Is Leo's view of time correct?

[Anderz]

I now found something even better than Zeno's paradoxes! It's called Thomson's lamp. It shows in my opinion that time cannot be continuous.

Quote

"Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks. ... It cannot be on, because I did not ever turn it on without at once turning it off. It cannot be off, because I did in the first place turn it on, and thereafter I never turned it off without at once turning it on. But the lamp must be either on or off. This is a contradiction.[1]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson's_lamp

 

[Rilles]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's all relative.

Time to make a video on time... and make it on time please... dont be late. ?

[Bogdan]

I keep seeing this reoccurring thing in spiritual/metaphysical talks in general, and that is not making it clear when you are trying to explain an Absolute point of view, like trying to explain how God sees time, or from a relative, more "human" point of view.

As i understand it now, from God's POV, there are no distinctions, in a sense, because it is simultaneously directly experiencing every possible configuration of consciousness. Our human experience of time, however, is generated by awareness going  at a certain limited pace through a certain limited number of configurations of consciousness, that are like pictures, or snapshots who each look very similar one to the other (just like the movement in a movie is an illusion consisting of pictures moving at a certain rate one after the other).

So every second we are going through a limited number of snapshots. Each one o those snapshots are (relatively) "separate" from each other, a new configuration. Each nanosecond is a completely new Universe (relatively). The "limited" number seems finite, (this is how God creates the experience of the finite) although it's still infinite, it's just a "lesser" infinity, just like how the natural number infinity is smaller than the rational infinity.

 

This is my current understanding, i am open to enriching/expanding it

[Anderz]

@Bogdan The Absolute sounds similar to what I mean by the unmanifested. To simplify it, the Absolute is a timeless block of infinite information, and the manifested reality is that block unfolding in the now.

That's what I mean by the simple analogy of listing all natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... instantly in the now. The Absolute in this analogy is the infinite set of natural numbers N itself, and the manifested reality is the list of numbers which never will reach infinity (there is no largest natural number) and therefore the manifested reality is always finite and time thereby goes on forever.

The Absolute contains intelligent design without the need for any designer! The Absolute is a platonic form that just is. That might seem like a bleak version of God, but the design has infinite intelligence probably considering the amazing structure of our universe.

[Member]

The root of all the misunderstanding is that we think of spacetime as a growing three-dimensional block or cube that expands by itself with objective reality being primary and mind secondary. This perspective is wrong because without a mind, there is no time and space, thus no existence. Instead of visualizing that you're inside a giant growing block or 3d space + time/current universe, think of your mind as being the timeless block of infinite information that manifests as time in a three-dimensional reality. The best exercise would be to visualize your mind like a tesseract with information manifesting (time) as infinite imagination (reality):

 

 

This means that the mind is actually the fourth dimension! And in the fourth dimension anything is possible - the limits are only set by your mind.

Edited July 3, 2020 by Member

[Anderz]

@Member Yes, mind and manifested reality being the same, that seems valid to me. But unfolding as imagination? I have a much cruder explanation which is that there is no choice, nor randomness and only the timeless block of information unfolding in a single timeline.

[Member]

Free will exists but the world is like a matrix and the mind needs serious work to untangle itself from all these imagined chains.

There is hope.

[sausagehead]

11 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Einstein had a pretty clear understanding of it.

Oh, BTW, on high enough doses of 5-MeO-DMT I was able to speed up "time". Like walking in 1.25x speed. Similar to how you can speed up a YT video.

What happens if you try to speed it up more or go backwards? lol 

[LastThursday]

May this thread last for eternity.

I reckon a fly exists in a very slow flow of time (relative to us), and elephant in a sped up time. Ask a tree, and our life times are just a breath.

If anything, the speed of time must be related to how much stuff (information/qualia/awareness) we can take in. The more, the slower time is and vice-versa. Taking drugs may mess with that rate of flow of awareness.

[Artsu]

I still think the past should be viewed as real. We can access memories, and even tap into the past to alter it in some senses.

When it gets to the part about an infinite past, i don't know how to answer the question, because fathoming real infinity is troublesome.

[Anderz]

@Artsu I claim that the past is real but that all the past is information in the now. Otherwise as you pointed out there is the problem of the past stretching back an infinite number of years away from the now.

And the past is expanding yet always finite information in the now. The entire history of our universe of billions of years is information in the now. This solves the false logic of infinite past and the false logic of time starting from no time somewhere in a past away from the now.

[Artsu]

10 minutes ago, Anderz said:

@Artsu I claim that the past is real but that all the past is information in the now. Otherwise as you pointed out there is the problem of the past stretching back an infinite number of years away from the now.

And the past is expanding yet always finite information in the now. The entire history of our universe of billions of years is information in the now. This solves the false logic of infinite past and the false logic of time starting from no time somewhere in a past away from the now.

