Einstein and Time (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, February 16, 2012, 20:58 (4662 days ago) @ dhw

I'm feeling a little guilty at having tried to bully Matt into answering three loaded questions concerning the reality of time. (Sorry, Matt.) -It might perhaps be fairer if I develop my answer to the question you posed in your post of 8 February at 00.26: "How can you possibly argue that time is "real" outside of conscious human existence...outside of the observation of phenomena?" I did respond to this on 12 February at 14.21, but the subject was not followed up, and it seems to me so fundamental to our discussion that it needs to be highlighted.-Our concepts of reality can hardly be based on anything other than human observation and the inferences we draw from our observations. Another of your comments was: "...there is no objective reality for time." In most areas of life we have no way of knowing whether our observations and inferences correspond to objective reality. But that doesn't mean that our concepts are wrong. As you have pointed out yourself, six witnesses describing an accident will give six different accounts, but the subjectivity and relativity of their observations does not mean that the accident itself wasn't "real".-As far as time is concerned, we have agreed that there is no objective way of measuring it, because it's always relative to its context and to the situation of its observer. But there is also a general consensus that things change, and the something DURING which they change is what we humans have always called "time". This applies as much to the birth and death of stars as it does to our own movement from babyhood to old age. -The discussion we're having hinges on definitions and hierarchies. What form of "time" are we talking about (see above), and what do we consider to be "reality"? Of course we humans do create our own realities (and woe betide you if you ignore them!) ... money, machines, jobs, art ... which in relation to the cosmos have no "reality". If there were no humans, none of these would exist. But my (subjective) view is that you can't say the same about time, because even if there were no humans, I firmly believe there would still be a moment-to-moment-to-moment sequence (which we call "time") in the course of which present conditions would change to past. I would even go so far as to say that without that sequence, you and I would not be here. My three questions still apply, but I hope this will be a gentler way of explaining why I feel I have to ask them.