In one moment I am born, living and taking my last breath. Time is an illusion and it just depends where I am in my perception of it.
I don't think it is an illusion. It may be relative and not linear, but it is measurable. there is no concept of speed without an element of time. Almost all physics is useless without time. Even gravity is measure in feet per "second" squared,
Time might be an illusion but if I don't pay my electricity bill on time and they cut off my power and I can't work or cook food, the illusion becomes pretty bloody real pretty bloody quickly. I guess these New Age feel good profundities just don't work on me.
Now...take a deep breath and revel in the wonder of it all!
Time may be an illusion in some sense, but I'm not sure I see it as making much practical difference. We still exist within that perception. Whether time is a real phenomenon or some sort of emergent property of a larger reality seems immaterial to how I behave. I don't truly believe in permanence of self, with gradual changes from moment to moment transforming me from a person I wouldn't recognize who occupied my relative space 20 years ago to the person I am today. As far as I'm concerned, the only real "me" exists in the moment, replaced by a similar person in the next moment, so gradually as to give the illusion of persistent identity. But if I'm hit by a truck tomorrow, that "me" dies but all the antecedent "me"s are unaffected. The "me" right now is unaffected by a future "me" dying. So, as far as I can tell, whatever is happening with time isn't an issue of a single moment affecting a single entity — "me" — or the far more complex notion of all relative timeframes for everything in the entire universe. If time is entirely illusory, then all I could postulate is that we are in some sense akin to frames of a movie reel (obviously more complicated than that, but metaphorically similar) — where the "me" now is just one frame of the film, and the me in a minute is a very similar frame on the reel, and on and on. So, time might be the entire reel, and from an outside perspective we could see it as a whole, but from where we necessarily reside, within a frame of the reel, we see only the frames that stretch before us and behind us, and that's for us the reality of time. I still have an obligation to those future frames because my actions now influence those frames directly, so I still have to live as though time is real even if it's in fact an illusion.
That was awesome. When I graduate from my New Thought Seminary, I'm using this in a sermon. Don't worry I won't cite my source.
@UnityBrad "Source: some weird guy on an agnostic social media site."
I like that philosophical viewpoint. It sounds very Alan Watts.
@UnityBrad It must be a 'wavelength' thing with you and me, but I can't decide if you're serious or not.
@Skyfacer His name seems familiar to me, but when I looked him up he doesn't ring a bell — so maybe I'm confusing his name for someone else. It sounds like he relied heavily on religious concepts with Eastern philosophies mixed in, but his Wikipedia page didn't get too in depth into the details of his philosophy.
There is a similar theory in a science video I saw some time ago narrated by Brian Greene. Time is similar to a film reel and the past, present, and future exist all at once. I think that if that could be proven then maybe it could also possibly lead to prove that everything is already planned out for everyone. Determinism. As to the problem of entropy in the video, maybe the present is the process of the past and the future "pushing against each other". That's my highly technical and scientific term that I don't even fully understand. I could also be extremely wrong lol
@Piece2YourPuzzle I'd actually seen this video once upon a time. I remember the time slices specifically (which is such a cool concept). I wasn't specifically thinking of the snapshots that Brian Greene refers to, though that's basically the idea I was thinking of for impermanence of self. The time slices complicate things a lot, though, at least from an intuitive sense, because every atom, every particle, needs to have its own snapshots, not the object to which it belongs (because if I throw something with my right hand, it's moving and changing the time slice, but my left hand is stationary and doesn't have a different time slice). I find it to be rather confusing in that sense, even though it doesn't change anything of substance in my thinking (just applies it to a much smaller scale). Conceptually, when I start to think of the universe and spacetime, sort of like a self-contained bubble, thinking about the particle level rather than the macro scale we observe, it almost becomes a simpler concept for me. Every snapshot of every particle or wave contained in this spacetime bubble, sort of like veins or branches. There's a sort of conceptual beauty in that.
@resserts The study of "inner worlds" is very interesting. It's basically a very confusing infinity.
I don't know about you but if time is an illusion I am going to live as hard as I can in this moment.
If time is an illusion how come we can measure its passage and see its effects?
I think you mean our perception of time is highly subjective. Which is fine for most lifeforms it is.