Time is not real. Correspondingly, nothing real is temporary.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

I think that you bring up a really interesting concept here. Time is truly a human construct. It doesn't actually create much of an impact beyond helping humans reference events in space.

Technically, I would argue that space doesn't exist either, for the same reasons and in the same way that time doesn't. However, if you replace the word space with timesless spaceless spacetime in your statement above, then I fully agree.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

As I once read in another philosophical book, they described time as a pool, instead as we are taught from a young age it being linear. So all things exist simultaneously.

Indeed, that's a great analogy. I've never heard it before. Thank you for sharing!

To add to it, an even better analogy for timeless spaceless spacetime could be specifically a huge circular pool that is mostly symmetrical in all directions. Then an even more better analogy would be an infinite would-be circular pool that is infinitely extended in all of the different countless directions.

Constructed illusionary time (and by extension a whole corresponding constructed imagined reference frame) is constructed by arbitrarily defining one point on the circular boundary of the pool as the farthermost point in the future, drawing an imaginary straight line from it to the other end of the circle, calling the second point with which that line intersects the furthermost point in past, and calling the line between the two points time, or more specifically the timeline. Of course, there is infinite such imaginary timelines that could be drawn to divide the circle in half, and none is more valid than any other. In any case, once that timeline is constructed, one can draw infinite imaginary consecutive parallel lines through that one-of-infinite timelines to define consecutive slices of space that are described as 'happening' 'before' or 'after' each other depending on which point in that made-up arbitrary timeline their spaceline intersects. All the points on any one of those infinite parallel consecutive lines of space (i.e. 'spacelines') are considered as 'happening' simultaneously to each other, and not simultaneously with any other points from any other lines of simultaneous space. However, since it is all based off choosing that first point on the circle and then drawing the imaginary line to create a so-called 'reference frame', combined with the fact that there are infinite other points on the circle that would create infinite other equally imaginary reference frames, it's easy to see it's not real, and easy to understand the proven phenomenon of relativity of simultaneity, which has been scientifically proven via countless experiments that verify Einstein's theoretical work.

Both in that pool analogy and in terms of using known-to-be-wrong Newtonian physics to imagine an analogue for reality, time is just a way of using imagination and arbitrary reference frame generation to drastically oversimplify and roughly (and incorrectly) describe something objective and real (the full circular pool that has no real objective timetime and no real objective time). Since there is infinite equally valid ways to do this oversimplification, meaning there are infinite different equally valid reference frames one could construct (i.e. infinite points on the circular boundary of the pool one could choose as the furthermost future point etc.), we end up with all the aspects of relativity that come with that, such as the fact that two observers will disagree about whether event A happened before B or vice versa, and the fact that there is always theoretically someone in your slice of the present who would see your future as being in their past, since they would chose a point in the circle as their future that creates a timeline that intersects with a point in your timeline's future. A symptom of the unreality of time is the lack of objectivity in measurements involving. Since its inherently based on imagination and constructions, there are infinite equally valid ways to do that imagining and constructing that give very different results in terms of what is which events are considered as simultaneous or not, and which events are considered as happening before or after which (e.g. did A happen before B, and then C happen after B, or did C happen first and then A and then B, etc.?).

The circular pool analogy is a great way to visualize the arbitrary and unreal nature of time.

Objectively, insofar as any events are simultaneous, all events are.

In other words, insofar as any events are objectively simultaneous, then all events across all of timeless spaceless 4D spacetime (including those events you would typically consider happening in the distant future or distant past) are all objectively simultaneous.

[Alex Reeves]

Wow Scott. This is very detailed and explainatory. Thanks for sharing this with us. I think I understand you clearly now.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

As others have said, your life in this body on Earth is temporary. Does that mean this is not real?

Yes, I believe the idea of continuous personal identity, starting from human birth/conception or such and going to the moment a doctor declares human death, is an illusion. The idea that there is you that is linked to one human body over time throughout that body's life in time but not another is an illusion, hence why the book refers to it as the unreal you and by extension the unreal me. I elaborate on that point and matter in much more detail in my other post, Commentary on self-transcendence, ego death, and dying before you die; with a finger snap more brutal than Thanos.

