence across string theory, loop quantum gravity, and causal set theory toward "emergent spacetime" models. However, this doesn't mean time is "fake", it suggests time might be like temperature, which is real and measurable but emerges from more fundamental processes (molecular motion). The research indicates time could emerge from quantum information rather than being a fundamental dimension. The 2023-2025 research I mentioned (cosmological time dilation measurements, atomic clock advances) is real, though the interpretation that "consciousness creates time" is more speculative than the underlying quantum mechanics. So yes, "emergent time" is a serious scientific hypothesis with experimental support, but science is still figuring out exactly what that means for our understanding of reality.
- anon12315 1y ago
  The first half threw me in a bit of despair and identity death, and the second half lifted me back up. Love this. edit: feel free to include me in as one of the feedbacks.
- qntmfred 1y ago
  you used the word instant quite a bit. and the word moment a few times. notably, to define what an instant is. was there any particular reason you didn't just use the term moment throughout?
  - TMEHpodcast 1y ago
    Probably subconscious. I tend to use "instant" when trying to sound more technical/physics-y and "moment" when being more conversational. If time is emergent, both words are describing the same phenomenon. It's like the difference between saying "temporal coordinate" versus "when", one sounds more scientific but they're pointing at the same thing.
satisfice 1y ago
I didn't realize it was intended as comedy until I saw the advice that meetings should be scheduled in superposition until someone shows up to one of them and collapses the wave equation. I guess that would mean that all the people headed to such meetings are ghost workers until the collapse confirms the reality of the workers who attend the winning meeting?
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Yes, in this quantum scheduling system, all the potential meeting attendees would exist in superposition, simultaneously traveling to Conference Room A, Conference Room B, and the Zoom link that nobody can find. Only when someone actually arrives and observes the meeting does the wave function collapse, confirming which reality we're all stuck in. The "ghost workers" headed to the non-realized meetings don't disappear though - in many-worlds, they just continue existing in parallel branches where they're attending completely different meetings about completely different quarterly projections. Somewhere there's a universe where your 2 PM budget review became a 2 PM birthday party because Karen from Accounting collapsed the wave function by showing up with cake instead of spreadsheets.
  - satisfice 1y ago
    Somehow the Endangered Souffle trope seems to apply here… https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndangeredSouffle https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndangeredSouffl...
netfortius 1y ago
Carlo Rovelli - one of my favorite scientists alive - has a lot to say about this fascinating subject. Start with "The Order of Time", if you never read anything by him.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 1y ago
> we’ve built entire industries around optimizing something that physicists increasingly suspect is just a really convincing illusion emerging from quantum entanglement. We've also built entire industries around optimizing image and status signaling: even more flimsy abstractions.
Raphell 1y ago
We keep stressing about not having enough time, and then physicists come along and say, "Well, time might not even exist." It’s like carefully trying to organize a desk that isn’t actually there. Maybe focus is the only real resource.
- hshshshshsh 1y ago
  Focus assumes you have free will.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    ADHD says I do not
    - throwawaymeta01 1y ago
      or maybe it's learned helplessness? i have adhd and can't stand these type victim mindset promoting comments.
      - LoganDark 1y ago
        Not to say I entirely lack learned helplessness, but not everybody with ADHD is the same. With my ADHD I can try to get out of bed and the body will refuse to move. I can try to get something done and I just won't be able to focus long enough for that to happen. Or, I'll do something useless like watching YouTube videos or scrolling Twitter and the entire time I will be screaming at myself trying to do the productive thing that I'm supposed to have been doing the whole time and it just won't happen. It doesn't feel like learned helplessness; I'm not deciding that things are hopeless "because of ADHD". In fact, the only reason I found out I had ADHD is because I posted about constantly being unable to do even things I know I enjoy and someone commented that it could be ADHD and I had apparently never heard of this aspect of that before. Turns out I definitely have ADHD. Sorry you can't stand my comment. It's genuinely how I feel. I'm sorry if I haven't sufficiently conquered my mental disorder to your standards yet - maybe I should get off the Internet until I do? It's cool if you don't feel the same way I do. I don't have that privilege yet. Maybe one day I will, but that's no reason I should wait to express myself. This is a genuine struggle I face and I'm not saying ADHD makes everyone helpless but it sure as hell makes me feel helpless.