So does anything that may have happened that we have no information of get put in the "unknowable" category? It still seems the past could stretch back infinitely, but perhaps there is a form of decay where past information becomes less and less relevant over time to the point it may as well not be there at all.

[Anderz]

There is nothing new under the sun, but the future is always new. The idea that there are past moments away from the now is like the story about how Earth rests on a turtle, which in turn is supported by another turtle, and then yet another one beneath that and so on, turtles all the way down. Or that there is a first turtle resting on nothing that supports billions of turtles above it plus the Earth.

[Anderz]

1 minute ago, Artsu said:

So does anything that may have happened that we have no information of get put in the "unknowable" category?

Physicist Leonard Susskind said that the deepest law of physics he knows of is that information is indestructible. He also said that entropy is hidden information. Just because we can't experience all the information doesn't mean that it's gone. So all the past information may always be preserved and permanent.

Also in The Wolfram Physics Project all information is preserved I think. They have a finite graph as the fundamental model of physical reality. The graph starts from an initial condition and then expands from there in a deterministic way. They believe that the effects of quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity can be explained with the graph. (To me quantum mechanics seems valid but Einsteinian physics looks like some kind of deception to me.)

[Artsu]

10 minutes ago, Anderz said:

Physicist Leonard Susskind said that the deepest law of physics he knows of is that information is indestructible. He also said that entropy is hidden information. Just because we can't experience all the information doesn't mean that it's gone. So all the past information may always be preserved and permanent.

Also in The Wolfram Physics Project all information is preserved I think. They have a finite graph as the fundamental model of physical reality. The graph starts from an initial condition and then expands from there in a deterministic way. They believe that the effects of quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity can be explained with the graph. (To me quantum mechanics seems valid but Einsteinian physics looks like some kind of deception to me.)

So the information around us could be infinite years old, whatever that means? Still, things would have to become less relevant over time. Events billions of years ago, if billions of years is even a thing, are less relevant than events that happened yesterday, although some age old events led to where we are now. Still though, if information continually grows, then surely the relevance of events diminishes until they are no longer of importance, although a) they will remain in the subtleties of the information around us, and b) the particular features of the world may be totally different depending on age old events,  e.g. due to chaos.

[Anderz]

11 minutes ago, Artsu said:

So the information around us could be infinite years old, whatever that means? Still, things would have to become less relevant over time. Events billions of years ago,

Not as I see it. The manifested information is always finite. Take for example the graph in The Wolfram Physics Project. That graph starts from an initial finite condition and expands from there with a deterministic rule. So the graph expands, step by step, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... and so on. When will the steps reach infinity? When will the graph reach infinite size? The answer is: never! Because there is no largest number. Infinity is not a number.

And about diminishing information, that's similar I think to the Thomson's lamp paradox I posted about earlier. First the lamp is on for 1 minute, then off for 1/2 minutes then on for 1/4 minutes and so on until the total time is 2 minutes. That's supposedly an infinite number of steps within those two minutes, but there is a problem: when 2 minutes have passed, is the lamp on or off?

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, sausagehead said:

What happens if you try to speed it up more or go backwards? lol 

I wasn't something I had conscious control over.

[Artsu]

Ive had time speed up and slow down, as well as spatial distortions when i would step, during psychosis/spiritual emergence.

[Anderz]

What do religions and spiritual traditions say about time? I like how Brahman is described as changeless. And God is described as changeless in the Bible. Not only that, the idea of the Absolute as a changeless block of information is mentioned in the Bible! Check this out:

Quote

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." - John 1:1-5

To say that the Word of God means the Bible is way too limiting. Instead, the full meaning of the Word of God is the Absolute unchanging and infinite block of information that is Brahman, the foundation of reality.

In the beginning was the Word. Meaning time has a beginning. And in the beginning the Word and God are the same thing. Then the Word was made manifest in the form of Christ, God's only begotten son. Christ simply means the manifested reality while God is the infinite unmanifested reality. That's why Jesus says in the Bible that the Father is greater than him:

Quote

"You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." - John 14:28

The phrase "going to the Father" refers to manifested reality being the Word unfolding. Christ will always "be going" to the Father, as the way and the truth and the life (generation of time) forever since the Word is infinite.

[Artsu]

@Anderz i would comment regarding God and time but that really gets to the limit of my knowledge and i am not comfortable speculating on it.

 

I will mention that it is one of the prime mistakes of Christianity to suppose that Jesus is God's only begotten son. Jesus was a man, but he was born perfect (in the sense of having no evil in him). We are all children of the one father, but Jesus is closest to the father. He was the first on earth with the divine love, and preached about it to mankind.

Christ refers to the principle of being complete in the divine love. All natural parts of the person are supplanted when one is Christ (Christ is a universal principle, and there are and have been multiple Christs).