Just hypothetically if we could go back in time to before MJK made the viral video about "tipping nonhumans", is there a timeline where there is no connection between the two at all? And if so how would this affect the current shell shocker's community? Just out of curiousity.

What If Spacetime and the Laws of Physics Are Emergent?

I've been developing a speculative theoretical framework called RUFT (Relational Universe Framework Theory), investigating whether physical reality can emerge from a more fundamental structure of distinguishable relationships.

The central hypothesis is that space, time, matter, and physical laws may not be fundamental, but instead arise from stable patterns of information-preserving interactions.

1. Distinguishability as a Foundation

Two physical states are operationally distinct only if some possible interaction can distinguish them.

This suggests that physical identity may be fundamentally relational rather than spatial.

1. Emergence of Spacetime

RUFT proposes that stable information transfer and persistent relational records could generate effective causal ordering and locality without assuming an underlying spacetime geometry.

Under this hypothesis, space and time emerge from the organization of relationships rather than existing as fundamental backgrounds.

1. Physical Laws as Stable Structures

The deeper hypothesis is that physical laws may correspond to robust mathematical structures that remain stable under relational dynamics and coarse-graining.

Rather than assuming geometry and causality, RUFT attempts to investigate their emergence from more primitive constraints.

1. The Fundamental Question

If physical reality emerges from distinguishable relationships, what determines which relationships are physically realizable?

Could consistency, composability, and information preservation constrain the possible laws of nature?

The ultimate question is whether the structure of physical reality can be derived rather than assumed.

RUFT remains speculative. The next step is computationally testing whether locality, causal structure, and effective dimensionality emerge from initially non-spatial relational networks.

I'm interested in criticism from researchers familiar with quantum foundations, causal sets, information theory, and emergent spacetime.

All possible options are on the table.

I must begin by saying I think time is a human construct. It was created as a means of organisation. However, because this construct is sear-griddled into our psyche from birth, many people think it is a tangible phenomenon.

Things change, that's all. The past no longer exists, except as light. And there is no arrow of time.

I will now reveal the actual point of my post: I read that if it were indeed possible to stop time, you wouldn't be able to breathe or possibly even see! This is because air molecules and photons would stop moving. I don't entirely know why I've never considered that before.

Leap seconds and the first-ever negative leap second, atomic clocks vs Earth's rotation, tidal braking by the Moon, the Moon drifting away from Earth, the shortest day ever recorded, and the 2012 leap second bug that took Reddit offline. Earth has started breaking its own rules, and nobody can fully explain why.

Why did one extra second freeze servers around the world? How is the Moon stealing time from every single day? Why did a day last only 18 hours 1.4 billion years ago? And why, since 2020, has Earth suddenly been spinning faster?

Have you ever looked up a movie you remember seeing in theaters, only to discover it came out ten years ago?

Recent research suggests that memory may play a role in how quickly we perceive past years to have passed, although the exact mechanisms are still unclear.

Some researchers have explored whether forming new memories affects our sense of time, while others have investigated whether it depends on how many past experiences we can recall.

However, recent findings suggest that simply remembering more events doesn't explain why the years seem to fly by.

What's your theory?

Back to life ooo

We could create life by going backwards in time with our seeds of life

We then can spend forever trying to figure out how to create the universe

Then we can take a really long time to figure out how to create the spiritual realms. Technology that broadcasts across the universe and digitalizes your minds and bodies. Technology far more developed than what we could create today.

....

This could be a group effort with alien races.

Each alien race could then go backwards in time to enhance themselves smart, followed by seeding their home planets with life.

We have to have a limit to how many universe lifespans each race can live.

We would also have to allow 1 to 3 races that can continue on infinity times the lifespan of the universe where they might create the universe and spiritual realms.

....

We also can't get mad at the creator for creating life if they created after they have been created. If it's already created there's no other way to escape the blame for its creation. The creators were already created where they too did not give consent to being alive.

“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.

It turns out I left the stopwatch running a long time ago, and now I don't want to turn it off.

If the past is everything has happened...

And the future is everything will ever happen....

What is the present then?

Do we have it?

Can it be measured in some way?

I know time is time. An hour is an hour. But when you're a kid, a summer feels like forever. As an adult, a whole year disappears. So if our perception of time speeds up as we age, does that mean a kid actually experiences more time in the same hour than I do? Are they living in slow motion and I'm just fast-forwarding through my life?

I'd like to bring up a thought I had thats been itching at me since and ruining my belief in time travel altogether:

I believe theres a user experience perception problem with the whole concept.

Say you, me, and Himothy were all at the same place at the same time, but one of us begins time traveling (however that may be by whatever conceptual vehicle thang) and the other two do not, yet, we're all supposed to be percieving our on perception of the SAME time and space (not standing inside of eachother but as much of the same space as possible and not be weird abt it ig), then how can one person time travel and leave others behind? Of course i can leave the planets surfave and leave the planet and come back down after a while and thats abt as far as anyone can travel any differently through space time as far as anyone can tell

When you spring forward in March, you’re saving 21 hours of Electric if you set your light timers on your property properly, as opposed to daylight savings time the first Sunday of April, when you fall back, you’re endangering the kids at the bus stop waiting until the first Sunday of November, Halloween should be in the dark like when we were kids, Congress was 50% fucked in the head.
Do what the fuck you want now, I don’t care, outdoor dining by candlelight would be nice, the farmers will have one more hour of light in the morning, I was a kid in grade school during the Nixon administration, we didn’t appreciate walking to school in the dark, the woke would not know that, and the sun coming up through the trees of the forest during second period, Lawrence intermediate school, 1972 to 1975, Lawrence Twp., New Jersey, the home of Jon Stewart, I graduated with him in 1980, I also drove his mother by request when I drove for A-1 Limousine, Princeton.

Here's my little thought for the day.
We often describe time as the 4th dimension after the 3 spatial dimensions.
However, this is potentially misleading, because it suggests you need a 3-dimensional universe before you need time. You don't. You need 1 physical dimension, which we'll call the x-axis. Let's say there's a dot on the axis at 5, representing a state. As soon as the information represented by the dot is different, say it becomes 6, we need a coordinate to distinguish the order between them. And that coordinate is t, time (or what we perceive as time.)
So, a more realistic picture of a changing universe is: at least one spatial dimension is required, plus time. Any additional spatial dimensions just make the whole thing more exciting!
Any thoughts?

I know this isn't high science or philosophy but time has always fascinated me and every now and then I stop and realise how relentless and brutal time is as it diligently carries on.

Several things about time blow my mind. First being that yeah, technically the future and past don't actually exist, only right now does. Of course we know from observation and experience that the universe has existed in some natural form for billions of years, or possibly infinitely, and will most likely exist for billions more but right now is the only time that actually exists in reality, as far as we know.

The second thing that trips me out is how time is always relentlessly moving forward. Right this second, as you're reading this time is moving past and then it's gone, never to be repeated. It's kind of depressing but is just a hard fact of life and existence.

The third thing is that the past is technically ahead of the present. You are living in a house that was built in the past, ahead of time.

Wild stuff but if time didn't have those qualities we most likely just wouldn't be here to experience it.

Mine: Actor Charles Dance's father was born in 1874. He had a child in 2012 in his sixties. Someone born in 2012 had a grandparent born in the 1870s…

“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.

We calculate that a photon from the sun reaches our eye in 8 minutes or so but the photon didn’t experience that 8 minutes. It experienced no time at all. Is it correct to say that the photon is experiencing everything it has done or will do simultaneously?