Is time an illusion?

[MoonRiver]

This fascinating article suggests that it is!

Rearrange the following words to tell a coherent life story: A man dies, later he gets married, and finally he is born. Thanks to our built-in temporal sense, it’s pretty straightforward: Tomb always follows womb, it’s never the other way around.

Yet at a fundamental level, time’s origin remains a mystery. “It’s one of the deepest questions at the forefront of science, but when we ask, ‘What is time? Where does it come from?’ it’s not even clear the words make any sense,” says Nima Arkani Hamed, a physicist at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, N.J. “We can barely articulate what a world without time, or physics without time, means.”

Confusing as the absence of time would be, there is mounting evidence that at the most basic level of reality, time is an illusion. Stranger still, laboratory tests with laser lights and advances in our understanding of string theory—the proposed framework positing that particles are composed of small threads of energy—independently point to the idea that time doesn’t really exist.

http://sorendreier.com/in-search-of-times-origin/

[Orrex]

1. That's what I told my payroll department

But they still insist that the work day starts at 8:00.

Damn them and their anti-science agenda!

[MoonRiver]

5. Lol

[Scuba]

2. Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

[MoonRiver]

7. Which would explode all our brains!

Illusions have their place!

[Dash87]

24. On the other hand, do we just lack the ability to experience everything at once?

What if time is a human construction? What if it's a self-imposed wall against reality?

[qazplm]

76. things would still take the same time to happen

whether we were here or not.

Glaciers would still melt at a certain timeframe tied to temperature, there would still be roughly 12 hours of daylight followed by 12 hours of night, and the Earth would still take roughly 365 days to orbit the planet.

I don't think time is a human construction, it is a reality. Now, is it possible that time is more an emergent thing than an actual thing so to speak? Yes. Time could simply emerge from the fundamental properties of space, and as with other things, the tinier you get, the less time may be emergent or matter.

[valerief]

78. What is everything? What is "at once"? There is no at once if there is no time. nt

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. There was an interesting NOVA special a while back.

One of the topics was the concept of "NOW". What's happening right now elsewhere in your house, town, planet or galaxy? What's happening right now on the farthest reaches of the universe? Because of relativity, it entirely depends upon your velocity in space.

We think of "now" as independent of the speed of light. We think of sunlight on our skin as having left the sun "8 minutes ago". If an alien on the other side of the universe changes his velocity, even a small change... say, by driving his car... he changes the angle of the slice of time that he considers "now". Drive one way and he's in the same slice of time that holds Galileo. Drive the other way and he's a contemporary of George Jetson.

[pokerfan]

4. Reminds me of a quote

Rearrange the following words to tell a coherent life story: A man dies, later he gets married, and finally he is born.

"A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished." - Zsa Zsa Gabor

[FSogol]

6. Time

"Well. There are those who believe that time is a wheel turning
forever. Which would mean that your moment will surely come.
Then, there are those who believe that time is a river. Which, if
that's true, it's possible that your moment has already flowed by."

"Which one do you think it is?"

"Ah. I believe that time is just time."

[FSogol]

8. And of course, Proust

"When from a long distant past nothing persists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still alone, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long, long time like souls, ready to remind us, waiting, hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence the vast structure of recollection." -"Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust

[MoonRiver]

9. Beautiful!

[RadiationTherapy]

89. Thank you for this. I am writing a master's thesis on the perception and depiction of memory

and Proust drifts in and out of every text. Beautiful passage.

[FSogol]

90. No problem. One of my favorites.

Good luck on your thesis.

[RadiationTherapy]

91. I love writing, but the bureaucratic nonsense and working with so many others' schedules...

Fecking tanglebangs!

Thanks!

[The2ndWheel]

10. Let's get rid of clocks and find out

The old wall clocks at least have a sense of a cycle and rhythm to them. Although hearing every moment in your life tick away can get a bit old. Then there are the relentlessly forward moving digital clocks.

[CrispyQ]

46. I read a fascinating article years ago about the difference in people who use standard

clocks/watches vs digital. First it stated that there are many young people today who can't read a traditional clock. It also said that some digital clock users have trouble with phrases like, "a quarter past eight." I experienced this some time ago. A young woman at the bus stop asked me the time. I told her it was a quarter till nine & she said, "But what time is that?" "8:45" I said & then she understood.

