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“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.

First and foremost, only experience is original to any of our knowledge, while all the rest is derived.  Second, our experience just is a “flow of time,” which creates a story that we call our history.  And third, we only actually experience the singular moment Now, with its connections to a partly remembered past and an imagined but unseeable future.

We also know, from our experience of this “flow,” that we can make choices by choosing one possible future over another one.  So there are countless potential Nows with many possible connections.  Our “flow” is not “out there,” but inside our own experience.  This is why VRT follows other proposals in rejecting the objective concept of universal time.

We also know that the flow of our experience, even though we can “steer” it to some extent, is largely self-propelled and self-directed.  It “keeps on happening” no matter what we do.  As long as we’re conscious, we travel something like a “road of time.”  And even while asleep or under anesthesia, this “road” continues to “go by” in the shared experience of humanity.

It’s easy to see how the conventional view of time emerged.  We imagined a sort of one-way “river” flowing inexorably onward apart from us.  It would be an objective and foundational “ground of being,” containing in itself not only all mankind but all things whatsoever.  This bald assumption, say many eminent theorists, is now called into question by science itself.

Although intrigued by relativity and quantum theory, VRT rejects conventional time for a simpler reason: a single universal timeline does not allow for our own daily experience of choosing futures.  We all know how to “steer” our future onto different “roads.”  And doing this is of overwhelming interest, because experience has shown that some roads are “good” and some “bad.”

The invented “spacetime framework” for reality is certainly useful to science, but it’s almost useless for understanding human experience.  Our experience in itself is utterly extraordinary, compelling VRT to see our world as “artificial” not accidental.  If the human “storytelling of time” has been given to us, it means that “Everything” in this universe values our lives and our freedom.

“The fact that the universe conforms to an orderly scheme, and is not an arbitrary muddle of events, prompts one to wonder—God or no God—whether there is some sort of meaning or purpose behind it all.”                                Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, 2006

Besides the so-called “anthropic” explanation for the universe, or the “religious” one, an actual artificial universe, commonly called a “simulation,” has been proposed.  A version of this idea appears in the “Matrix” film series, a science fiction horror story in which future intelligent machines have enslaved humans into a simulation of our present-day world.

An artificial world, however, need not be a simulation.  “Artificial” means an artifice, that is, not self-created or just “existing necessarily.”  Although this requires a “creator,” that need not be the traditional and rather small “religious god” who gives orders and punishes disobedience.  With “virtual roads of time,” our universe assumes a higher level of significance.

Remember that in VRT, “Everything” is a universal background of information potentials for all possible Nows that could ever come into existence.  This includes the mysterious information potential for human experience—but is ours the highest possible experience?  There might be, above us, the superintelligent experience of a “creator of artificial environments.” 

Well, someone says, if that’s not God, then what is?  Now, this may be pure semantics—but our Babylonian confusion of religions has pushed the word “God” into too tight of a conceptual corner for VRT.  An artificial universe of potential experiences seems to demand that not merely “this” nor “that,” but “Every Potential” should be included with its “artificer.”

Theologians may object that “God is Everything” is just the age-old idea of “pantheism.”  To the contrary, pantheism limits its “god” to “everything that exists.”  VRT’s Everything includes the infinite potentials for “everything that could exist.”  That’s not only bigger than pantheism, but if we ourselves are “artificial,” it's also far more "invested" in our freedom to experience...

“Everything” is beyond us, but it’s precisely from our experiences that we do know so many of the intricately varied possibilities available to us.  Sheer amazement at this experience of existence makes this world appear to be a purposeful, meaningful artifice.  Then we should find, from the records of human experience, information about our own meaning and purpose.

The simplest version of “multiple universes” may be many potential histories in a single actual universe.  “Virtual roads of time” sees our experienced history as just one “road of linked potentials” which we observed among all possibilities whatsoever.  This separates our conscious experience from a “quantum background” of potentials not yet experienced.

In the VRT worldview, potentials are “information packets” for momentary “Now states” of the world.  They’re linked by “information handles” of cause and effect and random probability, which also let us observe and perhaps even select them.  In the history of actual experience, things have “evolved” as a series of Nows appeared in a “story” that happened for us. 

This larger context of possible reality implies a very complex human history.  We know that we can sometimes “select” among potential future histories.  This involves “changing roads,” and implies that the actual history of human experience has wandered among many potential or virtual roads.  Whenever we “change roads,” we “lose track” to some extent. 

This understanding of time can seem confusing in VRT because the word “exists” is used only for actual experience Now, not for all of reality.  All potentials, however, are said to be “real” even when they aren’t “happening Now.” They are the “Everything”— something like Kant’s vast unknown “Being.”  Only his “Becoming,” a tiny part of all reality, “exists” right Now.  

Thus, although beginning with a “science of time,” VRT leads us deep into philosophy.  Various similar combinations of science and philosophy regularly appear in a fast-growing library of popular books referencing the “foundations of quantum theory.”  In the following quote (without adopting their own new idea of time) VRT lines up with Unger and Smolin:

“Natural philosophy tries to distinguish what scientists have discovered about nature from their interpretation of these discoveries.  The interpretation is regularly influenced by metaphysical preconceptions…  the progress of science requires that they be occasionally identified, resisted, overturned, and replaced.”

Roberto M. Unger and Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (2015)