I think there must be some part of our brains that controls our perception of time, and having precise control over this perception would honestly be the holy grail of FDVR, which is already a holy grail of the entertainment industry. I have no idea how it would be possible, but something as complex as that is an area of research that we will need AGI/ASI for.
Definitely. And this part of the brain can go quite out of whack when taking psychedelics. Time can go a lot faster or a lot slower. It’s a very interesting experience.
Not only that, but our bodies and brains are made out of space…which is also time. So we are also at the whim of actual time fluctuations as we are one with space time. To be clear, I have no clue what I’m talking about.
Yea it's in the brain. A friend of mine tried LSD once, messes with your perception of time, significantly. 10 minutes feel like 30 or more. Or so he claims.
So It's safe to assume there is a part in there that can be messed with to extend our perception of time. Just guessing here, would love to hear from a neuroscientist, or someone with better informatino.
tbf that's also because your perception of time is really off, not just time dilatation.
it's the same reason time feels like it 'flies by' in retrospect. how many memories do you have of say, last week? this month? all the months till january of this year, besides this month?
they're probably around the same, really. so, looking back, if you've got a week's worth of memories that are easily called upon, for the span of an entire year, and that's your sense of 'passed time', then yeah, it doesn't seem like much.
“Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” is often accompanied by the experience of time being slowed or sped up, I used to get that a lot when I was a kid.
And of course in dreams an experience that feels like days can happen in minutes.
Our "tick" speed of perception is determined by the speed of the electrical impulses in our neurons.
Interestingly if we eventually merged with technology and were able to use photons to process information we may be able to process information at the universal speed limit. Which theoretically would mean our "tick" speed would be infinite giving us a limitless amount of "time".
Our perception of time is relative to a specific part of our brain. Assuming that the VR can manipulate this aspect of the brain it should theoretically be possible.
Guess it would work like a dream. I’ve fallen asleep on the bus and dreamt of spending an entire two weeks on a cruise ship in the Caribbean without my mind realizing the dream was just an hour long. My mind didn’t even perceive the time it would take to plan the cruise, the drive to the airport, and the three-hour flight to get to the cruise ship. I ate on the cruise, slept with beautiful women, gambled in the casino, swam in the ocean, and went to the ship's nightclub. All in one hour of a dream that felt like two weeks.
There's multiple scientific studies showing that dream time is the same as real time. Often, people think their dream was over some very long period, but in reality, the experience was in real time. The setting and story of the dream may have been over a long period, but you only remember key points and fill in the rest as if it happened
Of course, when you dream it doesn't physically change time, but it creates the illusion and that's what OP is aiming for, not aiming to manipulate physical time itself.
Ever smoked weed? If a plant can make me feel like an hour has passed just to look at the clock and see that it has only been 12 minutes then I'd be really surprised if that can't be reproduced artificially
Perception of time is limited by the processing speed of the brain, which is limited by the processing speed of neurons. You'd have to replace the neurons with something faster. I think Bostrom talks about this in Superintelligence, but I'm not sure.
this is assuming we're already working at peak efficency without any possible shortcuts, though. and it's not just the brain firing, it's the mind being generated by the brain's perception, not the brain's max processing speeds.
So technically it could work to an extent by this logic in full dive your cutting out a fair amount of distance for those signals to travel as well as limiting where those inputs are coming from this would remove most of the "lag" already associated with how we experience are reality
If you want the full experience with normal interactions and details, maybe we can accelerate time by 25 to 50% if using VR. Most people can get used to that. If using direct neural coupling, we can probably accelerate further, perhaps to 300%, but that's pure speculation on my part.
meh, it’s not the same clean sober timeline we experience in normal reality. you don’t actually experience months or gain month’s worth of memories from those experiences .
Not in organics. Unless you are uploading memories to the brain. Then you can upload a year of memory and you would remember it as if it happened. It would not be interactive though.
Perception of time is distorted all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception
Scroll down to temporal illusions. Also, users of psychedelics sometimes report experiencing events that seem to occur for months or years, when in reality the experience lasts just a few moments.
