Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Misty]

As others have said, time is a measure of change. If nothing changes, time doesn't exist.

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving? Similar to a paralyzed person.

[Obvious Leo]

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving?

There is no state of absolute rest in the universe, thus time cannot stand still. Even within a single atom photons and gluons are always bustling about at the speed of light holding them together. If time were to stand still the universe would fall apart.

Regards Leo

[Misty]

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving?

There is no state of absolute rest in the universe, thus time cannot stand still. Even within a single atom photons and gluons are always bustling about at the speed of light holding them together. If time were to stand still the universe would fall apart.

Regards Leo

You did not address the example of the paralyzed person, existing but not moving. It takes 'time' but the paralyzed person still falls apart as at some point they die. Time is not one event/happening, so the universe is always falling apart and rebuilding. Time, like thought is not 'one.' Time is multiple just like thought. Time works within time, within time, etc..

[Rilx]

Those who continue to insist that time does not exist may reflect on how they would answer this question. Is it the case that the universe did exist yesterday, is existing today, and will exist tomorrow? Minkowski says that this is not a true statement and that the different tenses of the verb "to exist" have no meaning. I regard Minkowski as a jackass of lofty calibre but I'd be curious to know if anybody feels up to the task of defending his position. Tread cautiously because the study of this question has been my life's work and I wait to pounce on the unwary.

Yes, universe did exist yesterday, is existing today and will exist tomorrow.

As a dimension it is a human construct and thus abstract like the other three.

I don't know what Minkowski means but he may try to take a non-human - quasi-scientific - viewpoint. Rocks don't have past or future.

Leo, I think that in your metaphysics time and space have kind of changed their position. As in most great ideas, you've found a way to solve some big problem. Another thing is that it easily creates new problems.

-- Updated 07 Jul 2014, 11:22 to add the following --

As others have said, time is a measure of change. If nothing changes, time doesn't exist.

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving? Similar to a paralyzed person.

Movement is the only property of time. Without moving it has no properties and without properties it doesn't exist. Paralyzed persons have lots of properties that define them existing even though they don't move.

[Misty]

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving? Similar to a paralyzed person.

Movement is the only property of time. Without moving it has no properties and without properties it doesn't exist. Paralyzed persons have lots of properties that define them existing even though they don't move.

How do you know movement is the only property of time?

[Spiral Out]

I regard Minkowski as a jackass of lofty calibre but I'd be curious to know if anybody feels up to the task of defending his position. Tread cautiously because the study of this question has been my life's work and I wait to pounce on the unwary.

Sounds like an interesting challenge. I'll accept that challenge. (unless I would be forced to adopt the silly concept of space-time!)

[Obvious Leo]

Yes, universe did exist yesterday, is existing today and will exist tomorrow.

I'm relieved that the bloody obvious still has some cachet in the modern world, mate, but I must caution you that you tread the path of heresy because the priesthood of physics elects to take a different view. Luckily burning at the stake seems to have waned in popularity in recent times so we may yet live to see our dotage.

Leo, I think that in your metaphysics time and space have kind of changed their position. As in most great ideas, you've found a way to solve some big problem. Another thing is that it easily creates new problems.

Indeed time and space exchange ontological validity in my metaphysics and I reckon I can argue the case coherently. It offers a significant unification of the physical models and makes them accessible to any educated person capable of logical reasoning. This may be a serious affront to the supergeeks who speak through machines with their eyelashes but in my view it's high time the blowtorch was applied to their gonads and they were required to explain themselves. After all explaining the universe is their core business and in the past 100 years they've made no progress whatsoever whilst holding their snouts securely in the public trough. If you can think of any problems that arise from a physical time, other than an ivory tower holocaust, I'd be delighted to hear about them

.

Movement is the only property of time. Without moving it has no properties and without properties it doesn't exist.

Well put. Accepting the notion that time is physical unifies a number of concepts under the same umbrella. Whether we call it time or change or motion becomes nothing more than a semantic self-indulgence because all these constructs become interchangeable.

Misty. Time doesn't stand still for the paralysed person or even for a dead one. There are tens of thousands of species that inhabit a human body and none of these others would even notice that their host has stopped moving.

Sounds like an interesting challenge. I'll accept that challenge. (unless I would be forced to adopt the silly concept of space-time!)

I've spent the last forty years of my life ridiculing the notion of spacetime so rest assured I would never force this silly concept on my worst enemy. My goal has always been to make physics comprehensible and the first piece of nonsense to hit the wastebasket was the 4D continuum, although it did take me decades to replace it with a better paradigm.

Regards Leo

[Misty]

Misty. Time doesn't stand still for the paralysed person or even for a dead one. There are tens of thousands of species that inhabit a human body and none of these others would even notice that their host has stopped moving.

