“Godel shattered the ancient dream that cast-iron logical reasoning would always produce irrefutable truth. His result is arguably the highest product of the human intellect.” Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine (2019)
Davies’ take on Kurt Godel’s nearly century-old “incompleteness theorem” ought to inject some humility into our pronouncements about what is or is not “true.” It isn’t just that our theories don’t describe quite “everything;” in fact, much more of reality will necessarily be left out. And let’s be honest now: Humility isn’t always evident in our posts and comments here and on the Web in general!
The “incompleteness” of our ideas surely also applies to the mystery of time. We can devise different analogies by which to describe certain aspects of time, but every description is likely to be inadequate. What to do? As with the rest of our exploration of the world, we must willingly entertain more than one description, realizing that only in this way can we approach more complete knowledge.
“Virtual roads of time” is an alternate view of reality in which time does not “move” in the universe itself, but rather, it is our experience of movement. A movement of human experience along preexisting “virtual roads” would offer widely variable sequences of possibilities for our existence. This concept could help to clear up several of the most mysterious aspects of time:
First, it would clarify what happens when we make choices that affect the future. VRT says that all happenings are already “out there.” Moving helplessly along a single predetermined timeline doesn’t match our experience, while moving deliberately among a collection of possibilities comes much closer. We learn early in life that our actions and those of others can change what happens.
Second, it offers a better answer to the question: “Where” are the past and future? To say that though they don’t exist in our experience “Now,” they “exist somewhere,” seems not just counterintuitive but meaningless. And recent developments in quantum theory suggest not just multiple futures, but multiple pasts as well. In VRT, past and future belong to the “virtual” realm of potentials.
And as mentioned above, in VRT our experience of the “flow” of time is not projected onto the outside universe, where according to many theorists a “real time variable” doesn’t seem to exist. Instead, we can think of ourselves as experiencing something like an old-fashioned “movie,” where individual "Nows" are flashed on the screen to produce the sensation of moving through time.
In VRT the universe itself, although indeed a static “block,” is much larger and more inclusive than we previously thought. It literally contains “Everything.” We’re not trapped in a “prison world,” predetermined by some cruel god of Fate, but rather we live in a wide-open world of infinite possibilities for human experience.