The Passage of Time

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The Passage of Time

Post by Jam »

So obviously time passes, one thing happens after another until there's nothing left to happen, if that's possible. But why does time take time? If time is an ordering of events, basically these things can't happen until these other things happen first then you could hypothetically 'fast-forward' the universe and everything would work out the same. Our brains would be sped up too so we wouldn't notice a difference. If you measure time you're just measuring the oscillation of something, ie: these events happened at the same time as this other thing oscillated so they took 1 oscillation worth of time. If you sleep or have anesthesia or a coma it's like you close your eyes and suddenly it's 8 hours later or 3 months later, so time doesn't have to take time? So is the perception of the passage of time just events occurring relative to events of observation and processing/thought in our brains? So hypothetically if for the entirety of all that has happened and will happen not a single conscious being exists, then the universe may as well just be over and done with because how ever many trillions of years only takes a long time relative to processes in our brains?

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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Ashvin »

wtf?!
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Post by Goodspeed »

Yes. I made a Reddit post about this somewhere:
You know how you can speed up time in some games?
Now imagine the characters in those games were conscious beings, and an outsider were to speed up time x2. Everything in that world (which is software) would move twice as fast compared to the real world, including the brains of the characters in that game. However, they would still perceive time to be flowing at the same rate as before because that's the rate their consciousness processes their thoughts and external stimuli at.
What it comes down to is: How quickly time moves is not relevant to anything or anyone inside that universe, it's only relevant to whatever is observing it from the outside.

This was in a discussion about Black Mirror's episode "White Christmas" [spoiler]in which brains are copied to software and thrown into a virtual reality where time is sped up as a punishment in order to subdue them.[/spoiler]
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Jam »

Ashvin wrote:wtf?!
Take your time.
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Re: The Passage of Time

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Post by gh0st »

I'll read this again after smoking some weed tonight.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Gendarme »

Time passes not; your consciousness passes through time. You can not fast-forward, for speed means nothing outside of time. An event does not exist, for what is half an event? Time is continuous; you are continuous. Nothing happened, nothing happens, nothing will happen. What you perceive as now is evidently in the past, as is the future, for only your perception of the future exists, and it is in the past. What is the past without the present? Nothing. Nothing is in the past. Everything is. What can pass without a past? Nothing. Time passes not. Your consciousness passes not. Your consciousness is not.
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Re: The Passage of Time

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Oh Christ I just woke up. I'll need more coffee first.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by oats13 »

On the physical- Watch how a footballer doing keepy-ups with a football looks the same as oneself doing keepy-ups with a balloon.

On the metaphysical- The axis from which we draw our graph of reality on the paper called time are existing and not existing.

Nothing is real/nothingness is a reality/somethingness is a reality/something is real.

etc.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Kaiserklein »

If you're in a space shuttle going super fast, you won't feel it but time is going slower for you, compared to people on the earth for example. So what is there to discuss?
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Hidddy_ »

Time dialation in enistein's special relativity and general relativity. Look it up ;)
Concepts involving time and observation (namely in difference of observation) are rather tricky to explain at first so I won't attempt on here but it is very interesting stuff. One of the consequences is what kaiser said, as you will find out.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Goodspeed »

Slightly off topic:
The fact that, assuming it's possible to simulate a universe, it would be possible to do it at such a speed that its entire trillion-year history would be simulated in only a second of "real-time", is, I would say, strong support for the theory that we do live in a simulation. Whether it took a second or 10 years to complete the simulation, the conscious beings inside the simulated universe would experience it at the same pace, which is the pace their brain processes thoughts at. Majillions of complex creatures could be born into that universe, with their own understanding of its reality and their own scientific theories, all in the span of a second. In fact that simulated universe, in turn, could spawn an intelligent species with the ability to simulate universes. And so on.

The only question that remains is whether it's technically possible to simulate a universe. If so, the odds that we are living in a simulation are infinitely higher than the odds of us being the first to develop this technology.

@Hidddy_ @Kaiserklein this isn't about time dilation.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Hidddy_ »

I get where Jam is going but didn't fully comprehend the last sentence of the OP. @Goodspeed @Jam I guess then you are referring to the problem of observation and passage of time. Do we need to observe things to feel time? Like you said, how come we experience a jump in time after a coma? Did we not experience time while in the coma? If so why not? What was different about us in that state?

