Has everything already happened?

I agree with you (and with Stephen Hawking) that “everything has already happened.” Hawking posits that the reason we experience time in a linear fashion is because our brains are based on chemistry and physics, which only works if entropy is increasing—and that entropy is somehow fundamental to the perceived “direction” of time.

I don’t think that deja vu and dreams have anything to do with out-of-step time. There’s plenty of reasonable neurobiological explanations for that stuff that don’t involve violating the laws of physics.

I didn’t really buy it when Dr. Manhattan explained it in Watchmen.

Meh. I ain’t that bright anyways no how.

I met Stephen Hawking last weekend! I love this idea, but think of it more along the lines of everything has happened, but wait no, now everything has hapened, wait wait now it has all happened. Of course that is only relative to us…

Julian B. Barbour wrote a book entitled The End of Time in which he put forward a really wild timeless cosmology based, IIRC, on the Wheeler-deWitt equation. Additional IIRC: deWitt was moved to say something like “he took it that seriously? I didn’t!”.

Yes but not happened for that would imply a past and future but just NOW.
The discursive mind marked by analytic reasoning can not comprehend a thing outside cause and effect and imagines independent sense experience as happening relevant to one another as time. The infinite arising of phenomena fundamentally empty of form are inextricably connected to each and every other thing and not apart from each other.

I haven’t made my significant impact on the world yet so it is safe to say that everything hasn’t already happened. When I’m ready to act, everyone will definitely know about it. Stay tuned.

When applied to each individual now in existance, the answer would have to be NO. However, as a generalized statement of causality, yes, “everything that can happen”

@SeventhSense…you’re not about to whip some crystals out are you?

@SeventhSense: I could if you ask nicely. I have a particularly beautiful moon-touched one, but I don’t know how to add pictures here.

http://everythingforever.com/einstein.htm

Part of this attitude developed because physics tackled linear, equilibrium problems, because they were the tractable ones. Modern physics has taken more of an interest in problems were history matters.

What do you mean by “everything”? I think the answer might depend on that. I definitely think some of everything has happened.

@warpling, you met Stephen Hawking? Wow! He is one of my heroes and is listed in my Fluther profile. May I…may I touch your avatar?

Let’s say that time does unfold in a linear fashion, as we’re used to. Let’s say that the Big Bang happened, and let’s say there is a Big Crunch in our universe’s future. (So far this is a somewhat common way of viewing the Universe.)

If after the Big Crunch we have another Big Bang, et cetera, for eternity, eventually this exact world with every exact atom in exactly the same place will come about again. So everything has been exactly like this before, and will be infinitely many times again in the future, if you buy into that.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop….Exactly To misquote Buck Henry in The Graduate, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Tachyons.”

@Jeruba…The whole enchilada baby, everything, ad infinitum.

@Blondesjon If you step outside time, well yeah, all of it that is in (our) time has happened, yeah. That really doesn’t seem to me to offer a profound change of viewpoint for us trapped in time. The computational view offers something you can grab onto I think: the universe is that which is constantly computing its own state change, and nothing smaller than it or within it can possibly do that work for it. ;) No one can really predict much of anything into the far future.

Well, @Blondesjon, I think we could have a delightful quibble about that, ad infinitum. Because I don’t believe in everything. I think some of everything is not real. We would have to decide whether if you can talk about something (even if it isn’t real), that makes it part of Everything, or if only real things can be talked about, and what we mean by “real” anyway, which can’t simply be “all that is,” because Everything would also have to include all that has been, or it isn’t Everything, in which case perhaps it also includes things that will be, but then how can you say they’ve happened if they are in the future, unless you use some other definition of “future,” which might include everything that is possible even though it has not yet been, but then that would also have to include some things that are not real because they could come to pass but they simply have not yet.

And of course that does not even begin to tackle the question of transformation..

So, you see, I think that like most things, it comes down to definitions.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop, lurve for “constantly computing its own state change.”

Why yes, in fact, everything has already happened. It is a well-known fact that the information singularity will happen on the fourth of June, 2143. The infinity of infinitudes, as applied to our particularity, signifies this future, which already happened yesterday. Similarly, tomorrow is already in our rear-windows.

Imagine that every smallest partical of time, every timeline branches off an infinity more actual timelines. Due to the infinite infinity of pasts, presents and futures, everything possible, or what we believe to be impossible, is happening simultaneously. Time becomes irrelevant. Just a fiction for poor meat-brains like us.

I would like to tell you about my fourth husband, who married my third wife the day after yesterday before yesterday came. Unfortunately, in my imagination, I am not bisexual. But in some world, I am, and husbands and wives come at you like cars on a highway when you’re standing on the median—that cement thingy that supposedly keeps cars from crashing into each other?