But the fascinating part was the study. They found that people who are comfortable reading a traditional clock also have a better sense of time passing - in other words, we have a better sense of when 15 minutes or 30 minutes have passed. The theory was that because traditional clock has a visual breakup of time - the five minute markers, the quarter hour/half hour, we learned a sense of that amount of time passing.

It made sense to me.


on edit: I have this clock in my office. No one ever knows how to read it & some people don't even know what it is. The time displayed is 12:34.

[kentuck]

57. Interesting!

Makes sense.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. God invented time so everything wouldn't happen all a t once. - Joseph Heller

[pinboy3niner]

12. So far my creditors aren't buying it

But I still have high hopes. Wish me luck!

[PasadenaTrudy]

13. I've lost 3 close family members

and in a weird way, I have this odd temporal feeling that they never even existed. I know they did, but, my mom and sis passed 3 yrs ago. It feels like just last week and it also feels like decades ago. Maybe it is just grief still, but it's the oddest feeling and experience. I think about time all the time (lol!) and it does boggle the mind.

[MoonRiver]

15. There is a body of thought, or rather belief, that states we individuals ARE illusions.

Our true self resides in God, where we are all One. But we decided to create a new reality for ourselves through the illusion of human life. Our minds deliberately forgot our Source and projected this dream outward. On one level we know we chose separation and want to return, but that decision has to be made by us. God will never deny his Creations free will. Anyway, that is a very brief summary.

[BelgianMadCow]

41. That makes sense, in a way I can't explain

I've always wondered about such questions, and very much appreciate your thought-provoking thread!

Organised religion really does nothing for me. But I do wonder whether we aren't one, and whether love is on the verge of uniting and awakening our collective (as of yet un-)consciousness.

[MoonRiver]

43. That is a wonderful thought.

It reflects a lot of what I believe.

[Whisp]

55. yes

This is as close as any explanation that makes sense to me.

[LuvNewcastle]

79. That actually sounds right to me. We're all clinging to an illusion.

We're like kids who don't want to quit playing their video game. I would say that I'm interested in stopping the game and checking out reality for a while, but will I exist as me if I do that? And how many other games are there to play out there? Oh well, it'll be dark soon, and I'll have to go inside and check it out for myself.

[JoePhilly]

14. Cool, I'll read this yesterday!

I'm busy tomorrow.

[MoonRiver]

16. But there is only NOW!

Didn't you get the memo?

[JoePhilly]

20. When will then be now?

Fortunately, its all explained in the documentary.

[MoonRiver]

26. Yes, now I understand perfectly.

[kentuck]

17. Very, very interesting

[MoonRiver]

19. Glad you like the link!

[reflection]

18. I read this book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Time-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925

At times, it was a little hard to wrap my head around and I had to reread passages multiple times. A very thought-provoking read, to be sure. Barbour's peers were none too impressed though, it seems.

[Javaman]

21. Time keeps on slippin slippin slippin into the future...nt

[PasadenaTrudy]

49. Tiiiiim time time, is on my side, yes it is....n/t

[lumberjack_jeff]

59. Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day... n/t

[PasadenaTrudy]

64. Oooh, I just heard this at my pharmacy today! n/t

[Vashta Nerada]

22. Time is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, stuff.

[hunter]

23. No, not an illusion, nor is it a "dimension" as it is popularly described.

I think about the question a lot, and I sometimes play with the math, even though it rapidly gets too hairy for me. (Exercises my brain, I guess...)

I don't think of time as anything one could travel through, sorry, no "time machines" or "faster-than-light" travel in my universe; in fact in my model of the universe everything is "traveling" at the speed of light, you, me, everything... Matter, "stuff," is an interference pattern on that light.

That gives us a universe of an "ever-present," a local point where the future is crystallizing and the past is dissolving, and simultaneously the other way around, with the past crystallizing and the future dissolving. In this universe the past isn't any more focused or concrete than the future. Wherever (or whenever) you go, there you are. There is never more than "here and now" and everything else "past" or "future" is a probability predicted from that "here."

The article you posted is a related perspective.

I don't think the model of a "Big Bang" in the past and the eventual cooling of the universe into an immense sea of darkness represents the "true" nature of the universe, it's just a matter of our human perspective.

