PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE. (Deep Thoughts From Grumpy Cat)

[Grumpy Cat]

I'm just laying here contemplating on the vast universe (while trying to get back to sleep) and had a question that I'm sure some extremely smart Aspie could help me with. It deals with time.

Is it true that Past, Present and Future happen at the same time? Could I actually be working now (I'm supposed to go to work tonight) while still lying in bed trying to get back to sleep? Or could I still be watching "Catfish" Season 3, which is what I was doing last night and still be doing that right at this very minute? I wonder about this stuff all the time.

 

[Suzanne]

I am no way a smart aspie wish I was lol

In essence yes, but only psychologically so; not in reality. Our past shapes us and depending on what happened, ie for the good or for the bad, plays a huge part in how we are in the now.

The future cannot because well, that is the future lol

Since I am a believer in our Creator, I know that any idea of true going back or forth, does not exist in the physical realm.

When one has a fantastic memory, yesterday is today!

 

[StephF]

Maybe. Does Cause precede Effect or not ? I don't believe in a creator at all, I'm all about the science.

 

[Suzanne]

Maybe. Does Cause precede Effect or not ? I don't believe in a creator at all, I'm all about the science.

Just to be a bit controversial here! If it were not for a Creator, there would be no science, and the bible and science, are in harmony!

 

[StephF]

Well I'm happy for people to believe in what they like. I don't think here would be the right place to get into my beliefs as I wouldn't want to upset people.

 

[Spiller]

So this is what keeps you awake at night Angie
I've wondered myself why we experience Time linearly as we live in a four dimensional universe.. why can we move freely and naturally in three directions, yet only in the fourth, Time, in one direction at a set speed of 1 second per second?
I tend toward a Buddhist outlook here, that we can't learn to see past the illusion that is the 'real' world unless we're first blinded by that illusion and learn, in time, to see its true nature.
I am intrigued by the subjective experience of time.. why does it go faster when I'm having fun and why does it become 'bullet time' (remember the slo-mo scenes in The Matrix?) when I'm flying over the front of the car that just pulled out in front of my bike?
I've discovered I can speed time up, according to my own perception, when I'm bored by concentrating on inane tasks, thinking about a point in the future, say 2 hours from now, and pointedly not looking at a clock.
I can also slow it down by doing different things during the day, every day.. I wonder if the idea that time passes faster when you're older is because we all get stuck in routinues..

 

[Judge]

Is it true that Past, Present and Future happen at the same time?

One can only guess.

In another very different universe or dimension which is not relative to physics involving the movement or velocity of the Earth, sun or moon? Perhaps.

Which might be how or why those on the "other side" can witness us here from the perspective of our past, present and future at will. And equally be able to physically accomplish bilocation appearing in multiple places at the same time.

 

[clg114]

I'm just laying here contemplating on the vast universe (while trying to get back to sleep) and had a question that I'm sure some extremely smart Aspie could help me with. It deals with time.

Is it true that Past, Present and Future happen at the same time? Could I actually be working now (I'm supposed to go to work tonight) while still lying in bed trying to get back to sleep? Or could I still be watching "Catfish" Season 3, which is what I was doing last night and still be doing that right at this very minute? I wonder about this stuff all the time.

Is the past, present and future happening at the same time? I do not believe so. For me the past is to remember, the present to live in and the future to plan for. Maybe that's to simple, but that is how I see it.

 

[Jaywalker]

It is convenient, mathematically, to treat time as a fourth dimension. Such treatment seems to be for convenience only.

We can move freely in spatial dimensions, and that movement can occur at different rates. In time, we can "move" in only one direction, and that movement occurs at a constant rate. In principle, we can move through time without moving through space (disregarding Heisenberg's uncertainty theory for a moment). We cannot move through space without moving through time.

Let's consider the ramifications of the past, present, and future existing simultaneously. Our self at the day after tomorrow would know what our self does tomorrow. This means that are future actions are known. They are fixed, not random. Free will cannot exist if our future actions are fixed.

 

[AsheSkyler]

The only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen at once.

Man, could you imagine how overwhelmed Aspies would get if on top of the normal processing issues they also had to brush their teeth while giving a presentation while driving in rush-hour traffic and cooking supper?

 

[Grumpy Cat]

It is convenient, mathematically, to treat time as a fourth dimension. Such treatment seems to be for convenience only.

We can move freely in spatial dimensions, and that movement can occur at different rates. In time, we can "move" in only one direction, and that movement occurs at a constant rate. In principle, we can move through time without moving through space (disregarding Heisenberg's uncertainty theory for a moment). We cannot move through space without moving through time.

Let's consider the ramifications of the past, present, and future existing simultaneously. Our self at the day after tomorrow would know what our self does tomorrow. This means that are future actions are known. They are fixed, not random. Free will cannot exist if our future actions are fixed.

I've had moments of deja vu where I was doing something and I felt like I knew I had done that before. Is that me knowing what I was going to be doing in the future?

 

[Grumpy Cat]

And then one night I didn't want it to go by very fast cause I wanted a lot of sleep and I would think to myself "Ok, when I wake up it will only be such and such a time" and that happened all night. That was the slowest night ever and I woke up like I was fully rested! I didn't want to get up today because of the snow and when I woke up 5-6 hours had already went by before I knew it....and here I am.

 

[Judge]

I've had moments of deja vu where I was doing something and I felt like I knew I had done that before. Is that me knowing what I was going to be doing in the future?