I'm not sure what you meant in the last sentence but I'm guessing it relates to the age old question...if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

As far as I know, the way we perceive the universe is unique and in fact every observer experiences the universe(the effects of time and space) in a slightly different way than everyone else/anything else (whether it be alive or not). Also we are subjected to our individual consciousness so it gets tricky. But at the end of the day we have to agree on one timeline so it's like a mindfuck.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Hidddy_ »

Goodspeed wrote:Slightly off topic:
The fact that, assuming it's possible to simulate a universe, it would be possible to do it at such a speed that its entire trillion-year history would be simulated in only a second of "real-time", is, I would say, strong support for the theory that we do live in a simulation. Whether it took a second or 10 years to complete the simulation, the conscious beings inside the simulated universe would experience it at the same pace, which is the pace their brain processes thoughts at. Majillions of complex creatures could be born into that universe, with their own understanding of its reality and their own scientific theories, all in the span of a second. In fact that simulated universe, in turn, could spawn an intelligent species with the ability to simulate universes. And so on.

The only question that remains is whether it's technically possible to simulate a universe. If so, the odds that we are living in a simulation are infinitely higher than the odds of us being the first to develop this technology.

@Hidddy_ @Kaiserklein this isn't about time dilation.


Very interesting. I like the last part where you conclude that if we can indeed simulate a universe then we are likely a simulation ourselves. You are right though like you said if you could simulate it in 10 seconds the beings in that universe would feel no different than you or I. Really makes you think....

Little bit of aside... universe simulation sciences have taken off in the recent decades and in fact there are teams that create simulations of our universe using the data we have amassed. The simulations serve to measure our accuracy for our models of the universe but they are also interesting in that they deal with discussions like these about manipulated/simulated reality.
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Re: The Passage of Time

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This really becomes a question of ontology - an unanswerable question, which leads to solipsism. But I'll post whatever incoherent ramblings my two thumbs can come up with below.

That's quite a bold assumption - simulating an entire universe.

What, in theory, do you mean by the word "simulation" in this context? As in, we are the existence of processes created and as a result of certain hardware? Or maybe hardware is too much of a narrow term... abstract computations then? The direct product of other, intelligible being(s)? Artifical?

At which point could we not call our own, natural existence a simulation - the result of the physical laws which govern us and the world around us?

The physical laws arise from a something, no? What is their origin? I suppose this is an unanswerable question.

The point being, simulation implies code. Code implies error to the extent of what we know now.

I understand there are advancements such as from binary to quantum. Then imagine if there were/are a near infinite series of computing advancements. Would then there be capacity to create a simulated universe? At which point could the universe now be said to be a natural and fundamental simulation existing from fundamental, presupposed laws? At which point could "artificial" be synonymous with "natural?"

I guess my point is that the word "simulation" cannot be readily proved to be different than "reality" when referring to our existence. Or suppose this is a simulation and there is another "true" reality. Is that too a simulation and there is another even truer reality? What is the "truest" reality? What is the origin of that?

I'm not sure there is anything which can be proved or disproved in regard to this, so I find your statement that something can lend evidence to the simulation argument questionable.

Or really, my head hurts.

Ok, this is my conclusion: if we are a simulation then a truer reality exists. If that is true, then another even truer reality could exist. There is no answer to the question of which is the truest reality. Therefore we must accept our reality as the truest and the question of simultion is moot.
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Post by deleted_user »

Ok or I could just take 5 min and read the wiki about it which offers much better counterparts than I could come up with.

TL;DR it's conceptually possible but unlikely, unless it can be proved that simulating a universe is possible, which is unfalsifiable. So I return to my previous statement of accepting this reality as true reality anyways and proceeding thusly.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Hidddy_ »

It does become a question of what you consider a simulation or not. And if so, when does it seize to be so and become reality? Doesn't that mean we first need to define reality? Wtf is reality and how can we distinguish it from a separate one?
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Hidddy_ »

deleted_user wrote:Ok or I could just take 5 min and read the wiki about it which offers much better counterparts than I could come up with.

TL;DR it's conceptually possible but unlikely, unless it can be proved that simulating a universe is possible, which is unfalsifiable. So I return to my previous statement of accepting this reality as true reality anyways and proceeding thusly.