KolibriFly 1y ago
It does make you wonder how much of our modern obsession with "productivity" is built on an assumed understanding of time that physics is now calling into question
atemerev 1y ago
Space also doesn't exist: https://open.substack.com/pub/sorhed/p/what-if-there-was-no-spacetime https://open.substack.com/pub/sorhed/p/what-if-there-was-no-...
LoganDark 1y ago
I've always had the idea that time didn't need to actually exist for me to perceive it, because even if everything happened at once from outside, my perception of time is based on how much has happened so far. It's weird to explain, but it's related to how I personally believe backwards time travel is fully impossible without some sort of "time travel epoch", to before which it would be impossible to travel. (Also, I am pretty sure a "time travel epoch" is impossible anyway, since you can't save nor restore the state of the universe.)
lotussleeping 1y ago
It made me think of my dreaming experience when I have a clock alarming every 5 minutes. After its first alarm, I had a complicated dream, feeling like 30 minutes had passed, but when I opened my eyes, the whole dream had only lasted 2 minutes.
gus_massa 1y ago
> The real productivity crisis emerged when physicists tried merging Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics. They discovered something that would terrify any time management consultant: the Wheeler-DeWitt equation—quantum gravity’s fundamental mathematics—contains absolutely no time variable. Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been merged since 1928 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation That's the base of all the calculations inside the LHC and with some more technical details it has been tested in some cases with a lot of precision. For General Relativity, we still don't have a good theory to merge it with Quantum Mechanics. The article cites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93DeWitt_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93DeWitt_equatio... but if you look at the equations it says g_μν dx^μ dx^ν = ... ... the Greek indices run over the values 1, 2, 3, 4 ... The notation is confusing, but it's standard in the area. It means that "g" is a 4x4 matrix and "dx" is a 4 vector, and the labels of the coordinates are actually "t,x,y,z" something like [1] ┌ ┐ ┌ ┐ │g_tt, g_tx, g_ty, g_tz│ │dx_t│ [dx_t, dx_x, dx_y, dx_z] │g_xt, g_xx, g_xy, g_xz│ │dx_x│ = │g_yt, g_yx, g_yy, g_yz│ │dx_y│ │g_zt, g_zx, g_zy, g_zz│ │dx_z│ └ ┘ └ ┘ So it's a equation that has the time variable, just like the "Einstein’s block universe". > The evidence keeps mounting from increasingly sophisticated timekeeping technology. Modern atomic clocks achieve accuracy where they’d only lose one second in 300 billion years—precision that makes your smartphone’s clock look like a sundial operated by someone with depth perception issues. These “tweezer clocks” combine atomic precision with quantum entanglement, revealing that time measurement itself has quantum foundations. That just make no sense. Atomic clocks just measure the frequency of some process, some may use entanglement, but the clocks don't show that time is created by quantum entanglement. > The Scientific Consensus: Time is a Group Hallucination > What makes this development remarkable is unprecedented convergence across theoretical physics. String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal set theory, and emergent gravity models all independently conclude that time emerges from more fundamental quantum information structures. When rival physics theories actually agree on something, reality is definitely trying to communicate important information about its operational parameters. There is no consensus about this. [1] If you want too bee too technical, to label the index of dx you should use dx^t,... instead of dx_t,... They important part is that they are 4 numbers in a vector, but the _ or ^ have a slightly different technical meaning and there are some details in important for the calculations.
scootz1 1y ago
How much of this was AI generated? From the website favicon to the background, the animation on your mouse, the color scheming, the structure of the page, the writing content, the podcast voice, I dont believe any of this was written, recorded or even posted and made by an actual person that knows anything about what theyre talking about. Are the comments here even actually real? Am I going insane?
- CarbonJ 1y ago
  I had the same gut reaction and did a little poking around. It turns out that the voice IS AI. The author has a post on Reddit here saying that they're using Elevenlabs for the voice generation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TMEHpodcast/comments/1k4c8f2/an_important_ai_disclaimer_about_our_podcast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TMEHpodcast/comments/1k4c8f2/an_imp...
MantisShrimp90 1y ago
I get that its funny to shit on philosophers with the "time is a social construct" quip but you then literally outline the arguments that make this statement true. The philosophers had their finger on the pulse decades ago, science only started listening after their models stopped being able to construct a clean deterministic view of the universe.

