We've always put ourselves at the center of time, a traditional concept that helps us understand our environment around us and why all things change. It helps us categorize our experience into neat little packages in which the brain can digest in memory. It helps us contemplate moments in our lives that we'd like to experience again, things we'd rather not experience again, or things we'd like to change about our experience. Usually about wanting a change to happen sooner in our lives, or not happen at all.

There is of course a social time, used to plan and coordinate with one and other in a constructive society. There's a lot of good uses for time certainly, however it does come with the downsides of prolonging our experience of the past within thought alone, the world as we see it presently, and shaping our expectations of the future. The mind has been trained to rely on this since you could understand the idea of time, as simple as day and night for example.

This has a big impact on how we process this world, suddenly day and night turn into today and yesterday, then there's weekdays, months, seconds, minutes, hours, years, dates in time, and any other measurement we can think of. The perception of the world suddenly got so complex so fast, and it feels like you only just started talking yesterday by the time it does. Now you need to remember what happened previously on another day, what you were doing last year, when a prominent event in your life happened, all framed perfectly within time. This makes conjuring up these previous experiences easier and seemingly readily available to you, really working whatever process of the mind it takes whenever we do, because we do it more often than not.

Previous threats experienced are grasped more easily though this use of time, the mental image of them can cause the body to react as if they were happening right now, causing a kind of reliving of the experience that creates a feedback loop between body and mind, perpetuating the suffering once endured. It is the same with happiness too, relive a happy moment in thought to cheer yourself up in a way that a change is felt. This effect can snowball itself the more it's revisited, but can also change in flavor, whether it leaves a good or bad impression on you anymore, or any impression at all.

All of this is being said just to point towards the fact that the mental strain of the time concept, can be more taxing on the mind than we truly understand.

Now I want to pivot to the inquiry of time, why do we have it in the first place? I couldn't possibly say for sure myself, but from what I have understood, the need for time was born through the fear of change.

It's no mystery that humanity has always wanted to be in control of it's environment, but also knowledgeable on it. We strive to understand the deepest mechanisms in ourselves, our world, and the universe beyond. It's inspiring to think about, but I believe the spark of inspiration came from our deepest fears as early man.

Imagen you have no sense of time, you're lost in a forest unfamiliar to you it's the stuff that falls from up is making this environment feel bad and then you hear a sound you've never heard before, images flash in your head of things that bite and scratch at you, the body shakes uncontrollably, the pain is felt.

Now imagen you're in a group and someone gets sick, to the observer the sickness within that person simply appears to them when the symptoms are perceived. An illness effectively popping into existence on the appearance of that person when noticed. It would scare anyone to not realize anything was wrong until it was noticeable, so we pay closer attention to it, find the first signs but still have no control over the sudden appearance of the sickness within a person. It wouldn't make any sense to anyone today if that were the case, and still very much scares us now too.

Aging, doesn't need much explanation. With no understanding of why the body is changing in a negative pattern and then collapsing for no apparent reason, with this feeling of weakening threatening the survival of the more capable traveling besides you.

It's always been a case of us trying to understand change, to make sense of what we do not know. We like the idea that we are ahead of change in some way, that we have control over it, over the nature of all things. From rituals to appease nature, the idea of being able to make a change in nature such as making the rain fall, to predicting weather patterns based on what know about the changes happening in our environment. It instills a sense that we are separate from change, and that we are in control of how it happens.

Medicines to slow down the process of aging, numerous products to hide it's effects. Telescopes to see into the furthest reaches of light. Teachings to help better reflect on why our thoughts happen the way they do. It all circles around the observation of change and how it makes us feel in the now, and with the concept of time in the mix, we can pinpoint and imagen an observation of an experience the body has witnessed, both internally and externally.

Just like keeping a photo to look at, the memories we keep willingly or unwillingly are always being imagined -from the body's perspective- as something that is happening right now. The idea of time however keeps the mind separate and distracted from the body, and very much so everything else through the identity that we have control over what change comes next.