The car you drive won’t work forever. One day it will be scrapped and turned into something else. It’s still real in its car form.

Is it? We must distinguish between form and essence.

Can you provide a precise definition of the phrase "the car you drive"?

It seems like that itself might be a construct or conceptualization rather than something fundamentally real.

Initially, I'm reminded of the the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. I'm also reminded of Plato's idea of an eternal world of ideas or ideals, such that Plato might argue that in the eternal timeless Platonic realm of ideas the perfect idea of "the car you drive" and "the ship of Theseus" really exist, even though the proverbial shadows on the cave wall are just illusions.

Those kind of ideas can get us into the weeds of philosophy, which I do enjoy going into.

Nonetheless, I prefer the approach of poets, such as Poe who describes this world of dancing forms (including the humans and cars) as a "dream within a dream":

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Time does not really exist. It is a symptom of the conceptualization and modeling of reality into a dream-like VR world.

If you look around in the dreamy VR-world for examples of time, and things happening in time and over time, then you will see them.

Does Mario really save the Princess? Maybe so, maybe not, but either it's a relative reality. It's true within the dream or VR-world, relative to reality that itself isn't real.

Does that which we call a 'car' that this avatar we call 'Scott' drives in the dreamy VR-world made up by our brains exist for more than 30 years or less 30 years? I may be able to answer it, just as I can Does Mario really save the Princess?

The logic is simple though: If time is not real, then--really--there is nothing temporary. Any sentence or question of the structure, "when XYZ happens to ABC..." has already presumed a time existing, and thus must logically either be taken as a loaded question that is loaded with the falsehood of time, or simply question a that is asked relatively in relation to a VR-world, like asking if Santa Claus is jolly or if Mario saves the princess.

Incidentally, I'm reminding of a short piece I wrote about reality vs non-reality, Big Foot the Bully.

Simply put, I don't think humans are real, nor is anything they do. For example, humans are born and humans die. But I don't believe that I, in terms of what the book calls the real me, was ever born. Likewise, I don't think you, the real you, was ever born and will ever die. That's because the real you is real, and I believe nothing real is temporary. If you are real, you are eternal.

[abstactlemon]

I do believe time is a human construct, but by that, are human constructs not real? If so, then what IS real? How do we quantify what is?

[Chiwelite Obioma Mgbeoji]

I think I consider time to be real. I do not agree with people who say that time is a human construct. No, time has been in existence right from the beginning. We humans just found a way to describe it better. To me the reality is all there is; all we see or how we see it.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

I do believe time is a human construct, but by that, are human constructs not real? If so, then what IS real? How do we quantify what is?

It's not simply that time is a construct that makes it not real. It's that the idea of objective time that existed in classical physics and Newtonian physics was debunked and disproved through scientific experiment when Einstein's theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity were proven correct through experiments.

Scientific experiments have proven the Relativity of Simultaneity, meaning it's been scientifically proven that there is no objective now, and there is no objective order to events. For example, it's impossible to say that the order of three events was A then B then C versus B then C then A, or some other orders. Events that are simultaneous in one reference from are not in another, and neither reference frame is right.

Here is the link to my complete argument about the non-reality of time.

[Blessing Chi Peculiar]

The idea that time is not real was tough for me to accept. Time, in my opinion, is something that people make up. We employ it to describe how humans come to be. We cannot understand the past, present, or future without it. There are both a temporary and a permanent component to human existence, which is real. Eternity calls, yet our lives are only temporary.

[brit]

If body, time, or other things are not real, do you believe that soul is real?

[Stoppelmann]

I don't believe time is real.

Taking the dictionary to hand, time is the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another. Therefore, time is an experience and a measurement of duration. In so being, it is a real experience which we are aware of when the day starts or ends and then starts again, but this is an agreed systematic arrangement of sequences to measure duration, and to explain why for example an opportune moment has passed (“not my day”), or that an opportune moment may occur (“the day will come”).

Since time exists or occurs as an experience rather than as a fact, and not an actual thing, having no objective existence, it is easy to say it is not real. But because we experience periods of existence or persistence, we tend to measure it by whatever patterns fit. In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold.

Correspondingly, I don't believe anything real is temporary.

