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“The past history of the universe has no more validity than is assigned by the measurements we make—now!”  J. A. Wheeler, eminent 20^(th) century physicist, in Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam (1998)

The past and future don’t “exist Now,” but we do know that they’re real.  As a “potential reality,” the future is actually less mysterious than the past, which “was here” but has “gone somewhere” where it Now no longer “exists...”  Oh, well—at least it has left behind some clear signs of “what happened,” such as memories, records, and “traces” in archaeology and geology—hasn’t it?

None of these “signs,” of course, actually “is” the past—so where is it?  “Quantum confusion” arises when we try to explain our obstinate assumption that even if the future is undecided, somewhere there has to be just one single “permanent” past.  “Virtual roads of time” vastly simplifies this conundrum by positing that both past and future belong to a manifold of quantum potentials.

Of course, among the potential roads of time, only one likely “happened” in our actually lived experience.  But shockingly, multiple “alternate histories” can influence our records of “the one that happened.”  Leading up to his statement at the beginning of this post, J. A. Wheeler describes how multiple histories can be caused to exist by observing the light from a distant quasar.  He concludes;

“What interpretation is then possible but that each single photon on its billion-year trip from the quasar to Earth followed both paths—in the form of ephemeral clouds of probability—until we pinned down that photon with our measurement?  Our very act of measurement not only revealed the photon’s history, but in some sense determined that history.”

VRT says that no singular “actual history” can be identified, because there are potentially as many pasts as futures, and potentials, including timelines, can “interfere.”  How this is possible will be suggested in later posts.  But the effect of many “virtual road” potentials being “interlaced” with selective timelines is that we must consider both multiple futures and multiple pasts.

No one clearly single history is “sitting out there” somewhere, forever settled and unchangeable. 

"Even allowing for the fact that our perceptions of the world are frequently wrong, can the world really be so profoundly different from our perception of it as this?”  Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, 2018

It may have been Aristotle who first brought forward the idea that time is change.  But then, which is “active?”  If the universe is smoothly “remolding itself” into something else, then change is the only actively moving reality.  But it’s also possible that the universe just sits there while our “time” viewpoint blurringly hops from one configuration to another, and only this viewpoint is “moving.”

Early in the 1900’s quantum physics began to suggest that the universe doesn’t exist “continuously” but in “jumps.”  This strongly favors the “moving view” kind of reality, posited (in two very different models) by Julian Barbour and Everett/deWitt.  Their “multiple universe” ideas, both of them containing much more “reality” than what exists Now, are the basis of “virtual roads of time.”

The “objective possibilities for things to exist” appear in quantum physics as real physical potentials. They’re not figments of our imagination, but their “active” existence indeed depends upon our observing them.  Reality may very well be just these “possibilities for Everything,” which can “exist for us” as one state of the universe at a time, a momentary Now in our experience of things. 

The idea that the universe “actively exists” only in our experience may sound like modern idealism, where “consciousness” is the only true reality.  But in VRT, reality is still “out there” as a kind of invisible but mindbendingly multiple universe.  “Objectively,” it might be an energized background matrix of quantum information potentials, with the power of “informing” our experience of time.

Because this is such a vastly different worldview from our commonly assumed ideas of time, it seems necessary to keep “repainting” it from different angles.  VRT claims that this alternative view of reality is “heuristically” a better assumption, not because the old ones are “wrong,” but because they don’t have room for the “multiple” aspects of time which come into view in modern physics.

Progress in understanding has always moved toward a larger worldview.  Every so often we abandon a “nearsighted,” increasingly confused concept and move to one that’s simpler but much more expansive.  This amounts to a revolution in thought, “crazy” at first but increasingly friendly to human endeavor.  Some of us, perhaps less invested in tradition, find this exciting rather than frightening.

Action is what we humans admire most, in athletes, heroes, performers, and winners of all sorts.  Most of us admire them by watching them (and sometimes cheering them on,) usually from a comfortable seat. —“There are two kinds of people:*  Those who get up and do what they’re not sure they can do, and those who don’t because they’ve already decided they *can’t.”—  

Oddly, the science and philosophy of recent generations has strongly supported the false assumption that we cannot choose our futures.  The doctrine of determinism says that the future is already set in stone and that our “choices” are not under our control.  Intentional or not, this appears to be another way of repressing the rights of people to choose their own way in life.