I did not say that time stands still for a paralyzed person. Rix said: "As others have said, time is a measure of change, if nothing changes, time does not exist." To which I replied: 'Wouldn't this be when time stands still, existing but not moving? Similar to a paralyzed person."

Are there any repetitions or hiccups in the universe when nothing changes, just repeats itself?

[Obvious Leo]

Are there any repetitions or hiccups in the universe when nothing changes, just repeats itself?

To understand a physical time we have to hold fast to the philosophy of the quantum. In order for an entity to be regarded as physically real it cannot be infinitely divisible and must therefore have a smallest possible bit. In the case of time this quantum interval can be quite clearly defined as the smallest possible interval of time in which we can meaningfully say that something has actually happened. I defy anybody to attempt to attach some metaphysical meaning to a time interval in which nothing occurs, but events occur bloody quickly at the sub-atomic level. The photons and gluons are the fastest of the sub-atomic particles because, being massless, they move at the speed of light. Thus we can say that change occurs within the atom at the speed of light and if we then equate time and change as two different expressions of the same thing we finish up with the speed of light being equivalent to the speed of emerging time.

The idea is not to think of time as being somehow "out there" waiting for something to happen in it, but rather time is something that is continuously being made by the causal events themselves. Once an event has occurred its consequences will resonate through time but the event itself no longer exists and can have no further causal interaction with reality retrospectively. This places reality in the time "dimension" only and defines the universe as a process, which I regard as a simple statement of the obvious. My own existence is clearly a process, in the sense that I can only define myself in terms of my current state. Yesterday I was a different bloke in terms of my physical makeup and tomorrow I will be a different bloke again because at the sub-atomic level I am changing at the speed of light. I am therefore a bloke who is continuously coming into existence at the sub-atomic level in a sequence of quantised temporal steps. So is everything else in the universe so it makes perfect sense to say that the speed of light is the speed at which the universe is coming into existence, which is the maximum speed at which changes at the sub-atomic level can take place.

This is where the great unification comes in, courtesy of GR. The maximum speed at which changes at the sub-atomic level can take place is entirely determined by the strength of the gravitational field, which is an emergent property of matter and energy. This means that time and gravity can be quantised equivalently in a single temporal interval and this, boys and girls, is quantum gravity. When we think the world from this revised perspective all the counter-intuitive absurdities of SR, GR and QM simply vanish, to be replaced by an orderly sequence of quantised events obeying the simple laws of cause and effect. Reality is not that which is but rather that which is continuously being made, which means the universe is not a place at all. The universe is an EVENT.

Regards Leo

[Misty]

Time is a word humans created to measure events/happenings. Time does not exist outside events/happenings as there is no purpose. Time is the abstract framework for referencing, indexing and calibrating events.

Time does not exist except as collective term for events.


I agree the universe is an event!

Very nice post Leo, thanks.

[Philosophy Explorer]

As others have said, time is a measure of change. If nothing changes, time doesn't exist. (Nested quote removed.)

Wouldn't this be when 'time' stands still, existing but not moving? Similar to a paralyzed person.

Part of the problem is what's meant by abstract time. A clock can run slower (when its batteries run down) so measuring devices wouldn't, in reality, be a good measure of time (since measuring devices through the sundial are linked to our Sun, then even our Sun isn't 100% reliable in measuring time).

So my concept of abstract time doesn't have anything to do with time measurement which is linked with change. I believe that abstract time exists, but the question then becomes as to what it is, really? Since it's divorced from time measurement, then what can be said about abstract time? It's a deep concept that awaits a great mind to enlighten it.

That's about all I can say on this matter.

PhilX

[Felix]

Obvious Leo said: "When we think the world from this revised perspective all the counter-intuitive absurdities of SR, GR and QM simply vanish, to be replaced by an orderly sequence of quantised events obeying the simple laws of cause and effect."

The problem with your theory is that it doesn't account for randomness: the quantum state is not operative throughout the Universe, e.g., within a black hole. Is a black hole an unreal nonevent?

PhilX said: "So my concept of abstract time doesn't have anything to do with time measurement which is linked with change."

You haven't even told us what your concept is, you believe in something that you can't define or articulate?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Obvious Leo said: "When we think the world from this revised perspective all the counter-intuitive absurdities of SR, GR and QM simply vanish, to be replaced by an orderly sequence of quantised events obeying the simple laws of cause and effect."

The problem with your theory is that it doesn't account for randomness: the quantum state is not operative throughout the Universe, e.g., within a black hole. Is a black hole an unreal nonevent?

PhilX said: "So my concept of abstract time doesn't have anything to do with time measurement which is linked with change."

