Further Treatises on Time... (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, March 19, 2011, 12:04 (4794 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: I sense you are very tired of me. -Absolutely not. Our discussions are never less than stimulating ... particularly when you are acting as the devil's advocate! ... and for all our disagreements, your scientific expertise in so many fields is enormously helpful to me. David is right in so far as my artistic (but not, I hasten to add, "romantic") background entails a different approach to life and the world ... a different hierarchy, if you like, to return to our epistemological framework. But as you will have gathered, I do not accept the universal validity of ANY hierarchy, which means I recognize that my own values have no more authority than anyone else's. The philosophical level of argument, which questions the reality of everything we think we know, is therefore perfectly acceptable to me intellectually, and since it coincides with your quantum physics, we could even draw the line there. But to do so would be to accept a hierarchy that goes against many of the tenets resulting from what you rightly call experience. Despite their subjectivity, I'm not convinced that our perceptions are necessarily false (after all, most of science is also based on perception), and so I draw my line between the "philosophical" and the "common sense" levels. The fact that time is a man-made word, and our divisions of it are also man-made, does not make it unreal for me. Similarly, if I stand at Point A, Point B may be 10 feet away and Point C may be 20 feet away, and these are man-made measurements, but that does not mean the space between them and me is not 'real'. You also live on this 'common sense' level ... you have no choice. The difference between us is that I reject the absoluteness of your argument that this level is not part of the "fabric of reality". Without a universal authority (God?) to tell us what is 'real', it seems to me that the only guides we have are our human perception and experience.-I think you're right that we've probably reached a dead end for the moment, but my main concern now is that you should not feel you've been wasting your time. I really do appreciate your patience in the face of my obtuseness!