But now, experiments in quantum physics have validated beyond question the phenomenon called “the observer’s choice.”  We already knew, of course, that choice is a big part of life experience.  According to “virtual roads of time,” we can choose among the futures available to us by an “athletic” effort of will.  When we do not make these efforts, our future “just happens by itself.”

The “power” of choice exists because of real possibilities for actual events to occur.  These “quantum potentials,” says VRT, are the invisible permanent and unchanging background of the universe.  It’s our experience of time that “brings them to life,” allowing us to actively and selectively “observe” them as a timeline, a “virtual road” that’s traveled only in human experience.

Potential realities, just like physical realities, are structured by information, which informs or presents things to our experience.  Like “potential energy,” potential information is inactive, but potently real. The information we draw from experienced past and imagined future potentials “informs” us about our possibilities, giving us the power to make actual choices and change our lives. 

Since our chosen roads can be good or bad as well as “neutral,” we must consider the likely effects of our choices.  Before choosing, we value or devalue the available “information potentials.”  This is why human values are necessary to a complete worldview.  Incredibly, some of us still simply reject or ignore our role in choosing “good or bad” experiences for ourselves or others.

As a society, we do try to limit “driving on the bad roads” by making laws to prevent disaster.  When we consider how our choices affect others, we’re engaged with the so-called “moral” concerns of ethics.  Thus, amazingly, modern physics brings the “human spirit” into science.  It’s precisely the immateriality of quantum potentials which makes our “spiritual” concerns very real. 

Just as in quantum physics there are real “virtuals,” in VRT there are real “spiritual” things.

“Three centuries of false thinking has brought many physicists and philosophers to expect and desire an understanding of nature in which everything is completely predetermined in terms of the physically described aspects of nature alone.  Contemporary physics violates that classical ideal.”  Quantum physicist Henry Stapp, in Information and the Nature of Reality (2014)

Following “science,” most of us have long assumed that time is a sort of simple “row of dominoes,” with every event caused by the one preceding.  In turn, it causes the following event, and so on.  This was the unquestioned “principle” of determinism, which for generations provided “proof” that humans do not control destiny (and of course, neither does the “First Cause,” God.)

Assuming that change was governed only by cause-and-effect determinism greatly simplified the ability of science to “calculate” the universe.  Einstein was able to make some of the greatest discoveries of modern times, but (to his own dismay,) he also helped uncover the much more complex “quantum causes” of randomness, probability and the observer’s choice.

The most mysterious of these influences has been human choice.  Yet hundreds of experiments have shown conclusively that how the experimenter chooses to examine nature can always change the results.  Cause and effect, randomness and probability still play their roles, however, making the outcome of these choices not just “selective,” but partly uncertain as well.

Quantum physics has been called “spooky,” because none of these new influences are physically real.  Random chance?  “Probabilities?”  Human choices?  How can any of that control what happens?  “Virtual roads of time” agrees with Stapp, who says, “The postulated global informational structure called the quantum state of the universe is the ‘spook’ that does the job.”

Our universe is demonstrably founded upon something more basic than “physical stuff.”  It appears to be made up of what Aristotle, Heisenberg and many others have called “objectively existing potentials.”  And like all existing “things,” potentials are structured by information.  VRT likes to boil this down to say: The universe is founded upon information potentials.

And if so, for our future we should not look into “destiny,” but into all the potentials available to us.

“Indeed, that is the current way that most physics is computed, and the way the physical world is represented, but we all know that it is not the world of our experience… The standard space-time diagram has no way to indicate now…”  Quantum physicist Richard Muller, in Now; The Physics of Time, 2016.

The usual assumption about time is that it’s an objectively existing structure containing three parts: “past, present and future.”  We only know this “timeline” from experience, however.  No “diagram” of that experience appears anywhere in either relativity or quantum physics.  No scientific explanation for our experience of time has ever been generally recognized. 

