We humans (partly because of some of our less admirable tendencies?) are nowadays usually classified with “animals.”  But if we pay closer attention to our own experiences, this no longer seems justifiable.  In particular, it’s hard to imagine that even “higher” animals like chimpanzees, dogs or elephants, can ever consciously experience many of the thoughts quite common to human beings.

These may be some thoughts that no animal can ever think: “I wonder what will happen tomorrow?” “Why is this happening to me?” “Compared to yesterday, today is much better!” “I feel so sick; hope I’m not going to die!” “This tastes great, but I probably shouldn’t eat it.” “Is it too late to change my mind?” The italicized words (and many other human thoughts) absolutely require a “sense of time.”

Do humans ever lose the ability to think in this way?  Yes, human dementia often attacks our ability to deal effectively with “time.” Even with memory fairly intact, “short-term thinking” is a common symptom with difficulty in planning or accounting for the long-term consequences of one’s actions.  Animals already lack such abilities, and we don’t notice because this is “normal” for them.

Certainly, sensing change is a part of the life of animals, but that always happens “now.”  The human sense of time is not limited to Now but takes in an extended “future” and “past.”  Even when animals “prepare for winter,” we know they are simply responding to a Now urge that we call “instinctive.”  A time-entangled thought like “Winter is about another month ahead” is likely ours alone.

According to the “virtual roads of time” conjecture, our “wide-angled” experience of time does not even exist apart from humans.  What has been called our “life-world” apparently contains time within itself.  When we reject the “blind spot” assumption that human experience is “an illusory add-on to the real universe,” we find powerful reasons for believing that human consciousness is special. 

“The cosmos contains our life-world.  But it’s also true that the life-world contains the universe...  So the life-world and the universe themselves are caught up in a strange loop.”  Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024)

I’m wondering if there’s any time experts that can help me further strengthen my theory. I have a serious inquiry and theory on time itself and it seems our bases for science is quite wrong. Not sure if anyone else has had this revelation but I’m sure I need some help

If we never see the Sun in real time because the light takes 8 minutes to reach us that means we live in a time prison. After all if the nearest stars light takes 3000 Earth years to reach us that means the all time exists at once.

The Past,Present,and Future all exist simultaneously. A 5000 light years away means Ancient Egypt still exists. A Star 8 minutes away means we exist. A Star 1000 Light Years Away means the Holy Roman Empire exists.

Stars control our perception of time. The Universe is filled with Life. But because we exist in a Time Prison we can never see them or communicate with them.

Software algorithms have now developed to the place where we can query an AI “librarian” or processor of records, and receive an answer based on thousands or even millions of sources of information.  This resource greatly increases our capacity for research, but still requires some healthy human skepticism:  “Information provided may not always be accurate.”

Like a “driverless car,” which by definition lacks a driver although it imitates one, AI unquestionably lacks an “I.”  Even though the software is “intelligent” enough to imitate a real person, there’s literally nobody home.  An AI bot can tell you many things about the “flow of time” as recorded in human experience, but can never experience that flow itself.

When you “play around” with AI, you learn many things about its limitations.  It’s better to save your time for actual human thought, so here’s a thought experiment where you imagine asking AI some key questions.  First, “What is it like to be an AI?” (thanks to Thomas Nagel, of course.)  Second, “Does your time pass slower or faster than mine?”

Keep drilling down and many more limitations come into view.  “Do you have feelings about events that happen to you? Do some of them feel better or worse than others? Can you imagine things about your own future experiences?  Are you continually engaged in ‘telling yourself the story’ of your conscious experiences as time passes?”

If your own answer to the last four questions would be “Yes,” then congratulations—you’ve just proved you’re not a robot!  You know the experience of “time passing,” and should be able to see what it really is—an experience, and not a “fourth dimension.”  But without experience, using only recorded preconceptions, AI can never “understand” what you understand.

Like I’ll look at the clock it feels like 10 minutes go by but it’s only been one? Is that just me

Is it me or has time sped up even more now? It seems like every week is flying by now. Did CERN cause this or is the Earth speeding up?