Accepting it as reality and living life to the fullest is all that makes sense after discussions like these
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by gamevideo113 »

Jam wrote:So obviously time passes, one thing happens after another until there's nothing left to happen, if that's possible.
I don't think there will ever be a time where there is nothing left to happen. The universe will never stop existing in my opinion.
But why does time take time?
What do you mean? I think this is a confusing and confused question
If time is an ordering of events,(time is a physical entity, it is not a sequence of events) basically these things can't happen until these other things happen first, then you could hypothetically 'fast-forward' the universe and everything would work out the same. Our brains would be sped up too so we wouldn't notice a difference.
Time is relative, depending on your speed every event is already being fast forwarded/slowed down according to your point of view.
If you measure time you're just measuring the oscillation of something, ie: these events happened at the same time as this other thing oscillated so they took 1 oscillation worth of time.
If you sleep or have anesthesia or a coma it's like you close your eyes and suddenly it's 8 hours later or 3 months later, so time doesn't have to take time?
As i said time is a physical entity, it is not subject to our perception of it. Whether you are aware of it or not, time exists and continues to exist.
So is the perception of the passage of time just events occurring relative to events of observation and processing/thought in our brains?
?
So hypothetically if for the entirety of all that has happened and will happen not a single conscious being exists, then the universe may as well just be over and done with because how ever many trillions of years only takes a long time relative to processes in our brains?
The universe doesn't need conscient beings to exist inside of it in order to exist itself.

Also i am very skeptical about universe simulation theories or the "we live in a dream" theory. I don't really see any reasons to believe such things. To me that sounds like mythology.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Goodspeed »

deleted_user wrote:That's quite a bold assumption - simulating an entire universe.
Indeed. Interestingly, you would do it in a way that fits with the history of our universe. You would create a bunch of very tiny particles, make some rules about how they should interact, and press play. You'd get a big bang and "slowly" but surely a complex universe would unfold.

Perhaps you would add "randomness", which means random to the inhabitants of that universe but not to you, much in the same way our computers randomize numbers (they seem random to us but aren't actually random). You'd add randomness in the very smallest building blocks of your universe to make sure entropy increases, to prevent the system from stabilizing too early. But of course, since it's not actual randomness, certain patterns could be spotted by anyone paying close attention.

It could even be speculated that you would not have to write a single line of code to govern how particles interact. You could make it "fully random", and the eventual patterns you would see in your simulated universe are entirely governed by the way you implemented the generation of these "random" events. If you make an algorithm that is able to approximate true randomness (for this is something you could only ever approximate) to enough of an extent, you end up with a complex universe. The more random, the more complex. The more random, the better the odds of your universe spawning intelligent life forms.
It could then be said that we are that entity who is "paying close attention". We, and every other conscious species in this universe, are the universe becoming aware of the patterns in its "random number generator".
Imagine the scientific discoveries you could make if you kept improving this random number generator to approximate true randomness as closely as possible. You would end up with so many entirely different universes, and you could learn so much from them.

Ok maybe I took this a little far. Anyway.

I don't think the question is whether the logic can be written in code. The question is whether there will ever be enough resources. I would imagine that, in order to simulate a single human brain, one would need millions of petabytes of RAM and an even more ridiculous processor. Go figure what we'd need to simulate an entire universe. The amount of calculations the processor would need to do every second is beyond imagination. We are far from anything like that, and it very well might be technically impossible to build something that fast.

What, in theory, do you mean by the word "simulation" in this context? As in, we are the existence of processes created and as a result of certain hardware? Or maybe hardware is too much of a narrow term... abstract computations then? The direct product of other, intelligible being(s)? Artifical?
It would need to run on something hard, yes. Any virtual reality needs a basis in "actual" reality (one level up, if you will), where it is generated. In case of a computer simulation we would indeed be looking at hardware much like our current desktops, but immensely more powerful.

At which point could we not call our own, natural existence a simulation - the result of the physical laws which govern us and the world around us?

The physical laws arise from a something, no? What is their origin? I suppose this is an unanswerable question.
Indeed there must be an origin for all of it. But even if we answer that with "it's simulated", we still have to answer the question of what caused the universe that simulates us to exist? Eventually, something has to have come from nothing. That's where it all breaks down. I can't wrap my head around origins.

