The argument that time doesn’t really exist and is just a byproduct of perception kind of reminds me (at least superficially) of Zeno’s Paradoxes arguing that motion doesn’t exist and is an illusion.
Time does have objective measures independent of human perception. For example, things like biological processes, astronomical/celestial events and movements, atomic radiation, wave frequencies, etc have consistent and observable durations or cycles that can be compared against each other. There are also known stimuli that have an observable effect on time, such as velocity or gravity, which can distort time. The fact that time interacts with its environment suggests that time is something inherent in the universe and not just a human perception.
It is also a significant leap to go from “no longer happening” and “not happening yet” to “do not exist”.
Agreed Yoss. Will post some other thoughts when I’m not driving. I want to explore the interaction of time and no longer/not happening = truly non existent.
Agreed Someone but it sure is fun to attempt putting the puzzle together.
Been thinking of time and cell degradation. I’m not sure that time is actually reaching out and interacting with it. Im not sure that just because we can perceive a change means time must truly exist. As we age we perceive time differently and so days and years seem shorter to us than when we were children. It’s not that time has changed - our perception/brain chemistry has. In short, I don’t think measuring time, be it by cell degradation or the invention of a clock prove that time must exist.
Space I think is also based on perception and not a concrete truth or perhaps is true and the distance between two points is always really, infinity. Follow Yossarian’s paradox link and take a look at Achilles and the tortoise.
I have always found this interesting and sometimes at work I will place my hand on my desk and think if I am actually touching anything at all. You can always divide distance by half. No matter how close you perceive your “hand” to be to the “desk” you can always divide that distance in half. Even after you feel the desk, if you could zoom in you would find nothing but empty spaces between atoms and matter that could then… Again… Be divided in half.
Back to time,
I do think the problem with my favorite time theory is the jump-to-not-existing-part. But Im not sure how to fix it. I suppose what you’re saying Yoss is that just because the future and past are not happening now, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist - perhaps dormant? Laying in wait for maybe - our perception to activate… My head hurts…
That would fall in line with the studies showing particles acting in accordance with how the observer wants them to act…
So then:
Space - is only infinite
Time - …I lost my thought… ;D
Time is like the inch or millimeter… it doesn’t exist, humans just invented it to measure things, divide it up, etc. Reminds me of the K. Gibran aphorism “If it were not for our conception of weights and measures we would stand in awe of the firefly as we do before the sun.”
So on that note, I reckon there is no ‘time’ in the universe’s, just change.
Well. No religion kinda kills part of philosophy. No Transcendentalism or Theism. That leaves us with Postmodernism and Naturaism.
Naturalism seems to sound all great, science and all that. But if we did evolve, we can’t really trust our minds, or explained evil OR good.
Postmodernism makes sense, we can’t really know the truth because everything we say, do or think is affected by the culture around us, making it impossible to really know the truth.
But then again, that’s saying we can’t know the truth, even if that means we can’t know the truth about if we can know the truth. Thus is self defeating.
Imma stay away from the other two cause no “religion”.
I think one thing that can be confusing is that the term “time” can actually refer to slightly different, but related concepts. There is the physical concept of time, like the duration between waves in a certain frequency of light, or the time it takes the earth to complete one orbit around the sun, etc. And then if you get into physics, you have all the properties that go with that, including things like relativity, time dilation, etc. I think there is solid evidence that we can take this as a physical truth.
But then we also have a somewhat separate concept of time based on perception like easytrapezey is alluding to when they mentioned that we perceive time differently as we age. Things like sleeping, levels of physical or mental activity and focus, etc can also influence our perception of time. Obviously that is related to the concept of physical time, but with more focus on how we perceive the passage of physical time than on physical time itself. This concept of time is built into our language with things like “time flies” or saying something like “that was a really long hour” after sitting through a boring meeting. This is also something that can be influenced by culture, where one culture might have a somewhat different concept of time from another culture even though physical time is still the same. This concept of time is not going to be a universal physical truth, but something inherent in our own perceptions.
Our experiences are always going to be filtered through our perceptions, so in a way you can always make some kind of distinction between some physical truth and the way we experience and perceive it. It can be really difficult to distinguish between the physical truth and how we perceive it. That doesn’t mean these concepts don’t also exist as physical truths, though.
I think in some ways distinguishing between “time existing” and “time being illusion created by the fact that we observe certain changes” is almost a semantic issue. We can observe those changes and verify that there is some physical concept facilitating them. Time is just the term we use refer to that concept. Granted, we can (and have in the past) make assumptions about the concept of time that turn out to be wrong, but there is still some physical concept that is driving our perception of change. Even if we later realize that specific details that we thought were physical truths were in fact wrong, the general idea will still apply. Rather than rejecting the concept of time all together, we would just update our understanding of the concept.
For example, the idea of time dilation disproved something we had previously assumed was fundamental about time. But rather than disprove time itself, it actually reinforced the concept that time is a physical truth and not just an illusion of human perception. It showed evidence of time interacting with the universe in ways similar to how space or matter do, and that it behaves in ways that are completely independent of our own human usage of time.
The idea of what physical contact means in the context of atomic or sub-atomic particles is really interesting. I’m sure there is some really complicated physics regarding probabilities of particle collisions or possibly involving fundamental forces or things like that that comes into play with defining physical contact, but that’s all way over my head. On a macro level, we can define physical contact easily enough in terms of physical concepts like friction or conduction or biological sensations like triggering nerve endings, but thinking of how our perception of physical contact breaks down on a microscopic scale is pretty crazy. I’m sure the wave theory of particles complicates that even further. It might be something like physical contact manifests as interference between two particle waves or something like that? It seems like I remember reading about something along those lines, but I’m probably butchering the concept somehow.
