Einstein and Time (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, February 20, 2012, 20:42 (4658 days ago) @ romansh

ROMANSH: My two cents worth (or tuppence in the inflationary UK).
I don't have a good handle on the concept of time - relativity and more importantly evidence that supports relativity shows me that time is not as I perceive it. Almost by definition an illusion. But is it a delusion? 
I don't know.
I have a sense of colour, pain, free will, dualism, self and much, much more. Plainly these things are not as they seem. Adding time to that list is no big deal.-I'm with you in adding time to the long list of subjective perceptions, but that doesn't mean that WHAT we perceive doesn't have a reality of its own. Our overall problem is that we simply can't be sure of the extent to which our perceptions correspond to that reality. As regards time, we need to distinguish between the different concepts. I'm not arguing against relativity, or the subjectivity of human perception and measurement. My point is that without time as a continuum in which events happen in a sequence of cause-effect-cause-effect etc., of before and after, of future becoming present becoming past, we negate all the findings and observations of the sciences and of human experience, which constitute the only access we have to the universe. That is what I call the philosophical level, on which NOTHING is real, and it ends all discussion. In the English-speaking world, the word we've invented to describe the above sequence is "time". And so, as I keep asking our time-sceptics, if you accept the reality of that sequence, and if you actually believe as I do that it went on before we humans were here and will continue after we humans have gone, what other word would you use to describe it?