182 points by TMEHpodcast 1y ago

Of course we are cutting close to "god" debates to debate if time exists. It exists! Maybe it an emergent thing sure. But so is a soccer ball.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

rukuu001 1y ago

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

m3kw9 1y ago

Our survival is tied to time because things change irreversibly and resources run out as t -> infinity.

roywiggins 1y ago

> We’re not just experiencing time—we’re creating temporal experience through the very act of being conscious, quantum beings embedded in reality’s information processing systems. sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)

TMEHpodcast 1y ago
Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.
- komali2 1y ago
  Consciousness being a purely physical process comparable to rocks eroding from water or whatever is an unproven and still debated presumption. Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    > Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either. And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?
    - komali2 1y ago
      One could argue for "emergent" dualism without arguing for an immortal soul, for example - the physical complexity collapses on death, so too does the emergent consciousness with it. Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity). I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically. I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.
      - koakuma-chan 1y ago
koakuma-chan 1y ago
How does that make any sense at all? "temporal experience"? "quantum beings"? "reality’s information processing systems"?
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Caveat, this is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. The actual science is much simpler than that comedic explanation: recent experiments suggest time emerges from quantum entanglement between particles/systems. When quantum systems interact and become correlated, observers inside those systems experience what we call "time." External observers see the whole system as static and timeless. But that's about measurement and observation in physics experiments - not about consciousness being special or rocks having "experiences" or the universe being some kind of cosmic computer.
  - pharrington 1y ago
    While I think I now understand what you're going for, remember that the overwhelming amount of people who will now read this don't have the scientific knowledge to understand your blog's sarcastic tone. I know I didn't have a clue that your post was a deliberate joke until reading your comments here!
    - koakuma-chan 1y ago
      I understand the post is supposed to be funny, but is the core premise that time emerges from quantum entanglement true?
      - TMEHpodcast 1y ago
        The Page-Wootters mechanism (proposed in 1983, experimentally validated by Moreva et al. in 2013-2015) does show that time can emerge from quantum entanglement between subsystems. In their experiments, time exists for observers inside entangled quantum systems but not for external observers viewing the whole system.

b00flyd00f 1y ago

timecube does exist

labster 1y ago
Four simultaneous days in one 24 hour day really does help increase productivity. That’s where we get 4x programmers from. (10x programmers are a myth, as cubes only have 4 sides)

jayrot 1y ago

Time does exist though, at least directionally, because of entropy, no?

TMEHpodcast 1y ago
Entropy definitely gives time a clear arrow/direction (why we remember past but not future), but entropy itself is statistical/emergent from many particles. So we might have time's flow emerging from quantum correlations while time's direction remains real due to thermodynamic entropy. It's like asking if "up" exists, gravity creates real directional asymmetry even though "up" emerges from mass distributions. Maybe time's arrow is real even if time's existence is emergent? Though honestly this is where my physics knowledge hits its limits!
ethan_smith 1y ago
Entropy gives us time's arrow (directionality), but modern physics suggests it's the observer-dependent growth of entanglement entropy specifically that generates our subjective experience of time's flow.

groby_b 1y ago

This is a lovely discussion that is best answered with "well, if time doesn't exist, it doesn't really matter when your paycheck arrives, right?"

pharrington 1y ago

"in the rigorous scientific sense where quantum gravity’s most fundamental equations contain absolutely no time variable whatsoever" Immediate BS. Rigorous science doesn't have a model of quantum gravity, because they're trying to find one. edit: did not know that this blog was sarcastic

TMEHpodcast 1y ago
Subtly but in this case it’s about Page-Wootters specifically

chipsrafferty 1y ago

This article is acting like it's profound, but it's profoundly obvious that time is durational. Waste of time to read this IMO

TMEHpodcast 1y ago
This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. And yes, in a closed system, time is durational.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

xivzgrev 1y ago

New levels of guilt tripping unlocked! “When you’re scrolling social media instead of working on important projects, you’re not just wasting time—you’re failing to fully participate in the quantum correlations that create temporal reality for yourself and others.”

wisemang 1y ago
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (Thoreau)

