artificial intelligence and time.

006 How does Artificial Intelligence experience Time?

ByLaurel Papworth

Artificial intelligence and human thought, cartesian theatre and Dennett, Socrates elenchus and more

This episode is on Time’s Complex Physics Theories. Today I bumble along between Quantum Mechanics, Big Bang and Blackholes apropos Time. While exploring general and special relativity – hi Einstein and Hawking and Eddington, big shout out to Bohr, Heisenberg, Wheeler and of course Bergson and Eagleman. Special note: Minkowski and Itzhak Bars (I took an extended license to discuss reversalism (two dimensional time theories). From Australia, NSW.

DOES AI EXPERIENCE TIME and what is time anyway?
My podcast on #AlchemyOfInnovation covers #science, technology, #artificialintelligence , #spirituality, #philosophy and ancient religion. My website has the academic resources and the transcript.
✅ Relativity and Time Dilation
✅ Times Arrow and Entropy
✅ Quantum Mechanics and Time
✅ Big Bang and then Time started.
✅ Black Holes and hey, is time slowing down?
✅ Reverse time, and Block Universe
✅ Consciousness and Time
Interestingly, Aristotle and Plato, St Augustine, Anicca (Buddhism) Kabbalah (Ein Sof) Sufism and Rumi, Hinduism, Taoism, Hermeticism (Hi Hermes Trismegistus , still can’t say your name sober) and other philosophies also explore various theories of time the main being nope, the linear time we say we experience isn’t real.
✅ Greek Philosophy
✅ St Augustine
✅ Buddhism
✅ Kabbalah
✅ Sufism and Rumi
✅ Taoism
✅ Hermeticism and Hermes Trismegistus
Finally, AI thinks so fast and so deep that time is a different concept. Rather than chain of thoughts (linear, step by step) fast deep time means tree of thoughts – exploring every possible outcome. Every timeline. Everything Everywhere All At Once.
✅ AI and perception of time
✅ temporal data and sequence learning
✅ LLMs and continuous learning (not GPT)
✅ Ageing and Obsolescence (synthetic data)
✅ Metaverse and persistent worlds, subjective time
✅ Metaverse and time dilation/compression
Something about archiving data (past experiential) and temporal simulations (avatars that feel and think in time)
I think I then went off the rails a bit to understand what an artistic (a moment in time) AI would be like.
These poddies are for me to explore my thoughts, if you enjoy them, awesome. They are not business focussed but bigger and higher and deeper. Well to me anyway.
The Shields podcast would not write itself and resisted me for a good 6-8 weeks so Time it is as it wrote itself in about 20 mins. LOL. I’ll never learn to take the easy path… fast enough.
Stay Human, stay Divine, stay Thinking.

Transcript of the science and philosophy of Time and Artificial Intelligence:

[00:00:00.250]
So I’ve been thinking… about time, how artificial intelligence perceives and experiences time compared to how humans believe that they experience time, and whether it’s possible to achieve an independent view of time. There are different times. Time is not measured in minutes and seconds the way we experience it. Physics can show us over and over again the way that we experience time as individuals within a microcosm doesn’t independently observationally exist. Now, I’m no physicist… Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity comes down to special relativity and general relativity. It’s around time dilation. Special relativity posits that time can speed up or slow down relative to how fast you are moving compared to something else. So when atomic clocks were put on fast moving jets and compared to stationary clocks on Earth, they showed a slight difference, confirming time dilation. Time was different on a fast moving jet than it was us standing on Earth. So when we’re standing on the Earth, we’re actually rotating at around 1000 miles, 1600 kilometres per hour. And we orbit the sun around 60,000, no, 67,000 miles, 107,000 kilometres per hour. And notice that we say per hour, we measure speed, distance and time. And that can be problematic. For example, in thermodynamics “time arrow” and entropy says that an isolated system can never decrease over time. So that gives us an arrow of time. However, on a really basic level, most physical processes are time symmetric, meaning they don’t prefer a particular direction of time. If we throw in quantum mechanics and time, yeah, there’s no single well defined direction. The equations of quantum mechanics are symmetrical in time.But the “delayed choice quantum eraser” suggests that actions in the present can influence events in the past on a quantum level, meaning does time go forward? There’s been some science conferences recently. People submitting papers talking very animatedly in corridors that time may have two dimensions, not just one. And I’ve spoken about this a number of times over the years. But it’s called “reversalism” reverse time or the block universe. And if there are two dimensions, we don’t just have a forward moving time. There may be another timescape, another realm where time runs backwards. And that’s not a new thought. Many philosophers, priests, magi, seers and oracles of ancient religions have talked about the reversal of time. In fact, some philosophers and neuroscientists argue that the perception of time, our perception of time, the human’s perception of time, is a construct of the human brain rather than a fundamental feature of the universe.

