Ontology of Time
Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist.
When I try to perceive time, the perception is empty. There is no such a thing as time.
I can say, past, present and future i.e. the time related concepts, because I can perceive the events in space. Past events comes from my memory i.e. I went to the supermarket last night.
Present comes from my present perception of myself, and the space around me with some of the objects visible such as books, beer bottles, coffee cups, and figurines, desk and chair, the computer monitor etc.
Future comes from my imagination. There is absolutely no way I can see the future apart from the images and ideas from the imagination.
I was trying to perceive the new year's day of this year. There is no such thing as time I could perceive. There are only the images in my memory on the new years day I can perceive, and they are from my own memories which are matched to the new years day (again a concept in the memory).
Hence there is no time in the universe. There are only the objects, space and the movements of objects.
Time is an illusion. We are just seeing the movements of objects in space, and the movements are marked as the intervals which we call time. Years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds are just the social contracts on the intervals of rise and setting Sun on our horizon. Without the solar system operation i.e. the Earth rotating around the Sun in a regular manner, which the current calendar system is based on, there wouldn't be such a thing as a timing system as we know it.
Can you prove time exists? Can we perceive time as an entity? I don't know what BC300 was like at all. I only know some historic events happened in that time by having read the history books. I don't know what the year 2050 is, or would be like, but I can only make guesses and try imagining what the world would be like at what we call the time of 2050.
All I can perceive is now, the present moment, which is still no perception of time as such, but just the perception of the space around me, some objects in the space, and my own existence.
When I try to perceive time, the perception is empty. There is no such a thing as time.
I can say, past, present and future i.e. the time related concepts, because I can perceive the events in space. Past events comes from my memory i.e. I went to the supermarket last night.
Present comes from my present perception of myself, and the space around me with some of the objects visible such as books, beer bottles, coffee cups, and figurines, desk and chair, the computer monitor etc.
Future comes from my imagination. There is absolutely no way I can see the future apart from the images and ideas from the imagination.
I was trying to perceive the new year's day of this year. There is no such thing as time I could perceive. There are only the images in my memory on the new years day I can perceive, and they are from my own memories which are matched to the new years day (again a concept in the memory).
Hence there is no time in the universe. There are only the objects, space and the movements of objects.
Time is an illusion. We are just seeing the movements of objects in space, and the movements are marked as the intervals which we call time. Years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds are just the social contracts on the intervals of rise and setting Sun on our horizon. Without the solar system operation i.e. the Earth rotating around the Sun in a regular manner, which the current calendar system is based on, there wouldn't be such a thing as a timing system as we know it.
Can you prove time exists? Can we perceive time as an entity? I don't know what BC300 was like at all. I only know some historic events happened in that time by having read the history books. I don't know what the year 2050 is, or would be like, but I can only make guesses and try imagining what the world would be like at what we call the time of 2050.
All I can perceive is now, the present moment, which is still no perception of time as such, but just the perception of the space around me, some objects in the space, and my own existence.
Comments (1104)
Can you prove temperature exists? or color exists? or charge exists? etc ...
Well, think of the positive benefits of the time system. Everything would be a mess otherwise. Furthermore, thanks to the time system, your thread is at the top of the first page. If you think it is actually pointless, we can ask to put it on page 26 and consider your recent thread as if it were an old one.
Does magenta colour exist? Yet you need it to print things that exist.
Do "stop" signals exist, or is it just a code of conduct? Yet you need it to put order in trafficking.
Do civil laws exist? Yet you need them to put order in marriages or wills, for instance.
Etc.
A proof that there are many things we say exist, but don't.
Yes, a good point. However, being beneficial is not also evidences for something to exist. Here we are concerned on the nature of time and its existence. Time as an entity evades our perception i.e. it cannot be seen, heard or touched. Only the events took place and motions in process can be perceived.
We use them, and is important in science and daily life, but it is invisible and unperceivable. Is it something else we have been calling as time? Or there are entities and existences which cannot be perceived, but exist?
If we agree that something that is unperceivable do exist, then surely there must be a lot more things which we deny existence, but affect us should be existing?
We are not trying get rid of time here. We are trying to investigate the nature of the existence of time.
Sure, but this doesn't tell what the existence of time is.
Can you prove that movement doesn't exist?
If there's any kind of motion, there has to be time.
Movements exist for sure. I drop a coin, and it falls onto the floor.
But still I cannot see time. I only see the movement.
Time is an integral part of motion and movement. The coin takes time of what, one second plus, to hit the floor. Now, if it would take 0,1 seconds it would be a lot faster, likely then to be thrown to the ground, not just fall with gravity.
And seeing? Do you see gravity? Mass? Weight? And when light hits your eye's retina, that already is motion. So without motion and time, no "seeing".
Or then think about the Einsteinian bloc universe as an entirity. All of it together. Well, then there's no movement. You need time for movement, for past, present and future. Notice the word on the graph below.
I agree, and I understand that time, as an entity, is complex to understand. Why does this happen? Why does something intangible, such as time, exist?
Well, we give relevance to something that, although it is not purely perceived by our senses, enters into our understanding of the world. I bet my dog is not aware of time, but I do, and when my dog was just months old, I called her a "puppy," but now that she is 6 years old, I consider her nearly "senior," yet she doesn't care about these facts.
On the other hand, I believe that most of us got used to living with 'illusions' or abstract features. Dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, etc. When we were kids, our parents used to say, Don't worry, they are just dreams. Like if a dream is not existing, while I disagree obviously.
Another point: time zone is very important, and its existence affects our online communication. We have to wait until our friends from America or Australia wake up to see your thread, and this is due to the solar system.
Quoting Corvus
The experience of any thing is the consciousness of time. When we think or perceive an object , we are synthesizing the now of its existence for us as a three-part structure of retention (immediate past), present and protention (anticipation). Without awareness of time there is no awareness of the continuity of the flow of experience. It would be impossible to understand music, for instance, or the spacing of space.
Quoting Bunge (2006: 244)
Quoting Bunge (2006: 245)
Quoting Bunge (1977: 308)
The Cartesian coordinate system represents movement, in the sense of remembered displacement spatially, in terms of a partial order on the space and time axes. Such pictures include the "Block Universe" that subsumes McTaggart's B series but does not represent any perspectival understanding of time in terms of McTaggart's A series which only makes mention of the indexicals "past" "present" and "future". This is a serious ontological limitation of pure B series reasoning, because any reasoning restricted to the B series which by assumption is an immutable series, cannot serve as a ground for present, past or future experiences, given the fact that the tenses are mutuble.
McTaggart famously argued that the A series is "unreal", on the basis of what he thought to be logical inconsistency; how can any contingent empirical proposition, say "the cat is presently on the mat", be true when said now but false when said in the past or in the future? For such propositions make no explicit reference to any underlying series. In the end McTaggart failed to find a satisfactory temporal ontology to overcome the issues he raised, but he believed that the A series when taken together with some hypothetical C series that he only partially explicated, could reconstruct the so-called B-series in a non-contradictory fashion. In my primitive understanding, his conception of the C series seems to bear similarities to what are called domains in computer science, which can be thought of as a "growing block" model of accumulated and consistent information. On that interpretation, the B series might itself reduce to some more fundamental concept of consistent and accumulative information.
In a nutshell, McTaggart meant that time was "unreal" in the Hegelian sense (i.e. still real, but in some other sense than the tenses suggest), as opposed to unreal in the Kantian sense of denying any objectivity with regards to a B series, even in the sense of rationally reconstructed noumenal object (which to many Kantians would amount to a contradiction of Kantian logic).
As for Wittgenstein, IIRC he once considered the concept of time as being factorizable in terms of a 'subjective' component he called "memory time" and an 'objective' component he called "information time". My impression of the former is that it was a weaker concept than the A series that did not include the 'eternal present' of the Tractatus, and that also did not assume that a person's memories were ordered in the asymmetric and transitive fashion assumed by McTaggart. As for Witty's conception of "information time" it also did not include the eternal present, but seemed to refer to the instrumental usage of concurrency and synchronization, as per a physicist's usage of "time".
The challenge for the presentist who prioritises the reality of phenomena to the point of denying the reality of the B series, is to reconstruct the B series 'as use', in terms of temporal cognition from the perspective of a solitary individual.
Space and objects co-exist momentarily; they are co-present. However, for us, the present time is shaped by the current virtual time horizons of the past and future. Without this distinction, the present would cease to be the present, becoming instead merely the intensely experienced flow of life.
I don't know a lot about Kant and much of what I do know I don't like, but I do like his discussion of space and time. Here's some of what he says about time, from Chapter 1, Part 1, Section 5 of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Quoting Immanuel Kant
This is very similar to what he says about space. To him, both space and time are known to us a priori. In my understanding, that means they are built into us. They are part of the nature of our cognitive mechanisms. I find this convincing, or at least plausible. It matches my understanding of how our minds work.
So, what does this mean for your bold statement? It doesn't mean you're wrong. I'd say rather that your claim is irrelevant. I guess you could say that time is an illusion, but it's one that we can't do without. The world as we know it could not exist without it. If time is an illusion, everything else is too - which is an argument that many people have made before and which sometimes makes sense to me, depending on the mood I happen to be in.
Alas, it can make no possible sense to ask "where is space?" nor "when is time?". And for that reason, I can make no sense of claims that space and time exist; I'm with Kant on this one; they are how we have to think about existence.
Isn't it the other way around? Without movement and changes, there would be no time.
With the objects moving in space, time was deduced from the interval of the movement.
Time is an illusion, which has no entity or existence.
Quoting ssu
Same with gravity. There are only motions. When mass or objects are released from the height in space, they constantly fall onto the ground. Hence, an imaginary force called gravity is invented.
Gravity itself doesn't exist.
Quoting ssu
As described in the OP, past, present and future are products of our minds. The graph seems to be depicting imaginary map of space and time, but time doesn't exist in the real world.
Of course there are changes, motions and movements. But they are not bound by time, or time is not a precondition for them. Rather, changes, motions and movements give rise to time in human minds as a form of perception.
But they are not instant, happening all at once, so, their process takes time, as maybe the Planck time and/or the speed of light.
Perhaps try getting rid of space instead
It may that our brains spatialize the sequence of nows so we can better navigate our way through the series of discrete nows.
No. Do you only believe things that are proven?
Quoting Corvus
Apparently not.
So do you just adopt beliefs arbitrarily?
This is a good way of putting it.
And yet you posted that 19 hrs ago.
Have you considered Eleaticism? Parmenides and Zeno of Elea and all that?
Quoting Banno
And yet Banno posted that 40 minutes ago.
And yet there will be more replies to this thread after mine in the next minutes or hours, making the thread longer. Therefore, time affects space.
Etc...
Maybe not in terms of philosophy. But what about physics? On the other hand, physics would have to start with the senses and the senses probbly can't touch time, although I would have to check with Einstein on that one. Maybe you have to go by way of philosophy. Or is it all the same?
Isn't it a product of human mind? You see the sun rise in the morning, and impose an idea that time has passed. Nothing has passed. It was the earth which rotated itself by 1 turn since yesterday morning.
Quoting javi2541997
Dogs don't care about time or numbers. Maybe they would do, if they had the concept of time and numbers. But we cannot teach dogs to be ready go for walk at 6pm today, or bark 7 times if she wants the biscuits or 8 times if he wants salami..
Isn't time then some sort of mental states or awareness? Time is not external existence. We just postulate time from the events, motions and movements. I am not sure if Music is time based, because some dogs and wolves seem to be able to sing without knowing anything about time.
I have not come across Mario Bunge before, but he seems to be a great thinker. Will have readings on the quotes you provided in the post, as they seem to be much relevant on the topic. Gracias.
Well, I think something has happened. The sunrise is like an alarm, and it tells me that the day just started and I have a lot of things to do: take a shower, have breakfast, go to work, pay things, take care of my relatives, and a lot of things that I can't experience when I am in the night. When night comes, I feel the day is ended, and I have to wait until tomorrow to do new or the same trifling things. Therefore, yes since the sun rises there are a lot of things that happened.
Quoting Corvus
True, good point. But the fact that dogs don't have the concept of time doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We can flip it and see the coin of the reverse side: dogs bark yet we don't understand bark language. Does the message in the dog's bark exist even though we can't understand it?
That's a better starting point because it's more basic than a concept of time.
So,
Start with matter exists to build a model of time.
Physical matter exists as we observe it...
And only in the present.
Information exists as Instantiated mental content.
Or,
Brains composed of matter that process mental content.
So time exists as mental content.
Brain; ( perception of time ).
That means nothing can physically exist outside the present moment.
But like some have mentioned, the concept of time is useful.
Understanding it seems a basic task of philosophy.
We should expect to see different time models in different applications.
Brain; (time model #1)
Brain; (time model #2)
Brain; (time model #3)
And so on.
He's the philosopher that has inspired my own philosophy the most.
If you are going to say time doesn't exist, but space and objects do, then you should go further and realize that if time is a construct, so is space, and therefore only objects exist.
But that denies motion, which doesn't seem right.
In my view, like Einstein realized the better conception of time and space is as one space-time, I think the better view is space-time-matter.
The existence of the object is as much a demonstration of matter, as it is a demonstration of motion, which is measured in space-time. It's all one thing.
There are objects.
We are objects that perceive objects (human beings).
When we perceive an object, we take measure of matter-space-time (or if you are a post-modernist, we construct matter-space-time).
Motion means: objects, through space, over time.
Take any object, say, an apple.
It is at once matter, taking up space, now..., and now again...and now again...over time. With matter, once perceived, comes space-time-matter. Space and time are the mental act of measuring, or perceiving. They look objective, but they are the act of objectifying.
I can experience a gradual change of pitch played on a violin (portamento), but I cannot make empirical sense of a flow of "experience" unless the word "experience" is substituted for a given phenomenon, such as the portamento.
Hypothetically, I think that if I were to fully attend to the portamento, I would no longer have the impression that the portamento consisted of a sequence of particular notes. Conversely, if I were to pay full attention to the notes played, I think that I would no longer hear a portamento but a glissando consisting of a broken sequence of tones.
The intuition that a phenomenon flows is in conflict with the intuition that the phenomenon is comprised of a sequence of states, as per Zeno's Paradox. So if talk about experience deflates to talk about phenomena, and if the nature of phenomena is relative to how it is attended and phenomena doesn't always flow, then must the existence of phenomena necessitate the a priori existence of a psychological time series?
"in due course"?
At a later time?
When we recall yesterday, we dont look into the past - we actively, now, construct a recollection - we re-collect, or collect impressions.
Its all, always, only NOW. The construct of time helps us see NOW as bigger then it ever is.
:rofl:
Yes!
There is something profoundly absurd about a thread arguing that time doesn't exist.
Quoting sime
It isnt necessary to use a notion of flow to address the necessity of the inclusion of past in the experience of the punctual now. Regardless of whether we attend to a discrete state vs a flowing continuum, in either case the now we experience includes within it the just past.
They are not the same meaning. Time doesn't exist as an entity in reality. It is a product of your mind. It is an extra perception generated from motions and movements.
Sure, but if the psychological past is part of a mutable mental state, then you presumably mean the "just past" in a manner of speaking, in the same way that we might say that a copy of yesterday's newspaper is about the past and Old Moore's Almanac is about the future. In both cases, we are at liberty to provide a definition as to what it means to treat an object as a 'past-referring' record or as a 'future-referring' prediction, that in the final analysis makes no mention of a B series and that reduces to observations and actions that as a matter of tautology can be said to be only of the present.
I agree. I cannot perceive anything or any object which is time itself either. I have never seen a being called time itself. But we often hear people talking about time, and asking about time.
When you get hungry in the mid afternoon, isn't it your stomach telling you the time? It is the lunch time. You need to go and grab some sandwich. It is just telling it is time to have something to eat, but it is not saying anything about time itself.
Bunge's writing is reflecting the point. We are not saying that time is not real, but saying that time has no independent existence. So, a question arises, how something which is so real has no independent existence?
Time reflects the state of changes in reality. Our perception can tell the state of the changes, and judge the propositions as true or false according to the state of perceived reality. Hence time is built in our perception?
What do you mean by "the current virtual time horizon"?
From my memory of reading their texts, Hume and Kant both seem to be saying time has no independent existence i.e. time is an internal perception emanated from the motions and movements of objects in space. In some sense, this point would negate Hume's system i.e. some perceptions don't have the matching impressions from the external world objects such as time. In Kant, there is no problem, as mind has a priori concepts which are not derived from experience of the empirical world.
Good question. I'm not sure what the answer is.
But what had been happening are not time itself. They are events, changes and motions.
Quoting javi2541997
Can we flip time, and see the other side of time?
Quoting javi2541997
Dog barking has no grammar, syntax or semantics, hence it cannot be understood in meaningful way.
They could be cleaver in some ways, but they are not rational.
When you say "matter", it is not clear what you are exactly referring to. Could you be more specific? Of course physical objects exist i.e. chairs, desks, cups, trees, folks and cars .... I see them. I can interact with them. They have the concrete existence. Time? I don't see, or sense it. I can hear people talking about it, and asking it. So what is the nature of time?
In my view, time in space-time should have been "space-perception", not time. Time doesn't exist. Space does. Einstein must have meant to say "space-perception" instead of "space-time". Would you agree?
To say X is relative implies, X doesn't exist. But X could be real in the sense that we talk and ask about it, and use it in daily life.
It just means, "future". We have three perception of temporality. Past, present, future. Past comes from our memories, present comes from the state of consciousness for the now, and future from imagination.
I was imagining and meaning some present moment in the future, when said "in due course". Not "at a later time". But of course at times (often) I also say lunch time and dinner time by habit with the knowledge that time itself doesn't exist.
If Kant is right and time and space are not something we learn through experience but rather know from our natures, doesn't that mean they are not illusions?
For Kant time is a pure intuition, i.e. it is an a priori structure that allows us to organize events.
The movement is as it is represented in physics, for example as a trajectory through time. Motion as we see it is the same, we see a before and an after of the thing moving, otherwise we would not notice the motion.
Time is already acting on the motion. A thing that moves is a thing that passes from one state to another, but then the difference we see between one state and another is different from the thing [cause we apply it to different things] , we call it temporal difference, a now with respect to a before.
I think you are saying we should question if time exists. I might agree that it does not in a physical sense.
Physical matter is just something I see as more fundamental and a better starting point than our perseption of time...that reduces to mental content
And our perseption of time isn't just one thing.
We use clocks, calendars, and physical models in different ways. An engineer might have practical reasons to use time in his math equations but a theoretical physicist might not.
So mind emerges from matter.
Mind is secondary so start the problem with physical matter as primary. That identifies the constraints of everything operating in the physical present.
If you find nothing of substance in this philosophical discussion of time, then maybe you are not interested in philosophical topics? Almost all major philosophers in history of philosophy had something to say about the nature and existence of time from the era of Aristotle or even before that time.
Quoting jgill
I am not sure if being able to measure X, is a proof of the existence of X. Anyhow we are not denying time is real. We are trying to explore on the nature and existence of time.
Quoting jgill
The problem with Time dilation is that it is another hypotheses i.e. possibility if you could fly in the speed of light. Could you fly in the speed of light? Could anyone? Even if you did, the result is not confirmed. It is a hypotheses.
Maybe we measure oscillation. Not time.
So a duration of time like 10 seconds is number of ocsilations .
Each oscillation exists in a physical moment.
They don't exist simultaneously.
