Indeterminacy said:
CrystalShadow said:
Linguistic pedantry really isn't helpful or meaningful.
This isn't linguistic pedantry; this is
semantic pedantry. Which is
entirely meaningful. (helpfulness being more of a value judgement)
THAT (points at the previous paragraph) is linguistic pedantry.
So... You are asserting that saying all, (or at least more than one) moments in time happen 'at once' is
semantically invalid based on... The idea that by definition 'at once' means they all happen at the same time. But since two moments in time are seperated only by virtue of time itself, they cannot, by definition be happening at the same time. (Or to use a different way of visualising the issue that is more immediately understandable, two points in space cannot occupy the same point in space...)
Well, whether you want to call that a linguistic issue or a semantic one, it remains overly pedantic in my opinion. I fail to see what you hope to accomplish by forcing that particular point, other than making a difficult problem even more convoluted.
CrystalShadow said:
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.
Exactly. My contention is exactly that you're conceptually muddled, and your point is technically meaningless.
My point, as per above, is that you taking me to task over the way I state the matter does nothing whatsoever to clarify it, and to the contrary actually makes it even more muddled than it otherwise was.
CrystalShadow said:
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.)
So you're drawing a distinction between the movie as having an executable sequence with points in time and its storage medium as independent of any particular sequence. Okay, no contention there.
You also suggest that during a particular snapshot in time during the movie, there is one frame in the storage medium that is "now". There are other frames that, if the sequence continues, will eventually be displayed; we call their storage medium vectors "later". And there are others that have already been displayed, and we call their medium frames "earlier".
Again, I'm not contesting this so far. The notion of a Time-slice is something I've used here already, and the idea is that some such slices are considered "later" and some "earlier".
But you're saying "The entirety of a film exists as a whole entity". That's fine, but if what you're saying is that the Whole Film can be thought of in terms of a progression from Earlier to Later, then you need to be careful to avoid equivocating over the notion of "film" and failing to distinguish Movie from Storage Medium. The Movie is the progression of frames through the sequential interpretive procedure. The Storage Medium is the material implementation of the frames, and these are what you're ascribing "Nowness" to at any given point.
The Movie doesn't move from Earlier to Later - it is a succession of Nows. The Storage Medium is static, and given the way the film works, only one frame at a time is ever "Now".
Saying while the movie is running that something that happened earlier can also be happening now, in this context, is just a misunderstanding. There is one frame at any given point that is now, even while the others exist as earlier or later frames. Yes, if you were at an earlier point in the movie, some frame in the medium that is, in fact, earlier would be what was "now" then. But it's still earlier now.
I think your metaphor is great, so thanks for suggesting it.
I don't quite know where I got that metaphor from but it works well because a film as a physical object can be equated to converting a taking a sequence of 2d images over time, and then storing the result in a manner that essentially converts the time axis into an additional spatial dimension.
That aside, let's see if we can use that metaphor to help us out here.
The storage medium is not technically the movie itself, that much is true, but it's really not difficult to devise a way to have more than one 'now'. You say that while the film is running there is only one 'now', which is the current frame. However, it's quite easy to contrive of a mechanism by which two or more parts of the film are being projected at the same time. In this instance we have more than one 'movie', which both have a 'now'. Since they come from the same physical medium, the only restriction on this is that they cannot both show the same physical frame at the same time. (if we were dealing with a digital file, even this restriction dissapears.)
You might argue that the physical medium has no 'now' at all, or you might argue that while the film is playing, the current frame is the only 'now'.
Yet, there is nothing that says that only one frame is being projected.
I would argue that 'now' is in no way special, and that all distinct 'frames' of reality are 'now'. They are of course, 'now' in relation to eachother, because any given 'now' is the future or past of another.
This is however a philosophical matter, since it can't be determined what is actually the case from known evidence.
There is however no reason to presume that a universe in which time is a static constant (which the film metaphor implies), would contain but a single unique point of projection that can be labelled as the one and only 'now'.
CrystalShadow said:
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...
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.
I'll try to be charitable here. Let's suppose the modality of time isn't just linear, such that you might make sense of there being many conceptual dimensions to the notion of time. Two things could occur "at once" in the sense of being the same in one dimension of many in time. In this case, you're not thinking of events as occurring at the same time
in the new sense of time. You're thinking of them occurring at the same position in some compositional aspect of time (for example qua earlier/later dichotomy).
Even in this sense, it's impossible for any "at once-ness"
with respect to time you need to apply correctly to [any pair of/all](delete as appropriate) arbitrary moments of time unless you're proposing the kind of unity that I earlier explained failed to appropriately distinguish between epistemology and metaphysics. Yes, every time can be a "here" in temporal space, and you can even think of this in terms of every time being "in this subspace", but to think this means that such "hereness" can be shared among every member of that space is to conflate perspective with structure.
Say they exist and be done with it. Any more than that is pointless, probably meaningless and hopefully insubstantial.
Invoking multi-dimensional time is a rather different subject. I was intending to make a statement about what the universe as a whole might be.
I gather from most of what you've just said that you mean that 'now' can't be understood from such an external perspective, because if you had such a perspective there would be no 'now' at all, nor a future or past.
From the perspective of 'now' being the observation of an entity that experiences time the way we do, there is also only a single 'now'. Yet, this presumes that such a singular perspective is the only one that actually exists at all.