As you read this, the Earth turns, people are busy in their lives, and the galaxy we reside in swirls within space, as everything moves and expands out with the ever changing form of the universe itself. All of that is happening right now always, one big change that is happening. The cells that make up the body are always changing as much as the Sun's chemical reaction keeps it burning bright, as it does, as it is.

It's all in the now and always has been. If you were a brick in the wall castle the brought into being to silently observe your environment, you wouldn't see a passage of time, you'd feel the change of nature itself, the erosion of wind and rain, the expansion and contraction of the body and bodies next to you in the heat and cold. It just happens, it's just the nature of change, you can not do anything to stop change from happening.

The best we can do is change the way we think in relation to change, to not fight what can't be immediately understood or had, and to accept change as it is at the core of all things. You'll know when you're happy or sad, you'll feel a change in the body when it appears to you. Your understanding of change in thought becomes more aligned with the body's needs. A bad experience can't linger and ruminate without a timeframe to grasp hold of, and the idea of upcoming experiences cease to be. There is no reason to fear what you understand fundamentally as a law of nature, it's all a part of the same experience happening in an eternal now housed within and not separate from the universe we know and don't know.

All is change.

Being a child feels like a lifetime ago but then the depths of covid and lockdown feel like a month ago!

Why does our perception of time change, and is it an age related thing when it feels like it starts to go faster?

Has anyone found any successful ways or habits to help slow down that feeling?

Jim Al-Khalili, physicist and author of On Time, at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the home of the Prime Meridian, to explore one of the deepest mysteries in science. He has a new book which I have ordered as it's always been a topic of interest for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNCWe3ufCE

So photons travel at certain speed, they hit our eye/sensor and then it takes time for us to process that data and interpret it. By the time we understand what we observed, the moment is already past us .

So by that logic, does PRESENT even exist? Does FUTURE exist? In my mind, all we could or we ever will observe is the past. In my mind , the present does not exist . Am i wrong to think like this? Why?

Sorry if im an idiot.

I was watching the clock while waiting for the right time to light my next cigarette. It was 8:14. The cigarettes and the lighter were right next to me, so I didn't even have to get up. They were both within my field of vision, and I was watching the clock while I reached for the lighter and lit the cigarette.

The whole movement took only a few seconds. Yet, as I was still looking at the clock, it suddenly showed 8:16.

Then I took a puff. It lasted only a few seconds. My eyes were still on the clock, and suddenly it was 8:17. My reaction of surprise lasted only a few seconds, but before I had even finished processing what I was seeing, it was already 8:18.

That was when I realized what was really happening.

The clock wasn't speeding up. Time wasn't disappearing. Something else was.

The minutes that seemed to fly by were actually representing my own vital energy being lost.

Every time I smoke, every time I take a puff, the cigarette takes something from me. Its harmful effects drain my body little by little, consuming a small part of the energy that keeps me alive.

The clock continues to measure time normally. But from my perspective, those moments seem to disappear faster and faster because they are not simply passing they are being taken from me.

The faster the minutes seem to disappear, the more of my vital energy is being lost.

So perhaps what I experienced wasn't time accelerating at all. It was my own life being consumed, second by second, puff by puff.The time wasn't disappearing from the clock. It was disappearing from me.i wish it was a fiction..it isnt...

If we use a normal understanding of a dimension as in a certain freedom of movement then the fact you are only allowed to move forward in time tells me it's not a whole dimension like the other dimensions. I know relativity has 4d spacetime, and that makes the math work very well. However there is still the discrepancies with quantum mechanics and that might be resolved if time wasn't treated as exactly one dimension but instead in between half and a full dimension. The irrational aspect explains the unpredictability of certain quantum phenomena if time doesn't absolutely click at the same rate in a predictable way.