The point being, simulation implies code. Code implies error to the extent of what we know now.
Some devs may frown at me for saying this, but code can be flawless. Especially if the logic in it is fairly simple, and when it's written by advanced AI. But perhaps the patterns we observe in our universe are exactly that: mistakes in the code. Flaws in the random number generator.
God help us all if we run into an actual error (in software terms: an exception). Perhaps the danger of things like the large hadron collider is not that it makes a black hole (although that would certainly end us), but that it could quite literally break the simulation that is our universe, by way of exception ;)

I understand there are advancements such as from binary to quantum. Then imagine if there were/are a near infinite series of computing advancements. Would then there be capacity to create a simulated universe? At which point could the universe now be said to be a natural and fundamental simulation existing from fundamental, presupposed laws? At which point could "artificial" be synonymous with "natural?"
What's natural to us may be artificial to whatever is simulating our reality. In the end everything is natural, and the difference between artificial and natural is in the eye of the beholder I would say.
I guess my point is that the word "simulation" cannot be readily proved to be different than "reality" when referring to our existence. Or suppose this is a simulation and there is another "true" reality. Is that too a simulation and there is another even truer reality? What is the "truest" reality? What is the origin of that?
Right. Origins. *Shrug*

I'm not sure there is anything which can be proved or disproved in regard to this, so I find your statement that something can lend evidence to the simulation argument questionable.
If we prove that simulating an entire universe is possible by achieving it ourselves, would you not agree that the odds of us being simulated are infinitely higher than us being the first to develop this technology?

Ok, this is my conclusion: if we are a simulation then a truer reality exists. If that is true, then another even truer reality could exist. There is no answer to the question of which is the truest reality. Therefore we must accept our reality as the truest and the question of simulation is moot.
It's moot either way, for even if we are simulated, whatever simulates us is outside of our scope of reality. We can never prove it exists, we can never reach out to it. But it's still an interesting thought experiment.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Jam »

Hidddy_ wrote:I get where Jam is going but didn't fully comprehend the last sentence of the OP. @Goodspeed @Jam I guess then you are referring to the problem of observation and passage of time. Do we need to observe things to feel time? Like you said, how come we experience a jump in time after a coma? Did we not experience time while in the coma? If so why not? What was different about us in that state?

I'm not sure what you meant in the last sentence but I'm guessing it relates to the age old question...if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

As far as I know, the way we perceive the universe is unique and in fact every observer experiences the universe(the effects of time and space) in a slightly different way than everyone else/anything else (whether it be alive or not). Also we are subjected to our individual consciousness so it gets tricky. But at the end of the day we have to agree on one timeline so it's like a mindfuck.
i'm saying that things take time but time doesn't take time because time is just the order of events.

and I don't like simulations theory, because having a computer simulating a universe down to the atoms would required the computer to be more complicated than the universe so that computer would be unreasonably massive device. The maintenance crew would have to spend hundreds of years at warp speed to reach the usb port.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by momuuu »

I don't understand where the discussion is? It's just altering the scales throughout from a point of view that doesnt exist.

Its like saying: we have infinite empty space now imagine if we moved to a different point in infinite empty space.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Dolan »

Exactly. You cannot observe something without being inside a frame of reference.

By placing yourself in another frame of reference with different parameters (such as speed), nothing in physical reality is changed, only your point of view.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by momuuu »

Goodspeed wrote:Slightly off topic:
The fact that, assuming it's possible to simulate a universe, it would be possible to do it at such a speed that its entire trillion-year history would be simulated in only a second of "real-time", is, I would say, strong support for the theory that we do live in a simulation. Whether it took a second or 10 years to complete the simulation, the conscious beings inside the simulated universe would experience it at the same pace, which is the pace their brain processes thoughts at. Majillions of complex creatures could be born into that universe, with their own understanding of its reality and their own scientific theories, all in the span of a second. In fact that simulated universe, in turn, could spawn an intelligent species with the ability to simulate universes. And so on.

The only question that remains is whether it's technically possible to simulate a universe. If so, the odds that we are living in a simulation are infinitely higher than the odds of us being the first to develop this technology.

To simulate every particle in the universe one would need more particles than in this universe right? So whats the point of devoting so many particles to a simulation (assuming thats done by some higher entity) that's not like the world the entity lives in? This makes little logical sense to me.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by Goodspeed »

You don't have to generate a universe as complex as this one. You could do with 0.00000001% of the particles in this one and it would still be plenty complex for intelligent life to evolve. Also your algorithms could be more efficient than the ones at work in this universe.

Point being that simulating a universe doesn't imply you would need all of the information in this universe and more. You'd certainly need a whole bunch, though, that's for sure. But that argument doesn't prove it technically impossible.
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Re: The Passage of Time

Post by momuuu »

The truth about the inital post is that you're saying "what if everything is sped up then everybody and everyone and everything would feel and happen the same" yet somehow you're placing something or someone outside the system that's noticing a difference of speeding it up or not. Time as we have defined it is simply a relative thing. It is just how long it takes in between stuff. You can speed everything up or slow everything down but that literally has no meaning unless you're looking from a god perspective.

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