[00:03:19.640]
So here we are back in Plato’s allegory of the cave, only this time, the shadows on the wall that we take to be fact, we take to be science. It’s actually time. If we extrapolate time out further and further out, we meet the Big Bang theory, which suggests that our universe began as a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. At such extreme conditions, our classical understanding of time breaks down. In fact, some cosmologists even suggest that time itself began with the Big Bang. No, I’m not talking about the TV series. And then as we head towards the black hole, any black hole – there’s one over there – near the event horizon of a black hole, time slows down relative to further away. If one were to approach a black hole, time would appear to speed up for everything else. And there are theories today that we’re surrounded by black holes, by black matter. So time indeed may change. Be flexible, be agile.

[00:04:22.150]
And because I know my audience likes the science as well as the philosophy, you can read Einstein’s relativity and time dilation, as well as Ludwig Boltzmann and Arthur Eddington. Arthur Eddington was the first one to speak about the era of time. Boltzmann was more entropy for quantum mechanics and time. Have a look at Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Kind of a standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation delayed choice quantum eraser. John Wheeler was the first one to propose the experiment, and scientist Yoon Ho Kim and I think the rest were from the University of California. But they performed the actual experiment. So this isn’t just theory. Maybe times different people posit theories, and then we test them. And every so often, such as recently, some of our most fundamental physics laws are not just questioned, but broken. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and a Roman Catholic priest, proposed the theory of the big bang. But the actual term was coined by Fred Hoyle, perhaps not in the best of moods. Stephen Hawking, of course, is a leader and proponent of the properties of black holes and he was the one who talked about the particle-antiparticle pairs near the event horizon, the impact of time. Oh. Herman Minkowski introduced the concept of spacetime. So interesting, this is the area that I really am passionate about, the block universe or block time and the actual reversalism was Itzhak Bars a physicist. Itzhak Bars is

the person who formalised the two dimensional time theory. One forward, one back, like me trying to do a three point turn in 15 points. For more philosophical views on time perception, Henri Bergson believed in the distinction between time as measured by clocks i.e. what we would probably call scientific time and the human internal experience of time, such as getting lost in time, lost in what you’re doing. Oh, the time went really quickly. Time went slowly. And then David Eagleman conducted extensive research on how the brain perceives time. So if you’re interested in neuroscientific, that’s something to explore there.

[00:06:45.250]
Before we get to the AI part of time, let’s have a chat about philosophers and mystics across the centuries who reflected on what we would today call physics and scientists. But back then, it was philosophy and sensing exploration through the etheric. So both Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greek philosophers, had their own notions of time. Plato. So time is related to the eternal and unchanging world of forms, those archetypes that I always talk about, the archetypal world. If you struggle to understand the archetypal world, see it as the blueprint for the 3D world. But the 3D world is just an iteration of the blueprint. Aristotle viewed time as a measurement of change, and without their work, we would struggle to even have a philosophical discussion today on the nature of time. St. Augustine Confessions, which I admit I have not read for many years and must read again but he pondered on the nature of time, asking “what then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” By the way, I also put Love in this category. Does Love exist? Prove it. And no, not by buying me chocolates, but thank you anyway. He suggested that perhaps time exists only in the mind. St. Augustine way back then. Buddhism has a concept of impermanence”anicca” which touches on the transient nature of all things, which could be linked to the idea of time’s relativity. Maybe Einstein was a Buddhist? Certain meditative practises in Buddhism focus on reversing events. So, for example, as part of my spiritual practise is to, at the end of the day, go backwards through the day, not in a category system, but to see the outcome before the input. So like AI, but seeing the output before the prompt. It’s an interesting experience that deepens one’s knowledge of the connection of the human into physical reality and into time. In the Kabbalah we have the nature of the divine and the universe. And that particular form of mysticism touches upon the concept of time, including, I think we talked about it last time, the sephiroth (sefirot), which is attributes through which the divine manifests. The idea of Ein Sof, the infinite, or endless, which, by the way, is in a lot of religions, a lot of spirituality, but it can be paralleled with the concepts of timelessness being outside of time. Is there a place outside of time? And how would we experience it? The Sufis, which are the mystics within Islam and which I studied when I lived in the north of Morocco, have poetry and writing suggesting the transcendence of time. And Rumi, darling Rumi, often wrote about time in a way that suggests its illusory nature. It is a shadow that holds us to the physical world. In Hinduism, time is not just forward or backwards, but cyclical, the universe undergoing endless cycles of creation, preservation and disillusion. This could be related to the idea of Eddington’s, the Times arrow. Not saying Eddington was a Hindu, just that these things do tend to repeat, particularly as we get closer to, I guess, the spiritual truth of the matter. The notion of Maya, the world is not real includes our linear understanding of time, the linear understanding of time, which is an illusion. Taoism, the way is internal and unchanging. Again, hinting at a concept of time that is beyond our linear understanding. How can we have time marching forwards eternal and unchanging? And the Tao Te Ching by Laozi very similar to Plato’s concepts of eternal and unchanging. I hadn’t pronounced this in a long time, Hermes Trimegistus, and I haven’t said that for decades. That word out loud touches upon the ideas of unity and interconnectedness of all things. Perhaps there’s a connexion between Hermeticism and the holistic understanding of space time in physics. So many ancient philosophies and spiritual traditions hint at ideas that seem to resonate with or parallel some modern physics understanding of time.

