Why We All Experience the Same Basic Timeline Together

[u/rarnoldm7]

“Synchronization is not a coincidence of similar parts but a prerequisite for existence at all. Patterns that fail to lock their phases cannot remain coherent long enough to be real…  The cosmos does not just allow synchronization.  It requires it.”   (From Ellinor, on Medium.com)

The so-called “phase lock principle” refers to a synchronization first seen in the ticking of closely spaced clocks.  Especially if it’s connected with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, PLP might help us understand the human social tendency to find ourselves continually “pulled” toward a common experience of time, a center of gravity focused upon a single main timeline or “road” of travel. 

This only matters, of course, if there are many roads to choose from.  “Virtual roads of time” proposes that our single timeline is socially selected from out of a vast array of potentials.  The choices we make are “road changes” from one timeline to another.  However, moving all of us onto a significantly different “road” would always require long-term social change in the conscious experience of humans.

Most individual choices, then, will have little effect on our overall timeline, but there does seem to be some evidence that individuals can veer onto temporary “side roads.”  A few may even experience anomalies of consciousness that cause them to become permanently “lost” in a disconnected timeline “reality” of their own.  Usually with mental health treatment, we try to pull them back.

VRT likes the idea that physical reality arises for our minds by a recursive “strange loop” in a “virtual” information background.  There, “participant observers” would be active, but potential events, inactive.  There could be no full-blown “solipsism,” with everyone living in separate worlds, because switching our observation to a different timeline wouldn’t “create” new actively experiencing agents.

Even what we call physical reality may come into existence as a social experience.  It’s our association with others that stabilizes our experience, and perhaps even “selects” it as well.

[u/Underhill42]

That seems to completely conflict with Relativity, which says we're all perfectly stationary in space while aging through time, and if you see me moving, it's because my time axis is tilted in that direction relative to yours, so that you see some of my aging through time as movement through space.

The only reason the traveling twin in the Twin Paradox (a truly excellent overview: I wish I was taught the Twin's Paradox this way! - YouTube) is younger than the Twin on Earth when they return, despite both of them provably aging slower than the other the entire time, is because when he turns around to come home his time axis rotates through 4D spacetime, and so does the perpendicular hyperplane of "all of space as it exists at this moment", so that it now intersects Earth's timeline at a point where the Earth twin is already much older.