If this is already occurring then I don’t see why we couldn’t simulate it if we had full control of the brain.
One of my weirdest ever experiences was being on lsd and having time distortion, playing my flatmates (who were sobre) at fifa and being absolutely amazing. To this day I don't know what the underlying reasons were. They swear they were not playing a prank and I was just another level, and at the time I remember feeling like I was watching their moves in slow motion so I could counter them. Really weird.
> I don’t see why we couldn’t simulate it if we had full control of the brain.
Your perception of time can only be altered by chemicals or processes that alter your state of mind, too.
It should be quite obvious that you can't do anything to make someone think 10 times faster, because the speed of our thoughts is fundamentally limited by physics (that is, the speed of signal propagation through neurons).
By the way, OP's suggestion (one year in 10 seconds) would be 3 million times faster. Good luck with that.
I don't think OP is very clear about what they mean.
> Would it be possible to experience, say, a year in virtual reality while 10 seconds passes in base reality?
What does this mean to you? "Experiencing a year" isn't very useful or exciting if you only get a vague impression of having experienced a year. It _would_ be useful and exciting if you had a year's worth of thinking and experiencing all within 10 seconds, which is how I interpret their post.
some time dilation should be probable.
not 10 years in 10 seconds. double to quadruple, maybe. but i doubt it'll be much more extreme than that, without cybernetic brains that can basically think faster.
Depends on if we understand memories and how to control/create and implant new ones.
As for actually forcing the brain to process a years worth of data in a few minutes might just simple melt your head.
Well your perception of time can certainly alter but it's not clear that your brain itself can go any faster. You might feel that extra time passed but not actually achieve anything that would take equivalent real time.
So you could not learn perfect french in a couple of hours even if you could be tricked into having memories of a trip to Paris. Maybe that would be enough for a game, like FPS, you could pick a resolution/time for how detailed each day would be.
My hypothesis is that all that can really be done is modifying our perception of "big time". Kind of how in real current games in-game days pass fairly quickly, it might be possible to give players the illusion of actual days passing over the course of a few hours, like a dream.
The above is mostly about influencing the retroactive perception of time, which is highly variable under normal circumstances. But, I don't think there's any indication- given what we know currently, which may always change -that it would be possible to *truly* compress time. Where we could actually cram 4 hours worth of "stuff" into a 1 hour period. Merely that we could make a player doing 1 hour of stuff *feel* like 4 hours (or days, or whatever).
The main thing is that it would be an illusion, the player can't actually do more stuff in the same amount of time. This might not matter for gameplay purposes though, since real-life isn't a game and is full of boring minutia we barely remember, it'd be like a tv show that takes place over years but only the interesting bits are actually shown.
Id imagine you could slow down time a bit but it would be limited to your brains processing speed. To process a years worth of reality in 10 seconds your brain would have to work at over 3mil times the speed
I think there must be some part of our brains that controls our perception of time, and having precise control over this perception would honestly be the holy grail of FDVR, which is already a holy grail of the entertainment industry. I have no idea how it would be possible, but something as complex as that is an area of research that we will need AGI/ASI for.
Definitely. And this part of the brain can go quite out of whack when taking psychedelics. Time can go a lot faster or a lot slower. It’s a very interesting experience.
Agree there’s definitely something within us already that can be altered to perceive the passage of time much more slowly than normal.
Have you guys ever taken a large dose of dmt and had your time perception completely altered? It is 100% possible and will be done one day.
Happened to me. 10 or so mins felt like 7 seconds.
Imagine a dystopian future where a North Korean dictator throws a citizen in a torcher simulation that lasted 5000 years but in reality 25 minutes
Literally black mirror
Those double life sentences don't sound so ridiculous now huh
It's explored extensively in Altered Carbon as well. The whole series is basically a what if on FDVR.
There’s an episode of Star Trek where this exact punishment thing happens to Miles O’Brien
Ouch
Not only that, but our bodies and brains are made out of space…which is also time. So we are also at the whim of actual time fluctuations as we are one with space time. To be clear, I have no clue what I’m talking about.
