
Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/71/flow/why-the-flow-of-time-is-an-illusion
======
hunta2097
I live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles:

a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future.

b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day
to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you
reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more
novelty.

~~~
egjerlow
Why would your brain need consciousness to anticipate the future? A computer,
which has no consciousness, would be able to do the same.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Consciousness is how the algorithm feels from inside.

~~~
egjerlow
Why would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate
perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also,
consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a
subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing
the more you think of it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Consciousness _is_ the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the
computational processes that are you see themselves.

It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't
understand the reasons.

~~~
Zaphods
The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a
computer, or that it _merely_ computes.

But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a
brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is _like_ it?
Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But
_is_ it an algorithm? No.

The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an
assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because
it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely
transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a
computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and
consciousness."

But there is very little reason to accept that assumption. This review of
Harai's _Homo Deus_ does a great job of pointing out the dead-ends that
assumption leads you to. [review]([https://inference-
review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z](https://inference-
review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z))

~~~
tialaramex
> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a
> computer, or that it merely computes.

The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does
that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But
when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter
(probably at length) without offering any substance.

In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively
defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains
can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the
reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't
provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-
changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.

You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be
summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain
can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we
have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if
similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What?
Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I
simply won't believe it".

~~~
Zaphods
> The brain can compute.

You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't
compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it _is_ a
computer, because computing is an _ability_. People can do many other things
aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can
imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers _can 't
imagine_ because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount
of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are
categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.

You are conflating an _ability_ with _ontology_. We know what a brain is. It's
a collection of fatty material with neurons that _do not_ explicitly fire
exactly like a computer. Key word there is _like_. Church-Turing built a
_model_ of computational logic off of _intuitions_ about the brain and formal
mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it
removes any distinction between it being right _or_ wrong: because it is a
model (lets make something _like_ the brain).

That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know
computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with
abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate
abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't
build computers to be brains.

You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review
repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the
singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published
at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea
that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire
branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the
computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind
argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just
unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.

~~~
parksy
"No amount of programming can produce imagination" is a very bold statement to
make.

The brain exists in a physical universe, made out of matter/energy, and its
behaviours are entirely dictated by the laws of physics; that's a fairly
accepted truth unless you have solid evidence otherwise.

The laws of physics are mathematical and can be computed by their very nature,
and we are already pretty good at simulating physical interactions to a
quantum level, and this ability improves over time.

At some point in time, unless there is "magic" or missing physics, a
sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a
brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

So either there must be new physics involved, or, the notion that a
sufficiently advanced computer simulation can't produce imagination must be
abandoned.

A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and
presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain
simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not
need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a
sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just
happen once the simulation is perfected.

Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually
understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and
figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc,
so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know
about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally
recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but
is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the
get-go.

~~~
Zaphods
It's not a remotely bold statement. Think about what imagination is, and then
think about whether computers can imagine. Computers can't imagine. Computers
can't come up with new things because they are programmed. Programming
prescribes the outputs to the same limitations as the inputs: it's a closed
deterministic system.

You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a
physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo
magic. That's what abilities _are_. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of
a car does not _reside_ in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the
intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it
is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower _is_.

The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we
have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.

As a result

> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a
> brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers
supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.

> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain
> (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied
> brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome)
> would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation
> such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things
> will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

All of this is still an assumption.

Again, that doesn't mean you are right _or_ wrong: it means its an assumption.
You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of
modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.

> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually
> understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation,
> and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness
> etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending
> to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of
> computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that
> works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's
> impossible from the get-go.

You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right
path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much
more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path:
their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have
fallen to a category error.

You think they _need_ to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense.
But there is actually very little if anything to support that.

Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be
fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not
mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.

------
cobbzilla
I find this quote fascinating:

"What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in
the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have
burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has
been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is
some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium;
de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There
will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the
other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is
the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."

I am not a cosmologist, but if all of space reached thermal equilibrium, if
space does have any mass (perhaps a tiny amount from the dark energy it
contains?), and the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't
that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce?

If that is true, then time never really ends, it just "slows down" a lot (not
much can happen, and not terribly quickly) until the next sparkup, whereupon
time speeds up dramatically (inflationary theory).

