Philosophy Explorer wrote:Several threads about time have run. Yet we haven't gotten down to the nitty gritty, does time exist? Makes no sense to try to define time with measuring devices like clocks or calendars without first determining if time exists because if it doesn't exist, then with or without those measuring devices (including calendars), we may be wasting our time trying to define time on the basis of measuring devices and time-explicit and time-implicit equations may have no backbone to them if we don't know whether time exists.
A closely related question to the topic title is whether abstract time is objective? Because if so, we may never know the true nature of time. Now I turn the floor over to you.
PhilX
I think time is IN everything, and each thing is a clock to another thing, and if there were no things, there would be no time. Time, as most people think of it as a ghost or a phantom, is just an illusion. The atoms and subatomic particles in my hands are “clocks / time” the moving and position of things are the only real “time” that there is. What makes a clock to move is firstly itself and then gravity and speed at which it is traveling.
That’s why absolute zero is not possible, because that means atoms stand still, and in a moving universe, that’s a bit weird. That’s also why I had a post where you visited where I claimed that to copy something and to time travel is almost the same difference. A copy of yourself, three years back, puts that copy as much into the future as when the “real” person would visit your time. There is virtually no difference, because the atoms, how they move and at what speed is what makes the time nothing more nothing less.
We are a frozen spirit; our thoughts a cloud of droplets; different oceans and ages brood inside – where spirit sublimates. To some our words, an acid rain, to some it is too pure, to some infectious, to some a cure.