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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

My intuitive, but not mathematical, model is that time is an illusion created by our perception “sampling reality”

It’s like when it looks like wheels are spinning backwards, or when using a stroboscopic light you see something different

“Time” is just flowing everywhere, not in any particular direction. But our perception assigns things an order, which gives us the impression of direction

We are also perceiving multiple times simultaneously. Consider that whatever is on your ears right now, will be converted to electrical signals and then loop through your brain, and potentially trigger a conscious reaction, but right now you have some other signals from some “previous” sound on your brain. So technically, your whole body is perceiving things at different times and trying to blend it all together in an illusion of “present time” that “moves forward”

My own, very personal opinion, is that there is no causality, only correlation

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Getting old and dying seems like a very real causality to me. Let me know when you'll be able to overcome that, I'd love to perform that trick.

Well, if you believe in causality, everything that happens in a certain progression might seem as the consequence of a previous event

And that seems totally right and it’s a great model to understand our everyday life

Now imagine for a second, that the whole universe was a big cycle, and that you are going to be repeating this very same life in a “future” cycle, and maybe infinitely many times

Which one of those times is the first one? And what is happening first? Did you die first and then were born again, or were you born first before dying? If it’s a never ending cycle, would you know, or would you just be picking a point that seems convenient to you?

At another extreme, when you feel like you are hungry, what is the cause for being hungry? Is it a certain signal in your brain, is a special hormone, is it because you have a habit of eating at a certain time? When exactly do you get hungry and what is the cause? There are pretty much infinite many possible causes to choose, because there are an infinite way of understanding and modeling the meaning of the question and how to answer it

Usually we just take the fastest, “most reasonable” explanation as the reason, but it is arbitrary and subjective. Causes are agreements expressed in language and our models, they are not an absolute unbreakable order of reality

> Now imagine for a second, that the whole universe was a big cycle, and that you are going to be repeating this very same life in a “future” cycle, and maybe infinitely many times

I've heard this called 'Eternal recurrence of the same' in a past life (pun not intended). It fascinates and terrifies me at the same time.

Thank you. Hadn’t heard the name. Apparently it was a central part of Nietzche’s thought and similar to the concept of Eternal Return. Fascinating!

And yes, it’s a bit like the scene in Dune 2 when Paul’s mother, after taking the water of life, tells him he needs to drink it too, that his mind will open so he can see «the beauty and the horror»

Borrowing from signal processing, you could also call this “life aliasing”

There is also the concept of kalpas that sounds similar.

> A kalpa is a long period of time (aeon) in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, generally between the creation and recreation of a world or universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)

We all share a single photon in some theories. When time has no meaning, it can run through the whole universe in a strobe. Large correlated events need to exist because smaller correlations do. It only makes logical sense if you try to remedy the movement / distance paradoxes.

There’s probably an information density limit, which is why far away galaxies will never have their information reach us after a certain point. They might as well not exist to us, because their information will never be useable in a correlated way.

> It only makes logical sense if you try to remedy the movement / distance paradoxes.

Time exists to prevent everything happening at once.

This is a great way to explain it

But, who/what wants to prevent everything from happening at once?

Interestingly, it seems like that might be the missing piece

Most mainstream physical models try to do away with us. To explain the world as if we weren’t in it. How things “really are”. But it’s an impossible thing to answer, because everything is mediated through our own human experience

Hence, it might be better to include our role as observers/interpreters in the models

How does that single photon theory work with black holes?

If we can prove entanglement still exists on a per particle level, hawking radiation is just a correlation fix that uses massive black hole lifetimes to reintroduce particles when they no longer affect the time ordering. Experiments showing photons “reversing” in time stop working through a black hole most likely.

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