10 meters is in fact ...10 meters.
Not the same kind of measurements.
There is a paradoxical co-existence of time. On one hand, only the present moment truly exists. However, the nature of the present moment differs from that of spatial locations and objects. The moment vanishes as soon as it emerges and cannot be carried into the next one. It is an event that ceases the instant it appears. And it is neither a brief interval between the past and future nor a fleeting absence of being. Thus, the present moment's reality is shaped by a virtual time, existing as neither what is no longer nor what is not yet, but as the difference between past and future.
Heidegger himself couldn't conclude Being and Time because he didn't have the language to tackle this issue in an adequate way. No one does.
The arrow of time is the most perplexing aspect here. If you move forward in space, you can move backwards. But you can't move backwards in time, you can only go forward, and necessarily so. The more you think about it, the more mind-boggling it gets.
To paraphrase Augustine: if no one asks me what time actually is, I know what it is. If someone asks me what it is, I don't know what to say.
There's an interesting essay on Aeon.co, Who Really Won when Bergson and Einstein Debated Time? Evan Thompson.
It concerns a famous debate which occured spontaneously when Henri Bergson attended a public lecture by Einstein, and then gave an improptu talk on his conception of 'experienced' as distinct from 'objective' time. In short, Einstein brushed off Bergson's talk, and public opinion has generally had it that Einstein, who after all probably has the greatest scientific prestige of any 20th c figure, was correct.
Here, Thompson questions that.
[quote=Aeon.co]We usually imagine time as analogous with space. We imagine it, for example, laid out on a line (like a timeline of events) or a circle (like a sundial ring or a clock face). And when we think of time as the seconds on a clock, we spatialise it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units. This is clock time. But in our daily lives we dont experience time as a succession of identical units. An hour in the dentists chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends. This is lived time. Lived time is flow and constant change. It is becoming rather than being. When we treat time as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real life; we lose the irreversible flow of becoming, which Bergson called duration.
Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if weve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones were hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.
Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state the current time is what we call now. Each successive now of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks dont measure time; we do. [/quote]
I think this is the salient point: that time itself relies on or is bound to the awareness of duration. And the awareness of duration is something that only a mind can bring. Of course, we don't notice that, because to do so would require becoming aware of awareness, which we cannot do as it would require a perspective outside of awareness. In Kantian terms, the awareness of time is a transcendental condition of experience, and whilst such conditions determine experience, they are not directly available within experience (that being pretty much the meaning of 'transcendental' in Kant's philosophy.)
Thompson goes on to note that Bergson was factually incorrect in his dismissal of the idea of time dilation, which is the discovery that time passes at measurably different rates for observers travelling at vastly different velocities. This error also undermined Bergson's reputation, which overall did not much outlast WWII except for in the Universities, unlike Einstein's, whose reputation has overall only increased. Nevertheless, Thompson argues, Bergson's fundamental insight about the significanc of 'lived time' remains valid, in Thompson's argument.
And from the horse's mouth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_testing_of_time_dilation
I see space like time - they are like measurements and measuring sticks at once. They are bound up with each other, as well as mass.
You have a mass, you have its own extension in space over time.
You measure time, you move a mass through space to clock your measurement.
You measure space, you hold a mass still through time.
Its always one thing being measured where someone says time or space or mass.
We must be very cautious in introducing consciousness as an observer. The two things are not the same. The same has to be said about seeing and measuring, they are not the same.
Think of schrodinger's cat. it is not true that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until we SEE it. Quantum decoherence has already taken place since it is not a completely isolated experiment; here the observer and the measurement is made by the environment as our apparatus. And it could not be otherwise: being perceived is not an act of physical interaction, that act of interaction is carried out by our technological devices or the environment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einselection
I don't much like the way Andrei Linde introduces the term 'consciousness'. I would prefer it if he stuck with 'the observer'. But then, Andrei Linde is a qualified commentator, he is a recognised expert in cosmological physics. He says in the interview that his publisher was very anxious about including his thoughts about consciousness on the matter - but, says Linde, he couldn't live with his conscience if he didn't.
My interpretation of the matter is simply that time has an inextricably subjective pole. So there's no truly objective time in the sense of being independent of any act of observation and measurement. This is implicit in what Linde says - that an observation requires there to be an observer and what is being measured. Time is only meaningful in that context - it is not truly observer-independent in the way that scientific realism might expect.
But that certainly doesn't mean, as the OP says, that time doesn't exist. It is far too simplistic an idea, and obviously problematic, as these very communications devices are reliant on measures of time.
I agree that there is irremediably a type of time that exists as Bergson points out. But I would not be so sure that it is something simply subjective. Thanks to Heidegger's analysis of Kant's work we have to say that the time we say is subjective is in fact constitutive of subjectivity itself, which determines it as objective or trascendental. This form of time I would say is more fundamental than the one provided by physics (because of the problems that arise when we think of time as a series of discontinuous points that follow one another).
Oscillation of what? I can measure many different things and use them as time such as the number of water droppings from the gutter while making a coffee. With the stop watch in the phone, it takes 3 minutes.
But I could ignore the phone clock, and use the water dropping clock, and say it takes 90 water drop time for making a coffee. Could it count as time as well? If yes, then which is the correct time for making a coffee?
Is it possible to say that something exists, when the existence vanishes the moment it is perceived or realised? Existence means it keeps existing through past, present and future.
Quoting Number2018
Isn't it just a mental state? The ability to tell the difference between past, present and future using different type of mental operations in human mind i.e. memory, consciousness and imagination?
Quoting Number2018
Virtual time? Remember when you were a baby and child? You couldn't have known what time is about. As you grew older, you learn about it, read about it, and think about. You have a concept of time. But the nature of time itself is still abstract. When you get older, they say time feels going a lot faster than when you were younger. What does it tell you? Isn't time just a mental state?
Actually, there is something I want to add about this. I'm not referring to the 'simply subjective' which is a rather dismissive way of framing it. The subjective pole of existence is not subjective in the sense of pertaining to the individual subject, but more in the sense of Kant and Husserl's transcendental ego - that which describes the structure of consciousness of any subject (or the 'ideal subject'). To quote an essay of mine on the issue, 'The subjective refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness. In an important sense, all sentient beings are subjects of experience. Subjectivity or perhaps we could coin the term subject-hood encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.' Which is what I think the second part of your post is referring to as 'constitutive of subjectivity'.
Quoting JuanZu
This may be true of Kants work on time, but Heideggers notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Daseins being in the world.
I totally agree. I should not have said objective but only transcendental. But it is still true with respect to another form of temporality which is linear. Let us recall how the temporality of Dasein is determined as ek-stasis in which a linear and discontinuous description has no place.
Heidegger argues, if I understood well, that time is not something external to Dasein, but constitutes its very existence. The temporality of Dasein is understood on the basis of its ek-static existence, that is, Dasein is always projected beyond itself, towards the future, rooted in its past and committed to its present.
That is a much better question.
Quoting Corvus
You acknowledge a future, and I assume you also acknowledge a past. This suggests a ordered relation: past->present->future.
We can label this ordered relation, "time". It's not a complete account, but it's a beginning.
This is cool: Andrew Jaffe talks about Carlo Rovelli
The article is called "The Illusion of Time."
Some folk conclude that what is real is the atoms and molecules of the cellulose, that the table is an illusion.
Some folk note that those atoms are mostly space. and again sups the table to be an illusion.
Neither of these is a sound conclusion. It remains that there is a table, consisting of cellulose and space.
The argument for time being an illusion is similarly unsound. It remains that the OP was written three days ago.
The problem here is not with time and space, but with the misuse of the words "illusion" and "real".
1) If tables exist, then a table is one more object in addition to the atoms that compose it.
2) A table is not one more atom in addition to the atoms that compose it.
3) So, tables don't exist.
With that in mind, here's a parity argument for the elimination of time:
4) Banno compared tables to time.
5) If so, then: if tables don't exist, then time doesn't exist.
3) Tables don't exist (the conclusion of the previous argument).
6) So, time doesn't exist.
Feel free to replace the predicate "exists" with the predicate "is real".
The table is the exact same object as the atoms that compose it.
Here are two reasons why it isn't:
1st reason: the table and the atoms that compose it have different properties. So, by Leibniz's Law, they're not identical to each other. For example, if you send the table through the wood chipper, the table ceases to exists, but the atoms don't.
2nd reason: if a table is identical to the atoms that compose it, then if you remove a single atom, you're no longer dealing with the same table, since if you represent both cases using sets, it turns out that the set of n atoms is not identical to the set of n-1 atoms.
Maybe not misuse, but certainly sloppy use, lazy use, imprecise use, shallow use.
However, we could loosen the word 'real' or 'exist' to mean whatever significant properties or concepts are required for us to make sense of the world around us.
You may not be able to point to time but all the interconnected concepts that it concerns itself with as such: Physical change, past/future as well as their asymmetry, metrical notions of temporal progression, existence or non-existence, etc.
Are concepts that I don't think a physicist let alone a laymen could do without as its seemingly rather baked into our cognition.
Quoting Corvus Well, what does it mean to say certain objects exist and why space?
There are void conceptions of space, although not as popular these days, which have been advocated in which the notion of space is understood in purely negative language. So space is a sort of abstraction that one can entertain and can't do away with because whenever you have a positive property we can always add on the word 'not' or negate it to get a perfectly reasonable concept as well. So if you can have things that are colored then clearly there could be un-colored things or if things are charged then they can be uncharged things. You can continue this little game until you are left with only 'pure extension' but while it would be rather peculiar to suppose that there is no space it seems also that this notion is heavily abstracted away from physical things so as to be 'less real'. It's only purpose or property being to separate things and nothing else but because it almost usually approached in such highly negative terms why add it into the 'physical' category?
An article that I found on JSTOR by John E. Boodin all the way from 1906 advocates for this in his second article talking about space & time.
Quoting Corvus Lots of things lack our ability to imagine them but that doesn't make them unintelligible or nonreferential.
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I'd again emphasize that the notion of time is a horrible cluster concept. The notions of past or the future could be subsumed under our psychological proclivities but so could so many other aspects of what people take to be illusory but real physical manifestations in the world.
The concept of time is usually also includes the notion of the present which is tied up with the notion of existence and clearly there is a difference one could say between change as well as the physical thing that is changed.
Then there is the designation of metrical measures of time either by extrinsic means (clocks or arbitrary comparative convention) or intrinsic means so the statement 'this process is faster than that one' is a statement that nature would take as meaningful. That there is some physical connection or series of properties that allow for this to make sense. Some who says, as you may, that nature has only extrinsic metrics of time so we 'invent' them so to speak would mean that nature can't actually tell the difference between short or long processes.
If time doesn't exist then does that mean there is no present and so our intuitions about existing things independent of our perception of them is to be thrown out as well? Are we to also think that nature can't tell the temporal difference between a stars life and our own in terms of temporal length given the past/future are fictions together with the fact that no non-existent thing can ground a measure for things?
Are willing to stomach those conclusions above? If not, what are you keeping and what intuitions are you choosing to get rid of?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I agree with your first reason, but not your second. It's still a table when you remove a few atoms. Not the SAME table but there's still a table there.
A table is an object composed of various physical objects arranged in a way to fit its intended purpose. One could dismantle it, and all the parts would still be there, but you couldn't use it as a table.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yep. Different properties may be attributed to the same individual under different descriptions.
Leibniz's Law says that two things that have the same properties are the same thing. It does not say that if something has different properties it is a different thing. You are using the inverse of Leibniz's Law, wanting to argue that if something has different properties, it is a different thing.
In one description the table is brown and solid, in the other it is cellulose and space. These two different descriptions are both true of the table. They are compatible. In order to show that there are two different things, one would need to show that the very same object could not be brown and solid and cellulose and mostly space. But of course you can't do that becasue the table is wn and solid and cellulose and mostly space.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yeah, it is. It is the same table if I gouge out my initials in the woodwork. Removing a few atoms will not make it cease to be that table. We use such terms in suitable vague ways quite successfully.
Both examples attempt to be overly precise.
Sure, but the distinction between LL and the contrapositive of LL is inessential to my argument. In second order terms:
?x?y((x=y) ? ?P(Px?Py))
Being able to persist while going through the woodchipper is a property that the collection of atoms has, and the table does not have this property. In other words, they have different persistence conditions, and by LL (or its contrapositive), it follows that they're not identical to each other.
Quoting Banno
I personally agree, but that contradicts this other claim that you made:
Quoting Banno
Then you say:
Quoting Banno
And that's a bad thing? How would less precision be a good thing here?
The obvious reply is, that pile of wood chips is the table.
There's two problems with that, IMHO:
Problem one: it's counter-intuitive. Obviously our intuitions can be wrong, so perhaps this is more of an aesthetic problem.
Second problem: if you say that the pile of wood chips is identical to the table, then your ontology can't explain artifact destruction (or artifact creation). When the collection of atoms existed as a living tree, was it also a table in that case? Of course not. But if you say that the table is identical to the atoms that compose it, then it follows that the table existed before being a table, in the form of a tree.
I don't agree that it is counter-intuitive. If the owner came along and asked where their table is, we might well point to the wood chips.
Quoting Arcane SandwichWell, obviously.
There's a play on what it is to be an individual here, that harks back to my initial point, that the table and the atoms are the same. When the collection of atoms existed as a living tree, it wasn't a table, yet it was the table, just as the wood chips are the table.
The table is an individual, and as such may be rigidly designated regardless of the properties attributed to it. It can be parts of a tree, or a pile of wood chip, and yet remains the table. But as the parts of a tree, or as wood chip, it is not a table.
If our aim were to explain the composition of the table, it would be better to start with a different set of individuals, perhaps the cellulose fibres. These can be arranged into a table, a tree or a pile of wood chips.
Which is were we started. The table is the collection of cellulose fibres. It's not as if one arranges the cellulose fibres and then adds something else, the table.
An object is more than the set of parts that compose it. It's the composed parts + the way they are arranged that makes it something more.
And yep, we can talk of have fox-trouts if we want.
Yep. Again, there is a difference between the type, "table" and the individual, "This table".
Quoting Relativist
So you would include some sort of form - we don't only take the parts and arrange them in a table-like fashion, we need to add, in addition, tableness?
I won't be agreeing with that.
But would he agree that time is inseparable from lived experience?
Aren't you discussing the Ship of Theseus?
Quoting Banno
Fortuitous example, considering that the 'hyle' in hylomorphism is precisely 'lumber' or 'timber'.
It's not a misunderstanding, but an actualisation of potential, at least as I understand it. Form is intrinsic to identity - matter must exist as form in order for it to be intelligible, identifiable as a table. Furthermore a table is an artefact, it is composed according to a design to fulfill a function.
When the table is chipped into sawdust and scattered, the functional structure is gone. So, in one sense, its no longer "a table" (a functional object), but in another sense, its still "this table" (the individual thing that once was a table).So Identity doesnt depend purely on form. If it did, then the table would cease to exist the moment it stopped being functional as a table. Instead, identity seems to track something deeperperhaps continuity of language, history, and the way we rigidly designate things.
Great question. As I understand it, no. The problem of the Ship of Theseus, in my view, is about indeterminate identity. What I'm asking Banno is a different question, a different problem. I should know, since I'm the one that has invented it (but there are some precedents in the literature). I call it "The Argument From Addition". For what? For the elimination of ordinary objects. It also works for the elimination of extra-ordinary objects. I've published a paper about this, in an Australian journal. It's the one that I was talking with Banno a few comments ago. Since I don't want to break the Forum's rules, if you're interested, send me a PM and I'll link it to you.
So I'm not saying "table" is some ontological category.
Quoting Banno
Which, of course, it does. When the object is dissassembled to its parts, the object no longer exists. Plain language, not 'word salad' :brow:
Quoting Banno
But whatever that might be, it is not inherent in the object. There is no use looking for a table in the sawdust, that is just a desparate attempt to maintain some kind of objective referent.
Yeah well, I'd rather err on the side of caution. Good rule for online Forums, good rule for ordinary life. The obvious question here is,
is there an extra-ordinary life?
Not a table, then?
It's a low blow. A Deleuzian low blow from a Wittgenstein fan. Deleuze hated Wittgenstein.
@Banno is not an atheist. He's a Spinozist.
Here the logic used is Kripke's, seen in Identity and Necessity.
Wittgenstein didn't care. :smile:
Ok, then on the Good-Evil Axis, you're a Neutral.
Now you explain to me what the blimey this got to do with a Thread called "Ontology of Time". And explain that to me rationally.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Only on Sunday.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
This follows on from my first post, in which I pointed out that the OP was then 19 hrs old.
The line of thought is that there is something amiss with an argument that claims to show that time, which is pretty foundational, does not exist. It misuses "time", or "exits", or both.
Today is Sunday (in Argentina).
Quoting Banno
Nonsense. Appeal to the stone, yadda yadda (on my part), I don't care. What you just said there sounds like nonsense (at least to my ear). It's not good common sense. It's pseudo-science.
Quoting Banno
But that contradicts what you just said in your previous thesis. It's like you want to uphold a Deleuzian thesis and a Wittgensteinian thesis at the same time, and it just makes no sense.
I think that in another place I spoke to you about temporality in Husserl as a constituent of consciousness as self-affection. According to this view the present is determined by a difference with respect to the past and the future, implied by the absence that is given in them. The present is never identically present but always deferred and postponed (a la Derrida), that is, we cannot deny the absence and non-subjectivity that constitutes it.
That's why I have concerns about thinking of time as subjective or hyper-subjective if you will.
And I own one of these:
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for table-ness? I say there aren't any. Unless you would stipulate some.
Dont you and I both believe that everything is inseparable from lived experience?
You're living in the past.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Fine. You can tell me why, later. :razz:
You don't see anything incompatible between your comments here and time not existing?
Yeah but it's like, you're making what can only be described as a dumb point.
(Added: It's pretty much Kripke's point, rather than mine. But if you think he is mistaken, go ahead and explain why. )
But dont you both believe that live is determinated by its relation to death?
Quoting Banno
You're saying that tables don't have an essence. Unless we stipulate it so. But then they can have essences, in a modal sense. It's possible for them to have them (the essences, that is). Not merely in a linguistic sense (i.e., modal logic, as developed by Saul Kripke), but in a metaphysical, objective sense.
So why would you even say that there aren't any? Like, it's a super-trivial point, there's nothing of importance, merit, or worth, there.
If you think tables have an essence, tell us what it is.
I seem to have been asking that a lot lately. No one wants to say what an essence is. Puts me in mind of the suit belonging to a certain emperor.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Any what? Tables? Time? Essences?
Tableness. The essence of a table is its tableness.
Quoting Banno
See above.
Quoting Banno
Essences. There are essences, Banno, you just said so. There are no essences, unless we stipulate it so. It follows from that, that there are essences!
It is even more perplexing than Nothingness.
That's just calling the essence by another name. You've said that the essence of table is that it is a table. Wow.
No, because essence is a genus, and tableness is one of its species. There are other essences beside tableness. For example, chairness, treeness, dogness, humanness, Godness, etc.
Quoting Banno
No, I didn't say that. I said that essence of a table is its tableness.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, I have that effect on impressionable white Australians. I'm marvelous, as an intellectual. I'm majestic, you could say. You? You're more like the intellectual equivalent to Crocodile Dundee.
Are you guys slightly off topic?
was Heidegger off-topic in Being and Time?
