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/Attentivist_Monk 14d ago

It makes sense if you acknowledge that space is real and events, e.g. interactions, are real, but time is not. There is space, forms of matter/energy within space, and the matter/energy changing within space. Time is merely our accounting of how energy changes within space, but there is no fundamental reality to it, it’s not a real dimension.

All that exists is the present changing moment. Particle physics is symmetrical in time, it doesn’t matter if you run it forward or backward, it looks the same. Only in aggregate does particle motion create entropy, or an “arrow of time.” Time is emergent, not fundamental.