If you were an entity who resided outside the realm of time (i.e. were not constrained by time) could you engage in two separate conversations simultaneously with two different entities who resided wholly inside the dimension of time? Explain how.
The act of holding a conversation implies that you, personally, are experiencing some sort of time, allowing to do things like “move” and the like. (Movement is change in position over time, so no time = no movement.) So you have to be experiencing your own personal type of time in order to do anything - talk, hold a conversation, whatever. This does not mean that you are experiencing time the same way that people “inside the realm of time” are - stay with me here.
When I think of being “outside of time”, I think of my relationship with a movie or book. I can rewind and fast-forward a movie; I can stand back, unroll the film reel and look at all moments within it at once. With a book I’m holding the entire sequence of events in my hand at once; I can travel forward and backward within the book by turning pages. That’s how I see it.
Now, books and movies are static, so it’s tough to have conversations with them. But I’m also a writer, so I’ve had a pretty good idea what it would look like if the characters in the book were dynamic. While you conversed with a character in a book, they would respond to you and change their actions based on what you said. This could, in theory, change their behavior even after the conversation ended, going forward. You would of course see this happening, because you’re outside of time - it would be like if you were editing the conversation in a document, but you only had to edit one side of it because the other side would adapt to your changes as you made them.
So, holding a single conversation would look very strange to you, because while you were in the process of having the conversation you would see the effects of you suddenly falling silent and exiting the conversation early, since you hadn’t gotten around to saying the latter half of your side of the conversation yet. This is, of course, assuming that you’re choosing to say your part of the conversation ‘in order’ - since you’re outside, you could do your conversation out of order, editing what you said earlier and watching the effect of the change cascade forward through time. You’d probably then have to also change your later comments to avoid sounding like an idiot - but don’t worry about it, every time you make a change the people in the timeline won’t remember what happened before, so nobody but you will remember the goofy half-formed version of the conversation.
Now, on having two of these conversations at once. At a basic level it would just be like going back and forth editing two different sections of a book. Things could get a bit more complicated, though, if the effects of your alterations ‘earlier’ in the timeline had an impact on things ‘later’ in the timeline. For example if your ‘early’ conversation was to try and talk a person within the timeline out of having kids, then the ‘later’ conversation you were having with their kid might suddenly be erased from the timeline entirely - or maybe your comments alone would remain, talking to nothing, until you edited them out. This would be a drastic example; even smaller alterations from the earlier conversation could alter the later one drastically. At which point you, from your outside-of-time perspective, would have to go back and edit your later conversational replies to fit.
Also, how exactly are you interacting with these people? If you’re just a booming voice out of nowhere it will probably elicit a different reaction than if you created an avatar for yourself which superficially appeared to exist normally in the timeline’s physical realm - but whose actions you would control via altering them from your perspective outside the timeline like a video game character. A self-insert character, if you will. (I’d tell you not to make yourself a Mary Sue, but honestly, you’re holding their entire timeline in your hands. What are they going to do to stop you?)
You understand that godlike powers have nothing to do with “physical” anything, right? Good.
In that case, being in two places at once is a bog-standard power (ऋद्धि) that anyone can learn with a little practice; you can find the details elsewhere so I will not repeat them here. Suffice it to say, with a little transcendent knowledge that everything is an illusion you can straightforwardly do whatever you want; it’s little more than a parlour trick.
By the time you learn how to do it, though, you probably could not be bothered; it’s really not that exciting.
This week’s Oglaf has an amusing take on the subject…
(This strip is “safe.” But be aware that Oglaf.com often has sexually explicit humor.) (ETA, okay it uses the f-word.)
A lot of time-travel imagery requires a second time-like dimension, something Fritz Leiber called “The Big Time.” Imagine, if you will, playing a time-travel game. Your tokens can jump from 1969 to 1066 to 44 B.C. But the game is played in “turns” which succeed each other in a timewise fashion.
