Linguistic pedantry really isn't helpful or meaningful.Indeterminacy said:Again, "At once" necessitates the existence of criteria for two events occurring "at the same time". It's crazy to think that everything that happened 10 seconds ago, now and 10 seconds in the future happen "at the same time", since the very conditions by which events are observed to occur "now, as opposed to 10 seconds ago" are what determine that they do not in fact happen "at once".CrystalShadow said:That is really a question that's very difficult to answer. Since physics essentially says time doesn't really exist as we understand it (it's an artifact of how the mind works), there's a high chance it all exists at once.
It is almost impossible to accurately describe what this really means without such contrivances, because there is no way to talk about what I actually mean by that which avoids the problem you're trying to point out.
Consider a metaphor instead; The entirety of a film exists as a whole entity. A film has a beginning, middle and end, but a print of a film contains every single frame. Yet, the only way a human being can understand the film in a meaningful way is to watch it one frame at a time.
That one frame is analogous to 'now', yet the other frames in the film don't just cease to be. They're always there (well, so long as the film as a whole survives, but that's outside the realms of the metaphor.)
Taken as a whole, 'now', 'past', 'future', can be thought of as being a place instead of a time, ten years ago, or ten years from now is not really all that different from saying 10 km away from here...
'Now' is a reference point.
But saying every point in time exists at once doesn't mean what you are inferring it to mean with your pedantic use of language.
It doesn't explicitly mean 'at the same time', because it refers to a perspective on reality in which time doesn't exist in the way we perceive it.
Yet, as a metaphor it's perfectly valid because in geography, Paris and New York (for instance) both exist at the same time.
Similarly, what it means is that that all moments in time all exist. (in whatever structure you want to use to conceive of it.)
Two moments in time both exist. Since time is measured relative to these moments, you indeed cannot actually say they both exist 'at once', but for lack of adequate vocabulary (because thinking in a context where time is a static thing is very unusual), saying they both exist at once is the nearest description that meaningfully conveys even an approximation of the actual reality.