I do know the human mind is very small and the universe is very large. Our sort of being will never "understand" the universe, we can only make rough models of it that have proved useful for our survival. The roughest model, the one people live by day-to-day, even if they have a complex understanding of physics, is a flat earth which we navigate with the common "dimensions" up, down, left, right, past, present.

Things got to be more complicated when people started traveling long distances and realized the earth was a sphere. Then the math of navigation got a lot more complicated, especially with long distance sailing where there were no "landmarks" to guide sailors which became a problem of even greater magnitude when clouds obscured the sky.

[CrispyQ]

47. I think you'll enjoy this link.

http://htwins.net/scale2/

I put it on for the background music - I like working to it. Then I move the cursor to the pretty twinkler's at about 10 to the 20th.

[kentuck]

25. Reality is an illusion.

These words only create the image that you want to create in your mind. These images are your reality which you share with the world.

[MoonRiver]

27. One thing I've been wondering about, since I do buy into the illusion premise,

is whether when I die nobody I love is left to grieve me. According to my belief system, they would go POOF along with me when I wake up from the dream, assuming I do wake up when I "die."

[kentuck]

34. I tend to believe...

that our experiences and "illusions" are imprinted upon the world forever. If we go down to the edge of the river and see a rainbow, that experience is always there, waiting for the next person to see. We create the illusions that are our claim to immortality. Our experiences and "illusions" are added to all the other illusions that have been created within our reality.

Our goal in life is to create beauty that we can leave behind when we leave this present dimension of reality. It can be in various forms, visual, musical, spoken word, etc.


Does that make sense?

[MoonRiver]

38. It makes perfect sense!

ACIM, of which you may know, says that within the illusion only loving thoughts remain throughout eternity. They are our "creations." Because God is pure Love, only Love can exist forever in our minds. All other thoughts represent false idols. Therefore, the illusions of fear inevitably disappear once Mind remembers itself.

[kentuck]

58. We are only limited by our imagination.

"I think, therefore I am." But not really.

I see, therefore I perceive.

I perceive, therefore I think.

The eye is the window to the soul. Our thoughts are about what we have seen. Even when we dream, it is through our eyes. Otherwise, there would be no form.

Thanks for the thread!

[MoonRiver]

60. And beyond true perception, of the real world, lies Knowledge.

According to my belief system, Knowledge is beyond our ability to grasp. When we are ready, God will take the final step, leading us to Knowledge and Heaven.

[kentuck]

62. I've always said...

Show me a church with 100 people in it and I will show you 100 different religions.

I believe there is good and evil in this world, just as there is beauty and ugliness. Just as there is love and hate. We choose which side we wish to look at.

However, I also believe that God is Love and that love is stronger than hate. In order to find the way of love, we follow the paths of truth and beauty. We desire to make our world better and more beautiful.

Beauty is the path to Truth and Truth is the path to Knowledge.

[MoonRiver]

65. 100% agree

Great conversation!

[Skraxx]

28. Time is a function of consciousness

[MoonRiver]

29. That's correct!

So, when (not if) we change our minds about time, and instead prefer eternity, time, and all it represents, disappears.

[Ligyron]

30. ^^^THIS^^^

[RadiationTherapy]

33. Is length, width and height a "function of consciousness" too?

No. And considering no one even knows what constitutes "consciousness", No.

[Skraxx]

45. Yes, they are

Our consciousness actively differentiates. The universe is one piece, our consciousness creates the perception that it is not.

[RadiationTherapy]

61. Ugh. Our NERVOUS SYSTEM differentiates. There is no commonly understood definition

of "consciousness". In any case, this kind of stuff is just word play. Time is no more an "illusion" than length, width, or height. People can debate their subjective realities forever since there are 9,000,000,000 realities to debate about. But time is a "thing" an observable and external thing that cannot - as Deepak Chopra's graying, wrinkling visage can attest to - be altered by "consciousness".

[Skraxx]

66. Call it whatever you want

"nervous system", "consciousness" whatever. The concept of time is a fundamental construct and function of our perceptual mechanism. It enables our "consciousness" or whatever to be what it is. It is a function of the existence of those particular clumps of matter that form the mechanism for our perceiving the universe. You cannot separate "time" from "consciousness", they are integral and inseparable, and they are both, illusions.