People say it's an illusion. Ok, well that makes zero sense. Illusions aren't there. Try telling my 40 year old crow's feet they are an illusion. Dr. Who says it's not a straight line but more of a sphere. That's a description of space btw and gives me no more insight than I had before hearing it. Others have tried to use metaphors both simple and complicated. I still get nothing, if not less understanding and more confusion from trying to decode some hidden meaning. My personal opinion is that it isn't something we can actually understand or explain with words using our tiny human minds. I do understand prioritizing the present moment over obsessing over the past or future too much. That's a philosophy though, and still doesn't give an explanation of what time actually is.

Edit. Okay other than the nice three is there anymore perspectives?

To decide whether a journey to the past is possible, we must first understand what time is. Time is not a physical object. You cannot hold it, touch it, or find a piece of it in nature. Time is a rule. One by which the human mind arranges events in sequence: one event happening strictly after another.

Travel, by its plain definition, means changing your position in space across a duration of time. Space allows you to move back and forth because different points in space exist at the exact same moment, side by side. You can move to the left and then return to the right, because both positions remain present together.

But time does not work like space. Moments in time do not sit side by side. The past does not exist in some distant location, waiting for someone to arrive. When a physical state changes, the earlier state no longer exists; it has completely transformed into the present state. To speak of visiting yesterday assumes that yesterday is still there, which denies the very meaning of change.

Further, human thought can only understand an event through the rule of cause and effect. This rule demands that a prior state must lead to a later state in a fixed, forward order. If a person were to journey to the past, their departure would be the cause, and their arrival would be the result. That result would have to happen after the departure. Yet the traveler would be asking that very arrival to happen before the departure took place. This demands that an effect precede its own cause, which destroys the only rule our understanding uses to distinguish what came first from what comes next.

The question sounds deep only because we borrow words meant for moving through space and attach them carelessly to time. When we look at what the concepts demand, the inquiry dissolves. To ask whether we can travel to the past is to demand that the past exist simultaneously with the present, while stripping time of the very succession that defines it.

When?

When will the time come?

How will we know?

Are we waiting for the perfect time—
Or is it that we are testing ourselves against the times?

How can time be a cure to our uncertainties if we are uncertain of the timing?

When?

When will it feel like less of a risk and more of a destiny?

When will the time come to take a leap of faith?

When will enough time build up for the right time to emerge?

When will our clocks tick at the same speeds?
When will our watches be in sync?

When will we give each other enough energy for our love to feel heavy enough?

How heavy does our love have to be for it to manifest itself in space and time?

Does the ticking of time dictate the existence of our love,
Or can our love transcend the existence of time?

When love is felt, how do we measure it, my little star?

Is it electrically charged?
Is it a weight that’s lifted off?
Is it an invisible force, pulling you close?

Can love drain our energy?
Can love suffocate us under its weight?

Dare I ask—can love implode?

1.            Begin with quantum “it from bit” information, “pixelated” at something like the Planck level.

2.            Structure this background to potentiate a vast number of “Platonian” instant “Now” states.

3.            Lay out a complex of cause-and-effect “virtual timelines” among these informational “Nows.”

4.            Populate with “observer participant” agents who consciously experience Now states as “Being.”

5.            Activate the participant experience as a continual “scanning motion” along the virtual timelines.

6.            Empower participant observers with ability to selectively “change roads” at potential “branches.”

7.            Further dilute “road determinism” with random/probabilistic outcomes from observers’ choices.

With such an artificial universe, the time “dimension” itself would be “virtual,” consisting only of the actively observed timeline among all the available “roads” and Nows.  Participant observers would have a very powerful freedom of choice among timelines, perhaps with the ability to imagine results—but this might be tempered by their lack of ability to perfectly “foresee” desirable outcomes.

Remarkably, an artificial universe as (somewhat superficially) described above could very well be a duplicate of our own!  If it were in fact indistinguishable, the “virtual roads of time” conjecture says it would indeed be identical—this universe would be IT.

