Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/16/here-are-all-the-ways-time-is-an-illusion.html
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And speaking of time…looks like time for this:
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If time is an illusion then why am I aging and why are we penalized for late payment of bills?
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It felt like taking up a dare, to spend an entire 31 minutes with this guy, before commenting. But so worth it!
I used to have sleepless nights that didn’t really hurt much, my brain would keep me awake and I’d just roll with it, and my body was young enough to take up the slack no problem… But I noticed that without the punctuation of a night’s sleep, I had a difficult time trying to talk about “yesterday”… because intuitively, I was still in the same moment.
On a larger scale, something pretty huge happened to me in 1997, and I haven’t felt a sufficient change from that moment, to experience the last two decades as being sufficiently “different” enough to make it into “yesterday”. Covid 19 seems like a similar magnitude event and I am hoping that as vaccines become more common, I can slip back into “this” time stream and resume making memories that are different from last year’s.
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What if I told you that the collection of particles that you consider “you” has a subjective experience of the universe simply because it cannot comprehend its objective reality?
You pay your bills because you buy in to consensus reality, man!
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I haven’t watched the video (yet) but this statement…I’m sorry for your loss (of time, of enjoyment).
And I somewhat understand it because I’ve felt a similar issue for five years. Three of those were years with hurricane scares that were serious enough to evacuate and that pace (and ensuing catch-up) just obliterated the highs and lows each year. Then almost a year had passed when covid kicked into gear, and it’s been a blank slate of crazy pace ever since.
Clearly I need to work on how to better experience stressy life events. 
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In the words of Janis Joplin, “It’s all the same fuckin’ day, maaaaan”
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It all starts to make sense when you recognize that consciousness is a dimension
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Well… you, me, and the rest of the world as well.
Just being able to talk about this kind of thing, is a big deal!
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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I think when time is accused of being an illusion, that’s conflated with it being a construct. A construct can be as real as you need it to be -like money- but no two people can be assured of seeing it the same way.
Sorta like when a scientist or engineer will say. “All models are wrong. Some are useful.”
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Sort of on-topic… long ago I inherited a World Book encyclopedia set from my late grandmother. It was published during the Kennedy Administration, and I strongly suspect the only people who have entries in it who are still alive are Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles.
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There’s so much going on in this.
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Whenever I hear that song, it always jars my brain and I think - “Hang on, time slips into the past.”
And then I try to understand what it would be like for time to slip into the future and I can’t.
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Immortality would be an illusion as well. A basic part of what we are is being changing beings. If we are changing, we won’t be the same being in the future. Who we are now won’t be who we will be.
We have the illusion that who we are now is who we are. We won’t change the way we did in the past. But studies show that is wrong.
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Just look at it.
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…and so is time.
Or, it’s a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey-wimey…stuff.
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A photon moving at lightspeed experiences no passage of time. The rest of us still feel hunger and thirst at intervals. It’s time for more coffee.
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