(On turn 2 I jump back in time and assassinate Napoleon. But on turn 3 you jump back in time and assassinate Louis XII, changing history so that Napoleon never rose to power at all. The second assassination happens “earlier” than the first…but is also “subsequent” to it.)
(This is also one way of talking about what happened “before” the Big Bang.)
No, it all just happens at the same time, synchronously at once. What you are referring to is called bilocation. It’s a 2nd flow of diffluence (1st is teleportation) that’s directed through the super geometry of a person to bieocate in 2 different places of space time.
Supergeometry is a term that sprung from Wheeler’s term ‘pre-geometry’ which says that the pre-physical realm is a sublayer and poses a problem, Super geometry provides a better model which says it’s an overlaying prime reality while our physical world is a secondary.
The physical universe is actually a consequence or after effect of pre-physical matrix. I assume that’s the patriverse, the point of dematerialization but not sure. It’s a placement of that realm over the physical, they naturally coincide kind of like bark on a tree, you can’t have one without the other.
Since super geometry exists outside of the normal 3 dimensions, it’s difficult to devise a simple illustrated model.
A poor example of bilocation is to use translocation. So lets say you put a piece of paper between 2 magnets and move one of them. The other appears to move as if by magic to any observer of only 1 magnet. To the guy on the top piece of paper, this would be some strange paranormal event because he is limited to only measuring the movement and a magnetic force.
Now a guy on the other side of the paper would actually see both magnets…why is a question that’s beyond my public educational standard but again this is a poor example. Basically the magnets are bi-located…dissimilar from talking to many people at once but I did say it was a poor example.
Such an entity would exist throughout all of spacetime at once except the consciousness as waves of diffluence begin to slow from the progressively stronger effects of primal conflict which solidifies into physical matter, energy, space and time (spacetime) as they drop below the speed of light.
So in other words, if you want to have a conversation with several people at once, your energy (whatever energy that entails) would be doing so in our physical universe through spacetime using whatever means our universe allows to do such a thing but your source is rooted beyond space time where it’s all happening at once. This is where the theory of a multi-universe comes to play, where our consciousness can jump between different space-time planes depending on a choice that you make, like swapping CD’s in your radio and movement of matter bends and contorts within the same space-time…throw a rock and you bend your current plane (i.e skip CD tracks). Kill someone with thrown rock and you jump planes, (i.e. swap CD’s.)
best examples I was able to find quickly.
The speed of light, and the dimension of time directly relates to “causality” and the transfer of information. If you did not experience time, under current well tested theories, you would not be able to communicate in a way that would be able to influence two non-causally connected points (E.G. faster than light or through time).
As a practical example the photon does not experience time at all. A photon from a distant star in the sky may have taken millions of years from your perspective to hit a rod in your eye but from the photons perspective it was emitted and absorbed in a single event.
While incomplete General Relativity is one of the best tested scientific theories to date, and without the creation an testing of a new theory all of these scenarios are purely thought experiments or fiction.
To be clear, the order of events, timing between events and even the flow of time are not invariant between observers. But the flow of information like you mentioned would still be limited by the speed of causality.
It is the speed of causality that is the limiter, and not if you experience time or not.
This is probably more of an IMHO thread than a great debate thread given that the nature of time travel and what it means for a being to be “outside” time is not well defined by science and will involve the responders filling in a lot of blanks.
But in answer to your question I would say that yes a being outside of time could hold two or more conversations with beings inside time and also by definition they would be simultaneous. But you should probably not think of them as conversations in the usual sense. In stead it should be thought of as the fact the existence of the being outside of time having a fixed influenced on the time line, and that influence includes the fact that two being inside the time stream experience having a conversation. But this influence is not a process that evolves instead it would be a one shot thing that affects all of space time.
For an entity that exists outside of time, what do you mean by “simultaneously”?
In case chronos’ question is aimed at me I was using simultaneous to mean not consecutively in time, but rather as a single event, which given that the entity has no time would be the only way it could do things.
I think chrono’s was going to head this direction.
