• Gogo SempaiOP
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      1 year ago

      Light has a finite speed. So whatever our eyes see happened in the past. If what you’re seeing is near you, light will take just a few nanoseconds to bounce off the object and into your eyes (but it’s not instantaneous). If you’re looking at the stars in the sky, you may be looking as far as millions of years into the past. We never see the “present”.

      • rockerface
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        51 year ago

        Not only that, but electricity travels through nerves at a finite speed (that is less than light speed), and brain spends non-zero amount of time to piece together the reality you perceive from all of your senses. So yeah, there’s always a delay in your perception and IIRC there even are experiments that prove that

        • DreamButt
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          41 year ago

          This is the more salient point. Light is so much faster than our brains ability to communicate with itself

        • Parastie
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          31 year ago

          It’s even more strange! According to one paper, our brains are averaging the last 15 seconds of visual information!

      • @lightsecond
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        21 year ago

        Reality travels at the speed of light.

        Someone with a better understanding of physics might be able to explain this better, but as far as i understand it, according to the theory of relativity, changes in the universe are propagated at the speed of light. So there is no definitive “present” without a frame of reference.

        Let’s say you observe two death stars equidistant from you, that are also moving at the same speed as you, blow up at the same time. From your frame of reference, they blew up at the same time. But from the frame of reference of each one of them, the other one blew up later. And this isn’t just a matter of perception. The change in gravity because of them blowing up would also only travel at the speed of light. This speed limit is a fundamental property of the universe.

    • @[email protected]
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      01 year ago

      No such thing as the present or ‘now’. There will be the future and there is the past. And the line between those two is the ‘now’. Except that line has no thickness.

      Everything we perceive is a memory is something that has already happened.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    It’s true! By the time the information reaches your brain and is processed, that moment has gone.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    So a blind person doesnt live at all?

    Dont you have other senses and organs? Dont you have a mind that anticipates a present even without other senses?

    The post is a funny scientific fun fact about lightspeed but thats about it

    • Gogo SempaiOP
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      -21 year ago

      Don’t take shower thoughts this seriously.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    I actually have the other problem. My therapist told me I’m so obsessed with the future that I’m not really living in the present. Working on that bit.

  • Maheswara Yadav
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    01 year ago

    When we live in the present, may be we don’t know what is past, what is present and what is feature…