Is time just a perception of potential possibilities?

[jaysteve]

This is a thought I had on a restless night and wanted to see what others thought about it.

what if all potentials of everything all dimensions, all states of matter, everything conceived or unconceived exist all at once, could our perception of what time is just be us seeing a sting of potencial possibilities. Because we can only see a small fraction of potencial of all things we precieve the potencials that we do see as flowing time.
I believe our perception of what time is to be like one of those books where you can choose your own path through it, just because your reading a specific chapter which leads you to a chosen path, all other parts and all other possible paths all exist in that same moment. Your just experiencing the book from one specific state.
We can only experience one state of an infinite number of potencial states at any given "time". This is why experience the world the way we do, and why we've come up with many of the theories that we use to explain the universe.

Any feedback would be great like I said I just want to see what others think of this.

 

[Steely Dan]

This idea exists already, sort of. This philosophy is built into the way that some people look at quantum mechanics. In particular, check out the many worlds hypothesis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

 

[jaysteve]

Just took a quick look (im at work) but it looks interesting. thanks for the post

 

[jaysteve]

After a more in depth look. I see the similarities to my post. One thing I think they miss in this theory is that it assumed these superpositions are responding to us and our observations. They often state things like "wavefunction collapse" and the "cat paradox" to show how superpostions become one state (position). I don't believe any observation by us collapses the wave function or brings a superpostion of states to one state. A better question would be why do we see specific states of that superpostion when we observe them. More along the lines of Quantum decoherence where all states remain we just loose site of some due to interpritation.