TMEHpodcast 1y ago

OP here. This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast, so the science is accurate but delivered with about 47% more workplace humour than you'd find in Physical Review Letters. The core premise is based on real, cutting-edge physics research, though it's still an active area of debate. The Page-Wootters mechanism (proposed in 1983, experimentally validated by Moreva et al. in 2013-2015) does show that time can emerge from quantum entanglement between subsystems. In their experiments, time exists for observers inside entangled quantum systems but not for external observers viewing the whole system. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation really does lack a time parameter, creating what physicists call the "Problem of Time" in quantum gravity. And there is genuine convergence across string theory, loop quantum gravity, and causal set theory toward "emergent spacetime" models. However, this doesn't mean time is "fake", it suggests time might be like temperature, which is real and measurable but emerges from more fundamental processes (molecular motion). The research indicates time could emerge from quantum information rather than being a fundamental dimension. The 2023-2025 research I mentioned (cosmological time dilation measurements, atomic clock advances) is real, though the interpretation that "consciousness creates time" is more speculative than the underlying quantum mechanics. So yes, "emergent time" is a serious scientific hypothesis with experimental support, but science is still figuring out exactly what that means for our understanding of reality.

anon12315 1y ago
The first half threw me in a bit of despair and identity death, and the second half lifted me back up. Love this. edit: feel free to include me in as one of the feedbacks.
qntmfred 1y ago
you used the word instant quite a bit. and the word moment a few times. notably, to define what an instant is. was there any particular reason you didn't just use the term moment throughout?
- TMEHpodcast 1y ago
  Probably subconscious. I tend to use "instant" when trying to sound more technical/physics-y and "moment" when being more conversational. If time is emergent, both words are describing the same phenomenon. It's like the difference between saying "temporal coordinate" versus "when", one sounds more scientific but they're pointing at the same thing.

satisfice 1y ago

I didn't realize it was intended as comedy until I saw the advice that meetings should be scheduled in superposition until someone shows up to one of them and collapses the wave equation. I guess that would mean that all the people headed to such meetings are ghost workers until the collapse confirms the reality of the workers who attend the winning meeting?

TMEHpodcast 1y ago
Yes, in this quantum scheduling system, all the potential meeting attendees would exist in superposition, simultaneously traveling to Conference Room A, Conference Room B, and the Zoom link that nobody can find. Only when someone actually arrives and observes the meeting does the wave function collapse, confirming which reality we're all stuck in. The "ghost workers" headed to the non-realized meetings don't disappear though - in many-worlds, they just continue existing in parallel branches where they're attending completely different meetings about completely different quarterly projections. Somewhere there's a universe where your 2 PM budget review became a 2 PM birthday party because Karen from Accounting collapsed the wave function by showing up with cake instead of spreadsheets.
- satisfice 1y ago
  Somehow the Endangered Souffle trope seems to apply here… https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndangeredSouffle https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndangeredSouffl...

netfortius 1y ago

Carlo Rovelli - one of my favorite scientists alive - has a lot to say about this fascinating subject. Start with "The Order of Time", if you never read anything by him.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 1y ago

> we’ve built entire industries around optimizing something that physicists increasingly suspect is just a really convincing illusion emerging from quantum entanglement. We've also built entire industries around optimizing image and status signaling: even more flimsy abstractions.

Raphell 1y ago

We keep stressing about not having enough time, and then physicists come along and say, "Well, time might not even exist." It’s like carefully trying to organize a desk that isn’t actually there. Maybe focus is the only real resource.

hshshshshsh 1y ago
Focus assumes you have free will.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  ADHD says I do not
  - throwawaymeta01 1y ago
    or maybe it's learned helplessness? i have adhd and can't stand these type victim mindset promoting comments.
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      Not to say I entirely lack learned helplessness, but not everybody with ADHD is the same. With my ADHD I can try to get out of bed and the body will refuse to move. I can try to get something done and I just won't be able to focus long enough for that to happen. Or, I'll do something useless like watching YouTube videos or scrolling Twitter and the entire time I will be screaming at myself trying to do the productive thing that I'm supposed to have been doing the whole time and it just won't happen. It doesn't feel like learned helplessness; I'm not deciding that things are hopeless "because of ADHD". In fact, the only reason I found out I had ADHD is because I posted about constantly being unable to do even things I know I enjoy and someone commented that it could be ADHD and I had apparently never heard of this aspect of that before. Turns out I definitely have ADHD. Sorry you can't stand my comment. It's genuinely how I feel. I'm sorry if I haven't sufficiently conquered my mental disorder to your standards yet - maybe I should get off the Internet until I do? It's cool if you don't feel the same way I do. I don't have that privilege yet. Maybe one day I will, but that's no reason I should wait to express myself. This is a genuine struggle I face and I'm not saying ADHD makes everyone helpless but it sure as hell makes me feel helpless.