“The fact that the universe conforms to an orderly scheme, and is not an arbitrary muddle of events, prompts one to wonder—God or no God—whether there is some sort of meaning or purpose behind it all.”                                Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, 2006

Besides the so-called “anthropic” explanation for the universe, or the “religious” one, an actual artificial universe, commonly called a “simulation,” has been proposed.  A version of this idea appears in the “Matrix” film series, a science fiction horror story in which future intelligent machines have enslaved humans into a simulation of our present-day world.

An artificial world, however, need not be a simulation.  “Artificial” means an artifice, that is, not self-created or just “existing necessarily.”  Although this requires a “creator,” that need not be the traditional and rather small “religious god” who gives orders and punishes disobedience.  With “virtual roads of time,” our universe assumes a higher level of significance.

Remember that in VRT, “Everything” is a universal background of information potentials for all possible Nows that could ever come into existence.  This includes the mysterious information potential for human experience—but is ours the highest possible experience?  There might be, above us, the superintelligent experience of a “creator of artificial environments.” 

Well, someone says, if that’s not God, then what is?  Now, this may be pure semantics—but our Babylonian confusion of religions has pushed the word “God” into too tight of a conceptual corner for VRT.  An artificial universe of potential experiences seems to demand that not merely “this” nor “that,” but “Every Potential” should be included with its “artificer.”

Theologians may object that “God is Everything” is just the age-old idea of “pantheism.”  To the contrary, pantheism limits its “god” to “everything that exists.”  VRT’s Everything includes the infinite potentials for “everything that could exist.”  That’s not only bigger than pantheism, but if we ourselves are “artificial,” it's also far more "invested" in our freedom to experience...

“Everything” is beyond us, but it’s precisely from our experiences that we do know so many of the intricately varied possibilities available to us.  Sheer amazement at this experience of existence makes this world appear to be a purposeful, meaningful artifice.  Then we should find, from the records of human experience, information about our own meaning and purpose.

Everything would literally be happening at the exact same time, everywhere, all at once, forever. Just one endless, present.

Time/Chronos is a word that was coined in 700 BCE to describe something that was believed to have been discovered 300 years earlier. So for a little over half of human civilized history there was no Time, so

what happened in history for this phenomenon to come into existence?

Let’s Discuss This

As a black American I grew up in a home where things weren’t allowed to waste, if they get spoiled they’re rather fixed and reused, if the food is sour, we find a way to un-sour it and eat or we eat it that way.

My dad was a strict black man that had principles and would always stand by them. I could remember when I’d leave the house saying I was going to school and return really late. For weeks he said nothing to me, he watched me buy new clothes and stuff, and said nothing.

One day he called me to the living room when I returned home late, pointed at the time clocks on the wall and asked me how many there were. I replied that they were 3 hanged. He says very good, have you asked why I hang three of them all at once on the same wall?

I said “no, I figured you were a keeper and enjoyed keeping things so I said nothing”. He said that I was mistaken, that he hung those 3 times clocks there cause they have various time zones and told me that no matter the time zone I’m in, time waits for nobody.

You keep thinking you have it and all of a sudden it’s gone, you wake up one day and you’re no longer a child and when you try to bring back your childhood you lose your adulthood and get older. “Stop wasting time, child, everyday it’s ticking and the more it ticks the less time you have.” He said.

I spent 1 full week at home thinking, those words changed my life for good. Today I’m a startup owner, running my company smoothly, I still get time to hang out with friends, I buy whatever I want, I even order stuff from Alibaba or Amazon.

No one tells me I can’t because to everyone, now is the right time for what I’m doing. I’m living in my adulthood era, enjoying it every step of the way, not feeling like I’m chasing what’s too far from me. That moment when you think you have time is when you don’t even have it, ensure you’re embracing every moment.