You haven't even told us what your concept is, you believe in something that you can't define or articulate?

And can you tell us which time measuring devices are 100% accurate? (even including cesium atomic clocks or our Sun). Since they're not 100% reliable, then they can't be used as absolute time standards which I'm proposing through abstract time which is a deep concept. The question is how would one define abstract time independently of time measurement, yet be able to somehow use it to derive time measurement. So the first step is to establish the existence of abstract time (which I've done in this thread). The next step is to prove whether or not it exists.

PhilX

[Obvious Leo]

Time does not exist except as collective term for events.

You seem to have grasped my meaning very well, Misty, and I thank you for your gracious comment. I often allow myself to get too frustrated with the "time does not exist" brigade because I have no taste for arguments about the meaning of words, which is basically what Wittgenstein has done to philosophy in order to safeguard its ivory tower pretensions. In truth I can think of no good reason why time, change and motion can't be thought of as three different expressions of exactly the same thing. To argue distinctions in semantic meaning might be fruitful in Ludwig's navel-gazing world, but it does nothing but muddy the waters in physics.

The problem with your theory is that it doesn't account for randomness

Yes it does. It consigns it to the wastebasket as an unrealisable abstraction because randomness does not exist. This paradigm holds strictly to the Aristotelian doctrine of causation because it defines the quantised grav-time interval as a Boolean logic gate which has only two properties, its information content and the duration of its existence. A more detailed explanation gets quite technical and would fall outside the scope of this discussion, as well as driving away any interested readers.

the quantum state is not operative throughout the Universe,

I have no idea what this statement means but I suspect you're misusing the word quantum in the same way that physicists do. When they speak of quantum entities they're actually speaking about sub-atomic particles, which are no such thing. Sub-atomic particles come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and they all have different physical properties. They didn't simply spring into existence complete with mass, charge, and spin, but rather these properties have been conferred on the sub-atomic particles by yet more fundamental entities, which my model defines as the quantised grav-time interval.

Is a black hole an unreal nonevent?

Black hole physics can also get overly technical for the layman but all of science knows that the equations of GR begin to lose their predictive authority in extreme gravitational environments. For decades this was mostly ignored, which led to the absurd non-quantum assumption that matter and energy could collapse indefinitely under gravity into an infinite singularity. Luckily nobody in physics believes this anymore but nevertheless the obvious conclusion has not yet been satisfactorily drawn. If gravity cannot be infinite then time cannot stand still because gravity and time bear an inverse logarithmic relationship to each other. In other words time will slow down to a crawl inside the black hole, and the more massive the black hole the slower the speed at which time emerges, but time can never stop completely because gravity can never be infinite. In accordance with Cantorian set theory an infinite entity cannot be contained within a finite one, thus the singularity is yet another unrealisable abstraction.

This even applies to the fate of the universe itself, when the entire cosmos will eventually collapse into the mother of all black holes. Even this cannot be a singularity because the energy content of the universe is finite. No doubt events occurred painfully slowly in the primordial mother black hole which gave birth to our current cycle of reality, but they never actually stopped, or else we wouldn't be here having this little chat, now would we? As you can see the philosophy of the bloody obvious has an exquisitely simple alternative to the much-misunderstood big bang hypothesis, and this far simpler alternative is also a far better fit for the evidence. Our universe did not "begin", but in the sense that our current cycle of it "began" it makes more sense to think of it "beginning" not with a bang but with a whimper.

Regards Leo

P.S. Phil. I'm not deliberately ignoring your attempt to arrive at an abstract notion of time but since I'm not quite sure where you're coming from I'm not sure that I can offer much of a contribution. Time is certainly my favourite hobby-horse, but a pragmatic son of the soil like me always prefers the physicalist approach, even to the most abstruse of existential questions.

-- Updated July 7th, 2014, 6:51 pm to add the following --

Phil. I may be misunderstanding you but I suspect you may be chasing the same phantom as Minkowski, who was an advocate of the god's-eye view. The god's-eye view is a referential frame which exists only in the mind of the observer and not in the physically real world, because the universe has no "outside".

Regards Leo

[Philosophy Explorer]

Leo said:

"P.S. Phil. I'm not deliberately ignoring your attempt to arrive at an abstract notion of time but since I'm not quite sure where you're coming from I'm not sure that I can offer much of a contribution. Time is certainly my favourite hobby-horse, but a pragmatic son of the soil like me always prefers the physicalist approach, even to the most abstruse of existential questions."

No problem Leo. I'm reacting to the reliance on time measurement (including our Sun) as unsatisfactory as explained before. I'm looking for something better which I believe can be done through abstract time which is tough to get a handle on.

PhilX