Einstein and Time (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 18:38 (4672 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT (to Julia): You mention my thought processes being complex. [...] How much do you love your future children? -MATT (to David and dhw): Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws [...[ describe a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty.-Complex indeed. How can you have future children if there's no such reality as past-present-future? How can you make and verify predictions if there's no such reality as past-present-future? Since when did Nature's laws describe anything? It's humans who interpret Nature's laws and make grandiose statements about them. You concede that my "view of time as a sequence of events, is necessarily true as with no object there is no determination of time." But then you go on to say that according to Einstein "you can determine the state of ANY object from any set of current or initial conditions." What does it mean to "determine the state"? Current = now, and initial = before now (= sequence of time), and how can you know the initial conditions when all objects hark back to an endless sequence of cause and effect? And how the heck does all this prove that time is "fundamentally nonexistent"? -Time, you say, "is relative in the absolute sense". I'm not sure how "relative" can have an "absolute" sense, but yes, we have long since agreed that time is relative, and that we use it to make measurements, and these are our human made-up measurements. But its relativity does not mean that the sequences of before-and-after and cause-effect-cause-effect etc., are not real. (See my final paragraph, if you can stick with it that long.)-You talk about the universe's perspective. Unless the universe has a conscious mind (David's panentheist God?) it doesn't have a perspective. "Even though the bus hits me and kills me, there's been no actual change of state in the universe." I don't suppose the Milky Way will go into paroxysms over your death or mine, but that doesn't mean there was no sequence. And you needn't set up a model. All you need do is zoom off into space with a telescope that has an infinite capacity and is infinitely adjustable, and you can watch your squishing for the rest of...oops...time. But that won't alter the fact that first you were unsquished and then you were squished. -Throughout our discussions on knowledge and reality, I've constantly harped on about levels. On the philosophical level there's no such thing as knowledge or reality, because we have no way of knowing what is true or real in the great scheme of things. So if you like to argue that time, space, the sun, the earth, scoobypoo and I do not exist, no-one can prove you wrong. That is the end of all discussion. However, there is also the commonsense level, which allows us to form a general consensus on what constitutes knowledge and reality. Since our human consciousness is the only one we can be sure of on this commonsense level (I do believe that you exist, Matt), and since experience teaches us that the sequences of before and after, cause and effect are real, and since no-one has yet succeeded in reversing the onward movement of these sequences, what grounds are there for saying that the philosophical level is more real than the commonsense level? As you have now acknowledged, hierarchies are subjective. I'll go for the commonsense level and avoid getting squished. I strongly advise you to do the same!