Have you ever tried that? Will you? You already have, even if you haven’t. Get that through your thick skulls (except for those of you who have no skulls at all—just brains in the rain). But do watch that car…. ohhhh. That’s not pretty. Well I tried to warn you. Of course, the warning worked, since you are sitting there reading this.

Einstein went a little further than me in his description to abandon the NOW which I would agree is more accurate. But what happens when you try to get your head around this your hair just explodes. And I like my hair.

@Jeruba & @hiphiphopflipflapflop… “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.” —Robert Heinlein

thank you both for the great answers…and the rest of you as well

@Blondesjon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnqtXOi1iaY
1.21 GIGA-GIGA-GIGA-GIGA-GIGAWATTS!!1

@hiphiphopflipflapflop
Giggety giggety

Thanks for that treat, @hiphiphopflipflapflop!

@SeventhSense I don’t really see how that relates to the topic at hand, but it is funny. lol

I can’t wrap my brain around this concept, I must be too dense. I do like Kurt Vonnegut’s (or Kilgore Trout’s) view of how time appears as occurs on the planet Tralfamadore, when talking about dead people in Slaughterhouse Five. “So it goes.”

@hiphop
That’s the problem with cerebral types. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Notice your link and then notice my link. Do you see a similarity?

@SeventhSense OK, I get it, I think.

If everything has happened then I… died at birth? Humans perceive time unlike any other creatures because of those big brains of ours. So from our perspective, the answer is no. But mathematically speaking… no. You can measure everything based on relativity of motion and apply randomness and chaos to the equation and we have the world and her events. However finite a moment appears, the more infinitely it could be broken down and observed.

GIGA-GIGA-GIGAWATTS
Giggety giggety

Vonnegut proved the past present and future have already happened in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

@Blondesjon
I’m sure you could find a place for those crystals in your back room.

I think I got confused by the comments here. When I see a comment under mine about crystals, it seems to be to me. I will try harder to read who makes the comments and who they are directed to. This “unthreaded” system is hard to follow. I am used to replys appearing under the acutal comment they are replying to.

@Yarnlady
Don’t worry about it. It’s all good.

@Yarnlady, you sort of have to read them as if they were scrolling in a chat room. I often feel as if I were reading several threads within a thread. I like the freewheeling feel of it and the fact that you typically get exposed to more varied comments than you would if you stuck to one on-topic sequence, but it does take a little getting used to. Anyway, welcome to fluther, and thanks for joining in.

@evelyns_pet_zebra

Yes…That’s what I was thinking…Kilgore troout and how the tralfamadorians see time as a mountain, already in existence….but we only see part of it…like looking at it through a telescope!

@alossforwords…You mean the same big human brains that came up with Racism, nuclear weapons, and clothing for dogs?

@alossforwords
However finite a moment appears, the more infinitely it could be broken down and observed.
Where exactly is infinity divided? To the left of right of endless?

@Blondesjon… Quite regrettably when I mentioned “big brains” I was referring to size alone. We do not often test their potential. One of the reasons I took a friend’s recommendation and joined Fluther was for some stimulation. We cannot help but build self-destructive and useless weapons. Humans have built-in population control. People will always feel racism and discrimination against cultures and groups that they don’t understand. Our brain is a super-computer. Some of those computers are programmed to do very bad things.

@SeventhSense I thought I would throw a little Zeno’s Paradox into the mix. “Every space can be infinitely divided into smaller space…” and such. If you start at any point in relation to anything then you have a little infinity to the left, right, north, south, up down, inside, etc. It’s all relative.

Ah, but some infinities are “bigger” than others. See Aleph numbers,

Also, Planck lengths.

@Qingu Awesome! I think now we ARE talking about the whole she-bang. The topic is about “everything” having happened. In terms of Aleph numbers though, if they are applicable to a dynamic system like human perception of time, there is no end, so everything will have never happened.

I actually have no idea how aleph numbers are applicable to our experience of time. The whole topic confuses and sort of enrages me. Not unrelated, I believe the guy who thought of aleph numbers had to be institutionalized.

@Qingu…They said the same thing about the fella who dreamed up the concept of ZERO.

@alossforwords…The reason human beings fail to meet their potential is because they take themselves way too seriously. Our only pre-loaded program is a need to control that, in a majority of people, is linked directly to being a “dick”.

there is no spoon.

I thought of this question when I came across the Cheating the Ferryman theory of Anthony Peake.

please read and follow along the left side of the page…

http://www.anthonypeake.co.uk/

he conjectures that most of the population has already come near death and have now looped and re-looped their lives while mistaking the re-created world for exterior or objective reality.

Another way of putting it would be “everything is happening all the time”. Think of a CD. It contains the entire piece of music finished and complete and unchangeable but when played it sounds fresh and alive at every instant, just like our lives. And what then of free will? Well I don’t think we have quite as much as we like to think we do.