The Ilusion of Time and Reality as We Think we Know it.
We can all agree that looking at stars at the night sky are just light hitting our eye from a long time ago. It's beautiful to look at and you can just sit back and stare. How about a candle 10 feet away? Look at it. It still takes 'time' to reach our eyes and register. You see it flicker and dance and are mesmerized, without a second thought. With such beauty too, just like those stars. It came from a long time ago, in time, as well. It's all relative. ;)
Now ask a person 5 feet ahead of you and ask them what they see. You can both have a conversation, just reverberations in air, and both feel you are in the same space and time in the present.
BUT YOU'RE NOT!
It takes time, even the most minuscule amount, for the sounds to reach that person 5 feet ahead of you. And it takes time for the light to reach both your eyes; Sound is just slightly behind, but it feels like living it the present. But you are still not.
Does this make sense? Do you see the ramifications of this? How do lucid dreams enter the equation?
We live in the past no matter what, I think our dreams are the only real time event we experience. How that matters I dont know but there it is - the truth...
I agree that Time is an illusion. I came to the conclusion long ago that I live "now". The past is just memories. The future is the now that hasn't happened. yet. Time is just a convention that people agree on. It makes things less cluttered. But it can never be measured twice. Duration of an event can, but not the "now" that is a memory. Just because we observe something that happened long ago does not preclude that we are observing it now. How else? To that particle/wavicle/ it is now for it too, whenever it is, right now.
What is 'time' even in a dream. How long does it take for a subconscious idea to manifest itself? It's not instant. :o
Here's a funny clip from Spaceballs. A funny, self aware movie, which is funny and yet thought provoking. Hope you enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZ9HhHU86o
it takes time but I think it is as close as you can get to living in the moment when you are dreaming. You are creating as you go and not exploring something already created
Hence... it's all an illusion isn't it? Waking life and dreams. :ugeek:
Where are we 'now'? Whatever feels 'right'.
If we saw reality as it really is, with light and sound out of sync, we would not be able to make sense of the world. We'd be confused. The world appears to make sense because our brains are constantly "lying" to us. By the time sensory input reaches consciousness, the data has been tampered with, conveniently doctored, and what we experience is, for all intents and purposes, a lie.
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i dont think you can term it a lie, its more the result of our senses and so its as real as it needs to be or can be for us to exist without harming ourselves.
If we had no senses then no matter what we could not experience the world, even dreaming is an experience using inner senses
I think you CAN term it a "lie" in the sense that your brain produces illusions, and, as a result, inaccurate interpretations of what is really out there. It is not the truth but the brain passes it off as the truth. This is the sense in which it lies. It is even analogous to a white lie if it serves the organism well and aids its survival. "Lying" in this context is not deliberate, it is consequential and the result of our biology. We are not deliberately lying to ourselves, Peter.
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in that context its a lie I can accept that but still not comfortable with the word as it seems to reduce us to nothing by using it and therefore the way we see the world. I fully understand the illusion and also the need, every organism has it own set of lies then and needs them.
Is there anything that sees the world as it really is?
Peter wrote: Is there anything that sees the world as it really is?
NO.
I doubt it. Each and every organism will have their own model of the world based on their make-up. In other words, perception is ultimately subjective. Each species has adapted to "see" the world in their unique way as it serves their needs.
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do any of our senses give accurate unbiased feedback on what is out there, sight, sound, touch, smell - something must be real ?
What is perceived is real for the organism. And us humans only perceive a small portion of reality with our senses. So, not only is perceptual interpretation a perversion of the truth, it also constitutes a minor portion of what is out there. Eagles can detect more colours in nature than us. Their vision is also sharper. Dogs detect far more layers of smell than us. A daltonic has his own model of the world. A blind person may compensate with sharper audition. A bat uses echolocation. In the end there is no true model of the world. Perception is idiosyncratic in accordance with organic structure and function.
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As you are reading this, turn your head at an angle and focus your eyes on it so you can still read it. Light coming from your screen is hitting your closest eye a fraction of a moment sooner than the other eye. Yet it still feels like you are experiencing the same reality with both eyes at the same time. It's only an infinitesimal difference, but a difference none the less. Our brains work it out and trick us into thinking it's all happening in the present.
It all needs to make perceptual sense...
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Thinking more about it, perhaps my "reading of text" example doesn't quite work. It's only whenever there is a CHANGE, the light will be noticed in one eye before the other. So let's say you're looking at a storm and see a bolt of lightening. The light comes at you at an angle and hits the eye closest. Now stop time. At that very moment, one eye sees it, the other doesn't. That's just another way to explain my visual thought experiment. (I don't want to exclude blind people and we can use the sound of thunder as well in place of lightening.)
But we don't notice, and if we did, we would not be able to function as a life-form, and evolve and procreate, so therefore we must 'lie' to ourselves, and not see reality for what it really is. The rate at which we perceive time is a product of natural evolution. We must use optical illusions as shortcuts, and make general assumptions to define our reality to survive properly. It would take too much time to analyze absolutely everything, and it's safer to jump away from something that we assumed was a tiger and be wrong, than take too long over-thinking it and be right. ;)
We have evolved to perceive time at the current rate that feels natural to us. Who's to say there aren't other life forms that perceive time at a completely different rate than us, and feels natural to them? We may find some right here on Earth in the animal kingdom. :idea: :?:
For my opinion, time is an illusion.
