The Illusion of Time (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Friday, September 17, 2010, 10:53 (4967 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

BALANCE_MAINTAINED: In real world terms, Time is the imaginary construct we have designed to link one instant and the next. It is not part of reality (i.e. it is not a real thing) but it is useful as an imaginary tool that helps us measure events.-This is very much in line with Matt's thinking, and I don't want to repeat the arguments I've put forward in my response to him (15 September at 14.01). However, when you say "it's not part of reality (i.e. it is not a real thing)", you raise all kinds of questions. Do you mean that only tangible objects are real things? Is love not a real thing? Friendship, joy, sadness, consciousness, imagination, hope, grief, faith? You won't find a solid block labelled love out there in the universe, but it's probably more real to you than a red giant or a white dwarf. (I hope it is!) There are vast areas of existence that we don't understand, but we give names to them because they have a reality for us as humans. You may perhaps argue that human reality is not objective reality***, but in your admirable post under "Science Trips Over Its Own Feet" (16 September at 13.13) ... which strikes many answering chords in me ... you emphasize that materialism and spiritualism are "two sides of the same coin, life". (I take it that by spiritualism you mean matters of the spirit, not Madame Arcati summoning the dead!) I would put time almost in the same category, except that it goes one step beyond these individual spiritual realities, because we can actually see its effects in the material world around us. Nothing stays the same. Science can observe the changes, and can even predict them. You say "the rate of change is an illusion". The rate, yes, but as you say yourself, not the change. You're treating time solely as a measuring instrument, which of course is one way of defining it. And as a measuring instrument, it's certainly a useful if imaginary construct. But if you define it as a movement, the statement that it has no reality flies in the face of all experience. -***In Matt's post today under "Chapter 2 of Does it Matter" he quite rightly, in my view, attacks Graham Dunston Martin's contention that "without consciousness nothing can exist", arguing that "the universe, without man, would still exist." I would say that without man the process of change would continue in Nature (I know you agree), thereby proving that there is a continuous onward movement which we call time. The present will always become the past, whether we are here or not.