Infinity itself is also a really strange concept. It’s not really a number itself, so you can’t apply mathematical concepts to it in the same way you would numbers, but it’s also closely related to our understanding of numbers, and you can work out mathematics involving infinite concepts (calculus, infinite series, etc). And not all things that are infinite are necessarily equivalent, mathematically speaking. For example, some of the the stuff in Zeno’s paradoxes is mathematically resolved, where you have an infinite number of distances to travel, but each successive distance continues to get infinitely smaller, and the overall effect is that the sum converges to a finite solution.
There are actually some really interesting philosophical problems involving infinite series once you get into advanced mathematics. For example, say you start at 1 and add 2: 1+2 = 3. And then you add 3: 1+2+3 = 6. And you keep doing that infinitely, adding up all the positive numbers in existence. Obviously, the sum is going to just keep getting infinitely larger. But there is actually a legitimate mathematical solution that says the sum of every positive integer is actually -1/12. And that solution has actual real world applications (I think in some kind of electrical engineering or something like that?) that actually work. Which makes no sense given everything we know about numbers, so it is a huge philosophical problem of what that solution actually represents. Infinity is just…strange.
How do we put this into a philosophical statement - how do we show that even though past and future aren’t happening that doesn’t mean they don’t exist?
Time will speed up or slow down depending on where the perceiver is. Higher up, you age quicker, lower more slowly. Gravity is changing time.
A man at the bottom of a mountain is experiencing existence at 1 gray hair per 10 years. A man at the top of the mountain is experiencing existence at 1 gray hair per 2 years. (Remember this implies our bodies are aging with the time) If there is another man at the center of the entire universe’s gravity will he experience time at all?
If time slows the closer you get to a point of gravity it stands to reason there are points in the universe where there is no passage of time - black hole right? If there is no passage it does not exist ATM (dormant).
The further you get from gravity - traveling at the speed of light - you should experience time speeding up. If you leave earth and fly for a couple years at lightspeed and come back everyone else will be, say 30 years older. But since time was speeding up for you then your body should have aged appropriately anyway? So really you haven’t gone to the future, you’re entire body has been perceiving (aging) more quickly.
Logi,
I think you’ve hit upon the underlying problem we face - we cannot trust ourselves. Maybe this is another good subject. We are just filters. We cannot see all the lights and waves and particles around us. We only see what our eyes and brains are capable of. We only feel what our skin is capable of. Our perception is everything.
If you could feel everything that was coming in contact with your skin right now you would probably lose your mind! If you could see what everything actually looked liked would you be able to interact and survive in this existence? Or would everything just be far too confusing, incomprehensible, to make sense of anything.
We can measure the distance of a string for sure. In this dimension, in this existence, in this perception, we know we can measure a “string” - for sure. BUT our perceptions are not necessarily fact. Really if you look closely the string is made of atoms and particles circling each other like tiny universes. Between the atoms and particles is space like space between planets that can continue to be explored and all held together by gravity.
Time is contingent on gravity.
Gravity is contingent on space between two points.
Space From one point to another is infinity.
Again time does not exist?
“A” is where you are. “B” is point of gravity. “C” is a point furthest from B(gravity).
If you want to slow time you move closer to B. If you want to speed up time you move closer to C. A to B is infinity. A to C is infinity. You can never truly reach either point. Does this again point to time not truly existing?
Here is something for you to think about. You are made of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, calcium, potassium, and many other things. But wait, you are not the only person or biotic or even abiotic things that is made up of these things yet you are an unique individual. So what makes you who you are? How did"you" even appear or appear the way you are? Most importantly, where did “you” come from?
Also, a little about time. What time would it be if all the clocks were stopped?
The time now is… Sun-behind-the-big-oak-tree-in-my-back-yard.
Very interesting about the molecular make up of ourselves. If I open my head, where am “I”. Further, our cells are replaced all the time. The “me” right now isn’t even made of the same cells of the “me” from 10 years ago… Yet here “I” am. What keeps telling the new cells to keep forming “me”? A cell DNA maybe? So there’s my DNA, a collective DNA of all the cells together and then another even smaller DNA that instructs the cells to stay together… :P. I know nothing about DNA, so this is “me” talkin’ out “my”… “Butt”.
Time is still just made up by humans. The universe’s just have conditions, nothing is measuring ‘time’, or waiting on ‘time’. It just is, as it is. What we may call ‘time’ is just a proper condition to any atomic structure. It’s not self referential where time is born.
There is no ‘self’ or ‘I’. That is just a figment of the imagination. But you need to meditate on that to see it. ;D
“From a scientific, third-person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only.”
Thomas Metzinger
“Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.”
-Theodore Adorno
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
— Albert Einstein
“The self is put together, made up, and the self is not when the parts are dissolved. But in illusion the self separates itself from its qualities in order to protect itself, to give itself continuity, permanency. It takes refuge in its qualities through separating itself from them. The self asserts that it is this and it is that; the self, the I, modifies, changes, transforms its thoughts, its qualities, but this change only gives strength to the self, to its protective walls. But if you are aware deeply you will perceive that the thinker and his thoughts are one; the observer is the observed. To experience this actual integrated fact is extremely difficult and right meditation is the way to this integration.”
Man philosiphy is confusing.
“One word of explanation already misses the mark.”
-Ejo
This is how I feel about it. You literally have to
“Think with your whole body”
-Taisen Dezhimaru