~~~
DiffEq
Here is the crux. Time IS motion. We measure this motion of objects relative
to one another by comparing their motion to a standard set of things in motion
called a clock. There is nothing else to time except that; but it is real, as
real as anything, it is not an illusion.

~~~
monkeydreams
> Time IS motion.

Relatively speaking, yes.

> There is nothing else to time except that; but it is real, as real as
> anything, it is not an illusion.

The article isn't claiming time is an illusion, only our perception of it
flowing.

------
jasim
When his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving
letter to Michele’s sister: ‘Michele has left this strange world a little
before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know
that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more
than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’

... ...

Many times in the past we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions
that are imprecise: if we had kept to these we would still believe that the
Earth is flat and that it is orbited by the sun.

Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience. When we
look a little further ahead we discover that the world is not as it appears to
us: the Earth is round, and in Cape Town their feet are up and their heads are
down.

To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is
rational, careful and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an
old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any
different from the one which he has always known.

\-- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

~~~
state_less
"Dr. Manhattan: There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is
simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing
one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet." -Alan
Moore, Watchmen

To me, this idea looks like we have a set of measurements of things (X, Y, Z,
T) and a function F that maps from the set of measurements to a future set of
measurements. You can generate the future from the past. You could take the
view that all these measurements exist, and we just can't see them (well)
because we are only able to jump from Tnow to F(Tnow). In other words, we
exist in one place and one time at a time.

------
everdev
I was really impressed by this 4d toys video:
[https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q](https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q)

Now what if time is an illusion and similar to the video objects in life
simply appear to be bouncing in and out of our 3d realm? That would look a lot
like time.

But if we could see in 4d, we'd see that they're not really coming or going
and could see all of their possible states at once.

It might be like being able to see an entire movie all at once rather than
frame by frame.

------
nikolasavic
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli ([https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-
Rovelli/dp/073521610...](https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-
Rovelli/dp/073521610X)) is an amazing and eye opening book on the topic of
time. Carlo, a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity,
slowly peels back the layers of the conceptual onion to get to some pretty
strange fundamental truths about time.

As a side note, the Audible book is read by Benedict Cumberbach and is a
delightful listen.

~~~
jiveturkey
This book is a MUST READ imho. I heard him pitching the book on KQED Forum, he
seems quite a pleasant, amiable fellow.

Books like this deserve a re-read at least once. Now I know to do the audible
for round 2 in a few years.

------
neom
The World Science Festival has a slew of episodes on the flow and illusion of
time:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/worldsciencefestival/search?que...](https://www.youtube.com/user/worldsciencefestival/search?query=time)

One of the thoughts I've been having recently about "human time" is the effect
that the observance of changing seasons and the circle of life over an
evolutionary period has had on how humans think about things like time and
permanence. Unfortunately I don't have anything particularly insightful to say
other than I've been wondering about it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
7373737373
The word 'illusion' should be removed from every dictionary. It's one
completely unspecific, indeterminate and misleading word and most subjects or
patterns of discourse in which it appears have the same properties.

The title of this post also reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime)

Just searching for "* is an illusion" returns

\- consciousness \- choice \- spacetime \- the world \- physical reality \-
certainty \- memories

It makes me feel disgusted.

~~~
vinceguidry
Illusion can be tricky to understand, but not impossible. It means that the
referent is not the same as the representation. When something isn't an
illusion, it means the referent is the same as the representation. We have
different words for different kinds of illusion. I can show you an actual,
physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while
the second is.

You watch a real television show on a real television. The television is
designed to create visual illusions of real things. But the television is
itself real. The show is a dramatic rendering, an illusion, of real-life
situations.

So there's three elements needed to make illusion. A referent, a
representation, and a type.

Consciousness is real, but its contents are illusory, thought represents
things that are not those things.

~~~
davebryand
An enlightened yogi, Hindi, or Buddhist would say that the physical chair is
also an illusion.

~~~
7373737373
Why, do you think? Because they reasoned that in the mind, everything can
refer to anything else?

~~~
vinceguidry
Enlightenment is the destruction of the perception that there is a separate
watcher apart from the watched. Non-duality. Not-two. Just one. Since illusion
requires three elements, the non-dual is just one element, there is no
illusion.

Any time you step 'outside', like if you look at a chair, you're dwelling in
illusion. Mind generated a 'tag' for the thing you're seeing. It's not
_really_ a chair, it's a bundle of atoms. But there's no bundle of atoms,
that's also a tag generated by mind. The mind itself isn't what you think it
is. Everything is an illusion.

Tricky to understand until you realize there's no such thing as enlightenment,
it's just a religious dogma. Enlightened yogis are no different than the rest
of us.

One can train the mind to perceive fewer distinctions, this is yogic practice.
You can even arrive at a state of mind that you can call enlightenment. But
the lie is revealed any time you open your mouth. The state of mind that is
being trained is an illusion like everything else.

Real yogis understand this and do it anyway. Fake yogis try to fool you into
believing that you can truly get rid of everything and 'merely exist'. It's
not an illusion at this point, it's a lie.

------
loblollyboy
Whatever time is, our favorite way to 'pass' it is by generate entropy.
Chemistry explains inorganic things, those inorganic things become
increasingly complex, eventually able to reproduce somehow, so you look to
biology for explanation. You get evolutionary biology which might kind of
explain how we came to be (super-self aware beings, capable of perceiving
things, like time for example, or creating the internet to share ideas, or
cars to commute). Then social/behavioral sciences attempt to explain us
specifically. But even more fundamental than that first step (chemistry) is
physics and math. And physics and math tell us that we are moving to a state
of more entropy. Sometimes it feels like this is the best explanation for why
we behave the way we do (driving to jobs we hate to do nothing important,
making nuclear bombs, etc.).

End result is we're f __ked!

------
o_nate
I liked the example of water spilling onto the floor. I was trying to explain
this point to my 7-year old the other day. As crazy as it sounds, the laws of
physics don't say that the water couldn't jump off the floor and back into the
bottle. The laws of physics are equations and equations are equally true if
you reverse the left and right sides. In terms of the equations, that water in
the bottle equals the water on the floor (along with the increase in heat
energy and other effects), so there's no fundamental physical reason you can't
go from one to the other. The reason why you don't ever see it is because it
is astronomically less probable to happen in reverse.

------
gtirloni
I love these discussions, they make my brain hurt in a good way. However, I've
trouble applying them to daily life. Is there something we should change in
ourselves because of these new insights?