De ja vu is the experience of sensing something you did in the past. Precognition would be sensing something that happens in the future.

 

[zurb]

Reminds me of an interview I heard once about someone living with constant deja vu.
Similar article here.

 

[Judge]

"It's The Mind."

 

[wyverary]

I recommend Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here, as it addresses some of these exact same questions. It will either clear things up a little for you or make you even more confused than before!

 

[Spiller]

It is convenient, mathematically, to treat time as a fourth dimension. Such treatment seems to be for convenience only.

We can move freely in spatial dimensions, and that movement can occur at different rates. In time, we can "move" in only one direction, and that movement occurs at a constant rate. In principle, we can move through time without moving through space (disregarding Heisenberg's uncertainty theory for a moment). We cannot move through space without moving through time.

Let's consider the ramifications of the past, present, and future existing simultaneously. Our self at the day after tomorrow would know what our self does tomorrow. This means that are future actions are known. They are fixed, not random. Free will cannot exist if our future actions are fixed.

If you consider the premise that the Timeline branches with every possible decision at every moment then the concept of free will Vs fixed future becomes moot.. given that either all moments exist simultaneously, or that we could move freely in 4 dimensions, we could essentially have free will while experiencing any possible future, so while we'd still know the futures, perceptually the choice of future, from an infinite number, would be ours.. just a thought

 

[Jaywalker]

If you consider the premise that the Timeline branches with every possible decision at every moment then the concept of free will Vs fixed future becomes moot.

In such a reality, there would be an infinite number of universes, but it would be a countably infinite number. That is, there would be a one to one between the set of universes and the discrete set of timeline branches.

The problem is that not all of our decisions are choices involvlling a discrete number of options. How much water I used to make my coffee this morning, for example, was a choice involving a continuously random variable. There was an uncountably infinite number of possibilities. That chice alone would create more "new universes" than all of the discrete options in the entire history of all of the universes. Far more than a trillion times as many. More than a googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeroes) times as many. Now consider how often we make choices involving an uncountably infinite number of options. How fast did you read this post? How quickly did you move across the room? How long did you lie in bed between waking and getting up?

Put another way, not all infinities are equal.

 

[Spiller]

In such a reality, there would be an infinite number of universes, but it would be a countably infinite number. That is, there would be a one to one between the set of universes and the discrete set of timeline branches.

The problem is that not all of our decisions are choices involvlling a discrete number of options. How much water I used to make my coffee this morning, for example, was a choice involving a continuously random variable. There was an uncountably infinite number of possibilities. That chice alone would create more "new universes" than all of the discrete options in the entire history of all of the universes. Far more than a trillion times as many. More than a googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeroes) times as many. Now consider how often we make choices involving an uncountably infinite number of options. How fast did you read this post? How quickly did you move across the room? How long did you lie in bed between waking and getting up?

Put another way, not all infinities are equal.

Interesting.. how do you define infinity as both infinite and countable? My understanding is that Infinity + infinity = infinity, therefore infinity = infinity. Two infinities would have no quantifiably different value, both being bigger than the biggest number (even a googleplex ).. bigger, by definition, than 'big', in fact.
On reflection, it occurs to me that there can't be an infinite number of futures as, while we may not know how many choices and seemingly random variables we have to play with in any one moment, they must be finite and any equation involving a finite number of finite variables has to have a finite solution.
..How much water I use in my coffee is random, but still limited by the size of the cup I'm using and no matter how big my cup is, I've got to be able to lift it..
It also occurs to me that I've been awake and thinking about this while Grumpy Cat's gone to bed..

 

[Jaywalker]

Interesting.. how do you define infinity as both infinite and countable? My understanding is that Infinity + infinity = infinity, therefore infinity = infinity. Two infinities would have no quantifiably different value, both being bigger than the biggest number (even a googleplex ).. bigger, by definition, than 'big', in fact.
On reflection, it occurs to me that there can't be an infinite number of futures as, while we may not know how many choices and seemingly random variables we have to play with in any one moment, they must be finite and any equation involving a finite number of finite variables has to have a finite solution.
..How much water I use in my coffee is random, but still limited by the size of the cup I'm using and no matter how big my cup is, I've got to be able to lift it..
It also occurs to me that I've been awake and thinking about this while Grumpy Cat's gone to bed..

I'm going to cheat, partially out of laziness, but mostly because my phone plus Internet forum software combine to create a lousy platform for explaining mathematics.

Colloquially, we are interested in how many things are in a set. Mathematics' formal concept of this is the cardinality of a set.

Wikipedia article on cardinality

Textbook chapter on cardinality

Countable and Uncountable Sets

It's true that there is a maximum amount of water I can use for my coffee, given that I've already selected the container in which I'm brewing. That the set of options has a maximum option does not imply a limit to the number of possibilities for the amount. Consider the set of our possibilities to be the interval (0, 16] where 16 is the maximum capacity of the cup in which I brew my coffee, in ounces.

It can be shown that any interval that is a subset of the real numbers has the same cardinality as the entire set of real numbers, e.g., there are as many numbers between 0 and 1 as there are real numbers between negative infinity and positive infinity! So as long as my coffee cup has some non-zero capacity, there exist an infinite number of possible amounts of water it could contain.

Note that a water molecule has a finite volume, so this isn't a very good example. I should have focused on an example using only time, distance, temperature, or some other truly continuous random variable, rather than chemistry.