There must be something that makes a table what it is, and this we will call tableness, and we will generalise this to other stuff, and say that what makes something what it is, is its essence.
Contrast that with the idea that it is useful to call some things tables, yet that there need be nothing they all have in common. What counts is that the word "table" is used.
We have made use of the notion of time in this thread. Therefore there is such a notion. There is time.
Humor is subjective.
Quoting Banno
Yes, its essence. Tableness, to be more precise.
Quoting Banno
:clap:
Quoting Banno
No, we don't. We discover (or invent, or stipulate, as you said so yourself) the essence of various sorts of things, both natural as well as artificial. It's a case-by-case approach, not a generalization from one case to the universe (of discourse, if, of anything).
Quoting Banno
Exactly, tell it to the people that study the Spanish Essence in the context of Academia, for example.
Quoting Banno
But you said that they don't have essences, unless we stipulate it so. It follows from that, that if we do stipulate it, then they have essences. Is this what passes for Great Reasoning these days?
Taken out of context: the point being, what is objective is supposed to be real irrespective of experience. So that, time would exist in the same manner as that measured by h.sapiens, were there none of them. That sense of time existing independently of any observer (i.e. absolute time) is what I'm questioning - but it might be useful to peruse the prior entries particularly the one on Einstein and Bergson. So what I'm arguing is that while an observer is intrinsic to the nature of time, the observer is never a part of what is being measured. It's a specific instance of a larger argument.
Quoting JuanZu
That becomes a bit abstact for me. I'm not well-versed in 20th century philosophy. My only point is to call into question the idea that time is real sans observers.
Quoting Banno
Preferably a flat surface, for accomodating objects, a suitable height for the purpose (either standing or sitting) and generally a space underneath to place one's legs if one wishes to sit at it. One can use a packing crate or all manner of objects as a table but provided it fulfills the function of a table then will serve the purpose.
Quoting Banno
And that is, precisely, it's eidos, the 'idea of a table'. But it is not something that exists in the same sense that the table exists.
The above also applies to your article. I see a problem with trying to maintain the notion of 'existence' as being univocal with respect to both the parts and the whole, meaning that the whole then becomes a separate, countable entity in addition to the parts that comprise it - in line with the above. The forms don't exist in the same sense as constituents. Hence the saying, I believe originating with Aristotle (although I might be mistaken) that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Thanks for the critique! No one had commented on that article yet, you're officially its First Critic. And I think that what you're saying has substance. Thank you very much. And no, I'm not being ironic now, I'm being sincere. I have a sense of Ethics. Perhaps not "sense" in the sense of the five senses, but in some other sense, a poetic one, if you will.
Yea. But a famous physicist speculates that time has to do with the way our consciousness is configured. Thus the famous cosmologist publishes an article in Nature talking about how time might be an illusion.
So it's legit to say that time might be an illusion.
here
Quoting Wayfarer
Not a table, then.
Quoting Banno
A man (not a man)
Throws a stone (not a stone)...
etc.
I think that's not what Wayfarer intended to say. And even if he did, why would you assume that it's also my idea? I don't define tables that way. I don't need to, since essences aren't modally necessary, they're modally contingent. You said so yourself.
That's a good point. Harman himself makes that point, he says that things exist in two ways: really, and sensually. And this occurs even in the inanimate world of rocks and crystals.
The Wittgensteinian notion of linguistic "family resemblance" is lumpen etymology.
The following music video is the Absolute, Ultimate Truth about the Ontology of Time:
Quoting Wayfarer
Absolutely
Is there a Dasien/being-in-the-world binary in Heidegger's philosophy? If there is, then it's just a historicized version of the good old subject-object binary from The Good Old Days.
EDIT: With a bit more form:
1) If there is a Dasien/being-in-the-world binary in Heidegger's philosophy, then it's just a historicized version of the good old subject-object binary from The Good Old Days.
2) There is a Dasien/being-in-the-world binary in Heidegger's philosophy.
3) So, it's just a historicized version of the good old subject-object binary from The Good Old Days.
Which premise would you like to deny, if any?
For Heidegger the subject-object relation consists in the theoretical attitude in which man tries to free himself from that which constitutes him (language, prejudices, culture, etc.) in order to reach an object also devoid of its being with man (for example when instead of using a hammer we ask what a hammer is and ask about its essence or objectivity). Being in the world is the way of being of man and things in which the theoretical attitude has not taken place or is secondary.
To me this fits into the American pragmatism of Dewey and so on. Only in transcendental terms
To me it sounds like that, and it also sounds like Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Augustine.
Heidegger was an intellectual thief.
Well, one of the things that makes Heidegger original is that he breaks down something like being-in-the-world, being-for-death, the authenticity, inauthenticity of his conception of temporality that he reinterpreted from Kant in "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics."
Yeah that, and being a Nazi.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
For Heidegger , subject implies self-consciousness, S=S. Dasein is neither subject nor world, but the in-between. The self does not pre-exist its world, but is reflected back from what it is involved with.
Quoting Banno
To be clear: I do not believe in essences nor "natural kinds".
I hope you see the irony there.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Are you saying that his work is more derivative
than these other thinkers?
Could "lived time" be similar idea to Wittgenstein's "memory time"? I recall seeing Wittgestein's idea of time diving it into "Memory time" and "information time".
Today is 13th of January in Chinese lunar calendar, and 12th of Magha Shukla in Hindu calendar. In Gregorian Calendar it is 10th February 2025.
Could they be also a form of Time dilation?
Space is not like time. Space exits without measuring anything. Does time exist, if you didn't measure it? Can you tell time without looking at a watch or clock? But watches and clocks are not time. Even if your watch and clocks stop, changes motions and movements in reality still happen.
I think you need to differentiate between primary substance and secondary substance.
A particular, individual thing, as a material object, is an instance of primary substance. As such, it has an "essence" within itself, as its identity, which accounts for it being the thing which it is, and not something else.
Secondary substance is the type, or species, which we assign to a thing, such as "table". This sort of 'identity' which we assign to a thing, is a tool which we use for communication, and logic. If we say that "table" as secondary substance, has an essence, then we may name the essence of a table and this may provide us with a type of necessity, logical necessity, which we can use as a tool.
So we need to be careful not to equivocate between the two types of contingency involved here. "A thing's' essence" in the sense of secondary substance, is contingent on the condition we place on being that type (what we say about the thing). From that contingency we create a logical necessity. But "a thing's essence" in the sense of primary substance, is contingent on the thing's material existence. The thing's material existence is a different sense of "necessity". Recognizing the difference between the necessity produced by what we say, and the necessity produced by material existence, allows for the reality of human fallibility.
To apply this to the quoted passage, "what makes something what it is", refers to "essence" in the sense of primary substance. "Tableness" refers to "essence" in the sense of secondary substance.
Both time and space are reference frame dependent. Space isn't an existent; it doesn't have properties. Rather, space (distance; length) is a relation between things that exist.
Time doesn't exist either. It's not a relation between things that exist. Rather, it's a relation between events.
Time cannot be solely attributed to the primordial activity of mental faculties or the outcomes of the learning process. Such a position would inevitably reaffirm the primacy of a transcendental subject behind an individuals time-related actions. Instead, we can refer to a temporality shaped by the rhythmic practices of society. Individual time-related orientations emerge not through reading, learning, or understanding but through shared collective experiences. A babys or childs entire life is organized according to the temporal structures of their immediate environment. Later, as an adult and member of an organization or institution, ones sense of time is primarily affected by the organizations structure of time. Thus, the present moment becomes an operational time of activity, guided by organizational memory and oriented toward an uncertain future of a newly redefined accomplishment. In this sense, the present moment's reality is shaped by a virtual time horizons of the past and future.
The OP doesn't deny time is real. We use time daily. But when it asks does time exist, it means does it exist as a physical entity in the universe? Space exists in the universe.
Without space, nothing can exist. But space itself is invisible. Could we say something exists, when something is not visible, has no mass and no energy?
Time has similar properties. It is not visible, not sensible to our senses as an entity. So where is it coming from? When the OP asks does it exist? It means where is it coming from?
The nature of time is an interesting topic, because there are many folks talking about time travel. If time is some sort of shared mental state of humans, then any talk of time travel would be a fantasy.
Does it imply that God, souls and Thing-in-itself are also real as time? Or are they just figments of human imagination? If time is real, why aren't the other abstract concepts real?
Yes, this sounds very close to the OP's perspective in the implication.
This is what Bunge himself says. Here's the evidence:
Quoting Bunge (2006: 244)
I'm not sure that I agree with this, though.
Quoting Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos
----------------------------------------------------------
Source:
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonising Society, in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Cataneda, Ann Marie Fortier and Mimi Shellyey (eds.), Uprootings/Regroupings: Questions of Postcoloniality, Home and Place, London and New York, Berg, 2003, pp. 23-40.
Dead can Dance - Yulunga
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Wikipedia
Sure. I agree.
Quoting JuanZu
Do dogs perceive time? When you throw a ball in the air, the dogs could jump and catch it before it falls on the ground. Surely they notice the motion of the ball. Is the motion noticeable to the dog, because of time? Or time has no relation to the motion, because dogs are not able to perceive time?
Quoting JuanZu
One night in my dream, I was fighting with an unknown bloke. He hit me first, so I hit him back. I could see my punch moving towards his face, and hit him hard vividly in the dream. Does it mean that time was involved in seeing the motion in the dream? Can time be acting on the motions in dreams? What is the difference between time in reality and time in dreams?
Is time a kind of perception of mental beings, or some concrete property of objects and motions in space?
Quoting Corvus . . . and yet people have constructed philosophies that don't make use of what you typically call 'space' and things turn out just fine. Don't confuse or define space as 'what is needed for things to exist' otherwise its rather uninteresting and tautological why you think it's needed. Then the word 'space' is just a substitute word for "whatever grounds all physical things".
Second, energy and mass can be considered mere properties. . . not things. So it's not mysterious to suppose anything doesn't have them or lacks them.
Mass is either defined, or has been defined, as a measure of how much stuff there is but over time its become more coincident operationally with a measure for the resistance to having ones state of motion changed. It's inertia. . . and if you don't exert a force on something to measure its inertia does it make sense to suppose there is this liquid abstraction 'mass' that such a thing possesses?
Quoting Corvus You're asking the wrong questions. What concepts do WE think are related to it? Of these which can we diminish or rid ourselves of and still get to keep the majority of our time-intuitions?
Quoting Corvus Presentists who use non-spatialized language to talk about time with metaphors that liken it closer to our lived experience would agree as well.
However, that would mean that any actual 'time-travel' scenarios would have to be heavily re-interpreted perhaps in fashions that make it seem no less peculiar.
Say, for example, that an individual appears in strangely advanced looking machinery in the heart of New York as if they appeared right out of thin air. They appear Human but analysis of their biology indicates the proper inference that they are rather heavily changed into terms of genetics or physical make up that coincides with possible predictions on future Human evolution. He attests to this and even makes proclamations about the future with the utmost precision as if his knowledge is pure prophecy. However, he only ever says it's because he 'lived' through a time when these event or occurrences became well known.
We are reasonable people, however, and the future doesn't exist beyond mere mental prediction and the past as mere memory or creative retrodiction. So where did he come from?
Not from the future, but one possibility is that he is a random statistical fluke of nature which just happened to have the atoms around where he appeared change on a fundamental level in a highly improbable manner. To yield a person with full fledged memories of a past life coming from the future with technology that seems advanced but possible for us to create.
We can even add in the future part of the 'beginning' of his journey but it wouldn't be so much a great embarkment as it would be him vanishing out of existence the second the time-machine fully energizes instantly vaporizing him.
To be a presentist is to have to accept such horrifying a reality that may statistically create fully fledged individuals with false memories.
Quoting Corvus As far as they may be needed for simple ordinary cognition; they are 'real' to me.
Consider 2 straight objects, touching at their ends, and lying at a 90 degree angle to one another (a carpenter's square). I would not say that the 90 degree angle exists (it's not an object in the world), but rather: a state of affairs exists (the carpenter's square), and that the 90 degree relation is a component in this state of affairs. So in this sense, 90-degree angle does exist- immanently, within the state of affairs.
This may, or may not, extrapolate to the time-relation, but it's at least a step in that direction.
But then, space is also no-thing, empty of things that could be said to exist. Things that take up space are the best approximation of "space exists". And things that take up space have to be measured to be identified.
A topic that might be more pertinent is notions of time in other cultures - cyclic time, for example.
And I would say, that this relation exists as an intelligible relationship, a regularity that registers as significant for an observing mind. Furthermore that while right angles might exist immanently in particular a carpenter's square they also transcend any specific instantiation. That it is actually a principle, or a form, which can be grasped by an observing mind, and existent in the sense that you and I can both grasp what a right-angle is.
And I say the nature of time is analoguous to that.
"And I say the nature of time is analogous to that".
Point being that both time and right angles "exist" becasue we treat stuff as if it includes right angles and time. And we cannot not do so.
But when you are reflecting the events in past, present and future, they don't need to always in the order of the past -> present -> future. You could think about the future on what will happen to your project or the world in next year, and then you could go back to the past, when you have started the project, and then think about the present state of the world economy.
There is no law saying you must always perceive the events in your mind in the order, is there?
How? Look at a pool and mentally see a right angle in the water. It's right there
The right angles don't EXIST transcendently, nor does any "form". That would entail reifying abstractions.
The right angle is there becasue we put it there as much as that it is there in some transcendent fashion. Perception does not only proceed from world to mind, but also from mind to world.
Duckrabbits.
Such forms don't exist in any material sense but they're nevertheless real, as their forms are givens. It would only be a reification if they were regarded as existent objects, which they are not. But then, because they're not existent objects, then naturalism is obliged to say that whatever reality they possess is derivative - products of the mind, is the usual expression. But that is a reflection of the shortcomings of a naturalist ontology.
Quoting Source
We don't get to do that. We recognise it. That's how come we could build, you know, pyramids, and the rest.
You're wrong. As I told you via Inbox:
Quoting Banno
Which is to my point about Heidegger's Being and Time, and about you being wrong that my comment was a bit too far off topic. What is Heidegger's Being and Time if not an Ontology of Time? The Ontology of Time?
As for cyclic time, see Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Return, and Heidegger's commentary on that concept. Then consider the concept of the Eternal Return in ancient Stoic thought, particularly in the works of Marcus Aurelius.
EDIT: But feel free to continue it in the Australian politics, Banno. It's the same thing. It's called Political Ontology. The term already exists, I didn't invent it. How's your knowledge of Badiou's work, mate?
Could it imply that Time is Being or a part of Being in Heidegger?
That's not the way I see it. I agree with Graham Harman's interpretation of Heidegger, which he sets forth in his first book, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects.
Harman's interpretation would then evolve in his subsequent works. In a nutshell, here's the idea:
Heidegger was a correlationist realist, something unfathomable for Quentin Meillassoux. Being is never entirely present. Even when it reveals itself, something remains hidden. We will never access Being. Not even through divine revelation.
Time doesn't reveal itself either. Moreover isn't all Being temporal? Therefore time is a part of Being. That idea just passed by me. It could be wrong. I need to get back to Heidegger. But fair enough on your idea. I am not sure also what divine revelation means. Does he say something about it? As you indicated, I am sure Heidegger says a lot about Time, hence Sein Und Zeit.
The way I see it, Being is historical. Existence is not. Both of them (Being and existence) are temporal, but not in the same way. Existence has no history.
What's problematic is supposed that they are either in the world or they are only in the mind.
It means that not even God could grant you access to Being.
Isn't it natural to presume such a dichotomy?
Could God be Being himself? From my memory of flicking SUZ, man is Dasein i.e. Being at now and here. What would Being as God be?
:ok: :up:
This sounds like a denial that they exist immanently. Existing entails them actually existing, but immanently- not as independent objects.
Abstractions are mental attitudes, which are derived by considering multiple objects with common elements, and mentally substracting the aspects that distinguish them. These mental attitudes ("abstractions") have no bearing on the ontology of the objects. They pertain only to how we might think about them.
Sure. Is it right?
No, he could not. God has being, as does everything else. Think of it like this: all animals have life, but there is no animal called "Life". All entities have being, but there is no entity called "Being".
Now that I've joined this thread, I will say something about this statement, namely, that I think it's fallacious. Time can be measured according to intersubjectively validated standards, hence the existence of clocks and other time-measurement devices. Every phenomenal existent, and all mechanical and electronic artifacts, are subject to the vicissitudes of time, and regulate their activities, or have them regulated, by or according to time.
What I've been arguing for in this thread is that despite all of this, time is not solely objective. Time has a subjective pole or aspect that can neither be eliminated, nor directly perceived. My first post quoted an Aeon essay to that effect, about the philosophy of Henri Bergson:
But this emphatically doesn't mean that 'time doesn't exist', simpliciter. Try holding your breath for a minute while you say that.
Quoting Banno
That's the nub of the issue. In the Einstein-Bergson debate, Einstein, a scientific realist, insisted that time is real irrespective of whether anyone measures it or not - in other words, completely objective. Bergson, as I interpret it, insists that measurement is an intrinsic aspect of time, and that therefore, time is not only objective. And if that goes for time, then the implications are far-reaching.
Were they talking about the same thing?
Quoting Corvus
?
Fair enough. Good explanation, gracias. I also feel that Time is closely related to Being.
No hay de qué, caballero. Lea José Ortega y Gasset.
"future" is the moment which will become present soon and in inevitable consequence, and it can be imagined at present.
And for you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ortega_y_Gasset
Es un nombre nuevo para mí en filosofía, pero parece ser un gran filósofo, especialmente para los estudios de Heidegger. Gracias de nuevo mi amigo.
Aun mejor es Carlos Astrada, buen hombre.
Quoting Corvus
So reflecting on past and future doesn't have bearing on their having actually been a past, nor in there eventually being a future. Right?
The ordered relation: past-present-future refers to the actual, not to the order we choose to contemplate them.
It comes down to the juxtaposition of idealism [s]and realism[/s] against physicalism, realism against antirealism, in which you tend to the idealist persuasion. It might be possible to give an account of the debate in which both are correct. 's mentioned of McTaggart went ignored.
Edited for
Es bueno saber que hay muchos grandes filósofos en los países de habla hispana. Leer y estudiar sus obras nos brindará perspectivas interesantes y alternativas sobre muchos temas filosóficos difíciles.
But you can only access all the past and future from present. Past has gone and not accessible from present unless from the memory and experience. Future is only accessible from imagination. I could only tell about the future of the world economy from at this moment and it is totally based on my imagination.
If I can access the future in reality, then I can win the lottery jackpot tomorrow. But I can only imagine it, which is surely inaccurate. Why inaccurate 99.99%? Because it is based on my imagination. All can only be accessible from present using my memory of the past, consciousness of the now, and imagination for the future. That was my idea. You may disagree on that.
Indeed, comrade. Indeed.
So what I am offering is not too far from the Wittgensteinian suggestion that A-series and B-series are different language games.
Yeah but you're leaving out materialism there. I'll explain it to you:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Sure, but the question is which of the two is used to speak the truth. And if it's neither the A-series nor the B-series, then it's time for a new language game, the C-series.
Why not both.
I think that what says in this post, is that the truth of the B-series would render the A-series impossible, and vise versa. This means that the two are incompatible. That's why McTaggart proposed the C-series which might take some aspects of each.
well,
Quoting sime
i'll leave it to @Sime to fill this in.