According to the “virtual roads of time” conjecture, all possible changes in the universe are in a sense “already out there” as potentials, made up of quantum information.  By abandoning the assumption that reality is entirely made up of our own “past, present and future,” VRT frees us from an unscientific view of time and opens up an almost inconceivably larger reality.

The “potentials” making up this larger reality, verified in quantum experiments, are the true foundation of the universe.  They inhabit a “matrix” of quantum information in which all possibilities are configured.  Instead of “something rather than nothing,” we now have “something” rather than everything.  We only need to discover why our timeline is limited to part of reality.

To that end, VRT posits that the background matrix of the universe is not completely random, but is ordered by stationary “roads of time,” which are mostly deterministic but partly random/probabilistic.  The “flow” that we experience is not a “moving part” of this background.  Our experience of observation is more like scanning a “movie film” of separate changes of state. 

Quantum physicist Henry Stapp, writing in Information and the Nature of Reality (2014,) calls our universe “a holistic global informational structure that represents tendencies for real events to occur.” Quantum experiments, he says, show that “the choice of which potentiality will be actualized in various places is in the hands of human agents.”  

In our search for knowledge, we humans have not been “too bold” in our assumptions.  We’ve been too timid.

“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility.” (From Adventures in Quantumland:  Exploring Our Unseen Reality, 2019, by quantum physicist Ruth Kastner.)

Everything we know arises from human experience, so let’s posit that “reality” includes anything that we can or actually do experience.  That makes reality our most broad category for anything we “know about.”  Even imagination and fictions are real in this sense—but of course those are pure experience, not something “physical” in the outer world.

So we need to specify the kind of reality we want to speak of.  “Virtual roads of time” says that, as in common English usage, “existing” and “actual” should refer only to realities experienced Now.  “Past experience” is real but not “active” or actual; it “existed” but does not Now exist. Likewise, “future” experiences do not yet exist, and aren’t Now actual. 

But what are these things which don’t “Now exist,” but can be in active existence whenever we physically “observe” them?  Quantum physics pioneer Werner Heisenberg called them “potentials.” These are objectively real. and have been thoroughly studied in quantum experiments.  We can experience them—even if we aren’t doing so Now.

What’s the evidence for the reality of “potentials?”  In the phenomenon of quantum superposition, the actual positions of particles haven’t been observed, so they’re in a sense “everywhere at once.”  Sometimes called “virtual particles,” they are in fact potentials for existence.  For this reason, quantum physics regards them as “physical.”

In VRT, however, potentials are often referred to as “nonphysical,” to distinguish realities physically existing Now from “past, future or inactive” ones.  Additionally, there are important realities in human experience which are nonphysical but “real Now,” usually referred to as ideas.  Heisenberg specified that potentials lie in between “ideas” and “things”

If reality were strictly limited to physical things, all of our mental ideals of language, tradition, politics and mathematics, including all our laws, literature, media, software, and artwork, would be called unreal (except for the blank materials on which we physically encode them.) Strict physicalists also label many quantum physics phenomena as “unreal.” 

VRT insists that reality must include nonphysical realities.  The common assumption that all reality is physical should be abandoned.

The most commonly believed “time fact” is that the universe is somehow zooming along with us through a medium called "time," with a singular past and future that can be mapped out as a “timeline.”  Yet relativity killed that idea long ago; there is no “universal clock," and events will “happen” in different sequences, depending upon the “reference frame” used.

Even if there were a “Big Clock” of some sort, it wouldn’t be the same thing we know from experience.  “Believing” in it is a veiled anthropocentrism that wants to see our own experience of time as a physical part of the universe “out there.”  In reality, time as such is not a physical phenomenon, but because we “experience” change, nonphysical time is very real indeed.

“Virtual roads of time” says it’s our mental experience of time that’s real.  What was once understood as physical time can only be “measured” by comparison with something else that also measures it—a complete redundancy.  Interpreting a nonphysical experience as a physical phenomenon is as wrong as claiming that nonphysical things aren’t real.  