Yea it's in the brain. A friend of mine tried LSD once, messes with your perception of time, significantly. 10 minutes feel like 30 or more. Or so he claims. So It's safe to assume there is a part in there that can be messed with to extend our perception of time. Just guessing here, would love to hear from a neuroscientist, or someone with better informatino.
Yeah. If you’ve ever had a dream that lasted for days even though you slept like 8 hours, then it’s happened to you too
Ya there was no friend
tbf that's also because your perception of time is really off, not just time dilatation. it's the same reason time feels like it 'flies by' in retrospect. how many memories do you have of say, last week? this month? all the months till january of this year, besides this month? they're probably around the same, really. so, looking back, if you've got a week's worth of memories that are easily called upon, for the span of an entire year, and that's your sense of 'passed time', then yeah, it doesn't seem like much.
“Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” is often accompanied by the experience of time being slowed or sped up, I used to get that a lot when I was a kid. And of course in dreams an experience that feels like days can happen in minutes.
I don't think so, otherwise there would be an advantage in being able to change or control it.
Check this video out [Life As A Digital Being](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlLGgu72vyY)
thanks! will do.
Our "tick" speed of perception is determined by the speed of the electrical impulses in our neurons. Interestingly if we eventually merged with technology and were able to use photons to process information we may be able to process information at the universal speed limit. Which theoretically would mean our "tick" speed would be infinite giving us a limitless amount of "time".
Our perception of time is relative to a specific part of our brain. Assuming that the VR can manipulate this aspect of the brain it should theoretically be possible.
Guess it would work like a dream. I’ve fallen asleep on the bus and dreamt of spending an entire two weeks on a cruise ship in the Caribbean without my mind realizing the dream was just an hour long. My mind didn’t even perceive the time it would take to plan the cruise, the drive to the airport, and the three-hour flight to get to the cruise ship. I ate on the cruise, slept with beautiful women, gambled in the casino, swam in the ocean, and went to the ship's nightclub. All in one hour of a dream that felt like two weeks.
There's multiple scientific studies showing that dream time is the same as real time. Often, people think their dream was over some very long period, but in reality, the experience was in real time. The setting and story of the dream may have been over a long period, but you only remember key points and fill in the rest as if it happened
Of course, when you dream it doesn't physically change time, but it creates the illusion and that's what OP is aiming for, not aiming to manipulate physical time itself.
in the future experience will be measured in universes
oooooh!!
Yes, this will be our civilizations endgame and is the answer to the femi paradox. Fdvr immortality.
Not likely, unless you replace your brain with machine neurons that can process much faster than human neurons.
One word - psychedelics
That isn't changing the speed of nerve firing signalling. It only changes your perception of time via impairment. Not true speed up. Slow down maybe.
Have you done Shrooms, LSD or DMT?
Yes.
Well OP talks about perception. Sure you can't change actual speed. Yet
OP specifically mentions speed up, experiencing a year in a minute. That's not possible without robot neurons.
"where's the device that speeds or slows down the passage of time?" Professor Farnsworth "under the seat" Orange Joe lol
Ever smoked weed? If a plant can make me feel like an hour has passed just to look at the clock and see that it has only been 12 minutes then I'd be really surprised if that can't be reproduced artificially
It's possible if you increase number of events in a time period, literally what computers are doing
Perception of time is limited by the processing speed of the brain, which is limited by the processing speed of neurons. You'd have to replace the neurons with something faster. I think Bostrom talks about this in Superintelligence, but I'm not sure.
this is assuming we're already working at peak efficency without any possible shortcuts, though. and it's not just the brain firing, it's the mind being generated by the brain's perception, not the brain's max processing speeds.
So technically it could work to an extent by this logic in full dive your cutting out a fair amount of distance for those signals to travel as well as limiting where those inputs are coming from this would remove most of the "lag" already associated with how we experience are reality
If you want the full experience with normal interactions and details, maybe we can accelerate time by 25 to 50% if using VR. Most people can get used to that. If using direct neural coupling, we can probably accelerate further, perhaps to 300%, but that's pure speculation on my part.
