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by Alex Vikoulov  "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." -John A. Wheeler What could be strange about something we're all so familiar with - TIME? We all have cognitive biases and some concepts in this essay may be kind of novel, or even bizarre to you, so I urge you to keep an open mind. While pondering about the ultimate nature of time, most people are used to think in linear terms and have these common misconceptions: Misconception #1: Time is Universal The biggest misconception of all is that a "Now" moment throughout our Universe must be the same. It turns out that time is paradoxical, flexible and relative, in other words, time is not what it appears to be. Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity shed light on the relativistic nature of time. He has shown that speed and gravity influence time thus making a now for an observer on Earth different from a now for an observer on a planet in some distant galaxy depending how fast the two planets are moving in relation to each other across the vast distances as well as their mass differential. Interestingly enough, this could possibly explain the Fermi Paradox (where are all the aliens?) that we'll discuss further. Einstein came to another mind-blowing realization about non-locality of time stating that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in the eternal NOW, as his quote "The distinction between the past, present and future is only an illusion, albeit a persistent one" became famous almost overnight. Thus, all events in the universe that happened in the past still exist, in fact, are even happening right now, in another conscious observer's reality. And all events that will happen in the future already exist, in fact, are even happening right now, in another conscious observer's reality. There's no special "Now" from the God's eye perspective but it's not what we experience, don't we?* Video: The Illusion of Time - PBS/Brian Greene  *Abridged excerpt from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, audible.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Misconception #2: The Flow of Time is Universal Time is not fixed at the same rate. We experience time as a series of fleeting "Now" moments. That's why as an acronym, TIME should stand for: The Infinite Moment Experience. Ultimately, it's all relative and subjective. Time dilation, a difference of the passage of time between observers, depends on your speed - the faster you move the slower your time in relation to others - you age slower than people on Earth, for example, if you travel on a spaceship near the speed of light. Your passage of time also depends on gravity which you are experiencing - the closer you are to a gravitational object like Earth, the slower time ticks for you compared to the astronauts orbiting the planet. Under normal earthly conditions your passage of time is not much different than mine except in some instances when consciousness switches to the "emergency regime" or "altered state" where events may be perceived in slower (or faster) motion. The perception of how time flows also depends on timescales specific to a species. In this sense, time is what makes us uniquely human. One may argue that all living creatures, which are basically biological computational systems, say, bees, bats or humans, experience the flow of time at different timescales. One day, human-level Artificial Intelligence would claim to be conscious and have "her own subjectivity" which would arguably be different from the ordinary human perception of time. Conscious AI quite probably would "think" and perceive time at digital scales, perhaps thousands or even millions of times faster than unaugmented humans! Would our "physical world" be perceived by Strong AI (or future us?) as almost static? Wouldn't AI be willing to create virtual worlds in "her imagination", or on other advanced computational substrate? The flow of time is a construct of our consciousness. Period. When speaking of the passage of time, consciousness cannot be ruled out of the equation. There's no objective reality "out there", only subjective reality. What stands the closest to the "objective reality" is actually what Howard Bloom, author of the "Global Brain", calls "a shared hallucination" of human species, and "physical rule set" - laws of physics, specific to our Universe. That's what we usually call "consensus reality", or simply "Reality" for practical convenience. If you imagined a humonguous balloon of your subjectivity, you would see a tiny, tiny dot. That tiny dot is "objective reality," consisting of common "physical ruleset" and shared (remembered) events with just a few entangled conscious minds. How does consciousness create a continuous flow of time for our inner experience? I describe temporal dynamics and the relationship between time and mind in my coming book but for now look at it this way. If you subscribe to quantum theory (and you should), there is essentially an infinite number of parallel universes (let's call them parallel earths here) and your consciousness shifts from one 3D-snapshot parallel Earth to another, slightly different one. That creates an illusion of movement and continuous flow of time for you to experience your smooth inner movie. As I mentioned before, everything in our "physical" reality comes down to consciousness, more specifically consciousness as integrated information, consisting of Conscious Instants (CIs). Your brain collects, processes sensory and mental data, and presents to your conscious awareness prioritized and relevant information which becomes your unitary picture of "reality". Every CI is an integrated information which corresponds to one particular "time slice" of our 3D space. In recent paper, published in PloS Biology, proposing the Two-Stage Model of Consciousness, developed by Michael Herzog and Frank Scharnowski, authors argue that our conscious perception comes in discrete snapshots, "time slices", like distinct images flicking quickly through a film reel. According to this theory, consciousness is in fact developed in two stages - simply put, conscious and unconscious moments few milliseconds long in duration, on and off. “We perceive time as continuous just as we perceive a line as continuous even though its ink is of discrete atomic nature,” as the authors write in their paper.* Max Tegmark, MIT's astrophysicist, argues that the flow of time is an illusion in our 4D spacetime: Video: Is Time Fundamental? w/ Max Tegmark -- Closer to Truth  *Abridged excerpt from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, audible.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Misconception #3: There's Only One Universal Timeline Hidden from our senses, lies an intricate web of alternate realities. Subjectively, we do experience only one timeline but quantum theory, which by the way has never failed its predictions, implies the existence of parallel universes with alternate timelines. It means that macroobjects including people display properties of the quantum world at a human scale, such as the wave function - probabilistic distribution of outcomes. At a more fundamental level of reality, you and I have an infinitely large number of our counterparts in parallel universes. These parallel universes may be slightly different or drastically different from each other, where all possible timelines branch off from our birth. These universes are all equally valid and comprise conscious observers which all perceive their own respective "only one true reality". Just like particles, say, electrons, traveling along all possible paths from start to end points, our Universe has the full set of possible histories, each eternally present, however imperceptible to us. Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ interpretation is now a standard tool in fundamental physical theory, and is even used in fields far removed from theoretical physics. Do all those alternate timelines truly exist? Most physicists believe they do but somehow, only certain potentialities become realities, and somehow large systems such as human observers are carried along from past to future.* There's a slew of certain quantum mechanisms we find in Nature you might want to read about in my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution."   *Abridged excerpt from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, audible.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Could the phenomena of synchronicity, déjà-vu be explained by physics? The past, present, and future are all connected, entangled in such a way that a relevant information manifests itself in the spotlight of your consciousness. As quantum mechanics implies, the present moment you are experiencing now is best thought of as funneled from all your probable pasts as well as funneled from all your probable futures.* Video: D-Theory of Time: Digital Presentism - Ecstadelic Media (cc)  *Abridged excerpt from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, audible.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Misconception #4: Time Travel is Impossible Time travel is not only theoretically possible but technologically feasible, as a number of scientists are working now on the proof of their concepts...* -Alex Vikoulov *That is an exclusive abridged excerpt from my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore.  Tags: temporal dynamics, misconceptions about time, time dilation, time travel, temporal mechanics, quantum mechanics, temporal paradoxes, Digital Physics, Quantum Physics, Albert Einstein, John Wheeler, Brian Greene, Michael Herzog, Frank Scharnowski, Max Tegmark, Richard Feynman, quantum Immortality, General Relativity Theory, Two-Stage Consciousness Theory, Fermi's Paradox, non-locality of time, conscious observer, universal time, computational substrate, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Strong AI, altered state of consciousness, time slice, integrated Information, 4D spacetime, parrallel universes, alternate timelines, quantum theory, synchronicity, duration, déjà-vu, feasability of time travel, time reversability About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist, philosopher of mind, CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Ecstadelic Media Group, painter, essayist, media commentator, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution," "The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology," "The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics," "The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence," "Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality," "NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology," "TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man." Self-described neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, transhumanist singularitarian. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio... Author Website: www.alexvikoulov.com e-mail: [email protected] 
5 Comments
6/28/2016 04:30:07 pm
I like to think of it like this:
Alex Vikoulov
6/28/2016 05:05:44 pm
It's an interesting hypothesis - I have had this conjecture myself - a particle in our universe is a universe of its own, and our universe may be a particle in a larger universe, going in both micro and macro directions ad infinitum. The Fractality of the Multiverse can be structured this way.
Khalid Masood
8/18/2016 08:00:49 am
The only true connection we have with nature is time.
Lonell Muldrow
2/18/2017 12:04:41 pm
I believe you are talking about special relatively not general relatively. The faster you go the slower your personal clock becomes. So the astronauts would age slower. If the past still exists so would it's gravitational forces creating a huge collapse. There can be an infinite realm but it must be structured for the laws of physics to exist. If all things were possible then they would be possible at any given time. The past, present, and future existing at the same time is an infinite prospective not observable by a finite being. If there are infinite possibilities they would need to occur in separate individual universes created in an infinite realm. If infinity were to hide itself in the atomic structure it would need to be able to adapt to all energies and velocities. This would be done in fields of energy. Each field can open up according to energy and velocity. Upon closer observation of each field a wave can be seen. The field of that wave another wave and so on. Life is able to stitch its way through time existing in the present by evolving from the past while moving into the future. Time is collapse and expansion and centripetal forces creating a balancing act. The black hole in our galaxy is pulling the past into it revealing the present while the present rides the wave of expansion into the future. A magnet is a magnet because all the electrons are spinning in the same direction. Electrons are able to filter the events of time through them and combine this force. The equator of a magnet is traveling through time faster than its axis. The equator of the magnet personal time is traveling slower than the axis of the magnet. The axis of the magnet show the two dominant forces of the universe which is expansion and collspse. Leave a Reply. |
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Recent Publications The Cybernetic Theory of Mind by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2022): Audiobook/eBook Series The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): eBook Paperback Hardcover Audiobook The Omega Singularity: Universal Mind & The Fractal Multiverse by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2022):Audiobook eBook THEOGENESIS: Transdimensional Propagation & Universal Expansion by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2021): Audiobook eBook The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2021): Audiobook eBook TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020) eBook NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2020): Audiobook eBook The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality by Antonin Tuynman (2019) eBook Paperback The Science and Philosophy of Information by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook Series Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook More Than An Algorithm: Exploring the gap between natural evolution and digitally computed artificial intelligence by Antonin Tuynman (2019): eBook Our Facebook Pages
A quote on the go"When I woke up one morning I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel “oh so real” when inside them but they are what they are - dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true... The question then becomes how to "lucidify" this dream of reality?"— Alex M. Vikoulov Public Forums 
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