Physicalism is not the same thing as materialism. Do I need to spell it out for you with symbols?
I believe the problem is that there is no difference between future and the past in the B-series, while the A-series presupposes a difference between future and past. Taking a point called "the present", and inserting it arbitrarily into a random position in the B-series, to artificially produce a future and past, doesn't do what is required to create that difference.
What is required is that the present is real, thereby making the difference between future and past real. But if we grant this, we rule out the possibility of the B-series. Therefore the nature of "the present" would need to be severely compromised, so as to be no longer consistent with the A-series, to make it compatible with the B-series. In other words, the A-series has a real present, and the B-series does not, and that's why they are incompatible.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
But isn't it a difference only meaningful within academic philosophy? I mean to all intents and purposes, they're synonyms, or rather, physicalism is rather more sophisticated term for materialism.
Nah mate, physicalism is the crass version of scientific materialism. I've a paper on this as well, though it's not been published yet (it will be published later this year, in a Bungean journal that I contribute to).
I'll just quote Bunge himself:
That's from his book Matter and Mind, from 2010. He was around 90 years old, more or less, when he published it.
EDIT: And here's some more Bungean wisdom for you:
I don't much care. Physicalism suits my purposes. You can phrase it how you wish.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, not in my experience either.
I'll use materialism for newtonian philosophies and physicalism for the doctrine that physics is the only ontology, others may do as they please.
I looked at the book abstract, and it says 'Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged.' I do address that problem in The Mind Created World, although if you would like to discuss it further, that would probably a better thread for it.
Quoting Banno
I'd sort of agree, although Marxist materialism is a different kettle of fish.
Quoting Wayfarer
As is new materialism.
Because physics is not the only materialist science. Geology is materialist, Biology is materialist, Sociology is materialist, etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sounds interesting, I'll check it out.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's "overmining materialism", to use Harman's technical terms. By contrast, physicalism is "undermining materialism". Both of them ignore the mid-level, the mezzanine level, of objects themselves.
But the rest of the Universe is under no obligation to share your purposes.
Quoting Banno
But physics is not the only ontology. Geology is ontological, just as physics is. If you say that you believe that physics is the only ontology, then you don't believe in geology. We've been over this, Banno, when we spoke of tables. Now I'll say the same thing, but for stones. A stone is not identical to the collection of atoms that compose it. It is a new, emergent object in its own right. It is not reducible to the collection of atoms that compose it. This follows from the contrapositive of Leibniz's Law, together with some other premises.
I'm afraid it doesn't really work that way, there's too many glitches. At the north pole for example, every direction is south. Adding dimensions into your representation is not a simple translation.
Inwards and outwards: inwards towards the center of the Earth, outwards towards outer space.
It is difficult for me to think that time is not something proper to external objects. Imagine a world independent of the mind in which time does not pass, our experiences would not be able to perceive the movement of things either, don't you think?
Quoting Corvus
I would not say because of time. Time is not the cause of movement, but time is part of movement. For a dog it is obvious that time passes, but it has no concept of time. The important thing here is to understand that movement does not occur without time, because any movement can only be explained in a before and an after. But they are not the same thing: without movement we do not perceive time; but time passes even for a hypothetical motionless object, we call it persistence or duration.
Yep.
Sometimes the OP is too broad for the thread to keep to a theme. That's the case here. Too many side issues.
:worry:
Now theres an oxymoronic phrase! Im forming the view that the world independent of mind is precisely and exactly what the in itself refers to.
It sounds illogical to be able to imagine a world independent of mind, when imagining is a function mind.
Human mind must have the common objective capability for perception and judgement such as reasoning and sympathy. Wouldn't time perception be some sort of perceptive mechanism from the shared capability of mind?
Without watches or clocks, no one can tell the exact time anyway. If you lock yourself in an empty room with no windows, and stay in there for days or even hours, would you be able to tell what time it is when you trying to tell time?
Quoting JuanZu
That seems to suggest even motions and movement has nothing to do with time. Motions and movements are result of energy or force applying to mass or object. Time is measurement of the start and end of motion or movement, not motion or movement themselves.
You need motions and movement first before they tell you how long it took to end the process. At the end of the day, you have measured the intervals, not time itself. Would you agree?
Do you believe mind also creates time? or is time a part of the world? Were there postings regarding time in the thread?
Yes, you are correct here.
Quoting Relativist
In theory, the ordered relation is true, but in reality they are one. If you think about it, future continuously becomes present, and present becomes past. In this case, is the division actually valid?
From my understanding, Buddhists claim there is no eternity and no self. Time is known to be eternal. Could it mean Buddhists deny time too? Would be interesting to find out.
Quoting Wayfarer
What do you mean by "it can be justified philosophically"? I agree time is a wide topic, but at the end of the day, the OP is asking if time exists. When it asks if it exists, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It means in what form it exists. Actually t may be found that time may not exist. But isn't nonexistence a pure form of existence?
It would be silly to ask if water or air exists. But it is a valid question to ask in what form time exists.
Comrade sounds more spiritualistic.
That's why I said it. We can't speak too much in Spanish, in this Forum, even though this Thread is called Ontology of Time.
Think of it like this: Heidegger said "remanens capax mutationem". That's Latin. And Spanish, unlike English, evolved from Latin.
Quoting Quentin Meillassoux
Quoting Omar Khayyam
remanens capax mutationem ? - I need to go and think about it for a while to see what it actually means.
Being seems to be another vast topic in Philosophy, similar to Time, hence why I tried to read Heidegger, because he wrote about Being and Time extensively. But his language in the original texts is highly abstruse, and uses the Greek words extensively in his sentences, which I found difficult to penetrate.
I put them down, and decided to return when I learned some Greek, which hasn't happened yet.
I didn't know Latin and Spanish had the same root. But Latin is another language which would be very useful in reading philosophy I would imagine. I had tried to learn Spanish long time ago, when I had a friend from Chile. But I realised it is impossible to learn so many different languages within the limited time we each have in life.
Talking about languages, I believe that a large part of Time is also embedded in our languages.
Always, eventually, gradually, at the end, in the beginning, at the same time, instantly, .... all seem to describe Time. But then is it the case they describe Time? Or would it be the case that they describe motions, movements and changes rather?
This idea is easily refuted, therefore you ought to be able to reject it without difficulty. Through observation, the reality of time manifests as motion. And motion is not proper to objects, but is a relation between objects. This is why relativity theory is so useful. So "time" as a concept is similar to "space", as a concept, in the sense that they are both concepts which refer to the relations between external objects, not the objects themselves. As such, we cannot say that time and space are "proper to external objects", because they are external to external objects.
Incidentally, this is actually the most basic way that naive materialism is also refuted. If all objects consist of one common element, "matter", then we still need to assume something else to account for all the observed differences in the world. If we claim that differences are the result of different configurations of matter, then we need to assume something else, something immaterial (space, or something like that) to account for the reality of "different configurations". This is why monism, as an ontological principle is fundamentally flawed.
It's a phrase from Being and Time. Ask @Joshs about it, he thinks it's an important phrase for some reason, and I would agree, but I think that my reasons for considering it important are different from Joshs'.
Heidegger invented the phrase "remanens capax mutationem". No Latin author from the Middle Ages, and no Roman author from Antiquity, has ever used that phrase. There is no evidence for its existence, prior to Heidegger's Being and Time.
Quoting Corvus
They don't. Latin itself is the root of the Spanish language. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, etc., are Romance languages. They are like dialects of Latin. English, on the other hand, has nothing to do with Latin. It's more similar to German.
Quoting Hegel
That's not really true. English is technically Germanic, as being rooted that way historically, but the Latin influence over time is so significant that it's false to say that English has nothing to do with Latin.
Cry me a river, Anglo-Saxon. Spanish is essentially Latin, while English is only accidentally Latin.
If you posit time into two different types, then which one is the real time? Are the two different times synchronisable in any way? Would it not create confusion trying to find out which time you must accept as the real time?
If one is the real, then is the other illusion? Or are they both real, or both illusion?
I have missed this post. Apologies. Belated welcome to the thread.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I said it in some other replies the same answer. "time doesn't exist" doesn't mean it is denying the reality of time or our daily uses and reliance of time. But it is asking rather if time is the objective entity or property of the world, or it is rather internal perception of human mind.
If it is the former, it might exist in some form of physical entity. If it is the latter then it is psychological state of mind. In that case would it be correct to say time exists? We are not talking about the use or reliance of time in our daily life here, but we are (as the traditional philosophers have done) trying to find the arche of time.
If it didn't exist, it doesn't mean it is nothing. Because nonexistence is also a type of existence. It could be defined as a pure form of existence. If you are an idealist, then it is a perfectly acceptable definition.
You clearly have an intuitive understanding of past present and future - because you refer to.them. Those are "imaginings", but they're primary - innate. No one has to train you to distingish events in this way. You just learn words to apply to your innate sense.
That distinguishes it from your other imaginings about past present and future.
Quoting Corvus
It does not follow that they are one. The "becoming" needs to be accounted for, and can be - in a way consistent with your intuitive basis.
As I've said, my belief is that time has an unavoidably subjective aspect, so I agree that it is not solely objective. But then, nothing is is 'solely objective'. I agree with the idealists and phenomenologists who say that the world and the subject are 'co-arising'.
That's about the most of Mellaisoux I've read in a single sitting, but I'm generally hostile to speculative realism. The given characterisations of 'dogmatists', 'correlationists' and 'idealists' have shifting boundaries; it's not possible to define such attitudes in an air-tight kind of way such that comparing them will result in such pristine clarity and demarcation.
There's a critical paper by phenomenologist Dan Zahavi (thank you to @Joshs) 'The end of what? Phenomenology vs. speculative realism' from which:
The way I put it is that this is accomodated in Kantian philosophy by the recognition that empiricism and transcendental idealism are not in conflict. The theory of the formation of the earth is an empirical theory, supported by considerable empirical evidence which I don't think Kant would deny. (Let's not forget that Kant's theory of nebular formation was also an empirical theory, and that this theory, modified by LaPlace, is still considered respectable.) But all empirical evidence is subject to judgement, and meaningful within a context. It may well be literally true - but what is literally true depends on literacy and the ability to interpret evidence and symbolic forms and to synthesise them into coherent concepts. Which leads me to wonder whether the entire assault on 'correlationism' is a straw man argument. But fortunately, not being in the academic trenches, it is a battle I don't have to fight.
Change reqires time whether the change is psychological or physical. If by real you mean the physical time is a substance then one has to study Hole argument which denies time to be a substance. There are all sort of responses to the Hole argument though. This is still subject to debates. Gravitation waves however were observed and that to me means spacetime is a substance. The psychological time is however another beast. It is required since otherwise we cannot function well. It is however contingent on brain function. I am currently thinking about nature of psychological time so I cannot by certainty say if it is a substance or not.
It isn't so.
Time itself doesn't have past present future. It is us who divide time into those categories depending on what point, and what part of time we want to focus on.
Quoting Relativist
Again, time itself doesn't become anything. We see them different way. There are no labels on time.
If dichotomy is the nature of time, which one is the real time? What necessitates the "co-arising"? How could subjectivity co-arises with the objectivity? When they co-arisen, are they then one? Or still two?
Let us know about it when you come to the Eureka moment.
Do you deny there's some innate sense of past, present, and future? If you agree that there is, WHY do you suppose we have this?
Quoting Corvus
Of course not: time isn't a thing. But the present has just come into being
Well, you know what I said. The other is very close to me and invades me - even in my imagination.
You asked about Buddhism before. The 'co-arising of self and world' is not foreign to Buddhism. In many of the early Buddhist texts (known as the 'Pali Canon') you will encounter the expression 'self-and-world' which designates the nature of lived experience. This is because the normal human state is always characterised by the sense of self and world. Being conscious is being conscious of.
Buddhist philosophical psychology is a subject known as abhidharma. It comprises a psychological theory about how perceptions and conceptions give rise to the various states of being. It is a very detailed and complex set of texts, indicating the depth and complexity of the subject matter:
[quote=Source;https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/outline-of-abhidhamma/]In summary, the Abhidhamma describes how 28 physical phenomena co-arise with 52 mental factors, manifesting as 89 types of consciousness, which unfold in series of 17 mind moments, governed by 24 types of causal relation.[/quote]
But the point about abhidharma is, that it experiential in nature - dealing with the causal factors of experience. That is where it is somewhat different from Western metaphysics which always dealt with highly abstract concepts such as 'being' or 'essence' or 'substance'. The keynote of abhidharma is self-awareness (hence the connection with 'mindfulness'). That is the context in which the co-arising of self and other is meaningful. It shows how the mind identifies with or attaches to what it identifies with as 'me and mine'. The idea in Buddhism is to learn to detach from or disidentify with that. Not that we're here to discuss Buddhism in particular, but there has been a recent upsurge of interest in the resonances between Buddhism and modern philosophical schools like phenomenology.
Quoting Corvus
Very interesting question. The meaning of 'advaya' (which is Buddhist non-dualism) is 'not divided' or 'not two' ('a-' meaning 'not', and 'dva' meaning 'divided'). That highlights the sense in which the goal of Buddhist practice is to lessen or overcome that sense of division or 'otherness' to existence or the sense of being 'outside' of existence. You will find expressions in Buddhist philosophy such as realising the 'undivided heart' as the consummation of practice.
That is also problematic. You say that an Unrelated thing is a thing to which time does not pass nor does it occupy space?
Well, yes. We have an internal time according to Kant with which we perceive time both in things that move and those that do not move.
Quoting Corvus
For me we do have time in itself, but time has different ways of appearing. one of them is measurable and discontinuous time. What we see in a watch are differences of times or differences of movements, different rhythms, proper of each thing. The time of a watch is the time of the mechanism that composes it, but we can change the mechanism and we have another time and rhythm, as when we go from seconds to thousandths.
Quoting Corvus
It is also us who invented the clock, and it is the clock that doesnt have past, present and future. It sounds like youre getting your notion of time from that human invention and then applying it back onto the concept of time, in the process concealing the basis of time in past-present-future. Physics made that same mistake for years, claiming that the phases of time were mere human constructs, and that past, present and future were not intrinsic to physical processes, which could be understood backwards as well as forwards without any effect on the fundamental nature of those processes.
"It (Being) remains capable of changing".
That sounds like a materialist thesis, from where I'm standing. You probably disagree.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I understand it to mean "something that persists identically in time". Heidegger is defining what he calls the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), which he contrast with the ready-to-hand, our comportment toward things in terms of how we use them and what we use them for rather than in terms of their properties and appearance.
But mutationem means that it can change, that it can mutate. It has the potential (as in, capax) to do so. It is capable (capax) of it. What is that, if not the Aristotelian concept of potency as matter-in-motion? And this very capacity necessarily entails the reality of time itself. For how could something have the capacity to change, without ever changing?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
What does motion imply if not spatial displacement of a self-identical object over time?
It's definitely a possibility, Einstein for example can be described as vouching for a sort of Parmenidean "Block Universe", where the temporal series of any process is more like a collection of cinematographic photograms. There is no movement there, there is only the illusion of movement.
But I'm not convinced of this. I do recognize it as a live option, though.
Heidegger shows how the common notion of time dates back to Aristotle's derivation of time from motion.
The thoughts of motion, continuity, extensionand in the case of change of place, placeare interwoven with the experience of time.(basic problems of phenomenology) So far as time is kineseos ti, something connected with motion, this means that in thinking time, motion or rest is always thought along with it. In Aristotelian language, time follows, is in succession to, motion. Because the now is transition it always measures a from-to, it measures a how-long, a duration.
Time is making present according to Aristotle, (the present at hand) and in so doing is a counting of time as now, now, now.
And thus time shows itself for the vulgar understanding as a succession of constantly "objectively present" nows that pass away and arrive at the same time. Time is understood as a sequence, as the "flux" of nows, as the "course of time.
The succession of nows is interpreted as something somehow objectively present; for it itself moves "in time." We say that in every now it is now, in every now it already disappears. The now is now in every now, thus constantly present as the same, even if in every now another may be disappearing as it arrives. Yet it does show at the same time the constant presence of itself as this changing thing.
I didn't say anything about an "Unrelated thing". I find that idea incomprehensible.
Sure.
When you say something is innate, what does that mean? I would say innate means we have them without experience of the external world, or we have it from birth.
Is past present future innate? We need our sense perception to rely on what we are perceiving to tell what part of time we are experiencing. Time doesn't tell you what time it is. It is you who knows what time it is. How would you be able to do that without the sense perception of what is happening outside of yourself?
A strange fact about Now is that it seems to be subjective but at the same time objective. Because my Now must be your Now, and the whole folks living on earth must be facing the same Now. However, my past, your past, the other folks pasts are all unique. Same goes with future. So past future must be different from Now, although they all seem to in the same category of the concept called Time.
Let's think about your future and past. How would you be able to tell about your future or past with no lived life or experience? Your future will be something that is deriving from your present and past. Your past is the life you have lived with your own experience. They are all empirical, a posteriori mental states. They are not innate.
Quoting Relativist
Could "present" be being? Being is a concept which needs some explanation too, my friend. Would you agree?
:fire: Great post. I will read it over taking time to digest fully before coming back to your points. cheers.
Time is known to be eternal and non stoppable. It keeps flowing even all your watches and clocks stopped. Even when someone died, time keeps flowing. Maybe not for the dead. If there were no life on earth, would time still keep flowing?
Time as human invention is what we use in daily life. But I don't believe it is time itself, even if it is also significant part of time. There seem to be far more to it than just daily life version of time. We know time from our perception of the motions, movements and changes in the external world. We also have ideas of past present future in our mind via lived experience.
Should we not look into time as our mental acts of perceiving the temporality from the shared faculty of mind such as reason and sympathy, which are also objectified as means to apply to the real world for the practical purposes?
This is the most brilliant combination of Aristotle and Heidegger that I've ever seen. Kudos to you for accomplishing this in just one sentence.
That's exactly what I mean.
Quoting Corvus
That's NOT what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that we have some intrinsic sense of temporal priority: we don't confuse a past action with a present one, and we anticipate/ hope for/ dread future acts but not past ones.
These are examples..I don't know the exact nature of this intrinsic sense of "time", but only noting that there must be something.
I suggest that the best explanation for this vague sense of time, is that it is consistent with reality: there's something ontological; it's not just a figment of the imagination.
It's a secondary matter as to how we account for time, and how we analyze it. We first need to accept that there is SOMETHING ontological to it.
Quoting Corvus
I agree, and I think it's worthwhile to construct a framework that helps us analyze time. A framework that makes successful predictions is better than one that doesn't. Would you agree?
Time is something that, figuratively speaking, we keep track of. When you say "I've lost track of time", it means that you don't remember what time it is (or was) that you've lost track of.
Time flies and so does fruit.
What flies? Fruit flies.
Time flies, in a figurative sense, when you're having a good time.
Time is slow, when you're going through some tough times.
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
And yes, I wrote the preceding verse myself. I don't use A.I. tools for generating poetry.
Now you're a poet, too.
As when Einstein had sat next to a pretty girl and had noted the much quicker passage of time, over the slower passage of his instant of touching a hot stove.
:roll:
I already was a poet, and unlike you, I don't use Artificial Intelligence.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Mario Bunge is Einstein's greatest intellectual disciple, philosophically and scientifically. And the greatest poet that has ever existed is José Hernández.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know
Quoting José Hernández
EDIT: Tagging @javi2541997
Great poem on Time too. Gracias. :pray:
Time flies like a bird and fruit flies like a banana. (If you believe in 'time-flies' insects.)
