I was walking in the Swiss Alps the other week, mulling over the illusion of time and a concept that had popped in a video i watched. The idea is that “time” is very inconvenient for science. I’m no expert, but one barrier to a unified theory of everything is apparently time itself. Some physicists are even working to disprove it entirely. While I’m not a physicist, these are exactly the kind of mind-bending concepts that fuel the sci-fi themes in my novel.
What I was pondering was the human definition of time. It’s the fundamental narrative we apply to our life’s experiences. We start, we do stuff, we end. It’s logical. I mean, what else could there be?
But what if this isn’t the case? What is existence without time?
But what if this isn’t the case? What is existence without time, and if there is no time, why do we have such a strong connection to the concept? It was surprisingly hard to convince my brain to think of anything without time. It was so alien; everything I bounced around in my head ended up tied to a linear process of A to B.
The Moment Engine
Eventually, I arrived at an idea I nicknamed the “Moment Engine.”
This is the hypothetical part of the human mind that forces us to think of events in a linear context. I adopted the concept that all moments, or “instants,” happen as one. There is no start, no end; all exists now.
The best analogy I have is that all moments are like individual printed photographs. If I gave you a chaotic pile of pictures and asked you to tell me the story it shows, your first instinct would be to sort them. You would look for the order of events.
This is the “Moment Engine” at work: our brains apply an ordering effect to a world of distinct, simultaneous moments to creating a linear dialogue we can analyze. In short, the engine creates the illusion of time from a pile of static moments.
5 Problems with “No Time”
However, removing time from the equation raised five distinct issues:
- Fate: It implies everything you, me, and anyone else will “do” has been predetermined.
- History: Why is there clear evidence of “old” and “new” (like crumbling ruins) if time doesn’t exist?
- Population: If everyone and everything is “alive” right now, where is everybody?
- Prediction: In theory, we should be able to predict everything if it has already happened.
- Purpose: Why have a Moment Engine to simulate “life”? If it’s all happening at once, there is no need for conscious control.
My Attempt at Answers
The “Fate“ issue depends on how you view free choice. Perhaps we do make choices freely, but we make them all in a single instant. It’s not fate, just a really quick set of life choices made in a frozen eternity.
For History and Population, the best answer I found is “Moment Clustering.” Perhaps moments are grouped. When analyzed by the Moment Engine, these clusters become our “past” or “future.” Our specific cluster creates the “now” we live in.
Regarding Prediction, maybe we can’t see the future simply due to data overload. It wouldn’t be practical to analyze such a vast amount of information. We are limited to processing our local cluster of moments. This limitation might explain why the Moment Engine exists: to save processing power, the brain looks for a simple pattern to follow (like aging), creating the consistent illusion of time.
Glitches in the Engine
I also liked this concept because it raises a terrifying question: what happens if your “Moment Engine” breaks?
A real-world example could be Dementia, where we lose the ability to process moments correctly. The patient jumps around time, having flashbacks to the past or failing to understand the present. Is this a medical condition, or just the engine failing to sort the photographs?
Anyway, this was just a fun thought experiment on the illusion of time to ruin a perfectly good walk in the mountains!
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