The Nature of Time Reveals the Truth

The reason why there cannot be afterlife
is the same reason why
there cannot be time travel
and is the same reason why
there cannot be ghosts or gods.

I met an old man in the street one day who was probably in his 90’s. He was a Jehovah Witness (JW) proselytizing from door to door. When I told him that I was an atheist he exclaimed “atheists don’t even believe that the sun sets and rises.” It doesn’t, I said, the earth spins counterclockwise and it seems to us that the sun is rising in the morning and setting in the evening. It was just a passing encounter, and I would have loved to find out if he were a flat-Earther. The point here is that …

The words we use are
sometimes inaccurate,
sometimes incomplete,
sometimes confusing,
sometimes ambiguous,
and sometimes misleading.

Humans invented these words and assigned them to objects, ideas, events, and other perceived concepts. Humans also made rules and structure for stringing them together (grammar) to comprise languages. Words and language constructs are ideas from humans, not gods.

There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today and many more languages that have come and gone over time. In Japanese there are many words equivalent to the use of the word beauty or beautiful in English, (silhouette beauty, colour beauty, shape beauty, scenic beauty, etc). In much of Africa there is only one word for meat, there is not venison, lamb, beef, pork, etc.)

God is a manmade concept. God is a concept derived from man’s imagination and assigned a label (word). Each god imagined has been given a name. Each god imagined has different qualities or characteristics, most are “higher powers”, some are creators, etc. The English word for the concept is “god”. None of the gods that are said to have supernatural powers, have been proven to exist (in the NOW) at any time in the past.

“Time” is another mal concept of man.
In the physical reality, there is only the NOW.
Everything occurs in the now.
NOW is the only physical copy of reality.

Only with at least some other physical entity within the now, can anything interact with anything else. Just to be clear, if something is not in the now, then it doesn’t exist.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is incorrect, (although it may need to be revised in the future), I’m just saying that when physicists and astrophysicists use Time as a factor in their equations, they must be mindful that they are using a human conceived and defined term, not necessarily the same quality that exists in the physical reality of the universe.

In everyday life, time is defined as the passage of the future, through the NOW and into the past”, or as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states it, time is “A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.”

Physicists define time as a fundamental quantity whereas a “second” of time is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 [cycles] of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom". (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_physics)

This definition is based on the operation of a caesium atomic clock. This is arbitrary as there are many factors being assumed about the environment.

The smallest “time step” considered theoretically observable is called the Planck time, which is approximately 5.391×10−44 seconds. However, time does not “step”, there is only the NOW. The stepping of time is a concept from our imaginations to define an observation of some sort.

If time were digital, you could assign the value zero to the past, and the value one to the future. You could then say that time steps when the ones change to zeroes and/or vice versa. The “changing” would be the NOW. However, time is analog so to speak, as an apple is falling there is a continual change of gravitation pull as the apple gets closer and closer to the Earth’s center. If the tree were tall enough the apple would burn up in the atmosphere. The seeds of life within the apple would burn up as well. The spirits of the future baby apple trees would not somehow go to some form of apple heaven−they would need a medium to exist in which enables growth. There is no other medium other than the now of the physical world we experience.

If something cannot be shown to exist in the now medium, then it simply does not exist. Ghosts, gods, and afterlife spirits all fit into this category. There are also no copies of past times nor future times that have been shown to exist. The NOW medium is the only medium that truly exists in a physical sense.

“Well how do you explain after-images?” you might ask. After-images occur in the now and it is your vision mechanism doing its best at observing the now.

So, Time is not a thing, it is a definition dreamt up by us for convenience. What Time really seems to be is a limitation or restriction of movement of things. It appears nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Just because physicists cannot find any evidence of anything moving faster than the speed of light does not prove that there are not particles moving faster than that. Perhaps there are particles that are a large order of magnitude smaller than light particles that physicists have not yet been able to detect, and perhaps they can move a large order of magnitude faster than the speed of light.

I think we need to qualify Time as we experience it in everyday life as “light-based time”. There could be a sub-light-based time that physicists have yet to uncover.

Just as we are tricked into thinking that the sun “rises” in the morning and “sets” in the evening, we are tricked into thinking that there is a quantifiable value of time, when actually there is always only the NOW in which things take time to move around. So, when we use the word “time” we have the time of day (a point in the NOW), and we have the quantity of time which is actually the distance things moved from one point of the now to another point of the now. The units of time are human assigned and are currently based on counting oscillations of electromagnetic waves.

If you could stop time by interrupting the current oscillation in its path, the point of interruption would be the NOW where existence lies. Anything and everything else that is not in the NOW does not exist either because it did exist, or did never exist, or does not exist yet, or will never exist. There is nowhere else for a thing to exist except in the NOW. The one and only copy of reality (existence) is the NOW.

The NOW has always existed and will always exist. The substance that occupies the NOW (what ever its fundamental nature) has nowhere (no place) where it can go and nowhere (no place) where it can come from and is therefore eternal. It just is, and it is moving around now, but perhaps has not always been in motion.

Please do not confuse the beginning of the Universe with the beginning of existence. The beginning of our immediate universe (within the multi-verse) may have started with a big bang of a motionless substance, but the essence of the resulting particles has always existed in the NOW.

See also: “The Simplicity of Existence".

I am going to continue to add to this post. I will be addressing the seemingly conflict that my only-the-NOW theory has with the second law of thermodynamics and, I will be discussing the world of the small and providing more evidence that there cannot be afterlife. I will be also discussing the words and terms we use that are muddled with our concept time.

There may be entities of life outside of our detection, however … stay tuned.