Now it seems that even our usual idea of reality is closely bound up with our understanding of time.  VRT insists that reality includes both physical and nonphysical things, although strict physicalists even label some of quantum physics as “unreal.”  Apparently, abandoning one deeply rooted assumption can lead us to reconsider another… 

“Time” is a mental construct for perceiving change.  Without change—or a mind to perceive it—the whole principle of “time flow” disappears.  But when we get rid of this “principle,” our understanding of time and change is left “hanging in midair.”  We’re now forced to try new assumptions, some of which may be harder to accept than the ones we abandoned.

Beware of principles.  They are assumptions, not always based on fact.  —Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, in Now: The Physics of Time (2016)

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not". 
St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) in his Confessions. 

Augustine pointed out that time seems to be composed of parts that do not exist: 
• The past is already gone (no longer exists).
• The future is not yet here (does not exist yet).
• The present is merely a boundary between the two, a "now" that has no duration.
Therefore, if time is made of non-existent parts, how can it “exist?” 

Amazingly, modern physics is raising this same question.  The idea that our inner experience of time is also a process happening in the outside world, may be a “pre-Copernican” false assumption—and how we “understand” time can change everything.  Time as an experience along informational "virtual roads of time" would not be a real "thing out there."

If time is our experience, says VRT, and neither a "dimension" nor an objective “flow of reality” in the universe, then time is necessarily artificial.  It simply is conscious experience—made by us, from a string of “ordered information packets” that inform our Nows.  In fact, it’s our first and most basic “artifice,” made before anything else we experienced. 

So what exactly are these “information packets of Now?”  They may not be “embodied” in any thing, but just permanently existing.  If made of the kind of information envisioned by J. A. Wheeler decades ago, they can include all possible groupings of “yes-no” quantum information bits.  As containing all possibilities, this might describe the most simple absolute reality.

Make no mistake, such an “information-matrix universe” must be objectively real, outside of our minds.  Our only access to it would be the subjective experience we call “time.” To probe this mystery, we must "enter the twilight zone" where we abandon certain assumptions while trying out new ones.  VRT will suggest some of these in future posts.

This isn’t a bad strategy, you know.  Nothing ever turns out to be quite as we thought.

The difference between past and future, cause and effect… in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.  Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018)

From Rovelli’s “3 cornerstones of quantum physics” we can conclude that: (1) what we experience as time is “granular,” that is, made up of discrete “events,” (2) time is not linear but random/probabilistic, and (3) time is relational—nothing happens in isolation from other events.  In other words, “time” puts some things up for grabs as it “jumps to the next event.”

These characteristics of our “time” experience appear to provide opportunity for human choice.  From the very beginnings of quantum physics experiments, it’s been clear that the experimenter’s choice of observation setups physically changes the outcome, although exact results are not predictable.  Human choice does have causal power over the experience of time.

The question then is, What is the “invisible force” that acts between events, to determine what comes next?  It was John Archibald Wheeler who provided the insight that information could underlie reality.  He says, “Information may not be just what we learn about the world.  It may be what makes the world.” (Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, 1998)

In the “virtual roads of time” proposal, each actual Now moment comes into existence, then “leaves,” but the information for that Now remains unchanged in itself.  Our “there it is Now” reality belongs to a background of superreal potentials.  Our experience of Now as “existing” is temporary, but the information potentials themselves have permanent, eternal reality.

Of course the most amazing thing about this is that the universe probably contains information potentials for everything that could possibly happen, ever.  Is our worldview big enough to take this in?  Can we even handle such an idea?

Why not?

We all know by experience that more than one possible future awaits.  This is true of the human race as a whole, not just of individuals.  Multiple futures give rise to the theory of “multiple universes,” where every “split” decision creates an additional world.  But the full truth is even crazier: The world we’re in “Now” may connect back to multiple pasts as well.

How could we know this? Decades ago, physicist Richard Feynman discovered that particle interactions can be specified only by calculating every possible past from which the particles might have come.  His mentor John Wheeler then showed that even light beams from distant stars come from different histories—depending on how we choose to observe them.

“The past history of the universe has no more validity than is assigned by the measurements we make—now!”  J. A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam (1998)

In the present century, many physicists agree that these “quantum effects” involve the whole world, not just elementary particles.  Momentous changes to our understanding of time would follow, and one of the most disturbing is an inability to confine “history” to a single timeline.  There’d be as many “possible” histories as there are possible futures.