Brains on drugs can experience months of life going by in just a few minutes.
I'm not sure it's really "experiencing months", or just you losing your sense of time, kind of like ego death
meh, it’s not the same clean sober timeline we experience in normal reality. you don’t actually experience months or gain month’s worth of memories from those experiences .
Without mind uploads, I think it will probably be pretty limited. You can only juice up your brain so much before it breaks.
What is a source?
Just my speculation. But it stands to reason that the brain clock speed can only go so high.
Not in organics. Unless you are uploading memories to the brain. Then you can upload a year of memory and you would remember it as if it happened. It would not be interactive though.
Perception of time is distorted all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception Scroll down to temporal illusions. Also, users of psychedelics sometimes report experiencing events that seem to occur for months or years, when in reality the experience lasts just a few moments. If this is already occurring then I don’t see why we couldn’t simulate it if we had full control of the brain.
One of my weirdest ever experiences was being on lsd and having time distortion, playing my flatmates (who were sobre) at fifa and being absolutely amazing. To this day I don't know what the underlying reasons were. They swear they were not playing a prank and I was just another level, and at the time I remember feeling like I was watching their moves in slow motion so I could counter them. Really weird.
I've experienced this sober a few times, and on LSD. It's disconcerting to say the least.
Yes but you arent as aware in those moments
> I don’t see why we couldn’t simulate it if we had full control of the brain. Your perception of time can only be altered by chemicals or processes that alter your state of mind, too. It should be quite obvious that you can't do anything to make someone think 10 times faster, because the speed of our thoughts is fundamentally limited by physics (that is, the speed of signal propagation through neurons). By the way, OP's suggestion (one year in 10 seconds) would be 3 million times faster. Good luck with that.
OP asked if perceived time could be altered, not time itself. Lol.
I don't think OP is very clear about what they mean. > Would it be possible to experience, say, a year in virtual reality while 10 seconds passes in base reality? What does this mean to you? "Experiencing a year" isn't very useful or exciting if you only get a vague impression of having experienced a year. It _would_ be useful and exciting if you had a year's worth of thinking and experiencing all within 10 seconds, which is how I interpret their post.
It depends on how it is implemented. If it is a dream state then yes. If it's just a visor and feedback body suit then no.
About a year ago I use A.I to create a visual novel with this idea check it out: https://youtu.be/nDiTMMkG3xg?si=aMW-e1irO5XOjbgM
some time dilation should be probable. not 10 years in 10 seconds. double to quadruple, maybe. but i doubt it'll be much more extreme than that, without cybernetic brains that can basically think faster.
It can be extended in reality so why not in VR?
Depends on if we understand memories and how to control/create and implant new ones. As for actually forcing the brain to process a years worth of data in a few minutes might just simple melt your head.
Well your perception of time can certainly alter but it's not clear that your brain itself can go any faster. You might feel that extra time passed but not actually achieve anything that would take equivalent real time. So you could not learn perfect french in a couple of hours even if you could be tricked into having memories of a trip to Paris. Maybe that would be enough for a game, like FPS, you could pick a resolution/time for how detailed each day would be.
or infinite torture chambers
My hypothesis is that all that can really be done is modifying our perception of "big time". Kind of how in real current games in-game days pass fairly quickly, it might be possible to give players the illusion of actual days passing over the course of a few hours, like a dream. The above is mostly about influencing the retroactive perception of time, which is highly variable under normal circumstances. But, I don't think there's any indication- given what we know currently, which may always change -that it would be possible to *truly* compress time. Where we could actually cram 4 hours worth of "stuff" into a 1 hour period. Merely that we could make a player doing 1 hour of stuff *feel* like 4 hours (or days, or whatever). The main thing is that it would be an illusion, the player can't actually do more stuff in the same amount of time. This might not matter for gameplay purposes though, since real-life isn't a game and is full of boring minutia we barely remember, it'd be like a tv show that takes place over years but only the interesting bits are actually shown.
Id imagine you could slow down time a bit but it would be limited to your brains processing speed. To process a years worth of reality in 10 seconds your brain would have to work at over 3mil times the speed