I sometimes scratch at the surface of the eternal and real when I earnestly tell my children I will always love them.

Parental love is something special and fathers experience brain changes when a new-born child comes along as well as mothers. In animals, it’s been discovered that neurons are created in the brain whenever the child is born. These neurons are associated with environmental richness, where the father’s life feels complete when the child is around. Other neurons created may help the father recognize their child, and it can be linked to memory. Also, like mothers, a father’s brain can be sensitive to a child crying. Men can be just as good as women when it comes to separating their baby’s cries from the cries of other infants.

This is true but a bodily function, and therefore it has a limit. Sometimes, if brain functions break down, like in dementia or similar disorders, these neuronic processes no longer function and the child is no longer recognised by the parent, although the photograph of the child as a baby may still be recognised. Equally, if a parent is psychologically affected by something a child does, it can strain their relationship to the point of breaking. Therefore, not only in death, where the body dies, but also in life, there are limits even to parental love.

The same is true of everything that is real, inasmuch that it is a fact, or an actual thing, or having objective existence, is also temporary. We can see this by observing other stars explode, and knowing roughly when the sun will expire, or even by observing human life. As a nurse, the finite aspect of life was always present and at times reality was a hard pill to accept.

We sometimes scratch at the surface of it when we talk about consciousness and presence, or in rougher words what we might describe as what makes the now now and what makes the here here, particularly in an apparently eternal spaceless timeless unchanging 4D spacetime that has no objective now, no objective simultaneity, and no objective time.

The present moment can indeed have that experience of flow, when time plays no role, except when returning to the rest of the world, where so much has gone on in between. I experience this in meditation, when reading, or engrossed in a topic, and my wife has to look in to remind me that life beyond the door has persisted and that a duration of time has expired.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

The Original Post (OP) in this particular topic starts with, as the very first sentence, the premise that time is not real. For those who are not yet convinced of the truth of that premise, or who otherwise would like to see a helpful summary of the science and logic that proves it, I invite you to my other more elaborate topic about that:

Your left is not the left. There is no "the left". Likewise, there is no "the past" or "the future". Time is not real.


For those who would like a whole book produced by yours truly about the subject, please retweet this tweet to cast your vote for that particular book idea.

[Chinemezu Okafor]

I agree with you on this one. But without time, we wouldn't know the past, future, or even present. I think time is a human construct. Our existence on this earth is temporary. I also believe that anything real is not temporary. That's why I believe that eternity is real.

[Covenant Olusegun]

Good day Scott. If nothing real is temporary, then life should not be real too, seemingly because it's temporary. Life and death happens for a period of time. If one lived fifty years and dies, can you say that his life wasn't real only because it was temporary. There are many other things that are temporary but are very very real. If nothing temporary is real, therefore there's nothing real in this world.

I absolutely agree with you on this.

[lec_nemanja]

I agree that time is not real. However, time measurement is real. I believe that many people unconsciously confuse these two concepts.

[Stoppelmann]

Time Consciousness Is Grounded in Phenomenology
William James’ (1890) “stream of consciousness” and Edmund Husserl’s (1928/1991) “inner time consciousness” attempt to explicate phenomenologically that all experience happens within an extended present, a unified temporal and spatial whole of experience, within which the unfolding of events, time passage, happens. The experienced present is extended as it carries an event’s history and possible future within the implicit temporal structure of consciousness (Lloyd 2012). Edmund Husserl (1928/1991, 32) writes about the duration of the temporal field, “which is manifestly limited, precisely as in perception’s case. Indeed, on the whole, one might dare to assert that the temporal field always has the same extensions.” As empirical researchers we may ask what the extension of this field of consciousness is, e.g., in units of clock time. Some contemporary theorists deny that consciousness extends over a relatively fixed “specious present” on either empirical (White 2017) or philosophical (Arstila 2018) grounds. It is by no means a settled question, but the early phenomenological and experimental studies of Husserl (1928/1991) and James (1890) are supported by contemporary theory and research (Zahavi 2005; Lloyd 2012; Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn 2014; Northoff 2016).
Time consciousness: the missing link in theories of consciousness, Lachlan Kent, Marc Wittmann, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2021, Issue 2, 2021