To make sense of all this, “virtual roads of time” conjectures that our possible futures and pasts are connected at the Now moment by the experience of “observing” them.  VRT envisions a “network of time roads” made up of “virtually” real events.  These are potentials for every possible experience, among which actual experience selects just one “road.”

How does this help us find “one reality” in a welter of “all possible worlds?”  It tells us that the historical “traces” found in ancient deposits are less reliable than we thought, while firsthand “stories” of human experience are actually more reliable.  This is because “false histories” were never experienced, while our real history of experience was “handed down.”

If VRT is correct, physical traces are still significant because they help us understand the many different potential “roads of evolution” that could lead to present or past states of our physical world.  These are all physically real, even if some never “happened in experience.”  The true significance of time, for us, must lie in the unique road of human experience.

“Time” has become something “markedly different from all that we have hitherto meant by the word.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems, 2016)

We’ve always known that there’s nothing permanent about Now, but then just last century, Einstein showed that Now doesn’t even exist “out there.”  Reality is relativistic, and the connections among events are not some sort of “extensions of Now.”  Events are linked by an interlocked information network, therefore “Now” is only for us as observers.

We “know” what time is because it’s our Now experience.  When we try to describe time by itself as if it were something “out there,” we lose understanding.  “Virtual roads of time” proposes that there’s nothing out there but possible changes—lined up as potential Nows.  These can only be experienced in our own timelike process of observation. 

This isn’t really a new idea.  Werner Heisenberg insisted on the reality of informational potentials, and Julian Barbour suggested a universe already made up of all possible changes.  In VRT, Now is our experience of “scanning” these changes.  This shared experience of mankind moves along one or another of many potential timelines or “roads of change.”

But doesn’t the entire universe itself “experience” time and change?  Not unless the universe is an experiencing “person,” says VRT.  We, as personal agents, experience or “actualize” only those Nows we observe, while all other possibilities remain—well, ”possible.”  Everything possible is already out there—but only as “permanent information potentials.” 

This is not “idealism,” because these potentials are not mere ideas*.*  They are somewhat “idea-like,” said Heisenberg, in that they are real but have not “come into actual existence.”  The potential Nows are out there, but we “see” only a few of them, one at a time—Now. 

Our difficulty with time comes from thinking we’re stuck in a single-timeline law of cause and effect. But if we look at our own experience of time, what we see instead is the reality of activated possibilities.  The universe we knew suddenly expands, into something almost infinitely wider.

I‘m not accountable for how my life began—but do I have any responsibility for where it “goes?”  The new religion some call scientism says no, claiming that our world “locks” us into a spacetime prison over which we have no control.  “Whatever will be, will be.”  Einstein’s relativity is invoked as the authority for this claim, but quantum physics begs to differ.

Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time (2018) says that we find ourselves in an “open” universe: “It is not a “static” world, or a “block universe” where all change is illusory… on the contrary, ours is a world of events rather than of things.”  As in “virtual roads of time,” these events are not predetermined, and they make up our actual timeline of life experience.

What governs events?  According to quantum physicist John Wheeler, “there are innumerable clouds of probability running around in the universe,” and these potentials, by “choice among possible outcomes,” can trigger actual events.  Before that happens, “all roads are possible.”  Afterward, “there are roads not taken.”  (Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, 1998.)

Some of these “virtual roads” are better than others, thus possibilities matter.  For us ordinary humans, the real debate behind scientific theories of time is the issue of human choice. Potentials may not sound real, but both life experience and our imagination tell us that some of these "probabilities" actually do “happen” and can turn out to be good—or bad!   

Here on the “virtual roads of time,” we’re either drivers or passengers.  We know the difference very well—if we accept no responsibility for where our lives “go,” we’ll certainly have no cause to complain about how they end!  Just “riding along” will take us places where we’ve already been and may not want to go—unless we choose differently, and “take the wheel!”

According to Dartmouth physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser (writing in The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2023) — “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.”  His thoughts seem to have some relevance for “Virtual Roads of Time,” which does amount to a “new story” about our world.