[RadiationTherapy]

67. Nah. You are just bullshitting. It sounds poetic and nice

but our nervous systems are actual identifiable, quantifiable biological components of our bodies. I won't even bother with the rest of the word-salad nonsense you are tossing.

[Skraxx]

68. Nope, that's why were seeing physicists explore this concept

If you're interested in learning, I would suggest you look up Julian Barbour's work on the subject. He's a reputable theoretical physicist who wrote a book called The End of Time that explores the concept.

Or continue to be dismissive and uninformed. Your choice.

[RadiationTherapy]

72. Bullshit. You can either articulate your point or you cannot.

Time is, like length, width, and height, a measurable dimension of space-time. There may be philosophical and scientific debates about the origin, nature of, and meaning of time as pertains to humans, but to call time "an illusion" is a manipulative and ignorant way to use our language in order to imply some human agency or "magic" can influence or eliminate the concept. If you want to elaborate Barbour's work and explain why you are calling it an "illusion" then go ahead. But if you are merely wordsmithing "consciousness" (meaningless term at the moment) and "illusion" (that time is a hallucination or made up concept), then you are just writing poetry.

It sounds lovely by the way. Yay.

[Skraxx]

73. LOL! not my problem of the concept is beyond your ability to comprehend

But as I said, feel free to continue to be incurious and uninformed.

Barbour doe a great job articulating the concept in his book, if you haven't read it then you're really not qualified to have any meaningful discussion on the topic.

[RadiationTherapy]

74. Your consciousness just can't see beyond the illusion of your programming.

hahahahahaha.

But you are a hell of a poet. Keep it up!

[Dash87]

70. Alright - prove it! :P

It's a trick question, you can't. How do you know that length, width, height, time, colors, the ground, air, etc. are actual, 100% real? Are you absolutely certain that your mind isn't interpreting each of these properties as something different from their real state? Maybe length, width, height, and time to us in their real form would be like trying to explain television to an amoeba?

Here's the problem - everything we know about these properties was observed by other humans. There is no third party to circumvent the limitations of our brains, and even if they could, they might not have the means (based on the limitations of our language) to explain to us what we're missing. An example of this limitation: Explain the color red to me.

We may or may not be missing something due to the limitations of our senses.

[RadiationTherapy]

71. They are as real as anything else that we measure with our tools and nervous systems

and then express through faulty language. The color red, for instance, is a lightwave - usually reflecting or refracting off of the surface of an object - that has a particular wavelength (~700nm) and that the rods and cones in our eyes translate into our brains. Length, width, height, and time are measurable dimensions of space-time.

That's all there is to it. This is merely high school physics.

[Dash87]

86. That still fails to solve the issue that nothing can ever be 100% proven, or at least not by humans.

Technically, we can be sure that things we "prove" are true, but we'll never know for 100% certainty that even consciousness itself isn't an illusion. To prove otherwise, you would need to become a being that has transcended consciousness who could tap into a human's consciousness and study it.

Also, while you've described what "red" is, it wouldn't, for example, help someone who has been blind since birth understand what "red" is. It's currently impossible to describe what "red" is in a way that would cause someone blind since birth to visualize the color red without seeing it.

[RadiationTherapy]

88. Yes, of course it is impossible to describe the sensation of red. But, still, red light has physical

properties able to be measured and described in both casual and mathematical terms. A person can't describe the sensation of "itch" either, but you can buy creams and ointments, hahahaha.

And so you don't think I am an absolutist or authoritarian of come kind, please consider this quote:

"Nothing in science is ever proven; that would require an infinite number of experiments. But if you disprove enough theories, the one left standing looks like the only alternative we have until we disprove that one. But nothing is ever proven. What happens is one model seems more plausible than all the others." Robert Anton Wilson

[kentuck]

92. I like that quote.

Nothing is ever proven. The one left standing is the only alternative until we can disprove it.

[BelgianMadCow]

42. everything is a wave

The universe is a wave of quantum probabilities. And yes, consciousness influences these probabilities.

So, our minds can change the universe. A powerful thought.

