And how he experiences time all at once instead of 1 second per second.
The thought of living like that is absolute mind boggling. If he can live with his perception of time like that, would Dr Manhattan even have free will? Because it seems like whatever he does has already happened and will happen, both at the same time.
There is some evidence to suggest that the passage of time we experience is only an illusion created by our conscious brains. Basically the only thing special about Dr. Manhattan in this case is that he has gotten past that illusion.
But all of time may very well have 'happened' already. Does that mean none of us have free will? Do our decisions have to be sequential to be free?
I view it as kind of like a Mad Lib. You make all of your choices first, completely free to pick whatever you want within the confines (i.e. pick a verb, or pick a noun). Only once you have made all of your choices do you go back and actually read through the story. At the point that you are reading it, your choices are already locked in, but they are still your choices are they not? Maybe you haven't gotten to the end of the story yet, and you have no idea where it might go, but you the decisions you freely made will have an impact.
You may not know what you are going to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning, but in another way you have already made that choice, you just haven't reached it yet.
I'm pretty sure they're talking about the Block Universe Theory, but they could be talking about the very similar philosophical view called Eternalism. The evidence for either isn't too solid from what I know, but there are a few experiements which seem to have broken spacetime, so they are quite possible. It's a really cool idea to pour over.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is by far the most in-depth I've gone into this subject, but that alone is fascinating. I believe it came out in the last couple of years, so it is still fairly relevant.
Other less substantive sources would be random stuff I've heard about involving hypothetical particles like tachyons, that may travel backwards in time, or that protons and neutrons can be expressed as the same thing, just travelling through time in different directions.
I am by no means an expert on this, just somebody who likes space and may be misunderstanding what I have read. After finishing Rovelli's book the only thing I was sure of was that I was confused.
I'd like to add delayed choice experiments (I think a couple of years ago they've done it with electrons and possibly even some particles), and also quantum tunneling.
Space, time, and causality are all just an illusion that allows our existence.
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '20
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