If I say that 5 minutes ago was a moment in the past, and 5 minutes from now is a moment in the future, that pre-supposes the 'now' of whenever I wrote this.
Yet, 5 minutes from now that will also be 'now'. If the 'now' is the only reality that actually exists, then there is no problem.
But if the entirety of time exists, then both the current 'now', the one from 5 minutes ago, and the one five minutes into the future (as well as everything inbetween and before and after) all still exist.
And from the perspective of that moment, they are all 'now'. Since there is no reference point in such a case which can be considered the one and only 'now', but each moment is 'now', all of it is 'now'.
Nevertheless, as amusing as that notion is, it has little to do with what I originally meant, which is simply that all moments in time exist, and are not separated from eachother as distinct things that sometimes exist and sometimes do not.
The purpose of saying 'it exists all at once', as opposed to saying 'it exists', is necessitated by the way we experience time. The past and future do not exist, as far as we experience reality, and in fact saying that something exists implies only that it exists in the
now, while suggesting it existed or will exist implies it exists at some other point in time other than now.
By stating 'it exists all at once' I merely meant to make it clear that despite the implicit assumptions dealing with time causes, that both the past, present, and future all exist as a single unified structure that does not ever disappear or have parts of it cease to exist due to anything relating to time itself.
Such a linguistic contrivance is therefore dependent and necessary because of inherent, deeply ingrained assumptions people make about time.
If you feel people don't make these kind of assumptions, and thus that my contrivance of language is unnecessary... Well, I can't say that's wrong, but I fail to see how you have any more grounds for claiming I'm wrong in feeling it necessary.
Perhaps you can come up with some reason that is more coherent than that, but considering how muddled your own attempts to try and clarify what was wrong with my earlier statements were, I'm not convinced you are any more capable of making a comprehensible remark about time than I am, and whether your use of language is technically more correct than mine pretty much becomes a moot point if it's incomprehensible either way.
FFHAuthor said:
CrystalShadow said:
So... All of these concepts you're using to say that time is a rationalization in and of themselves depend on time existing as a concept to have any meaning at all.
Exactly.
I argue against the very concept of Time itself being a natural phenomena. Time as we declare it to be is our observations of the natural world. A construct that is as common in nature as an inch or kilometer or a cubit. We interpret the events of the natural world as being based along time, but they are events in the natural world. Physics may measure things against time, but they also measure things against distance, and those distances are as arbitrary as seconds, minutes, or hours. We can only fathom Time and we must demand it's existence because we cannot contemplate the lack of it's existence.
My point is that the concept of ongoing time, the thought that there is a linear flow of time, and in which time exists as a quantitative and measurable trait that exists as a product of the natural world is false. The thought that there is a dimension to our existence which dictates every moment of our very being exists individually and can be (according to the OP's question) viewed or visited, is false in my opinion. That which has happened has happened, we cannot travel back to it, or view it, even if we have created a 'Time Machine' to manipulate that dimension.
I am fully aware that much of modern physics revolves around the concept of time as a fourth dimension and 'space time' as defining an object's position in space and time, a point is not just filled with something at this moment, but at infinite moments both before and after. But I can merely state that I feel it is very much an arbitrary application of human thought on a situation.
A concept can exist even if it is false. An idea can exist even if it is false. A theory can exist, even if it is false. The world of science is littered with ideas and theory's that are false, spontaneous generation, the inability for powered flight, the death of the human body at a speed greater than 35 mph, even the concept of 'nothing can go faster than the speed of light' is being challenged.
Is a concept of time necessary to society and scientific research? Yes, without question.
Does time exist as anything more than a human creation? No, I don't believe so.
But such is my own opinion on the subject, I freely admit that I have no advanced degree in Mathematics or Physics, merely a logical mind willing to examine something that few people look at in depth from beyond the confines of an equation, so take my views for what they're worth.
As good a perspective as any other I guess. The problem is that much of reality isn't 'real' anyway. We have limited perceptions, which our minds reconstruct as a model. All the mathematics and physics, and all the theories and 'laws' involved aren't reality. They aren't even necessarily descriptions of reality.
They are models which produce results which, insofar as we can make measurements of whatever might actually exist give the same results as the measurements. (or very close to it.)
This neither proves nor disproves that these models are reality, nor how they actually relate to reality, or even if there is such a thing as reality at all. (Though that's getting a bit messy because 'reality' simply refers to whatever there is... To say that there is no reality is somewhat nonsensical, unless you define 'reality' to have a particularly strict meaning)
One thing that does raise a few questions regarding time is the way the theory of relativity seems to show that time (and space) can be distorted, and thus that from our subjective experience of it can pass more quickly or more slowly depending on how fast we are moving. (That speed, which is itself dependent on time can be an issue here only aids in making it seem all the more confusing.)
Still, that doesn't specifically prove anything as such.
Does our perception of time mean only the 'now' exists? Does it imply there is an actual past or future somehow? If these things exist can they be changed, or are they static? (Change also implies time, so 'changing' the past immediately implies some kind of meta-time as well)
But most of these questions seem almost unanswerable. Certainly, given that the perception of time seems to be one of the most subjective things that exist, it would seem incredibly difficult to untangle it scientifically.)
Of course, in the end, what do I know? I studied physics, but I wasn't good enough at math to continue with it for very long.
I might know more about this than the average person who has never even looked at it, but what I do know is far removed from what a physicist might know, and even they would probably struggle to really answer this meaningfully.
