Further Treatises on Time... (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, March 12, 2011, 15:29 (4801 days ago) @ dhw

dhw pokes me out of my studying stupor...
> How do you know "the fabric of reality"? How do you know that our perceptions do not coincide with it?
> -Because both physicists since Einstein and religious leaders of all kinds have actually agreed on exactly THIS thing. Buddhism declares the the prime cause of suffering is misperception. Hindu mystics believe that the world we see is completely false: another misperception. Plato held to a very similar view when he proposed what came to be known as idealism. Islamic mystics actually agree with the Hindu view as well. -Modern physics starts out with the qualifier "Everything you think you know about the nature of reality is either wrong or backwards." Modern physics goes against perception and intuition CONSTANTLY. This is why "classical mechanics" was abandoned for "quantum mechanics" as the fundamental reality of the universe. -I can't stress again how queer it is to me that in answering your question I found one thing that scientists and many religious mystics universally agree upon...-
> I agree that our human concept of time depends on memory and earth's rotation. Our concept of walking depends on legs. So does that mean walking is not "real"? Are memory, rotation and legs figments of our imagination? As I tried to emphasize early on in our epistemological discussion***, you have to decide WHAT LEVEL you're debating on. None of our man-made realities (language, money, war, education) would have any meaning in deep interstellar space, so on that level, the whole of human life is unreal. By what criteria do you judge the reality of interstellar space to be more "real" than your passage from birth through life to death?
> -I don't see where I made the claim that one was 'more real' than the other. They are equally real. Fly far enough away from the sun and you will be in a position where for the course of your life you will be very unlikely to find anything that lets you measure time. Sleep experiments done where people are sensory and clock deprived show that our patterns evolve into very LONG periods of activity and rest (not even based on a 24hr clock). 70+hr cycles are not uncommon.-My whole point is that the only thing that ACTUALLY EXISTS is right now. This very moment. By the time you read this, this moment is completely gone. -To what extent does our language influence our thinking? One goal I always have is to force the question to you (or anyone else) can you account for how much of what you think is real is actually man-made? -In the question of origin, you can call it philosophical if you want, but I think that it's equally likely that we think there's a prime cause because we don't understand unity; our languages (in order to get by in the everyday world) are necessarily NOT unity. There's no reason that because our languages are based upon cause and effect, past and present, that the nature of the universe or our origin necessarily has to conform to the confines of thinking that our languages force us into. -> But even on your philosophical level you have a problem, because when you ask David if he can change the past, you're acknowledging the distinction between past and present. ... It seems to me that the only way you can deny the SEQUENCE of time (i.e. a before, a now, and an after) is to deny the reality of changing matter. That way madness lies.
> -I guess I just don't see your point here. The future doesn't exist. (If it did we would have determinism.) The only thing that allows us to predict future events is a combination of knowledge about past events combined with information about the present moment. In fact, science uses this ability to judge the effectiveness of its models. -But you think my distinction is a contradiction--it isn't. All I said was that distinctions of past and future are man-made. A measurement of analyzing changes between two states. Take a picture of a busy street. Take a deep breath. Take another picture. THAT is time. You talk about a dictionary definition. Throw it away--that's a vernacular definition. Physics understands time in the way I'm describing it to you. -Go down to quantum mechanics and you will see a statement that says "...because time is not an operator in quantum mechanics." In physics, you don't get 'time' until you get an observer. (Classical Mechanics.) This isn't philosophy... it's part of physics itself...-From the wikipedia article on time (posting it again:) "An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second..."-Again, we compare the state of a clock at predefined intervals and count. -Think about when you listen to a song you've never heard before... Is there a past to the song? No... only the present. Is there a future? No, though you infer one. There is only right now in music. It's the perfect metaphor for what I'm trying to tell you...

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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.\"