> Thought is necessary, time is necessary. To go from here to there time is necessary. And thought is necessary to drive a car, to take a bus or train. Thought is necessary, time is necessary at that level. Now I am saying as thought and time are the root of fear, is thought and time necessary psychologically? Are they? As long as you think time and thought are necessary, in the psychological world, in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin, then you will be perpetually in fear. If you perceive that, if there is perception, not acceptance, that thought and time are the root of fear, then thought and time are necessary at the physical level but inwardly are not. Therefore the brain is actively watching itself every minute to see that thought and time do not enter into the realm where they are not necessary. This requires great attention, awareness, so that the brain, which has accumulated fear for centuries, or for one day, sees where they are necessary and where they are not. It watches like a hawk so that thought and time don't enter into the whole process of living. This is real discipline, this is learning. The root meaning of that word is disciple, one who learns, who is learning all the time, who never says, "I have learnt" and halts.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Saanen 4th Public Talk 15th July 1984 - To Be Human - https://books.google.com/books?id=S8TU01Dd3moC&pg=PA86&lpg=P...

Even if all that were true, it seems moot because our memories are encoded in our brain. If you could suddenly transport to 10 years ago, you'd be reverting to the state of your brain at that time so you wouldn't remember doing so anyways. Ditto remembering the future -- your memories come from your brain, which is subject to time causality.

Dualism offers a solution: your soul could have access to the timeless perspective and transmit that insight to your conscious self through whatever mechanism they are connected by.

Dualism is the technobabble of philosophy.

And Determinism is the faith of rationalists.

Either that or chaos, but you can wave freewill bye bye either way.

I've yet to hear a good argument against determinism, though. Not that is matters, our brains are obviously wired to pre-suppose free will, but nonetheless.

Why do you say that?

So basically magic.

Sure, if you psychologically can't stomach the idea that the nature of some things might ultimately not be amenable to empirical methods. The only problem is you might be like the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.

If a hypothesis is untestable by definition, then it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it's true or not because there's no way to distinguish any effect.

So sure, maybe our infinite soul communicates with our body from the future. But until you can show that that makes any sort of noticeable difference in reality, it's magical nonsense.

Just because something is untestable by humans doesn't mean it's untestable by definition.

Sounds like Philip K Dick's take on time. IIRC he had a mental breakdown at one point, and believed this is exactly how time works. That at any moment, you could be walking down the same street in 2000 AD, 4000AD, and 0 AD, and the same stories would be or could be unfolding

Actually based on a short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life

Not from what I know. PK Dick towards the end of his life believed himself to be living both in 1974 and as an early Christian named Thomas in the Levant sometime in the first century CE contemporaneously.

It's easy to check:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

Writers: Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Ted Chiang (based on the story "Story of Your Life" written by)

Are you talking about "Time out of Joint"? He wrote a novel about it.

Check out Exegesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick Pretty far out there though. He sort of went insane.

> and 0 AD

"Zero AD" is not a year, AD (a.k.a. CE) begins with year 1.

What you desceibe here is the Philip K Dick book V.A.L.I.S.

This is somewhat like my personal view of time. All points in time exist already, but because causality only flows in one direction (the Arrow of Time), the illusion of the passage of time is created. At any one point in time, your brain can only have stored memories about things that previously happened.

This kind of ties into my more general hypothesis that the universe is a single mathematical structure. And that all possible mathematical structures are as real as ours. But only some structures have conscious components within them (e.g. us) who can observe.

This does run into a wall with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It's hard to imagine how a mathematical structure can produce self-awareness. But any alternate explanation is just as magical.

Mathematics is also mysticism. 1 is arbitrary. The senses can never perceive 1. So it is self-contained. There is no time without perception, and no perception without division. Consciousness perpetuates itself, but it has no reach outside its self-generated paradigm. Time is created by the witness, and the witness is time. It's a circle the mind cannot escape. If there is such a thing as a quantum computer, the mind cannot comprehend its output. Your hashes won't be broken.

The movie builds on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The basic idea is that language changes how we think. The main character starts to think like the "aliens" because she starts to learn their language.

Of course, it what I meant, and I'm fascinated by this. I know that my personality is very different when I speak English. (I'm French).

It's all of the freedom flowing through you like a Saiyan.

This is a great visualization of how time could be the 10th dimension. It starts with one dimension, and works it way up.

By studying how one dimension can be expanded into two, then three dimensions, it extrapolates and visualizes even higher dimensions.

http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php

For a non-physicist who's wondered why string theory imagines 10 dimensions--which seems like a totally arbitrary number--the short video above gives a nice visual explanation of why it should be 10 dimensions and not some other number.

That video is basically nonsense and has nothing to do with string theory or physics.

The problem I have with this video, is that while I find it amazing, someone could create a video about 15, 20 or 5 dimensions, and it would still make sens in my mind, with the right explanations.

What makes you think that dimensions do exist?

Thats the problem I had with the concept when I saw the movie. Is a "moment" a unit of measurement, a unit of change, what is it? How is that purely continuous?

For reference, the short story this is based on is "Story of Your Life"

Exactly, it's a very short read, and I encourage anyone to read it!