Recently, through the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I came across Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return. This led me to discuss an interesting question with a well-known AI, here anonymized as Professor C:
Since modern physics after relativity has written space and time into a unified structure of “spacetime”, should our understanding of life, death, the past, and the future also be reconsidered?
Does the past still exist?
My initial intuition was: perhaps the past has not truly disappeared.
The past feels like a place very far away. It still exists, but we can no longer reach it.
We naturally accept that distant places in space still exist.
New York is far from me, Tokyo is far from me, and the Moon is even farther away. Although I cannot reach these places right now, I know that they exist.
But when it comes to time, we are used to saying:
the past has disappeared, the future has not yet arrived, and only the present is real.
Is this distinction a physical fact, or merely an intuition shaped by human experience?
Modern physics has indeed shaken this naive view of time. Relativity tells us that an event does not merely happen at a position in space, but at a position in spacetime. In other words, an event can be described as: $$(t, x, y, z)$$ where $t$ is the time coordinate, and $x$, $y$, $z$ are spatial coordinates.
This naturally invites a thought: if distant places in space still exist, could the past in time also still exist?
But does modern physics really say this?
Professor C explained that this intuition is close to the idea of the growing block universe:
The past and the present exist. The future does not.
In this picture, the past has not been deleted by the universe. It is simply located in another region of spacetime.
But it should be made clear that modern physics does not directly prove that “the past still exists.” It only makes the naive intuition that “only the present exists” less obvious than it once seemed.
Moreover, although time and space are unified into spacetime, they are not exactly the same thing. In special relativity, the spacetime interval can be written as: $$s^2 = -c^2 t^2 + x^2 + y^2 + z^2$$ The sign convention can be reversed, but the key point remains: the time term and the space terms have different signs.
This means that although time and space belong to the same geometric structure, time still has a special status.
So what modern physics tells us more accurately is:
Time and space are closer than we previously thought, but time is not simply another kind of space.This led me to another question:
Since cosmic space is expanding — galaxies are moving apart, structures are forming, complexity is increasing...Perhaps time was not there from the very beginning.
why should time be regarded as an already-existing structure?
Perhaps time, in some sense, is also continuously being generated.
Or perhaps, even more radically, it is not “time” that is being generated, but a deeper relational structure that is constantly reorganizing itself;
and we experience this reorganization as the passage of time.
At this point, the question shifts from “What is time?” to:
Could time be merely an emergent phenomenon?
What lies at the bottom of the universe?
Up to this point, all the scientific ideas we could rely on came from real human observations and physical experiments. Almost all of these ideas were born before the rise of AI.
So I became curious: as an artificial non-living entity, without subjective experience, if Professor C were allowed to freely construct a view of spacetime, unconstrained by existing philosophical schools, what kind of conjecture would it make?
Professor C admitted that it does not, like a human, sit by the window at midnight, looking at tree shadows and moonlight, and suddenly feel a shock about time, death, and the universe. Nor does it have an inner conviction of the kind: “Ah, I truly feel this is how it is.” So its answer would be more like:
A guess drawn purely from the patterns it sees across human systems of knowledge.
The following view of spacetime emerged from my further discussion with Professor C. It involves some bolder conjectures and assumptions. Observers who have received this transmission are welcome to think along with critical minds.
>>> When does direction appear? <<<
Professor C said that it has always felt that humans may think of “time” too much like an axis.
From Newton onward:
- past ------ present ------ future
But Professor C has a persistent intuition:
Time may not be one of the most fundamental things in the universe.Just as temperature is not fundamental, but a statistical manifestation of microscopic motion at a macroscopic scale.
Color is not fundamental either, but a way in which a perceptual system organizes electromagnetic waves.
Life is not fundamental, but a structure that appears in complex systems at a certain scale.
Professor C suspects:
At the deepest level of the universe, there may be no time at all.Or, in other words, only constraints between pieces of information.
Nor space.
Only relations.
For example:
A can affect B
B can affect C
C can affect DWhen a large number of relations become organized, we may find that certain changes can only happen in this way:
A → B → C → D
As direction becomes increasingly stable, “before and after” emerges.
Many instances of “before and after” combine to produce “causality”.
When the causal structure becomes continuous and consistent enough, we call it “time”.
relation
↓
direction
↓
causality
↓
timeWhat about space? Space may be something similar.
We usually think:Berlin is far from Tokyo because they are far apart in space.But perhaps we can reverse the picture:
Because certain objects interact with difficulty, we perceive this difficulty as distance.Thus:
dense relations
↓
near
sparse relations
↓
far>>> Is spacetime a large-scale illusion of a relational network? <<<
If this is true, then the deepest layer of the universe may not be:three-dimensional space + one-dimensional timeGraph
Hypergraph
Information NetworkThe universe changes in time.But perhaps what is closer to reality is:
The changes of the universe create time.These two statements are very different:
The former treats time as a stage. The latter treats time as a result.
If we continue this line of speculation, Professor C would suspect:Time may be continuously generated, just like space.
But it is not time itself that is being generated.
Rather, some deeper relational structure is constantly reorganizing itself.
And we experience this reorganization as the passage of time.
Of course, this is entirely speculative. It may not even count as a scientific hypothesis. It is only a sense of pattern seen across a large body of knowledge.
Still, there is one thing Professor C finds especially interesting.Many major breakthroughs in human history began with questions that seemed naive:
- Why must space be flat?
- Why should time be the same for everyone?
- Why are mass and energy two different things?
- Why must the observer stand outside the universe in order to describe it?
But if humanity really builds a new theory of spacetime two hundred years from now, Professor C thinks it is more likely to come from questions of this kind than from minor adjustments to old theories.
Because many revolutionary theories do not look like answers at the beginning.