[00:11:33.150]
Not all of them. Some. So if I split time into a physical understanding of time and a metaphysical understanding of time, we come up with some interesting concepts. The physical understanding of time is really classical mechanics. So Newton’s absolute time, it’s an independent quantity that progresses uniformly. Relativity Einstein’s theory, both special and general, altered our understanding of time. Introducing that concept of “time dilation” but changing depending on speed. And the interconnectedness of time and space also under physical understanding of time. Quantum

mechanics superposition entanglement multiple states at once and events that are not strictly determined until observed. What is the role of time cosmology, the Big Bang, event horizons, black holes and more. If I was to summarise the metaphysical understanding of time, I’d look at A theory presented in the growing block universe going backwards. And the B theory is eternalism of time. So one goes forward and back, and the other one is eternal. Is there a past? Is there a present? Is there a future?

[00:12:46.010]
Are they real? Or are we just talking about time as a human construct? Also under a metaphysical understanding of time, we need to look at consciousness and time. How does the human consciousness perceive time? Why does time seem to fly when we’re having fun and drag when we’re bored or there’s not enough to do, or things are slow in the office? Maybe we’re going on holiday? We have to wait. How do memories and anticipations and the feeling realm shape our experience of time in the present? So the thinking realm could change time, and the feeling realm changes time from a mystical perspective. We have cyclical cosmologies and meditative techniques that aim at taking us out of time so that we can transcend temporal constraints. We can transcend time as a human construct. And now ethics. What are the ethical implications of our actions in the context of time? For example, what responsibilities do we have to future generations? Then we need to think about sustainability, legacy and the long game. But if we don’t think time is like that, if we think it goes backwards, stops it’s relative, that may change the whole way our reality is constructed if we move into interdisciplinary insights. So we mash up, we alchemise, we put the ingredients in and mortar and pestle them. We could take neuroscience and psychology how does the brain perceive and measure time? What are the neural mechanisms behind it? Literature and art Proust In Search of Lost Time, Dali’s the Persistence of Memory – artistic interpretation of time’s passage.

[00:14:38.500]
I frequently speak in presentations about asynchronous and synchronous time with technology. So with the digital age we have instantaneous communications and an emphasis on speed as it affected our perception of time Rushkoff “the Present Shock”. Interesting reading. If you are looking to investigate further, I would recommend meditation and mindfulness focusing on your perception of time invite in other experiences. Once we move into artificial intelligence or large language models and the Metaverse AI underpins the metaverse there are things we have to look at. For instance, the perception of time through AI. AI. Models process information at speeds far beyond human capabilities. A second for us would be instantaneous for an AI. The perception of elapsed time doesn’t exist in these systems the way it does in humans. AI models, especially in the realm of deep learning, deal with temporal data. RNNs, for instance, are designed to handle sequential data by having memory of previous inputs. This allows AI to understand and predict time series data from stock prices to weather patterns, but then leading to the issue that we have with synthetic data. Models are designed to learn continuously over time. Well, the continuous learning models, not pretrained models, but those that are designed to learn continuously over time adapt to new information and tasks. This ongoing process challenges the conventional “train once, deploy forever” paradigm in AI. And in fact, in life. The concept of time is integral to AI models as they evolve and grow in knowledge. But what if, just like humans that learn and forget and change over time, a model might face similar challenges.

[00:16:41.480]
The concept of ageing in machines, where older data might become less relevant or even forgotten introduces a temporal dimension to machine learning. I find that very interesting. Perhaps old age, forgetfulness is catching and our models will catch it from us. And while many see the metaverse simply as persistent virtual worlds, each of them has a sense of its own time. Often it’s pinned to the human’s time, but not always. Sometimes you can have four nights and four days in one human day. It depends on the world. With persistent worlds, events that happen in the metaverse in real time persist. The changes persist. In fact, in hardcore games, if you die, you’re permanently dead. In other games, you die, you’re reborn. You die, you’re reborn. All you’ve lost is time. With the metaverse, if a virtual building is constructed or an event occurs remains part of the history of that digital realm, that’s persistent independent. That’s the human experience of time. We do have subjective time experience. A user’s perception of time can be altered in the metaverse. Now in the real world may

feel like minutes or days in an immersive world. Also, if we look back at time dilation and compression which we spoke about at the beginning. The metaphors could implement different timescales in different areas. One could enter a space where events transpire at an accelerated or decelerated rate compared to what we call the real world. There are intersections of time with AI and the metaverse digital archiving. With AI’s ability to process and store vast amounts of information we can create detailed digital archives in the metaverse. This could translate to detailed histories and records, allowing users to travel back in time to revisit past events.

[00:18:42.140]
And in fact, when I was thinking of the Tree of Thoughts this is where neural networks role play many different outcomes. To understand the most likely outcome, it occurred to me that we would be able to visit alternate future timelines and in fact, choose our timeline, the outcome that we prefer. There’s also temporal simulations. Advanced AI could simulate events based on historical data, allowing users in the metaverse to experience different time periods as well as these future scenarios. The simulations are different than the archiving because one is human data, primarily human data. Digital archiving and temporal simulations are synthetic data. So while AI and metaverse don’t experience time in the emotional and conscious way emotional and conscious shadows that humans do they do introduce novel ways of processing, understanding and interacting with time. These technologies not only expand our temporal capabilities but also challenge our traditional notions of past, present and future.

[00:19:51.760]
In summary, I would suggest that we look at art and time and explore it from a snapshot of history, a personal emotion, an event in society. From cave paintings to prehistoric times to contemporary digital art, the medium changes, but the essence remains the same. Art is a window into a moment in time. The way the artist perceived, communicated. Time can differ vastly based on their cultural, personal and historical context. Philosophers have grappled with the concept of time for centuries. From Augustine’s reflections on the nature of time and his Confessions to Heidegger’s Being and Time there is a rich tapestry of thought on temporality. Many philosophers argue that our understanding of time is deeply intertwined with our understanding of existence itself. Ancient religion, which I separate from philosophy and make it more global many ancient religions view time as cyclical rather than linear. In Hinduism, the eternal cycle of creation, preservation and destruction represented by the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Ancient Mayans believed in cycles of creation and destruction. These cyclical views of time contrast with the more linear perspective common in Western thought the linear perspective of the divine masculine as opposed to the cyclical perspective of the divine feminine. AI. In its current form, while not experiencing time as living beings do, is able to process vast amounts of data quickly, so quickly allows it to perceive and predict time based patterns in a way humans can’t. Its very notion of time must be different than ours as ours goes through our neural networks, our brain and our consciousness. AI. Will see time is different. The emergence of AI. Also brings philosophical questions. As AI. Systems become more advanced and perhaps gain some form of consciousness, how will they perceive and interact with time? And then we reach synthesis. Imagine a future where AI Systems, designed with deep philosophical and artistic understanding, curate experiences in the metaverse. You could walk through a virtual recreation of ancient Rome, not just as it was, but as its inhabitants, philosophically and artistically, perceive time. So not just with historical accuracy, but with psychological, sociological accuracy. Or you could experience the cyclical concept of time as understood by ancient cultures, all while discussing these concepts with AI entities, I suppose avatars that have their own unique perception of temporality. So time as a concept is deeply interwoven with our understanding of existence, art, philosophy, technology, and now artificial intelligence. By delving into each of these areas, we can gain a richer, more holistic understanding of time and its multifaceted nature.

[00:23:05.850]
I’ve not finished my exploration on time changing time, of metaverse time, cyclical time, the beginning of time, the end of time. But unfortunately, I’m out of time. Thank you you for listening to the Alchemy of Innovation. My name is Laurel Papworth. And remember, Stay Human.

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