Ok. Except that it doesn't.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Not all fruit flies like a banana. Some fruit flies like an apple.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
You mean fruit flies? As in, biological individuals of the species Drosophila melanogaster. What do they fly like? I'll tell you what they fly like: they fly like fruit flies.
Quoting Wikipedia
Memorys ideas recall the last heard tone,
Sensation savors what is presently known,
Imagination anticipates coming sounds
The delight is such that none could produce alone.
I had this idea that Time could be a general concept for all the durations, intervals in hours, minutes and seconds, days, months, years, even the light years. It even includes past present future. When you are looking for the ontological status of time, what you get is just your past memories, present perceptions, and future ideas, which are fleeting in your mind.
Quoting Relativist
I need to think about the point. Will get back to you if and when I get some ideas on it. But for now, what I think is this. It is a reiteration of above my point. It could be wrong, or reasonable. I need to keep thinking on it. If you let me know what you think, that would be great too.
Time is a general concept which contains all of the particular events of durations, intervals, moments, and personal perceptions from the memories of past, future ideas and present perception with consciousness.
:ok: :cool:
Time moves in steps, not flowing smooth and free,
Each Planck-length jump too small for eyes to see;
No infinite division saves the hare
From catching up with Zenos theory.
It would - but by what measure? In the absence of awareness of past-present-future then what is time? We of course can comprehend the world before life existed but we do so against an implicit sense of the meaning of time, derived from our awareness of days and years. But again that is what we bring to it.
And here's the English version, courtesy of Yours Truly:
The Eternes motion dooms forms permanence;
But, the patient time til their expiration
Restrains for awhile the shapes destructance;
Thus they can slowly traverse lifes distance.
Energy is a beauty and a brilliance,
Flashing up in its destructance,
For everything isnt here to stay its best;
Its merely here to die in its sublimeness.
Like slow fires making their brands, it breeds,
Yet ever consumes and moves on, as more it feeds,
Then spreads forth anew, this unpurposed dispersion,
An inexorable emergence with little reversion,
Ever becoming of its glorious excursions,
Bearing the change that patient time restrains,
While feasting upon the glorious decayed remains
In its progressive march through losses for gains.
That doesn't seem to follow. Do you have an argument for why and how the fact that imagining is a function of mind precludes the possibility of imagining that the world is independent of mind?
So yeah, it's worth pondering - but don't expect to land on a "proven" paradigm.
How would it flow? If time is a general concept which covers all the temporality in general, how would time flow without human mind perceiving, measuring, asking, and telling?
Tell us first why it doesn't seem to follow.
Arguments are as important as the conclusion in philosophy. Paradigm can change anytime when better proofs and arguments come along.
That's what I mean.
:ok: :up:
We know that time 'flows' absent of human awareness, because we see evidence of it. We see evidence that things were changing (therefore time was flowing) before we were here, and this allows us to extrapolate, and talk about the flow of time, without the human mind being there, at that time, to perceive the resulting changes. This allows us to use things like geological formations to do chronological dating. These forms of dating rely on the assumption of a necessary relation between change and the flow of time.
However, it's very interesting to note that we study the flow of time from its effects, and we do not directly experience the flow of time through sense observation. We infer logically, that the flow of time is real and independent, from the evidence of sense observation. We see evidence that things were changing prior to our presence. This makes the flow of time very mysterious to us. We only understand it only as a "general concept", but we also commonly assume that it exists (or occurs) independently from us. Further, we commonly claim to experience it, but in no way do we sense it. The reality of time remains a deep mystery.
There will be changes, motions and movements for sure as always have been since the beginning of the universe with the weather, nights, mornings and days, explosions and comets flying. But time? It needs human mind to exist. Are we being extreme idealists here?
But seeing things were changing is not time itself, is it? You are just seeing changes of things. Where is time, if you didn't measure the duration or intervals of time taken for the changes?
I am not sure if time flows is logically correct way of saying it. Because if something flows, then it must be stoppable, and it must be visible or detectable directly. Time doesn't have the qualities which flowing normally gives. All there are in time are intervals, durations, instances, moments, years, months, hours and seconds. Hence could time be just a general concept calling all these temporal elements?
It looks like time is a concept to me. It is like a general concept "human". We say "human" often in the arguments and daily conversations. But actually when you try find out who human is, there is no one called human in the world.
There are Johns, Marys, Janes, Peters, and Pauls, and a Metaphysician Undercover who also has his own real name. But there is no one called human. But all of the folks living in the world are humans. Isn't it the case with time?
There are intervals, durations, instances, moments, pasts, presents, futures, years, months, days, and seconds and light years ...etc. But there is no time in reality. And yet all those concepts are the subconcepts of time.
Human minds? I would prefer 'the observer' or just 'mind'. To say 'human minds' is already in some basic way to objectify, to stand outside.
Have another look at this post from five days ago - notice that I start that post by saying the OP is 'mistaken'. What I mean is, It's not that time doesn't *exist*. It exists, but we're mistaken about the nature of time - that is what is at issue, and it's a deep issue.
That tells us nothing about time. Only about believing, doubting, and measuring.
Quoting Corvus
Yep.
Measuring is what is significant. Give us a dissertation on the nature of unmeasured time. That should clear things up for once and for all.
significant - to do with signs, hence mind.
It cannot be concluded that time does not exist without minds. It's an illegitimate leap.
The same problem that infects all your ontology.
That's right, it's exactly what I said. We don't see time flowing, nor do we sense it in any way, we infer it logically. Then from visible evidence we can conclude that X amount of time flowed past, even though we never saw any time flow past. That's what makes time so mysterious, and allows people like you to ask "where is time?". Some will even conclude that since we can't sense it in any way, it's not real. But that position is very problematic, and difficult to defend in front of the evidence.
Quoting Corvus
I prefer to say that time passes.
Quoting Corvus
Time is not like this though, because there is actually something in the world which is referred to with "time". It is something we measure, as the passing of time, and we talk about measured quantities of time, an hour, a day etc..
It's already been demonstrated in this very thread, that there is a scientific argument for the indispensability of the observer in cosmological physics.
What do you think he means by that?
The problem though is that cosmological physics uses a conception of time based in relativity theory, i.e. relative time. This means that there must be a choice of reference frame in order that the flow of time is something real rather than having the flow of time lost in the infinite ambiguity of infinite possibilities.
If we assume that the principle known as the relativity of simultaneity is just a useful tool, and that in reality time is absolute, then there is no need for an observer to make time real.
Quoting Wayfarer
He is assuming time is relative rather than absolute. Notice he says: "The passage of time is not absolute".
It forgets the Page-Wootters mechanism, loop quantum gravity, Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds, and so on. It conflates "observer" with "consciousness".
It's an illegitimate leap.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hes saying in plain English, the passage of time always depends on there being a change in one physical system relative to another. Customarily, that involves measuring the change in one system relative to the observers system. The observer is intrinsic to that. That is all that is being said, but its significant.
But you are not advocating antirealism, you are advocating mysticism.
That'd be the measure of the passage of time. Do you have reason to suppose that time could not pass without change? Not that we could not measure time without change, but that time could for some reason not pass without change.
it remains that we don't know. But you must leap to your conclusion. Sure there are good reasons to disregard the bifurcation of subject and object. That doesn't mean time ceases to be or that the universe consists in consciousness.
Love your work, but can't agree with it.
And so far as the thesis of the OP, eight days later it is... outdated.
You refer me to the battle realism VS idealism. For me there is always a delay of everything existing that prevents its presence from being absolutely or absolutely identical to itself, but it is still constitutive. This delay is given by the relational being of things. And this is impossible to be given without time and space. This is applicable to consciousness which in turn is referred to an outside that constitutes it. Therefore time and space are conditions of consciousness. Therefore, time is something real and existent.
Your posts are a beacon of light in a sea of waffle. But that does not make them right.
Just a reminder: the observer is not consciousness.
Youre the master of the back-handed compliment, Banno.
Yes, because observer is not consciousness. it is called a measurement, carried out by a machine or the environment. That is why the cat is not live a dead at the same time. Consciousness belongs to humans not observers.
Citing sources in support of argument is perfectly legitimate.
We don't actually measure the time from the clock, the clock does the work automatically, we read that measurement.
Interesting argument.
That is the case according to the precepts of relativity theory, as a result of Einstein's principle known as the relativity of simultaneity. If we reject that principle, in preference of "absolute time", by which the passing of time is absolute, and not frame dependent, then for us who do reject that principle, the passage of time does not depend on there being a change in one physical system relative to another. Instead, time is absolute, and relative change of position (motion) is dependent on the passing of time, rather than vise versa.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's significant, as the consequence of special relativity. It's not necessarily true though, as special relativity is not necessarily true. And, it's the sign of an untrue premise, that it produces conclusions which are extremely counterintuitive.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, this is the consequence of adhering to relativity theory as if it is truth. Galileo proposed relativity after it was realized that the motions of the sun and planets could be modeled by either the geocentric or the heliocentric model. He realized that in modeling and predicting motions, "truth" was irrelevant, so long as the necessary predictions could be made. So "relativity" is fundamentally a useful disregard for truth. But if we adhere to relativity as if it is itself "the truth", instead of simply a useful way of predicting motions, then we lose the grounds for realism in favour of some sort of model dependent realism or something like that.
As I said in the last post, the boundary between subjective and objective is blurred because of the need to choose a frame of reference. A physicist will designate a rest frame, or inertial frame, but that's a choice, likewise, a cosmologist will choose a world line, or something like that. These principles provide the basis for a "real time" within their models and experiments, but it's chosen based on factors relevant to the project at hand, not on truth.
See this post for a rebuttal. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks dont measure time; we do.
The thing is that for quantum mechanics to measure is not to be conscious but to interact with an isolated system in quantum coherence. It does not matter if we experience a time different from the quantifiable one, it matters however the mechanism that acts in our quantum clock. The clock measures time as its mechanism interacts with an exact minimal motion. We would not measure time because that accuracy is not given by our experience but by the clock mechanism. Hence it is the clock that measure.
I dont agree. The clock is the instrument by which we measure, but the act of measurement is carried out by the measurer. As that passage I quoted says, A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession - which is what measurement entails.
That's kinda the point, really. Look away and it keeps going.
The Infinite Pixel Row Thought Experiment
Imagine an infinite row of pixels extending in one direction. The first pixel is initially "on" (lit), while all others are "off" (unlit). The state of this lit pixel propagates along the row through a series of instantaneous operations:
1. Copy: The state of the current "on" pixel is instantly copied.
2. Turn off: The current pixel is instantly turned off.
3. Paste: The copied "on" state is instantly pasted to the next pixel in the row.
These operations occur in a strict sequence:
How fast will the pixel state travel down the infinite row of pixels?
Despite each operation being instantaneous, the propagation of the "on" state is not infinitely fast. This is because:
As a result, the "on" state travels down the row at a finite speed of one pixel per two instantaneous operations. This demonstrates how duration can emerge from a series of timeless events, revealing an apparent paradox where instantaneous processes give rise to measurable progression (or what we commonly refer to as "time").
And the manufacture and you and I understand that becasue we share the world in which time passes, and hence each have much the same understanding of time. We have that shared understanding because there is a way that time is not dependent on the perspective of any individual. Waffle about implicit perspectives is a misunderstanding of the independence of the world from our beliefs.
If time only passes from a perspective, then clocks would be pointless. Clocks have a use becasue time also passes independently of perspective.
Ontological, the world is independent of our beliefs about it, and time passes without regard to a perspective. Epistemological, having beliefs involves having a perspective. What you sugest confuses ontology and epistemology.
Yep.
Quoting Corvus
In some possibly world there are no minds.
What's the problem?
But we all share a perspective! Time passes independently of a particular perspective, but it is common to all of us, because we live on a planet that rotates daily and orbits yearly. That is the same for everyone. But for a being from a world that rotates once a century and orbits every millenium, the human concept of time would be meaningless.
The world is indeed independent of us, but to the extent that it is independent, its also unknowable. The mind-independent nature of the sensory domain is a methodological heuristic, not a metaphysical principle.
Quoting Banno
on many planets, no doubt. But, absent mind, they are not worlds.
They might use different units, but you cannot conclude that our two approaches would be incommensurate. The very fact that you used our units to set out the mooted possibility demonstrates this.
Quoting Wayfarer
...and yet we use clocks. We know what an hour is, and that eight days have passed since the OP. We agree on this. We know this is independent of which of us measures it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, how could you know this? The very most you can say is that it might be unknown. You step too far, again.
Deductively, from the nature of knowledge.
Quoting Wayfarer
Then set out the deduction - the one that concludes "absent mind, they are not worlds".
That's the step too far.
Added: You might claim that "absent mind, we cannot know that they are not worlds". That's as generous as is allowed.
The thing is that to measure we need interaction. The observer is subsumed in this interaction in such a way as to make that interaction physical. So the observer is our measuring machines, like a clock, which makes the coherent state of an isolated system disappear. That interaction does not exist between our consciousness and the system. I am not saying that the clock measures the time of consciousness, what I am saying is that the clock is the interaction that the mechanism reflects as a function of a minimal movement. So measures a part of the movement of the world (and remember that there is no time without movement) But there must be an ontological continuity between the clock and those movements. This continuity does not exist between the consciousness and the measured object (here the isolated system in coherence). To affirm the contrary is to affirm magic or some kind of mentalism. How does the consciousness interact with the isolated system if it cannot even see it? It has a representation of it but does not interact, it needs the machine. Did you get it?
Meanwhile here is an interesting video about time for quick reference from a psychologist and brain scientist, Jonathan Schooler Ph.D.
The observer is the engineer or builder who makes the clock and decides on the units of measurement. The interaction is between the object of measurement and the observer who takes the measurement. Were there no observer, there would be neither a clock, nor two systems that interact. It makes no sense to say that the observer is 'subsumed' by the mechanism, when the mechanism is the instrument made by the observer. And measurement is not just physical interaction, but an intentional act that requires an observer to define, interpret, and establish a measurement framework. Without an observer, a clock is just a set of moving partsit is not measuring anything in any meaningful sense.
By invoking "magic," you seem to be saying that the requirement for the observer somehow violates causalityperhaps that consciousness somehow directly affects physical systems. But this doesn't require consciousness to be a causal agent in that sense; it is simply that measurement, as a concept, only exists within an interpretative framework, and that framework is necessarily provided by observers. If no observer sets the terms of measurement, then the notion of measurement is meaningless whatever object is being considered is simply undergoing change.
Seems to me that your issue is that if measurement depends on mind, then it seems to entail that reality must somehow be "mental". That seems to be the core fearthat acknowledging the role of the observer seems to entail an idealist framework. Is that how you see it? Whereas, I see the attempt to depict the measurement as being something that takes place irrespective of any intentional act, arises from a fallacious division between 'material' and 'mental'.
It was a simple statement with no complexities in its point. But you pointed out something doesn't follow in the statement, which indicates you have an argument why it doesn't follow. You couldn't have said it doesn't follow without your argument why it doesn't follow. :)
It just means the earth has rotated itself 8 times since the start of the OP. Now 9 times. Is there anything more to it? And of course, you counted it, and noticed it.
The Short Answer:
Planet
Day Length
Mercury 1,408 hours
Venus 5,832 hours
Earth 24 hours
Mars 25 hours
Jupiter 10 hours
Saturn 11 hours
Uranus 17 hours
Neptune 16 hours
- Info from NASA Science, Space Place
But what other minds could know about time apart from human minds?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that was the point of the OP. I agree with your point here.
I think the consciousness does act causally, with the measured physical system, necessarily so. This is done through the measuring tool. The tool is created with intent. As you see, others like to argue that the tool measures without any interaction with the conscious mind. But as you argue, that is not actually a measurement at all. So we need to accept that "the measurement" includes the intent put into the tool, as well as the observations of the tool.
Conversely, the thing measured must have an effect on the mind which measures, or else there would be no information from the thing, to be interpreted by the measurer. So a measurement is truly an "interaction", with causation on both sides. Measurement is essentially a strictly bounded experiment, complete with intention and interpretation, where the interaction is constrained within well-defined parameters which enable the prediction based interpretation .
What I want you to understand is why the measuring device is necessary. The collapse of function in fact is explained not because a person thinks or is aware of the experiment. In this sense the human or scientist is neutralized. There is no experiment that is correctly explained by something like "collapse by interpretation". In such an experiment the measuring apparatus and the environment are involved. And both are efficient causes of the collapse, the passage from coherence to quantum decoherence. Just think about the necessity of the means to perform the measurement: why are they necessary? They are necessary to interact with this quantum phenomenon. And, at this point it is obvious, they are necessary to measure, that is to say, they perform the measurement. The scientist is the person who interprets that measurement, but he is not the efficient cause of the wave function collapse.
This sounds to me like, literally, the ghost in the machine.
What about saying time is a general concept? The video above says time is a 3 dimensional entity which is made up with subjective, objective and alternative time. That too, is saying nothing much more than time is a complex multi dimensional concept.
You won't see any of the objects or existence or entities called time, but time has multi layered conceptual structure which contains various aspects of the temporal events and traces from human experience in the real world.
Righto.
I am just waiting for you to keep periodically mentioning this lmao.
Hmmm, I think @Mww would agree that objects being real checks out, but why would space be real if you hold time as merely a priori?
My claim still exists in the OP, but the time 9 days ago doesn't seem to exist anymore. It passed. No longer existing. Only the now seems to exist. Even the now passes away as soon as it exists, strictly speaking. In this case, can it exist? What is it that exists here? The claim, the OP or 9 days ago? Or the now?
If space didn't exist, then you wouldn't exist. You exist (I presume), hence space exists. : MT
Pardon. The same argument can be made about time, Corvus.
Not quite. I was quite happy existing when I was a child, and didn't know what time was. Space? No space, no body.
I can keep living quite happily without time, but I cannot live without space. To move around and go to places, we need space. I am 100% certain that no one can exist without space, unless he/she is a soul or spirit.
No, I'm quite sure that time is 1D, because a 1D time plus a 3D space allows your physical theory to have a 4D spacetime.
Time is just a concept.
Yeah, he would. With the provisio that checks out is relative to a specific theoretical framework. Within the confines of that same framework, it follows necessarily that space and time are not real.
But then, of course theres possibly as many frameworks as minds that can think them up.
Kant said that, because time is a concept? In Kant, time is definitely internal mental condition (a priori) for human understanding. A priori here means it is innate, and doesn't rely on experience on the empirical world.
Any world events, objects or matter can be conceptualised, and time is a typical case of the conceptualisation. You could make time into 5th dimension keep adding the other aspects to it, and make space-time, into space-time-consciousness, and say it is 5th dimension. All are the result of conceptualisation.
You just say, Roko's Basilisk is caused by uncaused cause. Therefore it changes. Therefore it exists. :nerd:
@zzzz[::::::::::::::::::::::::>
If understand that and did not say otherwise. I didnt say anything about collapse by which I presume youre referring to so-called wave function collapse. My analysis of that is presented in an an offsite essay. You will see that I reject any idea of doing away with the observer.
Quoting JuanZu
Why? What dictates that necessity?
It is true that you made your OP nine days ago. Therefor nine days ago exists.
Sure, it's in the past. Some events are in the past. Therefore there is a past.
:fire:
Is it possible that you could go back to 9 days ago?