It’s only the environment(dark to sun) and the people(young to old) which change not the time.
What I mean is that; imagine if human didn’t need to sleep, and the average age of a human is 80 years old, so 80 years old is one day, I mean that when you are born you wake up and when you die, you go to sleep.
Ex: human need sleep:
-Wake up, go to sleep → one day pass, 24 hours went and after its tomorrow.
Next day, wake up, go to sleep→ another 24 hours went and after its tomorrow
Ex: If human didn’t need to sleep: -Wake up, go to sleep→ 80 years pass, no tomorrow -People will see no different; when its dark it’s not late, or when the sun wake up its not early, because one day is 80 years, so the sun goes, the dark come and the sun come back and the dark come back. -For them, it’s only the environment and people which change not the time (Sun to Dark)
It's my point of view OK.
You have a point Je-Je. What you are talking about sounds more like 'time of day', which really is quite arbitrary isn't it. Even time zones zig zag at times, and I learned recently that all of China defies physics and is all one time zone!... For some reason you can only guess. :roll: And each year is actually 365.25 days roughly. So how old are you right now at this exact moment? You're clock is lying to you. ;)
There seems to be the mathematical concept of 'time', but then there is the personal perception of 'time'. And even the mathematical concept is really just a measurement for the rate of change in the universe. If absolutely nothing moved, not even an electron, there would be no time.
I was thinking about how a spider views reality. How can it just sit there on a web for days on end without moving? It never get's bored and is probably not thinking about much at all and that is why. So 3 minutes, or 3 days, are irrelevant and it probably doesn't even notice.
Our rate of 'perceived' time is perhaps due to our 'speed of thought'. Or the '# of thoughts per second'.
I was also pondering why things appear to be 'fast' and 'slow'. It's always relative to us. We, and anything perceiving reality, will always feel like they are in the center and that is what comes natural. We don't notice a vine grow because it is so slow, and we can't see a hummingbird's wings flap because they are too fast. But with technology we can time-lapse that vine and truly see how magnificently alive it is, and capture that hummingbird in slow motion and see the intricate movements. These things and many more are happening all around us, every day, without us even knowing about them. We have just a narrow view of reality around us don't we?
Our own personal size is another reason. What is 'big' and 'small'? It too is always relative to us... and you can repeat that same paragraph above changing only a few words. Think about Earth compared to bacteria.
If anyone was interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fouo6GKGBIM (Hummingbirds in slow motion.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTljaIVseTc **(Time-lapse of a vine growing.) **
Time really is an illusion. The perception of time continually fluctuates even withinin an individual, particularly as a result of age. If you are at the age of twenty-five, half of your lifetime is already gone. This is because time speeds up as you age for a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with an increase in unconsciousness that comes with age. As a 5 year old, the world is strange and full of things to think about. But with age, all of those things fall away and our minds cancel out so many things we already know exist and we fully understand--we only become fully and truly conscious (fully and truly alive) when experiencing some strange and novel new thing. Art, for example. We are meteors, hurtling toward our deaths at an increasingly exponential speed. The only way to slow down time is to exercise consciousness and lucidity--one of the many reasons lucid dreaming and meditation are such vital skills.
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I didn't think I needed to point this out but upon consideration, I thought I probably should:
With lowered brainwave states, the mind tends to totally disregard the passage of time and thus time moves at an increasingly fast rate. Just consider normal sleep. With total unconsciousness, time seems to cease to exist. Time just sort of ... slips.
And so an increase of unconsciousness with age speeds up time.
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Interesting discussion. Scientifically time is only a measure of the rate of change in a system. Entropy as we perceive it is constant in most systems even when we can't see it at atomic levels. Our minds are even set to seasonal and diurnal periods which correspond to biological cycles. So what is the absence of time one might ask? In this dimension it would correspond to a state known as absolute zero. A point where subatomic particles stop and light looses photonic properties. By comparison if we are on fire we should have time moving faster right? Well, not really. :lol: Moving faster also seems to at some point slow time according the Einstein Rosenberg principal where the closer you get to the speed of light the slower time goes. Neil Degrass Dyson did a good job trying to explain this on his remake of Cosmos originally by Caral Sagan. So what does all this mean in the analysis of reality or dreams? To me it's simple. The faster any rate of change the greater the perceived flow of time. If you perceive few changes then time seems to move slower. In dreams we can move at the speed of thought so many things can change very fast. Perception of time should also speed up making it appear you can live a life in a flash when outside the dream mere seconds have passed. Greater brain activity may be proven to accelerate the perception of times passage much like faster moving particles. Conversely in the mind the lack of perceived change when dreams are not occurring might well involve the common feeling of time stopping. That feeling when you wake up of "it can't be morning yet, I just laid down". Without dreams you have no basis to judge the passage of time. :ugeek: