What if Time is an illusion?

[zedDoubleNaught]

Time stops inside a black hole? I doubt it. But it is standard theory. If it does stop inside a black hole, then it probably doesn't exist to begin with. The photon or any other mass-less particle that [must] move at the speed of light supposedly doesn't experience time. I doubt that too:

Can something move if there is no time? Or is it like, it's in all those places, it's just our illusion of time that makes us think it's in different places?

When a black hole sucks in light, does the light slow down and cause it to transform from energy into mass?

(no fancy math needed because I won't understand it, I'm happy to hear it described in words)

 

[nitro]

My head hurts, nitro. Make it stop.

Ok maybe simply stated. Say you had a bottle and a bunch of marbles inside the bottle of different colors, say blue and red. Imagine that you look inside the bottle and you saw that all the red balls are on the bottom and all the blue balls are on the top. Do you think that happened by accident, or that someone spent the time to arrange them that way? (your mother's energy arranging your molecules into an ordered state and billions of years of biological evolution) That is low entropy. Now, shake the bottle (the system going through state changes, cells damaging in need of repair). Do you expect that the red balls and blue balls will still stay nicely arranged? Right, they get disorered, because there is very few ways to stay all red and all blue, and a huge number of ways to mix red and blue

That is all that entropy says. Systems evolve towards more likely states (which are almost always disordered):

 

[Frederick Foresight]

But I don't see how that negates the notion of time. Sadly, I'm out of my depth here.

 

[nitro]

But I don't see how that negates the notion of time. Sadly, I'm out of my depth here.

Actually it is not obvious at all and your confusion is totally warranted. I will post something later that gets closer to an answer.

 

[CaptainObvious]

Perhaps another thread we had going here might add something to this discussion. Worth a quick read for those that haven't already seen it.
http://elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/putting-time-in-perspective.288835/

 

[Blueline]

If aging isn't real, how do you explain the inevitable wearing out of the body and the death that follows?

Anything that has a beginning must have an end. This means anything (object/subject/things) that ever existed only has a temporary existence. Aging is just a word that we use to describe this process of birth and death. We can call this a cycle. We call it real because we believe in our senses..ie. our sight etc. Just because we SEE the process doesn't mean it is real. If we do, we fall into the trap of our false senses and not seeing what is beyond.

You see, there is that state where it is termed the deathless, a state where there is no birth and death. It is known in the mind. Here, time doesn't exist and it is timeless.

The only reason you believe in what you see is because we're within a plane / boundary of this particular existence. It is a limitation factor where we're restricted within it.....ie. conditioned existence.

This is why "aging" is also an illusion.....because we are also an illusion as there is no self.

 

[StarDust9182]

If time is an illusion, then how do we explain what we normally regard as the passage of time, such as aging, agreed upon recollection of (supposed) past events, overdue interest on debt?

Simple, then the world is all illusion (or perception) if time is an illusion. The world is what you percieve and there is very little you can know. For me time is the speed of perception of my consciousness. Quantum mechanics leads to a very strange non-intuitive universe at deep understanding levels. Newton and Einstein had much more comfortable ideas for most people.

 

[StarDust9182]

If aging isn't real, how do you explain the inevitable wearing out of the body and the death that follows?

Are we talking about agism? LOL.

Where were "you" before your birth? Consciousness is not taken into account in physics and though the body dies, who can say that "you" do? How can you raise your arm by thinking about it? There are lots of unknowns in this world.

 

[StarDust9182]

Nitro already touched on the other key curious point - time having a direction in entropy. Order and disorder appear to be time directional in this universe. Most mathematical models work in both directions.

There is another potential issue. A model is just a simplification (ce n'est pas une pipe) the ONLY universe model that truly is complete is that universe itself! A map can be drawn to any scale but must lose some detail in the model. (BTW, this is directly applicable to trading system theory.) If you go to sleep does the world disappear? If the math contains an error found out decades later, does the physical world change.

Therefore, a mathematical model without time may leave out some details of perception. Nobody has yet come across y=mx+b lieing out in the field (at least as far as I have heard).

Oh look ..... I am out of time (Pun intended)!

 

[stu]

Time is what stops everything happening at once