Can you answer the most fundamental question about time?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Speakpigeon, Apr 18, 2019.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    I have given you a link to a reputable professional expert, who you say is wrong. Now explain yourself and what are these equations...OR ARE YOU AGAIN TALKING OUT OF YOUR ARSE!!!
     
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  3. river

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    I don't care about wether someone expert or not , just give me your ideas .

    So does your arse do the thinking , pad ? It seems so , hence his stress filled posts .
     
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Of course you don't. That's because you see yourself in your psychotic delusions as an expert. See a doctor.
    Stressed?? Not at all silly boy...'Tis you you lack the balls to answer questions and side step them instead, as well as trolling and lying.
     
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  7. river

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    So since spacetime is effected by matter , then spacetime should be able to effect matter .

    What are the real physical properties of spacetime .

    There are none .
     
  8. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Since you were just mentioning stress river, perhaps you should note that your post is in the wrong thread...this is your time debacle nonsense.
    And no to both your unsupported assumptions. Just your opinion, and we know how fallible that is don't we river?
     
  9. river

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    No fallible enough to say I'm wrong .
     
  10. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    So, not meaning to build up your obvious stress levels again, but in reality, you are always wrong. I mean I could go and list them and it would go into pages and pages....from your atomic war on Mars, to your non rotating Moon, to your UFO and alien claims, to your live rocks claims, to your electric universe crap, to your weird water molecule claim, to your time debacle nonsense, to your general word salad in many posts.....want me to go on river?
     
  11. river

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    From my post#164


    So since spacetime is effected by matter , then spacetime should be able to effect matter .

    What are the real physical properties of spacetime .


    There are none .
     
  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    You are in the wrong thread river. Try calming your stress levels.
    and as usual totally wrong and unsupported anyway.
     
  13. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    I was asking what is the most fundamental question about space.

    If there is one.
     
  14. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    A permittive condition?
     
  15. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    Time is the dimension that organizes events in sequence and increases continually.
     
  16. river

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    More than this ,

    Space is fundamental , as is the real physical object . Neither can exist without the other .

    At minimum this Universe is three dimensionally based .

    time is irrelevant , to both space and physical objects , existence . And manifestation .

    To take out time , neither affects space nor any physical object . Obviously .
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2020
  17. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Space and time are two sides of the same coin...one cannot exist without the other. Time, as we know it, started at the BB, just as space, as we know it, evolved at the BB.
    What you see as time, I may see as space, and vice versa.
    Nonsense. Spacetime is the universe...three dimensions of space and one of time.
    Again, more unsupported jargon. But hey river, prove I am wrong, and give me a reputable link/reference with evidence about what you claim.
    Here's a couple of questions, which no doubt you will ignore...
    [1] When did time start?
    [2] When did space start?
    [3] If you decide to travel through space, [say to Mars] are you moving though time?
    [4] While you are travelling to Mars, how do I back on Terrafirma view your space? How do I view your time?
    [5] How does your space and your time, from your persepctive, differ from how I perceive your space and your time?
    [6] How do you view my space and time, and how does that differ to how I view it?


    All those questions river, show the variable nature of space and time, when they evolved, and how they are perceived from different frames of references.
    Space is real: Time is real: Spacetime is real:
     
  18. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Describing what time is faces the difficulty of using words that are temporal, like verbs.
    Apart from time being passive, in that time doesn't react or resist any motion, what else can be said?
    Time can be mapped to a real line? There is one and only one such line (for a local frame)?

    Is asking the question "Is time real?", influenced by what humans think "real" means?
    In physics, "real" is a very fickle mistress.

    So someone assuming that it's some kind of fundamental question isn't supported by the, lack of evidence . . .

    I recall, if this question came up in physics lectures, that the answer was usually like: "time is as real as a real number, if you want to know how real that is, ask your maths lecturer".
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2020
  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Most probably yes. "Real" to some people, us something they can touch, smell, feel, or in some way physical.
    I don't think physicists see it that way [check out the Sean Carroll video] Time is as real as space, and as Einstein's relativity has shown, can be interchanged and are variable. As far as physics is concerned, time is real, as is space.
    Yep, same sort of thinking can apply.
     
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    To all the above questions, isn't the main consideration if the universe cares?

    The question is not if we care what time is. The question is if the universe cares if time exists or if it is unable to perform without need for measurement.

    What I find curious is that a lot of people like to say that mathematics are not intrinsic to the universe but a "descriptive" tool used by scientists, a human invention, not a discovery. Yet in the same breath the same people suggest that time is an intrinsic property of space and thus not a human invention, but a discovery.

    I see this exactly in the opposite way. IMO, mathematics are an essential property of the universe, but time is not. In a permittive condition time is not a privileged special property, but an inevitable emergent result of duration of existence or change.

