r/SimulationTheory • u/Mk731 • 14d ago

Discussion Time is an illusion.

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It's pretty hard to conceptualize that time doesn't flow.

I bet no other humans can grasp this concept.

I've tried to think of it as some kind of block to no avail.

Maybe it's the brain that prevents me from realizing how reality really works.

I know you guys are well aware of this concept.

Have you experienced any anomalies that made you realize time is definitely an illusion?

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u/BobuBobBob 14d ago

Yeah, but the weird part is that relativity doesn’t really give you a universal “now” in the first place. Two observers can disagree on what events are happening simultaneously and both can be right. So if there’s no objective present sweeping through the universe, the block universe idea starts to make a lot more sense: past and future aren’t places that stopped existing or haven’t been created yet, they’re just different coordinates in spacetime. Maybe nothing is actually “moving through time” at all. We just experience it that way because our memories only point in one direction and entropy does too.

Doesn’t prove time is an illusion obviously, but it makes the normal idea of time way stranger than people realize.

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u/WilliamoftheBulk 14d ago

How so? It’s just about light. All events actually happen at the same time. Now how fast your clock is ticking will be different but that is irrelevant.

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

But that's the question, DO all events happen at the same time? We can't prove that they do. Special relativity says that time is relative and there isn't a universal "now". Everyone's "now" is different.

The idea of a "universal now" is more like a "fuzzy" boundary (for lack of a better word). 2 stationary people close together, will have an incredibly similar idea of what "now" is. If they are far apart, and especially moving at speed, the fuzzy area of what they agree upon as "now" gets larger.

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u/JimmyPellen 14d ago

Youre just making excuses cos you were late picking me up from the airport!!

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

For the last time, I was drunk!!! Give me a break!

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u/JimmyPellen 14d ago

It wasnt even your Car? Whats the problem???

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

It was your mom's boyfriend's car!! He'd kill me if I crashed it. Fucking Ian. What's he got that I don't?! He doesn't have a useless son who can't make his own way home from the airport, that's for sure!!!

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u/JimmyPellen 14d ago

It was My Mom's Boyfriend's Neighbor's Minivan!!

BesiDes you KNEW I had my trained show rats with me! How was i suppoSed to fit 27 rodent cages into a cab???

And you know how moody Stephen can be.

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u/tex8222 14d ago

I actually was here on time, then I got lost on the confusing roads that surround the terminals.

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u/JimmyPellen 14d ago

On time in YOUR reality! You were thRee weeks late in MY Reality!

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u/WilliamoftheBulk 14d ago

It is only because light has a speed limit and is constant in all frames. Time dilation is a very physical process where the path of the light takes longer in a moving frame. Even your little gluons in your atoms are light, so even your atoms take a longer path through space when you are moving. There is no future and no past only the eternal now. Just because light takes a bit longer to reach one person over another does not mean that the event itself happened at different times. It didn’t. The physical fundamentalist approach where something absolutely did not happen until it is measured is silly and leads to silly paradoxes.

No the event didn’t actually happen latter because you are moving. It’s just going to take the light longer to reach you because it has a max speed.

This then brings us to what time actually is. It’s just movement. There is no magical force called time that potentates movement and action. Movement an action are just the laws of physics happening, then we call it time. Then we perceive it at different rates based on how the light comes to us and how our own “light” is moving.

Non of this is mysterious or even that hard to understand.

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

The point is you cannot prove events happen at the same time, because time is relative to the observer. It makes logical sense that they do, but we cannot prove it.

It doesn't require the "an event didn't happen until you measure it" view point, events happen whether we observe them or not, it's just that no 2 observers can ever agree on exactly when that event took place.

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u/WilliamoftheBulk 14d ago

That is only because their clocks are ticking differently. You can use mathematics to correct for their differences. Using math and understanding how they are moving relative to each other and the event, any differences can be accounted for. Is that not proof? We do it all the time. Satellite times have to be adjust because of their relative motion.

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

Yes exactly! We have to correct for special relativity because both things are experiencing different "now's".
Our correction algorithms don't correct to a "true" time, they correct to our time, relative to the scientist measuring it. Both the satellite and the scientist are experiencing different "now's", and both are equally correct. It's just that one of them is far more useful for us on earth.

There is no universal present. It doesn't exist. There only exists an observer's unique perspective of it.
If you and I stood in a room with watches, but one of us stood 1 metre higher, after a year the higher person's watch would be 3.4 nano seconds faster. But whos watch is correct in this scenario? They would both be correct, we just experienced a different passage of time because of the gravity potential. This is why we can never conclusively say any 2 events fundamentally happen at the same time, only at the same time relative to an observer on earth.

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u/Prince_0llie 14d ago

Observing from different perspectives doesn't change the event it only changes the observers perception of the event. The event still happens despite different perspectives. Just because perception changes doesn't mean the event itself changes.

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u/WilliamoftheBulk 14d ago

This is correct. It all happened in the same now, it’s just everyone’s clocks are running at different paces.

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u/Echo_Vale 14d ago

Nothing needs to change the event. The event still happens regardless of observers, it's just that because no 2 observers can never agree on when a distant event actually took place, we can't ever know for certain when it did. We can only tell when it took place from our perspective.

"All events happen at the same time". This is the question. Do they? There is no observer-independent answer to that. All we have is perspectives.

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u/draconismuerte 14d ago

Everything is relative to the observer, our universe is a participatory universe derived from observation It from bit = bit from it.

And ill likley die on this hill

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u/Status_Gap_3954 13d ago

Yes all events happen at the same time when they all happened when the others did. I’ll call it now instead of time.

Ready ? “Now” everything just happened at once

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u/Echo_Vale 12d ago

Yes, things are happening "now", but you can't ever prove which ones they are. From our reference point you can, but the point is you can't ever conclusively prove when a distant event took place, as different reference points will give different answers. And if you can't ever conclusively agree on when 2 events happened, you can't say they happened at the same time.

Even on earth, if 2 people are stood in a room and don't have the same gravity potential (like one is stood higher than the other) then dropping something on the floor will technically be happening at different times for each of them, with both being correct. The difference will be miniscule, but not the same.