Citing disturbing data from the James Webb space telescope that appears to upset what we know about the origins of the universe, Gleiser lists other inconsistencies faced by cosmology, going back to “inflation,” a Big Bang with multiple universes, and the “necessary invention” that more than 90 percent of our celestial surroundings must be both invisible and unexplained.

It’s quite normal, Gleiser notes, for science to continually adjust its ideas to conform with new discoveries, including the appearance of radical new ideas.  He mentions Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein, and includes more recent suggestions, such as the possibility that the laws of physics themselves might change and evolve.

But he also points out that sometimes the whole picture has to change:  “An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe,” he says.  In this “participatory universe,” every act of observation would be “in some sense a new creation.”

Gleiser suggests that we may even be approaching a complete revolution in our thinking about the universe—one that would change our ideas of space and time, and perhaps the whole “story” we tell about who we are and what our existence is all about.  Time and space not being what we thought they were does evoke the “virtual roads” of VRT. 

It’s interesting that these developments appear just as human society seems to be actively resisting the pronouncements of “traditional” science.  Perhaps this isn’t just rebellion, but an actual uneasiness with the prevailing “story” of our existence.  Science is supposed to be a search for knowledge, not a basis for “official decrees.”  True science is our search, not our church.

Information (like time) has proved to be both hard to explain and controversial.  In the “virtual roads of time” worldview, time is a conscious experience in which observers “scan” along preexisting but virtual “roads,” timelines of lined-up potential Now states.  Information, it’s now proposed, is the bridge that connects and defines these potentials.

Information is real but nonphysical or “potential.”  Though it’s an immaterial reality, it could very well be a “measurable missing part” of a universal information-mass-energy continuum.  Though neither matter nor energy, information has physical effects when its “code” bridges between the physical states of matter/energy.  In a sense, it may actually create the next state.

This fills a big gap in understanding VRT’s view that time is a series of Nows.  The “gap” is our strong sense that something is moving us along this “road of time” on which we find ourselves.  The sequence is continuous and also relentlessly inevitable and unstoppable.  Perhaps the motive power is information, which by definition informs and “moves” consciousness.

This “power” of information can also help us understand how a vast realm of “potentials” can possibly be part of reality, though unseen and not “normally” measurable.  “Virtual” and “superposed” particles appear constantly in quantum physics, but their “reality” is not like normal matter or energy.  Yet they make themselves known, essentially by information transfer.

Information moves us, therefore it’s what we experience time by—and it’s what we want. Accurate and verified information gives us all we can ever know of reality. 

“Information may not be just what we learn about the world.  It may be what makes the world.”

 (J. A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, 1998)

It’s commonly said that intelligence does not appear until very “recently.”  This assumes a “streaming flow of universal time”—against Einsteinian relativity, where time is a “fourth dimension” with no universal clock.  With “virtual roads of time,” actual streaming only occurs in conscious experience.  If so, there can be no “stream” without conscious intelligence.

But if a “stream of time” requires intelligence, then intelligence must be in some way “prior to” time, a primary reality.  Early thinkers called such an intelligence “God,” and various cultures assigned to it all sorts of fanciful stories.  More modern thinkers have suggested a cosmic “ground-of-Kantian-Being god,” or even a simple “self-observing Universe” (J. A. Wheeler.)

“It has become an article of faith in physics that if a theory is simple enough, comprehensive enough, “beautiful” enough, it must be right.”  (Wheeler, in Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, 1998.)

Molecular biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer (2010) says that within standard assumptions, “only a deity could possibly have created such unnatural beings as you and me.”  So in order to oppose religion, he believes that “the burden is on science” to show that what looks like an intentional setup, with purposeful action toward goals, has somehow “appeared naturally.”

For VRT, “naturally” means that Everything (not the partial universe of “time things,” but the much wider potential Cosmos,) is Itself intelligent, with both goals and values.  Timeless, but neither static nor limited, it could “act” by choosing the laws of potentials.  This intelligence would be a container for “Everything,” not just part of its contents like a mere “resident god.” 

What about humans?  As “participating minor intelligences,” our experience would be a clue to the “larger experience of Everything.”  The non-measurable “values” which most of us share should also belong to the universal reality.  Then our experiences of good and bad, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, love and hate, actually are universal values.

“Materialistic realism” doesn’t recognize “universal values”—but intelligent experience does.

The mere fact of our existence in an experience of passing time, is no doubt reason enough to want to continue.  But we’ve always looked for more than a mere “story.”  We want our history to mean something, and we dare to hope that it could achieve some ultimate purpose—even if beyond our present sight.  According to theoretical physicist Henry Stapp (2010,)

—human choices “inject the elements of wholeness and meaning into the quantum universe.”

—“otherwise there is nothing but a continuous smear of meaningless un-actualized possibilities.”

—in this universe, “human beings, by means of our intentional effort, can make a difference…”

In line with Stapp, “virtual roads of time” says that “meaning” arises from our intentional actions when, by our choices, we actualize the events of certain timelines.  A healthy person, we think, believes that his or her life does have meaning, usually envisioned as “the story of what I do” during my active experience of movement in time from past to future. 

But is there also an overall purpose to this ongoing experience of “doing?”  That would mean an effect of some sort upon our future existence, not just as individuals but as a civilization. But this should not arise only in the future, beyond our reach.  Since we provide input, our purpose must be experienced Now, part of the universal “information potential of Everything.”

Finally, is the Universe Itself affected by our choosings and doings, or does VRT shrink all “non-human Reality” down to meaninglessness?  Despite the urgings of extreme physicalists, this universe appears to be focused upon “us and our future,” a future which only exists as a potential for continuing existence.  Our future, full of potential, matters for Everything!

“…the physically described world is not a world of material substances, as normally conceived, but is rather a world of potentialities for future experiences.”  (Stapp, “Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe,” in Davies and Gregersen, Information and the Nature of Reality, 2010.)

 

“If you think too long about this, you’ll go down the drain.”  Physicist Richard Feynmann

Feynmann, the discoverer of “sum over histories” in quantum mechanics, understandably found it troubling to imagine a particle having more than one “history”—let alone many histories.  Yet his own approach to calculating this mystery is an essential part of scientific understanding today—as long as you don’t “think about it” too much!

Feynmann’s mentor was John Archibald Wheeler, who soon “thought about” some of the far-reaching implications of Feynmann’s discovery.  Wheeler pointed out that the light of a distant star, passing the gravitational field of a “superstar” billions of years in the past, can be switched to the other side of that star, today, by the human choice of an astronomer, Now.

But how?  Einstein showed that there is no universal moment in time. Today is not the same as today, billions of light-years away.  “Now” is entirely local, and only affects what we see in this moment. “Virtual roads of time” understands that the potentials of that distant starlight follow many histories. Astronomy can choose Now which one to "observe," and thus actualize.

Why is it so “scary” to think about these “potentials” of history?  We try to plan our choices ahead of time, using our imagination, instincts and memory.  Thrown into an unfamiliar situation, we suddenly don’t know what to do.  Our familiar environment suddenly changes into an unpredictable “spook world.” Fear always arises from the unknown.

Humans tend to think that history is the most stable of all our certainties.  We can’t entirely predict the future, but at least we know what “happened” in the past—don’t we?  Well, we’re pretty sure of our own memories—okay, let’s say everybody’s memories, and the written records of them.  And surely we can trust archaeology, geology—but not astronomy?  

“Many histories” opens up a lot of scary territory—but, says VRT, let’s not let fear control us!

“There is a way that (first) appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.”  (Proverbs 14:12)

Imagine an architect designing a superskyscraper like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.  Almost every possible idea must be rejected, because it will lead to disaster.  All factors must be considered; gravity, bedrock, materials, storms, earthquakes, aircraft, terrorists, etc.  Only an extremely narrow set of alternatives will even work, and of those, likely only one will have the desired result.

Now try to imagine developing an elaborate “information world” of quantum bits like ours, where the inhabitants participate in its creation by choosing among alternate “virtual roads of time.”  No self-respecting “architect” would design this world for certain destruction, but rather as one that works.  VRT says that we find ourselves in just such an artificially produced world.

