Is there such a thing as universal NOW?

[Someone here]

Our concept of time was drastically altered by Einstein's realization of relativity. He realized that the speed of light is the same, no matter what individual measures it and no matter that individual's relative speed. This means that time passes by at different speeds depending on which individual's perspective we are talking about. Before Einstein, we had a clear and logical sense that time ticks at the same speed everywhere in the universe, that an hour spent sitting on a couch (0 mph) was equivalent to an hour spent speeding down a highway at 70 mph. We now know that is not true. Despite the fact that our experiences in every day life lead us to believe that time ticks by at the same rate everywhere, it is simply not true.

What I am trying to wrap my head around is an idea similar to the question: does a tree in a deserted the forest make a sound, since no one is there to hear it?

I have always had an assumption, due to my mundane experiences, that when something is happening in one place at a particular time, at that exact moment everyone else is experiencing that exact moment (no matter what they're doing) at the very same time. However, if time flows at different rates, what is this exact moment to me, when compared to everyone else? Compared to myself, is there a moment occurring at the same time at the other end of the room, the world, or the galaxy? This enters into the realm of questioning the existence of things outside my awareness, which I do not want to do. But, if everything is literally on a different time schedule because of relative motion, how can there be a NOW that every individual thing in the universe can agree upon? I like to believe that there is such an objective clock ticking away the TRUE time, whatever that may be, but this could be simply wrong, as we were back before Einstein about the flow of time.

Physically speaking, I wonder whether this cosmic clock has any truth to it because it all depends on observations. If I were traveling at half the speed of light towards the sun, and wanted to know what time it was back on earth, the information (assuming it traveled at the speed of light to reach me) would take time to reach me. Or if I were to turn around and head back, it would take time to get back to earth before I knew the time on earth. Since instantaneous transmittance of information is impossible, how then could I know if there truly was a single NOW throughout the universe?

Even events cannot transmit their implications instantaneously - if the sun were to vanish, it would take about 8 minutes for the earth to quit its orbit and sail into outer space, because even gravity is bound by this universal law of relativity.

My questions to you:
Is there some cosmic clock ticking the exact time EVERYWHERE in the universe, or does the fact that there is no NOW for everything mean that every individual is experiencing a different NOW?

If an event occurs NOW, at the other end of the galaxy, does it really happen NOW, if no one is there to observe it and the information physically cannot be known until light years later?

Thanks .

[Someone here]

@Benton is your now the same as my now ?

[Someone here]

@Benton i won't ask you how you came up with it or why you're so sure the present moment is Al there is for my pov .
The problem is that if, as you say, "there is no future or past" and the present is all that really exists, existence is so incredibly fleeting it makes things seem pretty insignificant don't you think?

If that doesn't bother you, this will:
We live (quite consciously) in the present moment right? And to live consciously in the present moment one would have to be aware of one's doing so. But, of course, if the present moment lasts merely 10^-43/sec then how can one be aware of the fact that one is in it? One cannot even be aware of it! There's no time! (And yet you claim that the present moment "is your perceptions")

You cannot use the word "Now!" meaningfully because it takes longer for you to say "now" than it takes for the present moment to pass. If a one-syllable word cannot even denote the moment you intend it to denote, how can talk of the present carry any meaning? How are we to live presently in a mathematical point?

[ZzzleepingBear]

If you think about a past experience that happened to you, when and where do you think about such memory?

If you imagine the future, even 5 min from now. When and where do you imagine this so called future event?

If you can answer this, then you know.

[Loba]

Yeah, it's the big picture, so it does include everything, I've experienced it before and everyone and everything is on the level of now even if we can't sense it most of the time.

 

[Someone here]

If physical time doesn't exist and time is a lense through which we intuit the world', then everything that has and will happen must already be there. If time is the fourth dimension (because we cannot imagine what the fourth dimension would look like think of a 2D cube as space and a 3D cube as space-time) and we only perceive cross-sections of this complete cube, then the future is already there, decided, and hence determined.
Many would want to avoid this determinist consequence. Incidentally, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

[bythos]

7 hours ago, Someone here said:

If physical time doesn't exist and time is a lense through which we intuit the world', then everything that has and will happen must already be there. If time is the fourth dimension (because we cannot imagine what the fourth dimension would look like think of a 2D cube as space and a 3D cube as space-time) and we only perceive cross-sections of this complete cube, then the future is already there, decided, and hence determined.
Many would want to avoid this determinist consequence. Incidentally, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I believe this is true.

 

When you ask "Is there such a thing as universal NOW?" You think of the universe as "all space" right? You must also think of it as "all time". So the universal now would be all time, past, present and future.

[Reciprocality]

Empirical magnitudes of say touch, or sight. These are like curves on a graph, mathematically.

It is not unusual to consider time to be base if this graph, instead it is emergent of the vector of all in conjunction, but the graphs are only a representation and not the nature of the "object" described.