I don't know why space is a requirement for me to be real; and, if it does, then why time wouldn't.
Because without space, your physical body won't exist. But without time you would happily exist like you had been when you were a child with no knowledge of time.
of whom?
Does it make sense to ask if your memory is accurate - is it true that the OP was made nine days ago? If so, then by existential introduction isn't there a time that was nine days ago?
The OP was nine days ago
Therefore something was nine days ago.
Quoting Corvus
You seem to think this relevant. It is not clear how. But it is not at all clear how you are intending to use "exists".
Added: Worth pointing out yet again that Wayfarer has muddled his memory with what is the case. Again, muddled his beliefs with how things are. Again, mistaken epistemology for ontology.
If you cannot go back to the past, then how is it real? How can it exist?
The OP was nine days ago. Therefore something was nine days ago.
For Kant, time and space are modes by which our faculties of cognition cognize sensations. You are claiming that there is a space beyond that a priori space but yet that there isnt a time beyond that a priori time. What is the argument for that?
It is not a concept: it is a pure intuition of our sensibility; and so is space. A concept is kind of idea comprised of attributes; whereas an intuition is a seeming. An a priori concept, e.g., is quantity; an a priori intuition is space.
I declare that I am a mereological and metaphysical part of Roko's Basilisk. Therefore, something has declared that it is a mereological and metaphysical part of Roko's Basilisk.
:fire:
1) No bumps allowed. If you want to attract replies, think of a better way.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines-note-use-of-ai-rules-have-tightened
Why would my body have to exist in space, but I can still age without time?
1) Say something about something.
2) Conclude that something exists.
It passed. It belongs in the past.
We already have intuition. Saying time is intuition is like saying we have intuition intuition. Not making sense.
Yep. Exactly. Therefore something belongs in the past. Therefore there is a past.
Now, what could someone mean by saying that the past does not exist?
You don't need to age at all, if you don't remember your age. You are only aging because you think you are aging. You body will still get old, but that is not aging.
Exactly what they mean: that it doesn't exist, because what exists is the present moment.
It depends what you mean by "exist". Past is just in your memory. It doesn't need to exist. You are saying it exist, because you remember it.
But
Quoting Corvus
It means it is in your memory, but it doesn't exist in reality.
The past is remembered, sure. But that does not mean that the past is just memory.
If the past were just memory, there could be no misremembering. One misremembers when what one remembers of the past is not what happened in the past.
The OP is in the forum, not in the past. You think it is in the past, because you remember seeing it.
Well, make up your mind:
Quoting Corvus
Which is it? Does it belong in the past or is it not in the past?
Past is in memory but also in the record. If there was no forum, and you lost all your memory, then you wouldn't know the OP existed.
Quoting Banno
Exactly, that is why past doesn't exist. You were keep saying nine days ago the OP started. Now it is ten days. Hence your memory was wrong. What you said didn't exist.
Not nine days ago as you claimed. But ten days ago now. Tomorrow at this time, it will be eleven days.
Yep. None of which implies that you never made the OP.
Quoting Corvus
...so you were right to say, yesterday, that it was nine days ago, and now it is ten days, but you are wrong to say it exists.
It was ten days ago, therefore something was ten days ago.
Or, if you prefer, my browser says it was nine days ago, yours, that it was ten. Which it correct? On your account, neither.
You did. But indirectly.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/968214
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/968235
This blurring between the objective and the subjective is a confusion of concepts that is solved by removing the unjustified intrusive belief of the role of the scientist in quantum physics experiments.
Quoting Wayfarer
Because otherwise we would have no possible explanation of how the watch functions.
I think of time as a building that goes upwards. We have the current floor and the floors below that are the past. You need a virtual and indeterminate raw material (future) to keep building floors.
The past exists as the dimension of sedimentation where the added floors solidify in an unmodifiable way.
I dont understand your reasoning. What you said was
Quoting JuanZu
Why must there be ontological continuity between the clock mechanism and the movement of the clock hands? Because otherwise .
Finish that sentence ;-)
None of what you have been saying is about time itself.
Quoting Banno
Socrates existed. But does he exist now? Existed means it doesn't exist any more. We have and use tense in language for reasons, not for show.
Past existed in the past, but it doesn't exist now. Does it? Saying past exists sounds language with no tense knowledge. We are not denying past didn't exist. It existed. Where did it exist? In the past, and in memories. But does it exist now and reality? No it does not.
It's about time. What is time itself?
Quoting Corvus
Socrates exists in the past. On you account, there is no past for Socrates to be in, because time does not exist.
You have been talking about the OP. Not about time, or time.
Quoting Banno
Socrates did exist in the past. But he doesn't exist now.
Hence there is a past.
Quoting Corvus
The OP was posted in the past. Therefore there is a past.
We don't deny past, but we are saying the events in the past existed in the past not now.
Quoting Banno
Of course, but it existed in the past. It exists now as a record in the forum, and causing the thread keep going. But the OP itself started in the past, not now.
But your claim, in the OP, is that time does not exist.
So are you now saying that there is a past, but no time?
Time exists, but in a conceptual form. The OP's statement time doesn't exist have different implications. The OP was in the past, and it doesn't exist now, as it was when it first created.
You have been talking about the OP in the past, but not time. What existed in the past doesn't exist as in the same state when time passed.
Past events exist in the past as causes, memories, records, archives as forms of knowledge and experience or facts.
These are different forms of existence to the existence of real beings which exist now at present.
They existed in the past. Some continue to exist into the present. Some ceased to exist at present, hence can be inferred or judged as not existing anymore.
Socrates existed over 2300 years ago. But he doesn't exist now.
If you say, but he existed in the past, then you are talking about the past event (which doesn't exist now), not Socrates the being, not time itself.
How can anything act as a cause, from the past? Isn't it the case that the only way something can be a cause, is to act at the present?
That is single-handedly the dumbest bit of sophistry I've ever heard. Growing old is aging in the sense that I obviously meant it; and you just sidestepped the question.
Think of a case, X killed Y 10 year ago. The event happened 10 year ago, but X would be still charged and put into the trial for what he had done 10 year ago. The act happened 10 year ago would be the cause for the trial of X having killed Y.
No, it wouldn't be the cause for the trial. X being in court with prosecutors accusing, is the cause of the trial.
"...it doesn't exist now"? Your OP exists. Here is a link to it:
"...as it was when it first created"? Do you mean that you edited it?
Time is much more than a concept. It's happened between your last post and your next. It happened between your reading the beginning and the end of this sentence. And your reply to this post is in the future. Unless you are reading this even further not the future, or you give up and do not reply.
Quoting Corvus
I am definitely talking about time; I mentioned your OP, but now I am talking about your last post. What they both have in common is being in the past, which is an aspect of time.
It is the archive of the OP. It is not the OP when it was created. You are still confused between reality now, and events taken place in the past. It existed means, it passed. It is now existing as a record of the event, not the event itself.
Quoting Banno
You are talking about time which has passed, and not existing at this moment pointing at the archive of the OP. It is like pointing at the picture of Socrates in the book, and saying Socrates exists. Look here, and this is him.
But isn't it the case that they are archives, essays or drawings on Socrates. They are not Socrates himself.
Ok about the posts written 10 days ago, and 1 day ago. They keep continue to exist now. But they are the archives of the posts, not the posts themselves.
You must understand some objects existed in the past, no longer exist, because they passed into the past. But some keep exists as records or archives of the objects and events.
Existed and exists are not the same thing here.
What's the different between cause for trial and cause of trial? Is it wrong to say, what is your reason for being late? It sounds not quite correct, if you say, what is the reason of being late. Hence cause for trial sounds better?
Well, no. It's the OP. It was written in the past. There is a past in which it was written. There is perhaps a future in which you read this post. End of story, really.
Here you seem to be talking about the past event, which has passed. It is not the OP, and it is not time in general you are talking about here. Some past events keep exist as archives. We are now seeing the archives of the past event when seeing the OP.
Quoting Banno
Events pass into past, and exists as archives of the events. But the event itself doesn't exist.
Have you considered that it is simply another dimension? A dimension where there is no present. And that is precisely why we cannot perceive it. Since consciousness only lives in the present. But we cannot say that it has no content, nor that it has no truths.
The Op was written in the past. Therefore there is a past for it to be written in.
It existed in the past. But now it exists as an archive. No equating here. Just showing you the change has taken place with the existence. It exists as a different form now. Existence in the past is not the same existence as existence the now.
Well, no. The OP was written in the past. It still exists.
Perhaps you might try setting out what you means by "exists".
Perhaps the OP existence is not a good example. OK, let us suppose, Banno was born 50 year ago.
The birth of Banno was an event in the past which doesn't exist now. But Banno exists now.
These are different nature of existences. Banno when just born is not the same Banno as now. The Banno just born 50 year ago doesn't exist now. The event of the birth existed in the past.
Can anything from the past coexist with the stuff in the present?
I would think that you can add as many dimensions you would like, because they in the level of conceptual domain when you are thinking in dimensions. However, I would think present should be always present in the dimension to make sense and be realistic, unless it is in the world of possibilities, or abstract arts and postmodernist novels.
Well, didn't you say the Banno from the past is different from the Banno in the present? So they couldn't be in the same room at the same time, right? They have to be separate?
They don't need to be separate to be different. They are different Banno in time, not in identity.
So they aren't actually different.
I believe so. Banno cannot be a baby 50 year ago, and at the same time Banno, a bloke who does gardening and drinking beer in the pub with his pals now.
The OP is the same case. The OP when created 10 days ago, is not the same OP the now which caused 400+ replies in the thread.
Somehow Banno seems to think what happened in the past is the exact same thing that exists now. I have been saying they are different.
So they're the same, but they're not the same?
What is the nature of identity?
That's ok. I've thought a lot about time and identity. Just wondering what your thoughts were. :up:
Can you give me an example of another dimension of time other than the past or the future?
It's far from clear how to make sense of this. It is true that I was born in the past. If banno's birth is an event in the past then there are events in the past and hence there is a past.
Nor is it clear how my existing now is different to the way in which I existed fifty years ago. I grew forma. young man into an older, wiser one, perhaps, but how is that a change in my "mode of being", or whatever obtuse term one might choose.
Quoting Corvus
Well, it was more than fifty years, but I am still here.
Seems to me that the more you say, the more confused your position becomes.
Some languages have two verbs that mean "to be.". One is for matters of identity, and the other is for transient states. That probably affects the way those speakers think. Spanish is like that.
That's one of the problems here - it is very unclear how one is to make sense of @Corvus's "time does not exist".
So, in your view, "End of story, really." is a legit thing to say, but "End of History" somehow is not?
A good question. :up:
There's arguably a fourth one: the "is" of composition, according to some people.
EDIT: And a fifth one: the "is" of constitution, according to some other people.
For example, we could add super or subconscious time, and imaginative time into the dimensions making it truly multi dimensional views of time. Super or subconscious time could mean time as captured by super or subconscious states which could be totally separate temporality such as the invocated time when we noticed in the meditation or reasoning to unite with divine beings.
Imaginative time could be time which might have existed during the active imagination in the creative process. If you were to write poetry or novel, you could jump into the imaginary time frame when all the historical, present and imaginary future figures co-exist in the same imaginary time span living, working and socialising creating together.
If uniting with divine beings and creating abstract arts are also events taking place, which require time, then the concept of extra dimensional layers of time would give you more room for the practice in real world.
Of course these are just some impromptu hypothetical examples as you requested. Time doesn't exist implies, it doesn't exist in real being, but it exists in many different abstract forms.
OK. But do any of those times have a direct relation to the present that you and I live in? I mean, of the explanatory kind and with truths that actually can be discovered?
All of them must happen at present. Without present, no other time can exist in any forms. But once you are in the other dimension of time, the dimension of time you are in becomes present replacing the real present. The real present then are eliminated from the dimension until you return to it. In some cases, it may never return you to the real present, which could be a bit scary state to be in then. Some folks live in the alternative time believing it is the real time. They must have super rich imagination, meditation or hypnotic tendency to be able to do that, suppose. This is, of course unproven hypothesis, which could be ignored. :)
Do they have a direct relation to the present you live in? If you were a relativist and extreme idealist, it could have, I suppose. If you are a realist and empiricist, it may not. If you were an esoteric magician or abstract artist, then it could definitely be very meaning way to conceptualise the multidimensional time for the process of invocation, evocation rituals, prayers, sermons and creating the arts viz. novels and poetry.
So we are still in the three dimensions of time. You haven't actually added any. You have added worlds but not dimensions of time, right?
If you read it again, it happens at present, but once you are in the other dimensions, the present is supposed to disappear. So, not quite right.
I think you are confused. You say that the events of these worlds happen in the present and then you say that they don't happen in the present.
I'm really not understanding you.
In order for you to be able to experience different time dimension, first you need to start from present. You will need some special mental capability to be able to experience that suppose. It is not for the ordinary folks. But I was only giving you a hypothetical example scenario since you asked for it.
I would imagine extra multidimensional time experience would only be useful and possible for the only the few folks who are esoteric magicians or abstract artists.
You must start it from present logically, which is the starting point of all the other time dimensions. If you were already in the time frame of subconsciousness, then why would you try to experience the time frame you are already in?
Let me get this straight: you're saying that people with special abilities can experience something like this?
Neurodiversity.
I would suppose so. It is from speculation actually.
That's because time still exists even though they haven't figured it out, Corvus.
Not sure if you were meaning about aging. But I know those indigenous folks in the jungle with no concept of time, doesn't know anything about their age, or aging, but they all were getting old like rest of us.
Are you aware that the experience is given in the present?
First, Physics uses modal operations throughout.
Second, how is this germane?
Third, no one here owes anyone else a response.
Fourth, I'm not avoiding your posts, just not bothering with those that appear trivial or irrelevant.
Spacetime, as physicists understand it, does not require the use of modal operators, especially not ??, but you bring up the point about S5 every now and then, so I want to know why. Out of genuine curiosity. If you think this is beneath you as an intellectual, then I'll just start quoting Bunge, specifically the parts where he refutes Kripkean modal logic.
Or it could be like a pendulum.
Or it could be circular.
What if it's a sphere? What would that even mean?
If hyperspace is possible (i.e., a space in which there are hypercubes), is hypertime possible?
You could say that you are experiencing something at present. But it is a way of expression to mean that you are perceiving something. In actuality, we have experience of something by reflection of thought on it, when the perception or participation of activity is over .
It would be like a process of conceptualisation on the content of the perception or memory of your participation in an activity. The conceptualisation would then be packaged into the envelope called experience, which could be revealed to other people in linguistic format, or just kept in your memory.
So, No experience is not given at present. I was explaining about this in the other thread started by @MoK.
Banno as a newborn 50+ year ago = Banno as a man after 50+ years from his birth ?
They don't look the same Banno to me. :D
Quoting Banno
It seems the case the confusion is in you. :)
Time as a consciousness would be able to capture the world in metasubjective and creative way dilating, compressing, shredding, titillating, scintillating, stretching and reducing the perceived time, objects and movements in space.
I am not talking about perception, I am talking about experience. That is to say, when you and I experience something we do not see a perception without content and without conceptualization. Rather, the experience is already given with a conceptualization (a la Kant), but I wonder if this is given in the present, or rather it is the present itself or the present of the consciousness to the extent that the conceptualization is given simultaneously with the experience.
So you agree that there is a present of experience where conceptualization occurs simultaneously with perception?
I used to interpret Kant's experience as "perception". Kant's CPR has problem of translation from the old German to contemporary German, and then to English, so some parts of CPR is unclear in linguistic level. Hence I put down CPR, and relied on the academic commentary books and articles on the topics.
Quoting JuanZu
No, I still believe that experience and perception is different. Perception happens now at this moment. Experience happens in the form of reflection on the contents of the perception when the perception is over. Experience has explicit label of beginnings and ends.
For example, if I am packaging my visit to Japan 10 year ago into experience, then the arrival of Narita Airport via JAL flight would be the beginning of the experience, and then my stay in central Tokyo, visiting Nagoya and Osaka area for meeting with my friends in the cities, and then the moment of boarding my return flight would be the end of the experience.
The packaged experience would be in the form of reductive capture of the perceptual contents of the duration and events in the linguistic format this instance of experience.
There would be also the other types of experiences which are in the format of knowledge (knowing-how) being able to deal with the tasks at hand which require sets of skills for solving the problems and achieving tasks etc in the real world.
Perceptions wouldn't have that sort of labeling or reductions. What you see, feel and sense themselves now are all the contents of your perception.
So... that's an ordering in terms of time, which you say doesn't exist...
Quoting Corvus
Now you have moved on to identity. I grew up, over time.
Your thesis is that what is not part of your immediate perception does not exist. This is in error.
Being perceived is not what it is for something to exist.
A breathe of fresh air. A history over time exists whether it is recorded through human perception or not. Paleontologists discover this truth frequently.
For those who suspect math underpins the character of nature, then the passage of time might well be understood in mathematical rather than philosophical discourse. What does the limit concept say about time? In the ever expanding galaxy of mathematical subjects does time arise?
You have the right to do such a thing. Thanks for telling me.
Quoting Banno
Then delete it.
If you don't despise me, then why won't you talk to me?
That's exactly one of the things that I've been saying ever since I joined this forum about 3 months ago. But people (like Banno for example) think that it's off topic in a Thread about the Ontology of Time. I ask him for his reasons, and he just won't talk to me about it!
With great singing:
Cheers. Comes back to the confusion between what is believed to be the case and what is the case. Sometimes our beliefs are different from what is true. Sometimes we are mistaken. Even Palaeontologists.
Events or objects in the past exist in different state and properties to the ones at present.
Quoting Banno
When you keep insisting about the OP when it was created still exists, you were talking about identity of the OP, were you not? I was just trying to let you know that the OP exists now with different properties. The OP when created had time stamp of "1 minute ago". It had no replies.
Now the OP has time stamp "11 days ago", and has 523 replies. They are not the same OP.
Quoting Banno
It is not an issue of "not exist". It is an issue of "different state of existence". Error is your not being able to tell the difference on nature of the existence.
Why not? What is it that qualifies and proves for something to exist?
Math can describe the motions and movements of objects in numbers and functions. But they are not time itself, is it?
The process of aging is a temporal process--hence in time. One might say, now, that aging is a representation of causality which is atemporal; but the aging itself is certainly temporal.
What does it tell you? Aging is just mental awareness, and it is doesn't have any relation or control of the physical body getting old.
If you were unconscious next 50 years, and suddenly you woke up. You didn't know anything about the passed time. But your body would still be 50 years older than now.
Aging is a representation? Correct. Representation only, not the real entity of any kind.
Correct.
Accepting that aging is a change then it follows that aging requires time since any change requires time.
Quoting Corvus
Aging is a process by itself but can also be considered as a mental representation of a process. We need to make a distinction between these two.
Aging is a concept. It is for describing a body or food has been changing via time. Because it is a concept, it doesn't affect the actual physical process of change itself. It doesn't require direct intervention of time. It is a perception and realisation or description of your state of change via mental reflection on you or your food or drinks.
Quoting MoK
Aging is not process. If something is a process, then it can go back to the original state. Can you age backwards to your newly born state or even to an egg?
It is a change. The information of DNA is not preserved completely during the process of cell division. This is the cause of aging.
Quoting Corvus
No, that is very unlikely because of the second law of thermodynamics. Does a glass change when you break it? Sure yes. Do you expect parts of the broken glass to come together and form the glass? It is possible but that is very unlikely.