Even under special relativity, which is much simpler two events are simultaneous purely an artifact of of the chosen point of observation.Outside of a very local context, which would not require time travel, there is no such thing as “at the same time”.
So superluminal communication or interaction is fairly irreverent, This is a very hard concept to really think about in an intuitive fashion but the most one could hope for is faster than light communication. Even if one could gain full access to the tesseract, one would just have to chose a position to view those two events as being simultaneous.
Given enough distance between events it would be possible to place most events on the same hyperbolic curve and view those events as being simultaneous.
In other words, given enough freedom in movement, and assuming that Starwars was real, you could find a point of observation to make those events that happened “long long time ago in a galaxy far far away” appear to be simulations with the movie release on earth.
There are some good animations on this Wikipedia page if Einstein’s train platform though experiment doesn’t help.
That’s the pertinent question. What sort of sequential narrative, if any, does the non-time-constrained entity personally experience.
Are they like Doc Brown, who experiences a bit of 1985, jumps in his DeLorean and then experiences a bit of 1955? - i.e. he’s experiencing the external world out of sequence, but the experiences themselves still happen one after the other from his personal perpective.
Or are they existing ‘outside’ of time in some higher dimension - and if so, is that dimension timelike in itself, but with spacelike access to our time dimension (if so, then it’s still a bit like Doc Brown with his DeLorean), or is it all a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey ‘stuff’?
Remember, the electron goes through both slits at the same time… or does it? 
Sorry I wasn’t getting notifications to this thread.
I’m going to reword my original question. Instead of “entities”, let’s just use the Abrahamic religion’s description of G-D, which the Church describes as being omnipresent.
What this entails, amongst many other things, and if my knowledge of divinity studies has been extensive enough, is that Person A can have a realtime, bi-directional discussion with G-D at the same time Person B is having a realtime, bi-directional discussion with G-D, and millions of others.
I’m looking to hear about how much science has to say about this in terms of it being possible.
I’ve seen the film Interstellar and found it to be a very interesting demonstration of how we can experience time differently depending on our proximity in the known universe. E.g. A person can get a certain amount of work accomplished in one minute while it would take one hour to do the same amount of work in another part of the universe.
The best I’ve been able to come up with is an example where this demonstration in the movie is taken to an extreme level: Imagine that a person could get done in 1 minute in, let’s call it, “heaven”, the same amount amount of things that would take 1000 lifetimes on, let’s use, earth. In this system, couldn’t one in heaven seem omnipresent to someone one on earth?
Anyways, I hope I’ve answered your question!
Oh. So you’re fishing for a explanation for god creating the universe in 6 days.
In zero days! =)
That would explain the shoddy workmanship and piss poor living conditions.
Reported. It’s against Board policy to ask for help with homework problems.
Why do people ask questions of the type, “if you remove science from the universe, what does science say about the answer?”
Pseudo-science was created specifically to address all shortcomings of science.
Every incarnation of every god I’ve ever heard of is written as though they experience some sort of personal time/meta time/big time/whatever time in which they act and operate. An obvious demonstration of this is that they do things, anything at all - doing something is changing the state of things, and change requires time.
When you speak of this deity holding two chronologically disparate conversations “at the same time”, I don’t read that simultaneity as being due to the fact the entity being ‘outside time’ - if the deity is doing anything at all, it is experiencing a form of time that flows and does not compress all of its existence into a single, “simultaneous”, unchanging instant. No, what’s going on is it’s basically turning its head back and forth to talk to the two people at once, just as we might do with two people standing on either side of us in the same timeline. How this would work with people in disparate times and what effect it would have on the timeline I described in my earlier post.
Regarding the idea of time merely moving at a different rate for ‘God’, with a thousand years being a second or whichever, if that was happening he couldn’t talk to the two people at once simply because one would have died and ended their conversation before the other conversation started. Experiencing time at an extremely compressed or expanded pace couldn’t change that - to interact with two different times ‘at once’, you necessarily have to be able to jump your attention back and forth between them.