<story><title>Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYOF-YggWAg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulnpace</author><text>Within her discussion is the unscientific &amp;quot;humans have no free will&amp;quot; statement. Free will is experienced as a part of the consciousness, which we cannot point to, physiologically. (For those who point to the head region as &amp;quot;containing consciousness&amp;quot;, this is also unscientific.) The most annoying part of the video is that her statement comes off as this being simple observable fact that &amp;quot;everybody knows&amp;quot; and is a good example of why articles on topics are best when &lt;i&gt;kept on topic.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;My own observation is that time is better described as human narrative description of events in the observable universe.&lt;p&gt;I have not read the paper referenced in the video and I have to really spend time on these things to recall the concepts such papers are typically breezing through, but when I have attempted in previous years to understand how scientists explain time, they seem to usually have little agreement and lots of guesses. I have not found scientists claiming they have discovered fundamental units of time. I have not found scientists claiming they can sample time. I have not found scientists claiming they can isolate time. I have not found scientists claiming to have derived time as some sort of force in the universe. I am not clear on how something that has no fundamental units, cannot be sampled, cannot be isolated, and is not a force can also be something in the physically existent universe. Yet, scientists seem to place time in their explanations and equations as something that &lt;i&gt;de facto&lt;/i&gt; exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bubblyworld</author><text>I think your observation can be generalised - &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; of physics is human narrative description of events in the universe, coupled with some principles for choosing one narrative over another.&lt;p&gt;I think when a scientist says &amp;quot;free will does not exist&amp;quot;, they mean that in a very particular sense - a theory of physics (or narrative) that includes free will has as much predictive power as one that doesn&amp;#x27;t. So from a scientific point of view it&amp;#x27;s parsimonious to exclude it.&lt;p&gt;As you rightly point out this has nothing to do with the subjective &lt;i&gt;experience&lt;/i&gt; of free will, which is an aspect of consciousness that I expect most people are familiar with (scientists or no).&lt;p&gt;By the way, this is not directly related, but who are these scientists you speak of who claim to be unable to measure time? Time, as it is used in theories like classical mechanics or relativity, has been measurable with clocks for millenia. The measurements fulfil the role of time in those theories; the predictions they make have been tested to an extreme degree. This is the strongest evidence for time as an ontological primitive that science can produce!&lt;p&gt;(which is not inconsistent with the fact that it may behave differently outside those regimes)</text></comment>
<story><title>Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYOF-YggWAg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulnpace</author><text>Within her discussion is the unscientific &amp;quot;humans have no free will&amp;quot; statement. Free will is experienced as a part of the consciousness, which we cannot point to, physiologically. (For those who point to the head region as &amp;quot;containing consciousness&amp;quot;, this is also unscientific.) The most annoying part of the video is that her statement comes off as this being simple observable fact that &amp;quot;everybody knows&amp;quot; and is a good example of why articles on topics are best when &lt;i&gt;kept on topic.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;My own observation is that time is better described as human narrative description of events in the observable universe.&lt;p&gt;I have not read the paper referenced in the video and I have to really spend time on these things to recall the concepts such papers are typically breezing through, but when I have attempted in previous years to understand how scientists explain time, they seem to usually have little agreement and lots of guesses. I have not found scientists claiming they have discovered fundamental units of time. I have not found scientists claiming they can sample time. I have not found scientists claiming they can isolate time. I have not found scientists claiming to have derived time as some sort of force in the universe. I am not clear on how something that has no fundamental units, cannot be sampled, cannot be isolated, and is not a force can also be something in the physically existent universe. Yet, scientists seem to place time in their explanations and equations as something that &lt;i&gt;de facto&lt;/i&gt; exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oezi</author><text>&amp;gt; humans have no free will&lt;p&gt;I believe that human brains harness quantum uncertainty and chaos theory to combine stateful information (such as preference for chocolate icecream) and recursive processes to make &amp;#x27;free&amp;#x27; decisions which aren&amp;#x27;t random and fundamentally unknowable to outsiders without destroying the human (similar to a quantum system which can&amp;#x27;t be measured in more than one dimension without destroying it).</text></comment>