Aging is a perception of change, not the change itself. The wine aged well, they say. You cannot tell it was aged well until you taste the wine.
Quoting MoK
Broken glass is not a process. It is the result of the breakage. You are trying to revert the physical consequence to the original physical state. You can't.
You could perhaps try to glue them back if desperate. But it wouldn't be quite original state would it? Same applies to you MoK trying to age back to the state of egg. The law of physics wouldn't allow you to do that.
But aging is a concept. You realise or notice you have aged by looking at the mirror with the increased amount of wrinkles on your face, or empty patches of your head due to lost hair, or missing teeth no longer able to chew the chocolate you used to enjoy, or feel your body is groggy and not energetic without any valid reasons like when it used to be. There is no time involved for that perceptual Aha moment.
Are you denying the loss of information during the process of cell division?
Quoting Corvus
I didn't say that the broken glass is a process. I said breaking a glass is a process.
That is a type of change in physical and biological level. It is not a perception of your Aha moment.
Quoting MoK
Breaking glass is a motion. A mass traveled into the glass in speed which increased the focused energy onto the mass. When the mass came into contact with the glass with the force, the force broke the glass. The breaking action should be looked as a motion with energy. Not a process.
The glass was not broken until the moment it was broken. The moment of breaking and not breaking is in the state of sorities paradox. How could a paradox be a process?
If you accept that as a change then time is required for it to happen.
Quoting Corvus
Let's focus on two states of glass, before breaking and after breaking, let's call them S1 and S2 respectively. It is easy to break a glass by which I mean that the glass goes from the state of S1 to S2. Is it possible that parts of glass come together and form the glass, by which I mean a change from S2 to S1? It is possible but very unlikely.
Have you come across the concept of sorities paradox?
This a gradual process and that requires time for it to happen. There is nothing paradoxical about it.
The exact moment of the glass breaking coexists with not breaking. How is it a process?
We are talking about logic here now, not physics. Until the moment the glass broke, the glass was unbroken. Therefore glass breaking is not a process. Glass breaking is a momentary motion.
It is also a paradox. The moment glass broke, the glass was unbroken.
The moment glass was unborken, the glass was broken.
Therefore the glass was broken and unbroken at the moment of broken and unbroken.
OK. But then you agree as would Kant that perception is given in the present. And we agree that you have to explain the prensent rationally in some way.
Let me ask you, do any of those worlds you invented have that function of explaining the present?
There are many (practically infinite states if we accept that time is continuous) states before the glass breaks into parts. The glass first is deformed without breaking since the atoms attract each other. As time passes there is a moment that atoms cannot hold on to each other so they separate. That is what we call the crack in the glass. As time passes, the cracks continue to extend and there is a moment when we have parts of glass. It is then that the glass shatters and its pieces move differently.
Quoting Corvus
Quoting Corvus
You made a bare assertion, to wit:
Quoting Corvus
It doesn't sound illogical to me, so I wanted to know why you think it sounds illogical. Do you think it just sounds illogical but is not, or do you think it not only sounds illogical but is illogical. I see no logical contradiction in saying that we can imagine that the world is independent of mind or even that we can imagine a world independent of mind.
There is a continuity of existence that is mechanically measurable. A car sitting by the curb ages a bit over twenty four hours in a an approximation of an ideal or mathematical continuity. Unless, for instance, someone comes along and blows it up. Then there is a discontinuity of existence and the end of a mathematical parallel description. The Riemann integral concept in math analysis embodies the notion of addition of a sequence of temporal points, the distances between points shrinking to zero. When applied properly to dynamical systems that are analogous to physical change, predictions result.
The accuracy achieved is, of course, ultimately governed by Planck dimensions. So, whether Bergson's interval description of the atoms of time is cited or a "continuity" of points is described, is irrelevant.
We can join bits of language together in ways that are somewhat deceptive. Think about the poem about the little man who wasn't there. It has a metaphysical ring to it, from the conflict between seeing f a little man, despite his not being there. Now I don't think there is any profound metaphysics in Antigonish, just the concatenation of a few words that behave in a way not dissimilar to an illusion.
I think something not too different is happening when one says something like "Time does not exits". I don't see how we can sensibly dispense with the notion of time, without leaving ourselves open to the sorts of discontinuities discussed above, where one talks about the past, and about past events, or the future and possible future happenings, or differentiates these from the present, while at the same time insisting that there is no time.
I surmise that there is a point you are trying to make, something to do with things in the past not being the subject of direct perception in the way things before you right now are, or some mistaken idea that only what is proven or believed or present to you now is what exists. I don't think you captured that sentiment with "time does not exist".
There is also something more than a little bit problematic in supposing that there are different types of existence, such that things in the past existed in a different way ("state") to how they exist now. perhaps this coms down to treating existence as a (first order) property, such that things that are before us now supposedly have a different sort of first-order existence to things in the past. I don't think there is a property of my footstool that changes between when I put my foot on it a few seconds ago and now, that somehow means it is now in a "different state" to how it is now.
Quoting Corvus
There is a very strong sense in which it is the very same OP, and that OP still exists, still can be linked to, is the very same OP mentioned in previous posts, had the time stamp "1 minute ago" but now has the time stamp "12 days ago". This is the common sense use, where when we ask "what is the OP of this thread?" we get the same answer now as we did then. If I ask you what the OP of this thread is, you will point to this.
Quoting Corvus
This is different to your original thesis, that time does not exist, so Kudos for adjusting your position. But as discussed above, it is not clear what "different states of existence" might be.
Quoting Corvus
becasue we can misremember - the idea that what we believe happened and what actually happened are different makes perfect sense. We might be wrong. This is what permits us to adjust our thinking to match what is the case. If what is true were nothing more than what we perceive, we could never misperceive. We could never learn.
Somethings being proven to be the case is very different to something just being the case. One is about how we think things are, the other about how they are. This is a very fundamental difference that seems obscured in the thinking of many folk.
If Carlo Rovelli is right that time is coming from the way we perceive the universe, then time exists, it's just not what we often conceive it to be, that is, independent of us.
Time is a category of the understanding, not a property of the world.
The mind shapes objects in space and time.
I call this theory transcendental idealism.
Not offered as anything authoritative - I think they are both wrong. But they are not the same.
I don't find the ChatGpt response persuasive in its identification of distinctions. It seems to argue that Kant considers time a non-relative absolute and a feature of reality. I take his view of time as a form of idealism, with time being necessary for understanding, but not a feature of reality.
The ChatGpt reference to time being emergent seems to contradict what else it says of time not being absolute. I take emergence to be the creation of a whole greater than its parts (as in consciousness) arising from various other interactions (as in brain states), but nothing suggests an emergent property is less real because it's origin is emergent.
I know little of Rovelli, but I can say it sounded a whole lot like Kant from @frank's short blurb. I'll trust the two are not identical, but they're surely within the same family.
..how can it possibly be independent of us?
Newton's conception of time was as something independent of us, right?
They are kind of possible worlds inferred from present state of consciousness. Many folks believe possible worlds exist. If you have no present, then nothing would be possible, and no possible worlds would be available to you. From present, you could remember past, and imagine future. From present, possible worlds get inferred, emanate, invoke, evoke, appear and reveal as you meditate, reason or imagine them.
I will be a bit slow in my postings due to increased work loads in real life here, but will try to catch up all the posts, as things get a bit quiet and free. Later~
Dunno if he states that unequivocally, but if his notion of absolute time is justified, then one has no logical recourse but to agree that time is independent of us.
But then, it is profoundly contradictory to profess the absolute of anything whatsoever, in juxtaposition to the impossibility for empirical verification, so ..
But all that really doesnt matter, if time is given from the way we perceive, then times independence from the way we perceive is also contradictory, therefore, wrong.
I don't know where this is coming from. Why would empirical verification be a problem if an item is independent of us?
Not talking about an item.
The idea that one could fail to recognize that time is real does not negate nor suggest that it isn't real.
However, under the Kantian interpretation of time, yes, time is not real but exists. You seem to be conflating self-reflectively knowing time exists with it not existing. By concept of time, I am presuming you are exclusively referring to a concept derived through experience by self-reflective reason.
What do you mean by real?
It seems physics cannot capture the moment of coexistence of the glass breaking and unbreaking. Math cannot either. Logic can.
Your description of the breaking in detail is the physical steps how breaking happens, but none of that step is the actual breaking. The breaking happens at the moment when the breaking and unbreaking coexists. The rest is not breaking itself or unbreaking itself.
Perception is not existence itself. To say perception is existence would be a Berkeleian. Some folks believe it, but it would be regarded as an extreme case of idealism.
However, even if one is not an extreme idealist, it is perfectly rational to say that perception is the source of the knowledge of existence. Of course not all perceived events or objects are true or existence.
But you have a mental function called reason or rationality to be able to discern truth from falsity, existence from illusion.
If you had no perception, then you would have none of that. You would just see blankness, and hear silence when facing the world. There would be no knowledge about the world in you at all without your perception.
The OP created on the very first day has different properties from the OP you are seeing now. The OP when it was created had a time stamp of the day, but now it has today's time stamp. The OP also has hundreds of replies now. When it was first created it had no reply. Therefore you are seeing a different OP now from the moment when it was created.
You have been saying that the OP when it was created exists now. This is an unclear statement. You clearly see the difference between the different properties of the OP.
Likewise, Banno, born 50+ years ago, is not the same Banno of now in weight, height and looks, and wisdom and knowledge too. Hence saying that they are the same Banno would be a wrong statement.
The statement "Time doesn't exist" in the OP was a suggestion to explore and to debate. It was not a claim or conclusion. You don't start OP with a conclusion. You start OP with suggestion and assumption.
Existence has ambiguity in its meaning. Socrates existed. But he doesn't exist now. Existence becomes nonexistence. Is it then existence or nonexistence?
Yes, exactly. A mathematical description of the existence is not the existence itself. That was my point. Of course, it could be an accurate description. But it is still a description.
The Banno of fifty years ago is the same Banno as the one writing this post. That Banno has aged, but it's not a different Banno. Ask yourself; Who aged? Why, Banno aged. See how identity persists?
The OP is the same OP you wrote, perhaps edited and perhaps with a different time stamp. Which Post has a different time stamp? Which post my have been edited? Why, the OP, of course. Identity persists despite change.
Quoting Corvus
No I haven't. I have been saying that the OP you wrote still exists. You can show this by following the links.
Quoting Corvus
So existence becomes nonexistence and yet that there is no time.
When you say X is identical to Y, it is because X and Y have exactly same properties in every aspects. The OP when created, and the OP now has different properties. Hence they are not the same OP. Of course the OP exists now, but with the different property.
Existence stopped becoming existence. Time stopped the moment it ceased to be existence. Nonexistence is in the mind of the living as a concept, not in the existence which ceased to be existence.
Above is a contradiction. Banno with the properties (weight, height, looks, knowledge, wisdom) 50+ years ago is not the same Banno with the properties (weight, height, looks, knowledge, wisdom) in 2025.
Is a seed of oak tree same as the oak tree in 100 years after it has grown from the seed?
You can do that. But what is being asked here is not if the OP is identical, but if it is the same OP. The OP has changed - what has changed? the Op has changed. It is the same OP but now it has different properties. The OP on my screen may not have the very same properties as the same as the OP on your screen, yet we talk about their being the same OP.
Quoting CorvusI've no idea wha that might mean.
Quoting Corvus
That's right. Banno has changed. Who changed? Banno changed. Look at that question with great care. The young man and the codger are the same person - your very utterance assumes that, by referring to the young man and then to the codger with the very same term.
There is no moment that glass is broken and unbroken. The change is continuous.
The point here is that, the OP created on the first day doesn't exist. It exists as OP with different properties. It has not only changed the time stamp, but it also has hundreds of replies. It also changed some of the readers ideas on time too.
Quoting Banno
It means a simple point. When existence stops being nonexistence, it happens in the state of coexistence of existence and nonexistence. There is no time involved in the change. The continued nonexistence is just a concept of the living after Socrates' nonexistence.
Quoting Banno
If being same being means having exactly same properties in every aspect, then they cannot be the same person. There have been too much changes in properties. If Banno +50 year ago is the same Banno after 50+ years, then it means there hasn't been any changes in his properties. But there has been changes in the properties, therefore they are not same Banno.
At this point we could differentiate identity into two different types, if you still want to see identity as a relation from past memories. Identity of properties and identity of relations?
Identity could be a subtopic of existence and time, because they are all related to each other.
Time is temporal continuity composed of moments. Not seeing it, means physics and math cannot capture the true nature of time or physical changes.
Mathematics and physics can explain what a continuous change is.
But obviously they cannot see the moment of coexistence of breaking and unbrokenness of the glass.
Hmm. If you cannot see the contradiction in those two sentences, then there is not much that can be done to explain it further.
There is no such thing!
No contradictions at all. It is a logical and physical fact.
It sounds like a subjective denialism. :) I can see it perfectly in my reasoning and inferring. The moment of coexistence of the breaking and unbrokenness is the actual breaking in unbrokenness. Physics and math have no ability to see it or describe it.
There cannot be any change in the case of a simultaneous process. Change exists. Therefore, the states of physical are not simultaneous.
Sure they do. A simple graph describes the aging of the glass, then, abruptly, there is a discontinuity when the glass breaks. Draw your own picture.
Now I see why fdrake retired as moderator.
Change is composed of momentary continuity. You must be able to see the moment of the actual change, not the pseudo changes you describe (which is the illusion you see when seeing changes).
Strawman posts will be ignored.
:up:
So you will not be putting up your hand? Me neither.
If you have ran out of what to say on the points due to lack of knowledge or ideas, don't post strawman posts please. That really doesn't help anyone.
I explained the change.
Sure, I think you are seeing the change as unbroken continuity. I am seeing change as continuity composed of slices of moments.
Correct.
Quoting Corvus
Time is made of moments but time is continuous.
OK, think of a movie in the traditional roll films. You have thousands of moments of stills image in each single film in the long continuous roll of films. When you look at the cut of the film of the glass breaking, there will be the single film which contains the glass in contact with the stone.
The stone hit the glass, so it is in contact with the glass, but glass is still unbroken until the stone further pushed into the glass. The moment of the contact is what I am talking about. That moment is the actual breaking. Not before or after.
Changes look continuous because your eyes and brain has something called latent memory when seeing objects in motion. Change itself is not continuous. It is made of slices of many moments.
Very clearly, in the first sentence you say that the OP does not exist. In the second you say that the OP exists.
If you cannot see this to be a problem, then there is no point in continuing.
As I said, your point seems to be coming from the concept of identity in relations rather than identity in properties. Would it be Wittgensteinian or Quinean?
The existence of OP is not main point of topic. You can still keep discussing on the other side of the topic, because it is wide and versatile theme in history of philosophy from various schools, as long as you don't participate or support the gormless strawman posters.
If you don't agree, and still see no point, then fair enough, discussions could be closed with you. No worries.
Logic.
Isn't it Wittgenstein who believed that anything you can express in language, exists. Therefore past facts and events exist. Is it the case? I am not too familiar with Wittgenstein, but just guessing here.
A world independent of mind is a world which exists without mind.
Imagination is a function of mind.
Without mind, there is no imagination.
Therefore a world independent of mind cannot be imagined. (or It is impossible to imagine a world independent of mind.)
That was my argument. It seems to be free from logical inconsistency here, but you claim, it doesn't follow. I was asking you why you assert it doesn't follow. What is your ground or reason for claiming that it doesn't follow.
Why not say the same about the past? Something proper to the past is that it was once present. In that sense there is a need for the past in order to understand and explain the possibility of the present. That the present passes but does not disappear completely (becomes past) is necessary for the existence of the present as something caused.
Breaking News:
Father Time has been diagnosed with a rare, cosmic form of "temporal tumor". His hourglass is leaking sand at an alarming rate, causing Tuesdays to last for three weeks and weekends to vanish entirely.
Don't take time for granted, or it might develop a serious medical condition that requires a specialist in the very niche field of "Temporal Oncology". And definitely, definitely, get a second opinion from Doctor Who.
Doctor Who diagnosed gravity as being the cause of Time's tumor, and in the operating room, when they opened him up, they found a black hole inside.
Oh, that's not good. Not good at all. I'm sure the gravity of the situation was not lost on anyone in the operating room.
Okay okay, let's not derail this thread. As you were everyone, as you were.
If you imagine a world without mind of course there is no mind by stipulation. The fact that you are using a mind to imagine a world without mind is not illogical. When you are, for example, just imagining a landscape you are not imagining it to have a mind.
The part of your claim that is unargued is as to why it should be impossible to use a mind to imagine something that has no mind.
If you had no mind, would you be able to imagine a world?, or be able to imagine anything?
That is not a philosophical posting, is it?
Are you suggesting that time is discrete? If yes, then there is a gap between two points in time. Accepting that physicalism is a correct view then physical in one point of time cannot cause physical in another point of time later because of the gap. Therefore, the change is impossible. Change exists. Therefore time is continuous.
No. I was suggesting time is a concept. It is a way to describe changes, motions, movements, and durations and intervals too.
Because time is a concept, it cannot cause any physical objects or events to change.
It can only capture them in perception, and describe them.
The physical changes take place in a slice of moment, where the cause and effect co-exist in the window of the change. Lumping them altogether, and seeing them as process or continuity would be categorical illusion from the latent memory in the brain.
How could deny change as a mere concept? It exists in the natural world. Are you an idealist?
Quoting Corvus
Time does not cause a change. It allows the change.
Quoting Corvus
No, physical changes take place in continuous time.
Quoting Corvus
You are mixing psychological time with subjective time. There is also objective time.
For my point there, any common sense use of the word will do. You cannot claim the time does not exist (or is not real) merely because people can fail to recognize it as such: that's a bad argument, and that is exactly what you are doing when you bring up indigenous people who fail to understand that they age.
Beyond that point of contention, I would say that what is real and what exist are different; because there are things which have being but are not a member of reality (e.g., the feeling of pain, the phenomenal color of orange, a thought, the a priori concept of quantity, etc.). As such, I denote what is a member of reality proper as real and what has being as what exists; and, therefore, everything that is real exists but not everything that exists is real.
Change was not denied here. The actual change itself cannot be captured by physics and math. That was an assumption. No denial.
Quoting MoK
No, I am not an idealist. I think I told you before, but you seem to have forgotten already. I am a bundle of perception.
Quoting MoK
No. Again wrong. Time is a concept. Time doesn't allow anything. Change and motion can be described in time.
Quoting MoK
That is an illusion from your latent memory. Change takes place in an instance physics and math cannot describe, capture or understand. The moment of change takes place in co-existing moment of unchanged state and change.
Quoting MoK
What is the difference between psychological time and subjective time? Can you mix time? Time is not liquid or powder. You cannot mix time.
I never claimed time doesn't exist. Your perception seems not quite accurate here. The OP wrote it as a suggestion for discussions and consideration.
I think I have given you a good example to consider making analogic inference. For aging, you don't need time. For you to get aged, you or someone must notice the aging. It is a momentary perception of realising that you have aged. You don't need time to notice your aging, or aging of wine.
Quoting Bob Ross
That doesn't prove time is real or time exists. You just keep saying the content of your perception as if they are time. Time is a concept.
You cannot say time is real. It would be like saying water is real. Water is hot or cold, not real or unreal. Likewise time is not real or unreal. You either know what time it is now, or yo don't.
