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

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 23:52 (5182 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 00:14

dhw&#13;&#10;> MATT: Our language helps preserve &quot;now&quot; in our memories, but they are only memories. [..] The present moment that was recorded in your memory cannot be reclaimed. [...] Time is nothing more than a ruler we use to mark events.&#13;&#10;> &#13;&#10;> I have no problem at all with this, but I&apos;m stubbornly reluctant to allow philosophy to take over from pragmatism, so I will argue my case so that you can both enlighten me with yours. What you have shown is that the past has no reality, and in a flash the present also loses its reality. The future has no reality anyway. But although they have no reality, we all assume (and why should we not?) that our memories ... even though they can&apos;t capture the reality of what was once fleetingly real ... nevertheless relate to something that WAS real. <<-I did try to deal with this; I&apos;ll try again. I do not say that &quot;things in the past never happened.&quot; I do not say that &quot;there is no events that did not occur prior to the present moment.&quot; -What I say is that time is separate from events. This shouldn&apos;t be too shocking anyway; Einstein already proved that time is relative in the first place. -First I need to try and restate myself: The absence of time does not negate cause and effect. I read your issue here as that the absence of time negates cause and effect? To me you seem to be reasoning, &quot;If time doesn&apos;t exist, then nothing that happened in the past happened.&quot; -Earlier this morning I had eaten bad fish. Now I have stomach cramps. -There is a cause and effect here; I ate bad fish, and now I have food poisoning because of it. How does time even affect this? -It doesn&apos;t. Bacteria began to grow in the morning--multiplying, but always in the &quot;present moment,&quot; until it got to the point where my body detected there was something wrong and started to fight the infection. When the doctor asks me, &quot;How long ago did you eat the fish?&quot; He is doing so because different species of bacteria grow at different speeds. Time here again, is only a measurement, one of many that the doctor uses to assess the type of infection. -Lets try another event: Some kids in a physics class are lined up, spaced every meter apart from each other. A bowling ball is rolled down their length, and as the ball passes them, each child clicks a stopwatch. -How does time affect this? -Again, it doesn&apos;t. In this instance, time is an explicit measurement in relation to the bowling ball. -Even our clocks are just a measurement of the position of our sun around the earth. -Time is practical because we need a way to reason about events yesterday to today. But it doesn&apos;t make it real. Time is a tool that lets us quantify and reason about the past.--&#13;&#10;>>I don&apos;t want to get sidetracked into issues of subjective interpretation here, so let&apos;s take a solid, material example. You and I are looking at a building. What we see will be our personal perception of it, but we do not doubt its reality, and if there were a million people standing there with us, they too would testify to the reality of the building. Through the mere fact that it is standing there in our present, we would all agree that it must have been built in the past. Each such perception of the present (immediately turning into memory) ... whether linked to material things or experiences or history or evolution ... testifies to the once-reality of the past. In other words, there has been an onward movement in which present has become past. We don&apos;t understand it, and as you say, it&apos;s a ruler we use to mark events, but &quot;nothing more than a ruler&quot; seems to me to miss out on the fact that the onward flow continues, and the records of the no-longer-real ... abstract as well as material ... are evidence of the reality of the movement. I would argue, then, that time is not the present, past and future, but the flow that links them. And so if you claim that time does not exist, you will have to convince me that there is no onward flow.-[EDIT]-You are presenting a false dilemma. My examples above deal with this. But I&apos;ll play. First let me explain more explicitly why I think it&apos;s a false dilemma: What creates time? For you to state that there is an actual flow, you have to be able to tell me what it is. I say that time is the difference between what I measured [at the present moment] yesterday, and [at the present moment] today. There is no &quot;flow.&quot; There just &quot;is.&quot; -In regards to the building, this is information that requires us to know how long it takes to build the building, and this knowledge tells us that the building has a minimum &quot;age&quot; (another two measurements of past vs. present).-[EDIT2]&#13;&#10;I&apos;m milking my brain for any other way to dispel the idea of a &quot;flow.&quot; I look into the past, I see what I would describe above as measurements. If a ball hit yesterday hits me in the head today, there&apos;s still a path of cause and effect. What convinces you that there is a &quot;flow?&quot; I think our differences here is one of perspective... you already accept that the future doesn&apos;t contain reality. -[EDITED]

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"