    What we have named Time emerges with duration of any mathematically permitted event, from quantum to the chronologically evolving pattern of the universe itself.
     
  21. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    The supposed "independent of mental properties" version of the universe doesn't have the capacity to care about anything, since at the general scale it lacks both interest in itself and cognitive representations of "what's going on with it".

    Locally there are humans possessing such abilities, but we're insignificant (have no control over the cosmos at large). In contrast, the sensory manifested and contemplated version of the universe has been wholly mediated by mind. It is chock-full of intersubjective properties, like objects being composed of qualia, as well as having various conceptual understandings superimposed upon it. But we can't control it by desire or wishes alone either; and like the meta-phenomenal or archetypal version, it is still portrayed as lacking consciousness despite acquiring materialization and discernment of components from psychological affairs.

    Minimalism (in terms of avoiding escalating complexity and levels of causes) demands that the differing states of the so-called development of the world simply co-exist with each other. If the universe is instead conceived as only partaking in three dimensions, then it's forced into becoming a process -- where its differences become ephemeral changes that replace each other in a "what currently exists" slot (popularly called the special "present"). Thus, no substantive, enduring be-ing for the world -- it is demoted to the equivalent of a meticulously governed fantasy or simulation.

    Aside from leaving such a process of changes left hanging as a magically ridiculous proposition of "it just happens", then the process begs more and more metaphysical baggage for making it possible (crudely akin to how each temporary scene on a television screen depends on hidden technological configurations behind it). Which includes regulating the changes and insuring each fleeting state is coherent with past and future states which no longer exist (in turn, suggesting memory or information storage added to the growing inventory of luxurious excess). The consequences that fall out of even trying to explain presentism lead to exposing it as little more than a modern concoction of the Eastern idea of the world being a dream of a god or world-engendering mind (the latter serving as the transcendent organizer and manager apparatus for the process of changes, which may invite origins for itself also as part of an endless Russian-doll fiasco).

    The Illusion of Time: What's Real?: "We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, "or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing; it's all just there — past, present, future.

    "So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD," he added; "there's nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there's all this drama unfolding in the movie. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing. But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories."

    "Time is out there," said Andreas Albrecht, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of California, Davis. "It's called an external parameter — the independent parameter in the [classic] equation of motion. So, time — the time we know since we learned to tell time on a clock — seems to disappear when you study physics, until you get to relativity.

    "The essence of relativity is that there is no absolute time, no absolute space. Everything is relative. When you try to discuss time in the context of the universe, you need the simple idea that you isolate part of the universe and call it your clock, and time evolution is only about the relationship between some parts of the universe and that thing you called your clock."

    Julian Barbour, a British physicist, describes time as "a succession of pictures, a succession of snapshots, changing continuously one into another. I'm looking at you; you're nodding your head. Without that change, we wouldn't have any notion of time."

    "Isaac Newton," Barbour noted, "insisted that even if absolutely nothing at all happened, time would be passing, and that I believe is completely wrong."

    To Barbour, change is real, but time is not. Time is only a reflection of change. From change, our brains construct a sense of time as if it were flowing. As he puts it, all the "evidence we have for time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear."

    Lest what Barbour says above be misconstrued as advocating traditional presentism, note this below (his use of "change" is really just structural "difference" rather than a particular state of the world being annihilated and replaced by another):

    https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-to-eternity-02

    Tim Folger: . . . Julian Barbour is convinced we are all immortal. Unfortunately, in a timeless universe immortality does not come with the same kind of perks that it does on Mount Olympus. In Barbour's vision, we are not like Greek gods who remain forever young. We still have to buy life insurance, and we will certainly seem to age and die. And instead of life after death, there is life alongside death. "We're always locked within one Now," Barbour says. We do not pass through time. Instead, each new instant is an entirely different universe. In all of these universes, nothing ever moves or ages, since time is not present in any of them. One universe might contain you as a baby staring at your mother's face. In that universe you will never move from that one, still scene. In yet another universe, you'll be forever just one breath away from death. All of those universes, and infinitely many more, exist permanently, side by side, in a cosmos of unimaginable size and variety. So there is not one immortal you, but many: the toddler, the cool dude, the codger. The tragedy— or perhaps it's a blessing— is that no one version recognizes its own immortality. Would you really want to be 14 for eternity, waiting for your civics class to end?
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2020
    Write4U and paddoboy like this.
  22. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    I like that. Nice post on the whole too.
     
  23. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    While certainly the universe simply exists and cares not how we describe and/or model it, our four dimensional framework model is still essential. It is for our benefit [the modelling] and is simply what we call science/cosmology.
     

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