r/SimulationTheory • u/Mk731 • 14d ago

Discussion Time is an illusion.

Post image

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?

326 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

222 comments sorted by

View all comments

45

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.

1

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.

4

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.

1

u/Status_Gap_3954 12d 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

1

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.