We are “observers” among a range of options offering a nearly infinite number of possibilities for our experience.  But instead of being “locked away” from all dangers, we seem to have full freedom to “live dangerously” yet fully.  It’s risky, but imagination, and the records of human experience, do provide us with a certain amount of “architectural foresight.”

We know, if only from the conjurings of troubled imagination, that the world can be made far, far worse than it actually is.  Sadly, some of these horrors rear their heads in actual experience.  Yet in spite of all the possibilities for destruction, something holds things together.  “Everything” somehow seems to be “on our side,” because things work well much of the time.

The fashionably gloomy pronouncements about a cold, uncaring universe oblivious to our existence (let alone our happiness!) don’t match the facts of human experience.  In the presence of real danger, even the most destructive events are exceptions from the overall trend.  Actual experience tells us that “good and bad” tend to be skewed in our favor.

Of course, not all of life’s experiences are “favorable.”  It’s because Everything “pushes” us toward the "good times” and away from the bad that we see meaning and purpose in our existence.  Here is the “calm” of nature, here is the “love” of life, here is what we “value”—and here is humanity.

“…we have imagined the existence of “eternity,” a strange world outside of time…”  Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, 2018

Rovelli understands the unreality of time better than almost anyone, but along with almost everyone, he seems to have misunderstood eternity.  What we call “time” can happen only inside of eternity, which is its “container.”  It is eternity that’s actually real—and the “virtual roads of time” (VRT) are mapped out within it.

Because human thinking is rooted in our “riverlike” time experience, we often confuse our use of the word “eternity” with the idea of a universal flow.  “Eternal” is supposed to mean something like “time without end.”  But while an eternal future is imagined, the very idea of an eternal past is seldom considered—surely there has to be a beginning!

This confusion lies in a false assumption:  “Eternity must exist as an unending extension of some real, measurable universal time.”  But the opposite may be true:  In VRT our “time” is just a moving picture show of linked “Now states” scattered across an eternal “landscape.”  Time only exists in us, in our flickering conscious observation along “informational roads of Nows.”  

A similar idea of time is set forth in Julian Barbour’s earlier book The End of Time (1999.)  His “Platonia” is like the real “eternity,” containing all possible different states of the universe.  Eternity includes Everything, and if there is anything “outside” of eternity, it’s not accessible to us, and probably not conceivable or understandable from “within.” 

Rovelli himself clearly represents time as human-centered:  “Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of our identity.”  Time “as such” is not real:  “There is no special variable “time,” there is no difference between past and future, there is no spacetime.”

Eternity, however, is real. VRT visualizes it as a vast information matrix underlying physical reality.  Since it includes us and our experience of time, it’s Everything there is.

Software algorithms have now developed to the place where we can query an AI “librarian” or processor of records, and receive an answer based on thousands or even millions of sources of information.  This resource greatly increases our capacity for research, but still requires some healthy human skepticism:  “Information provided may not always be accurate.”

Like a “driverless car,” which by definition lacks a driver although it imitates one, AI unquestionably lacks an “I.”  Even though the software is “intelligent” enough to imitate a real person, there’s literally nobody home.  An AI bot can tell you many things about the “flow of time” as recorded in human experience, but can never experience that flow itself.

When you “play around” with AI, you learn many things about its limitations.  It’s better to save your time for actual human thought, so here’s a thought experiment where you imagine asking AI some key questions.  First, “What is it like to be an AI?” (thanks to Thomas Nagel, of course.)  Second, “Does your time pass slower or faster than mine?”

Keep drilling down and many more limitations come into view.  “Do you have feelings about events that happen to you? Do some of them feel better or worse than others? Can you imagine things about your own future experiences?  Are you continually engaged in ‘telling yourself the story’ of your conscious experiences as time passes?”

If your own answer to the last four questions would be “Yes,” then congratulations—you’ve just proved you’re not a robot!  You know the experience of “time passing,” and should be able to see what it really is—an experience, and not a “fourth dimension.”  But without experience, using only recorded preconceptions, AI can never “understand” what you understand.