Language and Logic (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 09, 2014, 20:15 (3879 days ago) @ David Turell

George: But if there is a zero of time then it follows BY LOGIC that there can be nothing preceding it and therefore no cause.

David: Time is caused by a sequence of events, as we humans perceived it. If there are no events an entity can exist timelessly, not changing in any way. No change, no time has passed. Our universe is not eternal, but something was. There is no logical way around this conclusion.

Is time "caused" by events, or are events simply the means by which we humans recognize and measure time, through the sequence of past/before, present/now, future/after? Even if we were all to agree that the big bang marked the first event we think we know of, that is hardly in itself a guarantee that there were no events before it.-However, I'm puzzled by your picture of an entity that does not change in any way and is not associated with any event. Such an entity might just as well not be there! Since I know you are referring to your god, which you call a universal intelligence, are you then telling us that the eternal something may be a mind that never had a single thought for ever and ever until suddenly it created our universe? If it did have a thought, there would have had to be a before-the-thought and an after-the-thought, and according to my logic (and George's), before and after are concepts dependent on time. And so a completely inert, non-thinking, non-producing, unchanging something suddenly becomes active, thinking, producing and all-changing? You have not specified that this is actually what you believe, but I can think of at least three alternatives that seem to me just as logical, if not more so, and that all entail a passage from past to present to future (which is how I would define time): 1) eternally non-conscious active energy, for ever producing matter; 2) eternally conscious energy, for ever producing matter (= a god); 3) eternal unconscious energy producing matter through which consciousness evolves. I must say I have difficulty distinguishing your do-nothing-think-nothing-change-nothing-eventless-timeless something from George's alternative, which is nothing at all until matter somehow (we'd all love to know how) "quietly began" to produce itself.