[Marr]

80. Actually, there's no science that suggests consciousness has an effect on reality.

That's a common misinterpretation of the whole quantum entanglement concept. It's not consciousness, per se, that matters-- it's interaction. A rock floating about in dead space can interact with a particle just as well as an observer.

[RadiationTherapy]

87. Yes, the act of observing - a nervous system looking at a measuring device of some kind.

[Vattel]

31. There are (at least) four dimensions to our universe. Time is one fo them.

The apparent differences between the temporal dimension and the three spatial dimensions are just an illusion. Or so some physicists think.

[RadiationTherapy]

32. Is length and illusion? Is height an illusion? Is depth an illusion?

No.

[Marr]

82. Isn't it bizarre?

People go off on these really weird, pseudo scientific/mystical/philosophical tangents with these sorts of things, and act like it's supported by science. I do not understand it.

[RadiationTherapy]

85. I am writing my thesis for my master's in communication

and I see much of these matters to be language related. Certain words and phrases, often due to having poetic or hyper-flexible "definitions", are deployed in such a way as to sound relevant, but cannot be pinned down for criticism or verification. Korzybski, McLuhan, Robert Anton Wilson, and Dr. Tim Leary all have written and lectured on the phenomenon.

[Iggo]

35. It's just one thing after another.

[Savannahmann]

36. Time exists.

It is flexible however. How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.

[panader0]

37. Thanks. Now I'm having a relapse.....

[Art_from_Ark]

39. It's not that time doesn't exist,

it's just that it keeps on slippiin', slippin', slippin' into the future

[Revanchist]

40. That's just silly, of course time exists

However, it is a cube

[kairos12]

44. Time is an illusion only if you are on the right side of the bathroom door

[CrispyQ]

48. "Live in the now!"

Fascinating thread!

~kick

[PasadenaTrudy]

50. Time has come today....TIME! n/t

[MineralMan]

51. That depends on who is asking and where they are standing.

For human beings on this planet, time is not an illusion.

[brush]

52. Time = Distance = Space nt

[ms liberty]

53. Yes, lunch time doubly so (Douglas Adams) n/t.

[democratisphere]

54. If TIME does not exist......

then WHY am I always late???

[Orsino]

56. "Lunchtime doubly so." --Douglas Adams n/t

[notundecided]

63. Psychological time or Chronological time?

The former is a thing of the mind, and the latter exists outside of the mind. Psychological time is yesterday, today and tomorrow. Chronological time is a measure of motion ie I need time to go from here to there.

[madokie]

69. It is when you're a 65 retired/disabled man

If it wasn't for my wife's work schedule I'd not know what day of the week it is most times. I know daylight and dark and when its time to eat cause my belly will start growling at me if I don't feed it. The bigger it gets the louder it growls too

[ChisolmTrailDem]

75. Time is a human construct rooted in the need to organize and schedule activities. It

does not exist as an ethereal thing that can be detected by the senses.

[kentuck]

83. I think you are on to something there.

Time is something we waste on work and experience, attempting to create our own reality. Once the work is done or the building is built, it becomes a part of reality for everyone. Even if the building were to burn down, its appearance would still be imprinted upon our consciousness. In the concept of the age of the universe, a baby born today is older than an old man that died yesterday.

Time is a collection of our illusions and experiences. They become the reality that we see and perceive with our eyes.

[valerief]

77. So I guess this is what the GOP will tell people whose food stamps they've cut.

"Your growling stomach is just you imagining you haven't eaten in three days, because time is an illusion."

[Motown_Johnny]

81. No. Entropy increases no matter what. Time can be thought of as

the change in the amount of usable energy present in the universe. It is, in effect, "God's proverbial stopwatch" except that it runs at different rates under different conditions.

Just because particle entanglement is hard to explain, does not mean that time does not exist. It simply may be that the particles form some type of a (super)string that we are not yet able to detect. Then when we do something to one end of the string it effects the other end immediately. It is more likely that one (or even two) spacial dimension(s) does/do not exist between those two particles (or ends of the string) than that time does not exist.

Personally, I don't believe a Theory of Everything is possible. Just because these people can't come up with one does not mean that time (or all of reality for that matter) does not exist.


Just my two cents.

[GoneOffShore]

84. Douglas Adams had a take on this.

Go to 11:40 on this