What we get wrong about time | Hacker News Reader

What we get wrong about time

bbc.com

20 pointsquickfox10 comments

> The more memories you can create for yourself in everyday life, the longer your life will feel when you look back.

The article is about our perception of time passing, not really about time itself. I noticed her book also has the term perception in the title which clarifies the topic.

That's reasonable.

If we are born, we don't know anything, so many of the new things we learn are valuable memories. The older we get, the more we know. What we see today can be the same known stuff we already saw yesterday. That's just a logical conclusion.

But there is also a thing we can affect, and that is to do something we didn't do before, there are probably more than enough acitivities on earth we can choose from.

If we do the same thing for years, our past gets blurry, but if we do new things once in a while we got something to hold on to.

Problem is, the older we get, the more we want to do the stuff we already know, so by being conservative in our choices you rob us of our past.

To see this in action, watch the movie "Click".

Obviously time doesn't exist. Too much confusion about it in popular science articles makes people hard to understand it. Like here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170233.

You “supported” your statement with another instance of you making the same statement somewhere else.

This bit of the article should clear any misunderstanding on whether the existence of time is relevant for this discussion. Regardless of the actual existence of time, our perception of it is certainly real.

> Of course, although some physicists propose that time does not exist, time perception – our sense of time – does.

I just link to another related discussion I know about - you're right, that it is thanks to my participation.

About perception - it's out of discussion if time does exist or not. Perception is one thing and time existence another.

All of us know mechanisms why we perceive time - neural networks are consisted of units which current state is shaped by previous mutations. All physical objects are constantly mutating - but some of them have abilities to remember previous states.

Obviously chairs don't exist. Scientists have discovered a thing called "wood," which is the true name of many of the things that members of the public call "chairs." Whenever I see someone sitting on what they think is a "chair," I tell them to stand up because it's not coherent to expect every piece of wood to be comfortable to sit on.

Science has been sticking to that view since around Newton. But it's actually beginning to slowly change now, as time-independent physics might be a reason why our theories work very well in specific areas, but tend to break down in a more holistic approach.

See the work of physicist Lee Smolin in Time Reborn (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe...) on why time and information might be the most fundamental concepts.

This does not mean though that we experience time in the same way - far from it. Just that passage of time is fundamental to information processing.

Thanks for the recommendation. Indeed information is the most fundamental concept and mutations. If you will call time a causality force which makes this mutations it's fine. But it's wrong if you think about time as a dimension in which you can travel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com