KolibriFly 1y ago

It does make you wonder how much of our modern obsession with "productivity" is built on an assumed understanding of time that physics is now calling into question

atemerev 1y ago

Space also doesn't exist: https://open.substack.com/pub/sorhed/p/what-if-there-was-no-spacetime https://open.substack.com/pub/sorhed/p/what-if-there-was-no-...

LoganDark 1y ago

I've always had the idea that time didn't need to actually exist for me to perceive it, because even if everything happened at once from outside, my perception of time is based on how much has happened so far. It's weird to explain, but it's related to how I personally believe backwards time travel is fully impossible without some sort of "time travel epoch", to before which it would be impossible to travel. (Also, I am pretty sure a "time travel epoch" is impossible anyway, since you can't save nor restore the state of the universe.)

lotussleeping 1y ago

It made me think of my dreaming experience when I have a clock alarming every 5 minutes. After its first alarm, I had a complicated dream, feeling like 30 minutes had passed, but when I opened my eyes, the whole dream had only lasted 2 minutes.

gus_massa 1y ago

> The real productivity crisis emerged when physicists tried merging Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics. They discovered something that would terrify any time management consultant: the Wheeler-DeWitt equation—quantum gravity’s fundamental mathematics—contains absolutely no time variable. Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been merged since 1928 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation That's the base of all the calculations inside the LHC and with some more technical details it has been tested in some cases with a lot of precision. For General Relativity, we still don't have a good theory to merge it with Quantum Mechanics. The article cites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93DeWitt_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93DeWitt_equatio... but if you look at the equations it says g_μν dx^μ dx^ν = ... ... the Greek indices run over the values 1, 2, 3, 4 ... The notation is confusing, but it's standard in the area. It means that "g" is a 4x4 matrix and "dx" is a 4 vector, and the labels of the coordinates are actually "t,x,y,z" something like [1] ┌ ┐ ┌ ┐ │g_tt, g_tx, g_ty, g_tz│ │dx_t│ [dx_t, dx_x, dx_y, dx_z] │g_xt, g_xx, g_xy, g_xz│ │dx_x│ = │g_yt, g_yx, g_yy, g_yz│ │dx_y│ │g_zt, g_zx, g_zy, g_zz│ │dx_z│ └ ┘ └ ┘ So it's a equation that has the time variable, just like the "Einstein’s block universe". > The evidence keeps mounting from increasingly sophisticated timekeeping technology. Modern atomic clocks achieve accuracy where they’d only lose one second in 300 billion years—precision that makes your smartphone’s clock look like a sundial operated by someone with depth perception issues. These “tweezer clocks” combine atomic precision with quantum entanglement, revealing that time measurement itself has quantum foundations. That just make no sense. Atomic clocks just measure the frequency of some process, some may use entanglement, but the clocks don't show that time is created by quantum entanglement. > The Scientific Consensus: Time is a Group Hallucination > What makes this development remarkable is unprecedented convergence across theoretical physics. String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal set theory, and emergent gravity models all independently conclude that time emerges from more fundamental quantum information structures. When rival physics theories actually agree on something, reality is definitely trying to communicate important information about its operational parameters. There is no consensus about this. [1] If you want too bee too technical, to label the index of dx you should use dx^t,... instead of dx_t,... They important part is that they are 4 numbers in a vector, but the _ or ^ have a slightly different technical meaning and there are some details in important for the calculations.

scootz1 1y ago

How much of this was AI generated? From the website favicon to the background, the animation on your mouse, the color scheming, the structure of the page, the writing content, the podcast voice, I dont believe any of this was written, recorded or even posted and made by an actual person that knows anything about what theyre talking about. Are the comments here even actually real? Am I going insane?

CarbonJ 1y ago
I had the same gut reaction and did a little poking around. It turns out that the voice IS AI. The author has a post on Reddit here saying that they're using Elevenlabs for the voice generation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TMEHpodcast/comments/1k4c8f2/an_important_ai_disclaimer_about_our_podcast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TMEHpodcast/comments/1k4c8f2/an_imp...

MantisShrimp90 1y ago

I get that its funny to shit on philosophers with the "time is a social construct" quip but you then literally outline the arguments that make this statement true. The philosophers had their finger on the pulse decades ago, science only started listening after their models stopped being able to construct a clean deterministic view of the universe.