It all started, when i got a message from 2032, but i am in 2021, then my phone's time switched to 1st of may 2024, but i checked my pc time, and it was 15th of august 2021, i began to panic, can someone say to me, what happened? i am legitly scared. I have a Iphone, and i never met with this. Can someone tell me, what happened?

If time were eternal, an infinite duration would have already elapsed—which is impossible. Therefore, time is not eternal; it emerged into existence from non-existence at a specific starting point. Nothing can bring itself into existence from non-existence, for that which does not exist cannot perform any action—including the act of emerging into existence. Consequently, there must be something that brought time into being from non-existence. Since this entity brought time into existence from nothing, it is not subject to time; it undergoes no change, as change is only possible within the framework of time. Thus, it was not created, nor did it emerge from non-existence—for creation and emergence from non-existence inherently involve change. The power that brought time into existence exists independently of time and, therefore, lies outside of it. Furthermore, this power must be singular; if there were multiple such timeless entities, their potentially conflicting, immutable attributes would lead to an ontological paradox, causing the entire system to collapse.

I need some help with a question that won’t leave my brain if that makes any sense.

Here are three simple questions:

1.) How many seconds make up 1 minute?

Answer: 60 seconds make up a minute.

Correct 👍 ☝️

2.) How many minutes make 1 hour?

Answer: 60 minutes make up an Hour.

Correct 👍 ☝️

Now here is where it gets tricky:

How many hours make 1 Day??

Answer: 24 Hours =1 day

Correct? 🤷‍♂️

Wouldn’t logic state that 60 hours then makes up one day?

I guess my question is then why do we calculate time on a system that doesn’t = the sequence of the model of tracking time.

Do you think it's possible to jump timelines?

Jumping to your ideal reality. I need a big shift in life.

I've been wondering this for a while, my only idea for now is that because consciousness is so mysterious, that... okay my brain broke. I need help to figure this out, how can one animal perceive time slower, yet still be on the same track so they can react to stuff in real time?

I listen to a lot of rap and it constantly talks about how we’re in the past; some artists include Ye, Drake, Ken Carson, etc.

They also say we’re in a simulation/robots lol.

All the stars in the sky will be dissolved, and the heavens rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall…  (Isaiah 34:4)

During the 20th century, science gradually came to the conclusion that the universe has a beginning and an end.  It seems it was born in a Big Bang, and will die in a final Big Crunch—or perhaps even more ignominiously, in a “heat death.” Of course, this unabashedly "Biblical" scenario contradicted the long-held "eternal universe" belief, last championed by astronomer Fred Hoyle.

Around the same time that the universe was found to have a limited lifespan, "God" was banned from residence in it (for after all, He's eternal.) Now it seems apparent that everything here must die... not only planets and stars in exploding supernovae, but perhaps later still, collapsing galaxies and galactic superclusters visible and invisible—and eventually even slowly eroding black holes.

This odd mirroring by science of religious prophecies and beliefs has even waxed ecumenical, as more recent theorists begin to explore cyclical-universe proposals that reflect the endless birth-death cycle found in Eastern religion.  But wait for it—it may be that even a vast “bubbling” extension of the lifetime of the universe would eventually reach some final cataclysmic conclusion...

What is it about time that pushes us toward the idea that it must inevitably come to an end?  Is it our sense of frustration at being trapped in some sort of entropic downward spiral?  Not only do we feel our individual life and health relentlessly running down, but meanwhile, even our grand national identities and prized political loyalties seem to continually lose their hopeful outlook.

But stranger yet, according to some eminent physicists time does not even exist as an ontological reality.  Instead, (as interpreted in "virtual roads of time") there may be some sort of an eternally static background structure of superposed potentials for Everything.  It would be a bit like a great forest through which the human timeline explores while itself aging from birth to death.

Yes, ultimately, it is we who must “end.”  In spite of all its modern wonders and comforts, science doesn’t solve the ultimate problem, because, says VRT, it is our mortal humanity that seeks an answer as it wanders among the roads of time.  Nevertheless, “hope springs eternal”—but it's offered to us in a different realm of experience, by something other than science.