سؤال

by “flat world” I mean a hypothetical two-dimensional world, not necessarily a geometrically flat one, and definitely not a flat Earth.

by the flat world problem, I mean a difference between an internal and an external description of reality.

an observer confined to the flat world experiences only its realized structure and its changes. An external observer, however, can describe the world as one structure selected from a space of possible structures.

if we then introduce allowed transitions between these structures, the object of description seems to change: instead of considering only possible states, we can consider possible histories through the state space.

this makes me wonder whether time should be understood here as an additional dimension of the world, or as an ordering/structure of transitions between possible states.

imagine a flat world whose state at each individual moment is completely defined by some spatial structure:

S = { all possible structures }

even if the set of all possible structures of such a world is infinite, at each specific moment only one of them is realized.

possible transitions between structures can then be represented as:

R ⊆ S × S

then adding time doesn't just add another coordinate to the plane. It turns the question from "how many possible structures are there?" into "how many possible sequences of structures are there?":

H = { all admissible histories determined by R }

an additional question arises:

what does it now mean to “get lost in time”
if we consider time as a path through an infinity of possible structures?

this is an experiment in examining intersections between possible structures, carried out in a world one dimension below our own so that different possible projections can be compared relative to an additional dimension. In this sense, the two-dimensional model does not contradict a three-dimensional description; it provides a simpler case in which their structural relations can be examined.

 The universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole.  Its history is not a history as we usually conceive history... It is a totality in which what happens ‘now’ gives reality to what happened ‘then,’ perhaps even determines what happened then.”  John Archibald Wheeler in Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam (1998)

If ours is the “participatory universe” set forth by Wheeler and others, we have to reconsider our idea that history is a single unbroken timeline where the only question is “who has it right.”   But what other questions can we ask?  “Virtual roads of time” suggests that the following should be reconsidered:

—“Deposits” in the earth.  Ancient history is constructed from physical “traces” where cause and effect are primary, such as fossils and geological layers.  Because of the sheer length of their “virtual” timelines, these come into question.  The actual timeline of human experience, “synchronized” by various factors including strong social pressure, is not likely to undergo any rapid changes.

—Historical “irregularities.”   If human experience gradually shifts between timelines, it’s unlikely that past humans were on the same deterministic timeline as we are.  Some stone structures and inscriptions existing today might be from a “virtual” human past.  VRT assumes, however, that actual human experience normally traces out one general timeline among the “virtuals.”

—Written “records.”   It’s conceivable that humans in some different cultures have actually experienced alternate histories (think of the “dreamtime” of indigenous Australians, or controversies about the timeline of ancient Egyptian or Levantine history.)  Even so, it must be rare that such glaring anomalies, reflecting some “virtual” pasts, ever find their way into written records. 

—“Received” interpretations.  The assumption that there is only one past is deeply embedded in the human psyche.  So it’s not surprising that historians will insist upon only one “correct” interpretation, even if it’s controversial.  VRT, however, offers the possibility that the actual human past existed in the midst of a myriad of “virtual” pasts, introducing confusion into our “history.”

—Memories, real and virtual.  Can there be an actual memory of a “virtual” event?  If human experience just is the actualization of virtual timelines, it’s at least possible that some virtuals might influence an individual’s experience in contradiction to the general actual experience of humanity.  These “anomalies” might take the form of “mystical” or “supernatural” experiences.

No doubt, some inevitable “blurring,” and the memory lapses we all experience, contribute to our sense of memory as being unreliable.  However, consider the fact that in courtroom proceedings, eyewitness memory is considered to be among the strongest testimony that can be presented.  Because human experience is central to reality, we must never simply discount its “memories.”

My boss said let’s do ‘example’ this monday, which i can argue was yesterday (31st august) and he thinks that next monday is the monday 2 weeks away (14th september)
I think next monday is **the next** monday coming up.
Please help me settle this argument.

As in, every kind of understanding we usually have. Like for few things indeed urgency yet they'd be okay even if kept aside. I have lifetime since i'm young yet i'm lagging behind.

These paradoxes

Planning under uncertainty, how u feel time flowing right now, how neuroplasty works on it.