 

Time is not distributed over what it is emergent of, therefore "proper time" is an illusion, yet the hypothesis has metaphysical significance, the negation of this hypothesis can for instance further the argument of solipsism.

Your "past" is a substantial memory, provability of emergence thereof require those memories to also be split into and then out of, you cant do that so therefore the best you can do is a computation of the mere theory. 

If time feels to be slowing down given the absence of empirical magnitudes, then it is justified to believe that time is emergent in part of them. if calculations and thinking speeds up the sense of time in proportion to some base (which again, is not itself tme) then that further justifies the emergence of time upon the "vector".

There is no infinite regress here because the properties of empirical magnitudes changing all the time, and that the only relevance is the memory like five second ago.

We may even justify the argument that impermanence or change exists at all because the opposite would contradict the question of why, as without the question neither any answer.

 

A universal now is a contradiction, whatever is universal can not be emergent.

Edited May 16, 2022 by Reciprocality

[Reciprocality]

Would you be without directionality? 

Time is what you have when actuality is yet to be potential, to be what it can potentially become. That time is considered present is an accident of the emptiness of what is considered potential as inherent in whatever is actual.

Presence is distributed (if we allow ourself an analogy) over "quanta" of time, due to the finitism of plural phenomenon, which means that presence is determined by various identities that inheres to each other, there is no "point" in time because presence is an indivisible manifold of finite elements trough perpetuity, we call this consciousness.

A second analogy would be a ship the name of which remains despite the renewal of all its materials (given some minimal congruence), the identity of the reality of the ship DID require some materials, though the name only initially so. A ship is only "the" ship if it is the one initiated by the materials, rendering the last statement necessarily true.

Potential is empty, acceleration empty, vector empty, direction empty, and requires to be filled. Thoughts are supposed to be of this character, meaningless on their own but of instrumental significance, everything is thus that without which a void would tear everything apart.

Absolute cohesion, existence demanded to become or never to disappear. It could not be escaped and so we are literally inevitable, weird and peculiar as we are, yet as necessary as the atom, as light, as anything at all.

It is this necessity which you may call "Now".

Edited May 16, 2022 by Reciprocality

[LastThursday]

15 hours ago, Someone here said:

If an event occurs NOW, at the other end of the galaxy, does it really happen NOW, if no one is there to observe it and the information physically cannot be known until light years later?

The speed of light is the rate of change of existence, the tick tock, and this is constant. But rate is second order not first - so "now" is necessarily relative. When stuff moves, velocity is exchanged with time, because the speed of light is the conversion factor between the two.

Something only exists when you have information about it (observe it) and this only reaches you at the speed of light. Before you have information about an event, it sits in a hypothetical realm. Before the sun rises, you can only hope it will rise.

[ZzzleepingBear]

3 hours ago, Reciprocality said:

A universal now is a contradiction, whatever is universal can not be emergent.

I wouldn't nessecarily call a "universal now" a contradiction, even though I partially agree with your take on it. Since neither universal or now can be described as emergant. They are both timeless and present in time.

 

I think it's rather OP's quesion itself that is unclear of it's aim for a straight answer in this case.    

Edited May 16, 2022 by ZzzleepingBear

[Someone here]

One of the first things that Einstein did when developing his theory of relativity was to prove (to his own satisfaction, anway) that there is no absolute “now.” This was to prepare the ground for his equations showing that time and space would distort when high velocities were involved, so that two people travelling at different speeds from the same starting point would end up with their clocks showing different times. So everything is relative to something else, and there is no absolute time nor absolute space, just a strange combination of the two, spacetime. But it is only a theory, and maybe someone will come up with some radically different explanation some day.

Anyways..thanks for the  insightful thought provoking replies.

[Someone here]

In Newtonian sense “now" is a frame of time infinitely short. He invented the infinitesimal calculus for this reason: instantaneous velocity is a derivative.

Imagine that you watch an event, and i watch the same event together with you. We occupy different positions and the information (light, sound) from that event reaches us in different, even if very close, instants.

So, even if apparently we perceive something simultaneously, there's always a “dt" difference.

Nobody has the same “now" of anybody else.

[DocWatts]

If you're serious about this question and don't mind putting some work in, the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a very penetrating and insightful explanation of how Time is disclosed to human experience.

To grossly simplify a very nuanced work, despite what some philosophers would have us believe, we don't actually experience time as a collection of Nows.

This is of course a high order abstraction stemming from our habitual tendency to think of Reality as a collection of 'Things', which is an illusion that we also extend to the notion of Time.

Rather, the way we experience time is inextricably coupled to our capacity for Care. Time is innately meaningful to us, because by our very nature we are Temporal Beings. That's to say, time is significant for us because the past and the future form the context and horizons of significance that make our capacity for Caring possible.