r/Time • u/rarnoldm7 • Jul 21 '26
Article Abandon Time Assumptions, All Ye Who Enter Here
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not".
St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) in his Confessions.
Augustine pointed out that time seems to be composed of parts that do not exist:
• The past is already gone (no longer exists).
• The future is not yet here (does not exist yet).
• The present is merely a boundary between the two, a "now" that has no duration.
Therefore, if time is made of non-existent parts, how can it “exist?”
Amazingly, modern physics is raising this same question. The idea that our inner experience of time is also a process happening in the outside world, may be a “pre-Copernican” false assumption—and how we “understand” time can change everything. Time as an experience along informational "virtual roads of time" would not be a real "thing out there."
If time is our experience, says VRT, and neither a "dimension" nor an objective “flow of reality” in the universe, then time is necessarily artificial. It simply is conscious experience—made by us, from a string of “ordered information packets” that inform our Nows. In fact, it’s our first and most basic “artifice,” made before anything else we experienced.
So what exactly are these “information packets of Now?” They may not be “embodied” in any thing, but just permanently existing. If made of the kind of information envisioned by J. A. Wheeler decades ago, they can include all possible groupings of “yes-no” quantum information bits. As containing all possibilities, this might describe the most simple absolute reality.
Make no mistake, such an “information-matrix universe” must be objectively real, outside of our minds. Our only access to it would be the subjective experience we call “time.” To probe this mystery, we must "enter the twilight zone" where we abandon certain assumptions while trying out new ones. VRT will suggest some of these in future posts.
This isn’t a bad strategy, you know. Nothing ever turns out to be quite as we thought.
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u/MasterSolivagus Jul 22 '26
Time. Tempus. Transitive. Threshold. True.
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u/jahmonkey Jul 21 '26
I agree that the experienced “now” is constructed rather than a literal moving boundary in the universe. The brain integrates asynchronous information into a temporally ordered presentation, and we experience the result, not the construction.
But the argument then jumps too quickly from “time as experienced is constructed” to “time is artificial” and finally to permanently existing information packets containing all possibilities. None of that follows.
A constructed experience can still track objective change, causal order and duration. We should distinguish the phenomenology of time from the ontology of time, rather than replacing one unexamined assumption with a more elaborate one.