~~~
hjanssen
I don't think you really have to apply these things to your daily life. It is
merely a question of _why_ is it that you feel time in your daily life like
you do. It's as much of a question of philsophy as it is a question of
physics.

------
jatsign
Even a skeptic philosopher, who would say most things can't be proven beyond
the self, would probably agree that one of the things we have direct
experience of is change.

~~~
JdeBP
"How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the
discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
\-- The Man In The Shack, _The Hitch-Hiker 's Guide To The Galaxy_

~~~
jatsign
True, but that's why I said "probably agree". You can be a solipsist and
disagree with the existence of time, but that doesn't seem to be a very useful
philosophy.

------
slackfan
Considering that the first post isn't "Lunchtime is doubly so" consider your
geek cards revoked.

~~~
stronglikedan
is?

------
wwarner
It's interesting, because usually people/physicists that _space_ is the
emergent thing, and time is the fundamental dimension. I'm also glad that
people are trying to _reduce_ the number of dimensions rather than adding to
them.

------
cairo_x
How easy is it for physicists to mistake their models for reality? Equations
are ways of representing reality. They are not reality. They are literally
abstractions. Yes, it's another way of seeing and thinking about a thing, but
it is not the thing... at all. Like a description of 4d space. Isn't a thing
in reality, it is an abstraction. The only things that are not abstractions
WRT time are movement and matter. Period. When ever you start freezeframing
and creating integrations (4d view of time), then you've crossed into the
world of the abstract and the non-existent.

------
Circuits
As a coworker of mine would say: "A watched pothead never toils." I have
always found it amusing when people talk about time's existence. It has always
seemed like a ruler or a measuring stick; t = d/v, to me. Some people disagree
as to it's existence but I think perhaps the problem isn't with our concept of
time but with our definitions of existence.

------
lm28469
If you zoom out far enough everything is just your brain tripping balls trying
to process electric signals from faulty/limited sensors.

~~~
egjerlow
What exactly is 'tripping balls' if it is not comprised of electrical signals?
Saying consciousness is 'just' this thing or another is, in my mind, making
trivial the most profound riddle in all of existence.

------
JdeBP
For an interesting book on the subject of time in the philosophy of physics,
see Huw Price's _Time 's Arrow and Archimedes' Point_. It does a fairly good
job of laying out what the problems are.

* [http://prce.hu/w/TAAP.html](http://prce.hu/w/TAAP.html)

------
KingFelix
I mentioned this in a previous discussion, some really interesting fringe
research going in. Retrocausation

[https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-
trav...](https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-traveling-in-
time)

------
z2
"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings
or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find
that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." -Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five

------
bookofjoe
"Time doesn't flow, we flow."—Michael Crichton

------
jelliclesfarm
(Not-a-Physics person)Question: If time isn’t linear, can we have perpetual
motion machines?

------
rc_mob
Time is just a measurement that we haven’t quite nailed down the definition of
yet.

~~~
GuB-42
We have a very precise definition of time: a second is "the duration of
9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between
the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom". It is
used in a lot of physical equations which are very accurate at describing the
universe as we observe it.

There are some philosophical questions regarding time. Questions about the
arrow of time, entropy, causality, etc... For instance we may have trouble
relating time and entropy, but it doesn't mean both of these concept are not
well defined by themselves.

~~~
lm28469
> We have a very precise definition of time

> a second is

Well that's a very precise definition of a second (unit of time), but not of
time itself.

~~~
Koshkin
Yet, historically and practically the notion of 'time' has always been tied to
a clock - the daily cycle, the change of seasons, etc. For example, when
people said, "time has passed," they meant a certain number of natural cycles
- days, seasons or years. The abstract, "theoretical" time, untied to any
clock, is a relatively recent invention and, in fact, very well may be a
fiction.