You could say it took too long time, or time passed fast. But it is all your linguistic expression of your psychology. You are not saying anything about time itself.
Time is a concept. Concepts are not real or unreal. You either know a concept or you don't know it.
Of course, not, but that is trivially true...so what? It says nothing about the ability of a mind to imagine anything.
This is a joke right?:
That's the very first sentence of the OP.
Time may be real, a [self-reflective] concept, and exist a priori all at once. It is on your OP to demonstrate why it is only a [self-reflective] concept.
Water is definitely real: no one disputes that. To say it is not real, is to say that it does not exist in reality. You deny that water exists in reality???
Concepts exist: they are not real.
Whether the concept exists is a separate question than if I know about the concept.
What do you mean by trivially true? Why is it trivially true?
Quoting Janus
Isn't it obvious? Imagination is a mental operation which is one of the functions of mind. How else would you imagine something without mind?
Yet
Quoting Corvus
And since (p&~p)?q
Quoting Corvus
...the OP both exists and yet does not exist.
:confused:
Why do you think it is funny that you cannot tell the difference between a conclusion and assumption (suggestion)? The conclusion has not been agreed yet in this thread. We are still in the middle of the debate on the conclusion.
The OP is not for conclusion. The OP started with the premises and assumption and suggestions.
Quoting Bob Ross
Something is real, if there are also fakes of the thing. Have you seen fake water? Have you seen or heard of fake time?
Could you explain the symbolic statement in plain English? Is that statement true or false?
It's trivially true because it's obvious that only minds imagine. It's not even worth stating it's so obvious.
Quoting Corvus
Are you being obtuse on purpose? The point is not that you need a mind in order to imagine, the point is that that bleedingly obvious fact says nothing about what particular things are possible for the mind to imagine. It says nothing about whether the mind can imagine a world without minds.
Anyway, I know my mind can imagine a world without minds, and if yours cannot imagine a world without minds then I can only pity you.
The point here was about logic, but you seem to talking about your own imagination. Anyhow this is not even main topic in this thread. Please refrain from posting off-topic trivialities.
Quoting Janus
Should it not be self-pity on your part? :lol:
Indeed it is. There is a distinction between it is possible for there to be a world without minds, account, and your without minds, there are possible worlds.
You may well be right that this last is false. But it is not what is being suggested.
My point was you cannot imagine anything without your mind, let alone a world. It was not about a possible world. But obviously it seemed clear that my point was not understood by Janus. He only emphasized his own point only, and ridiculed other's point.
Not a philosophical appeal or relevant point, it seem to be the case. As he put it himself in his own post, he was after some trivial truth, whatever that meant. It sounded like, that he was after trivial truth to ridicule other parties, not the truth itself or good philosophical argument.
It has long been noticed you have well established group of folks supporting each other when one gets criticism due to their ill manners. Hence no surprise. :wink:
Do you honestly think or believe that sort of comment is philosophical or relevant? Why do you say you pity the other party, when you cannot understand the other party's point? Should you not just walk away and do something more constructive things in life instead posting personal attack type of comment in the postings?
I think you have good philosophical knowledge in some areas, but you seem to lack some basic etiquettes for public discussions. If I may point them out,
1. Don't take sides on your pal's positions blindly when they are clearly wrong, or ever, even if they were right. Public discussion is not about taking sides or being a spokes person for the others. You should speak for your own, no one else. If you keep doing it, your integrity in public perception will go downwards.
2. Try avoid posting personal attacks or ridiculing type posts to anyone. If you did it, they will do it to you back. No one wants to see that. But if you started it, you will get the blame for doing so.
3. Don't use any foul language. It just make you look and sound an uneducated barbaric chap, who has no capability doing philosophy or any academic discussions, even if it is not the case.
4. If you don't agree with the other party, then just walk away, or say you don't agree. Don't ridicule the party's point using low level language or personal attacks. If you agree with someone, then you can either walk way, or say you agree, and that is all you need to do.
5. If you want criticise the points or threads, then stick to purely on the logical arguments based on reasoning for doing so. Don't use any emotional claims or assertions. When you do that, your position becomes unworthy for further discussions.
6. Don't be a supporter of fallacy of authority or majority. Whenever possible, bring your own ideas for the points in discussions. Don't ridicule minority points or creative points. You can just tell they are wrong, or you disagree, but don't forget to add the reason why they are wrong instead of emotionally attacking or ridiculing the posters.
OK, I hope you would understand these points, and keep them in mind. I am only saying this because you came here and kept on making points which seem not fair and, also not the case. I was not agreeing with that at all, but I also had these points in mind from the past unpleasant experience with yous. I hope we can avoid the negative situation, and try just talk about philosophy, and learn from each other via edudaimonian discussions, if we could. Thanks.
So, do you agree that change is real? If change is real then what is the subject to change?
Quoting Corvus
Correct. We however experience change. It is through the experience that we act accordingly. For example, do you step into the street when you see a car moving very fast in the street and it will hit you if you step into the street?
Quoting Corvus
How could you have any perception? Are you denying that you have a brain and your perception is due to physical processes in your brain?
Quoting Corvus
So you are confirming what I said and at the same time saying what I said is wrong!
Quoting Corvus
So do you step into the street when you see a car moving very fast and it will hit you if you step into the street?
Quoting Corvus
I already discuss that. What you are referring to is a simultaneous process. There cannot be any change in a simultaneous process.
Quoting Corvus
Subjective time allows physical change whereas psychological time regulates our subjective experiences.
Quoting Corvus
Sorry, I mean you are confusing the subjective time with psychological time.
This point has been addressed to @Bob Ross also. Is it correct to say change is real? Are there fake changes?
I was not denying the fact there are changes. But My point was that change happens in the moment where there is co-existence of change and not change.
Before actual change happened, it was no change. When the change happens, it is no longer change or no change. It is a new state of the object or event.
I must do some daily living chores here for today, so will be getting back later for the rest of you points. G'day~
I think I told you before. This is exactly where I agree with Hume. When I try to see my own self, all I can see is perception. My own perception of what I see. I look at me and there is only perception of my body. When I look around, there is only perception of the world around me.
Of course I don't deny I have a brain. But I have never seen the brain in my life. Folks say we have a brain, and the books say we have a brain, so I believe from my inductive reasoning, that I have a high possibility of having a brain.
And from that inductive reasoning, I also can infer that you also have your own brain. What the brains do, is only my conjecture and knowledge from the books. I have no direct sensation, experience or knowledge of the brain. All I have is perceptions which are vivid and forceful in my mind and consciousness. That is all I can be certain of myself.
All I know is that time is a perception appearing in my mind, and change is also perception captured and appearing in mind. How they appear or why they appear physically or mentally is not philosophical topic or interest, I believe.
Later~
No, you won't do that. You also have reason to tell you not to do it. Reason is not just for telling you what to do, or what or why the world is the way it is. It is also for telling you not to do things when it is a possible danger.
You have sense perception, but you also have reasoning ability for discerning things, telling you what is the case, what to do and what not to do. You are not a CCTV camera just capturing the world. Are you?
That was what I have been explaining to you too until my face went blue. Physics and math cannot capture, describe or understand it, hence they would say that. Logic can. So what does it tell you? The world works under the principle of logic. Makes sense?
So do you mean we have three different types of time, which are subjective, psychological and objective? Which one is the real time. Now we can ask about the real time. You have claimed that there are three different times. They can't all be real. If one is real, then the rest of the two must be fake? Correct?
Sure the change is real and there is no such thing as fake change.
Quoting Corvus
That is incoherent.
I don't understand how that could be a proper response to our discussion.
Therefore there is a car that is moving. Therefore, changes in physical are real.
I am discussing logic here. Could you have a change in a simultaneous process?
Yes.
Quoting Corvus
Subjective time for sure is a substance so real. Objective time is required to allow a motion of the subjective time and it is not a substance. Psychological time is mysterious. It can be easily experienced by the conscious mind when there is nothing that we can entertain our time with. Therefore, I think that it is a substance as well.
Logic is about what we can coherently imagine. Quoting Corvus
Why take it personally? I don't believe you cannot imagine a world without minds, so I wasn't saying I pity you, I was saying I would pity you if you really could not imagine a world without minds. That is not the same as saying you cannot imagine a world without having a mind. You seem to be confusing the two.
Quoting Banno
Did you mean "your without minds, there are no possible worlds"?
Quoting Corvus
There have been no "ill manners". You are being over-sensitive. As far as I have witnessed Banno agrees when he genuinely agreesand we have had our share of disagreements, so your fantasy of a "well established group" is looking a bit like a case of paranoia.
Taking critiques of or disagreements with your arguments personally makes doing philosophy in a fruitful way difficult if not impossible. It should be an opportunity to learnto sharpen your arguments or find the humility to concede to a more well reasoned view.
What really is, is casual processes. These processes can be mentally separated and made independent. Then, when we compare placeholders that are significant to us in these processes, such as revolutions of the earth, ticks on a clock, beats of a heart, you can compare the two: some amount of X placeholders in one process have transpired as some amount Y of the other has.
This is what we ordinarily call time. But this description doesn't seem to necessitate some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity, the way the noun 'time' seems to suggest.
Time is a concept. Like human is a concept. They are like sets. We say them, use them to describe the elements in the set. But they don't exist like cups and chair exist.
Time has the members in the set. T = {durations, intervals, instances, past, present, future ...etc}
Human has its members in the set H = {John, Paul, Peter, Jane, Mary, .... MoK ... another billions of persons}.
Continuity is a property of time. It is not time itself. It doesn't cause anything. The glass breaks due to the energy contact with the glass and the mass, not time. Time could capture the moments and durations of events.
I am still not quite sure what you mean by subjective and psychological time here.
OK, my argument is not 100% accurate or free from logical consistency, but it is purely from my own reasoning, and I admit it could be fallacious in parts. This is where logical and rational debates are cried for, suppose.
Your post here is interesting, and intelligible to me. I am going to read it over, trying to understand fully and return with my further points on your ideas.
I was just commenting on your sentence "going to pity". That wasn't necessary, and it just sounded like personal attack. Honestly I have never seen someone will pity somebody in philosophical debates or books. It was very first time I ever seen anyone saying that.
Read over your postings. You have been noticed making many personal attack type comments on your postings. I was just pointing it out not making great deal about it. But if you read your postings, you make big deal out of it taking it very personally yourself for what had been started by your own emotional writings to others.
It tells me that you are very lenient on your emotional writings to others, but very sensitive and paranoid on other folks response to your postings. If you have any personal points to address, use the INBOX messages. Don't write your personal and emotional grievances in the public philosophical threads.
And try to be fair and honest. Don't be lenient to your own paranoia. Be objective. Be lenient to other party's response to your postings too as you are to your own paranoia, and think why they were addressing the problematic points as they did.
You are making mountains out of a mole hill, as they say. My point was simple. Use INBOX for any non philosophical posts. Don't write your emotional writings in the public philosophy threads.
Your explanation here sounds like a mysticism. You claim that your explanations were based on logic, but here you seems to be admitting it is actually based on mysticism. Correct?
I reject your claim time is subjective, real and a substance. If subjective time is real, then objective time must be fake, right? First, you need to demonstrate how and why subjective time is a substance.
I agree.
Quoting hypericin
This is interesting. What could that "some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity" be? We need more elaboration on this.
Change happens in a contradictory moment. The contradictory moment where forward driving force or energy on the mass (the stone or steel pipe), and the object (the glass) comes into the physical contact with each other. The force and the object being in contact with the mass with the force is in the contradictory moment. That contradiction is the instance of the change.
When the change had happened, it is no longer change. Before the change happened, there was no change. Change is the instance. It is not process. It is not continuity.
Change is from the original state to a new state. You don't say car moving is change. Car moving is driving or travelling.
Well, I have been trying to help you understand, but the progress seems to be slow and challenging.
I think I said it before, but will say again. It is difficult to understand from physics or math point of view. All they have is numbers and measurements of the movement, motions and change of the objects. That is not time itself. You need to rise above from the physical plain, and think in metaphysical plain.
My suggestion it that it is a fictiticious placeholder, an abstraction of derived from physical process.
But if there is such a thing, it is the same sort of thing as space. Space is the medium of arrangement, as time is the medium of sequence.
This: without minds, there are no possible worlds" is what Corvus is maintaining. He thinks it a counter you your It is possible for there to be a world without minds. Of course, it isn't.
Corvus is incapable of shouldering critique. Been that way for years. Hence his response here is to attack you and I, to do anything but reconsider.
So he writes
Quoting Corvus
and
Quoting Corvus
Yet
Quoting Corvus
So blatant. Oh, well. There's nought queer as folk.
You don't hold back your unfounded critiques to others, but you are not prepared to accept others' critiques on you. That is an irrational attitude.
Quoting Banno
My point was to get over it, and just concentrate on philosophy.
That sounds not far from my idea on time too. But a fictitious placeholder sounds a bit unclear. Why "fictitious"? What do you mean by "fictitious"?
When you say "a placeholder", would it be in the form of concept? Or would it be some other form or nature?
Quoting hypericin
I understand space as physical entity. Do you mean the placeholder could be in space somewhere?
Could it be in the form of property of space or principle of motion?
You blatantly contradicted yourself, at least twice.
Quoting Corvus
and
Quoting Corvus
Yet
Quoting Corvus
Not so unfounded...
You seem to have problem of understanding under what form OP comes in general. They come in the form of suggestion and assumption for further discussions. OPs don't start with conclusions.
Also "existence" can mean many different things. "doesn't exist" implies it exists in other forms. Obviously your understanding of existence is 1-dimension only.
If you did read a good basic logic textbook, then you would have known that contradiction is necessary in some cases of logical reasonings.
If I contradicted myself, then it would have been for proving something using Reductio ad absurdum. Why do you find it unacceptable that contradiction was adopted in the process of proof or assumption?
You wriggle and squirm.
Quoting Corvus
and
Quoting Corvus
Yet
Quoting Corvus
You do not have anything more than a superficial grasp of logic. You were not presenting a reductio. You are a bit of a twit.
I am just trying to help you understand the points.
I take that as your self-confession. :rofl:
Your stupidity is doing my head in. I'll have to leave you to it. You and your ilk are a large part of why philosophy is not taken seriously in certain circles. It's not enough just to make shit up, as you do.
You are a fool.
You kept attacking the OP because it started with an assumption by contradiction.
Moreover, you don't even know in what form OPs usually start either.
Who is the real fool here?
:roll: Well you're wrong. What I write on here are not "emotional writings", not emotional apart from impatience and annoyance when people distort what I have written or do not respond to reasoned critiques reasonably but deflect and wriggle just as you do.
Quoting Banno
That's just how I see it too. I for one will not waste any more time. on his childish shenanigans.
Quoting Banno
Sadly, what you say here is true.
Well, if you care to read Banno's postings, he just proved himself as the official fool. I was right.
Quoting Janus
And as predicted you are just his spokesman, as he was yours.
Physics without the maths and philosophy without critique. Stuff to warm the cockles of any curmudgeon's heart. It's worse than the rash of God that afflicted the forums last month.
I blame @fdrake leaving the mods.
But you don't even know what assumption by contradiction in the introduction to Logic textbook means. Plus you don't even know how OPs usually starts. What you have been saying don't seem to quite add up or be reflecting the truth.
In my view you lack humility and have a deluded sense of your own abilities.
Well that's your twisted and deluded view. No one will take your postings seriously apart from Banno, and anyone would have guessed why by now.
It's a now familiar play...
Yes, what Corvus is doing is symptomatic of the malaise in western civilisation. It's about to hit the wall.
Read your own postings too. You are not just unfair, but also dangerous and harmful in making up and spreading emotionally fueled disinformation to the genuine philosophic students who are pursuing their studies.
:up: Yes, it's "us and them" and "doubling down" seemingly all the way down and more and more. It's very disturbing to see its playing out intensifying on the world stage. I guess this forum is a microcosm, although thankfully it's not all bad here.
You two are just here to derail the OP keep posting off-topic rubbish as usual. Not good.
...will accept and learn from criticism.
Quoting Banno
Many other people here noticed and suffered from your antics, and the OP derailing attempts and complained about them many times too.
I was just giving you advice not to go that path, that you often wandered into. But you two have taken the advice in emotional way.
OK, will do. cheers.
My passing heralds the end of days.
Indeed; as a great writer once put it,
Quoting fdrake
But I bet you are glad you are no longer obligated to deal with this particular bit of melodrama...
My heart remains Christian, alas.
:lol:
Now the Mods will be after you for going off topic...
You gave up your immunity with your other powers.
I'll shut it now. Enough corrupting the youth for one day.
Apologies for all the off-topic postings here. Never an intention of mine, but the two folks with emotional problems. As soon as they appeared, I kinda suspected where it might head. :D
Will try again just to stay on the topic and philosophical pursuits :)
Problem with past is that it is in our memory and archives. Events in the past are no longer accessible at present, unless they are the objects with continuing existence such as cups, chairs, documents and films.
In Temporal logic, time can be modeled in two different types, namely Model of instances, and Model of Intervals. The fact that time can be modeled implies that it can capture past present future and instances too. You are correct in saying that the passing present doesn't disappear completely but it becomes part of the past. Hence time can be viewed as instances or intervals depending on what events or situations we are talking about. It is flexible.
Why don't you get involved in my threads and try to find flaws in my arguments? I would be happy to know your opinion and criticism. Insulting is not constructive!
I don't care I'm not a mod any more. I thought @Banno tagged me for chitchat reasons.
I see. Totally forgot about your recent resignation.
Was there always past? Does it mean without past there is no present? Or is it rather without present, there is no past? Was there ever the first present without past in the universe? If there was, where is the first present from?
SEP Article on Temporal Logic by Valentine Goranko.
Now I get to derail threads and be ornery. It's great.
If it is philosophical derailing with good arguments, then fair enough.
Some words have substantive [referents outside the web of language, some do not. Some do not but pretend they do. Time may be one is them.
Quoting Corvus
A kind of concept. An eminently useful mental tool we use to engage with the world. We ideate it as having an essential reality of it's own that we can't clearly articulate. But it does not.
Quoting Corvus
I wouldn't call space an entity, and I don't think you perceive it any more or less than time. When you think you perceive space, you are only perceiving objects and their arrangements. You unify this set of arrangements under the umbrella concept of space. Time may be a similar thing, but with relative motions. We perceive relative motions and imagine an umbrella concept 'time'.
Put another way: What if you abandoned the notions of space and time as metaphysical containers, and thought only of objects and their relative arrangements and motions. What would you thereby lose?
Quoting fdrake
So did I.
My apologies for compromising you.
When you pour coffee into a cup, is it cup or space in the cup which holds coffee? If there were no space in the cup, coffee won't be contained in the cup.
Space is also perceptible too. We don't sit on a chair if someone else is already sitting and taking up the space on the chair with her body. We make sure to sit on an empty chair.
We only drive when space is available on the stretch of the road. When space is not available due to the car in front is stationery or road is blocked by work, we stop the car until the road gets cleared and space is available for the car to keep driving.
Likewise even dogs and cats seem to be able to perceive space. They don't try walk through a wall or closed door. They only walk and run when space is available for them.
So, space does things for us (contains and holds), and is perceptible, and also is a precondition for all the objects existing in the universe.
But I see your point. Space is an odd object or entity if we could describe it as entity. I was not sure if it is correct to say space exists. Because it is perceptible, but invisible at the same time.
It exists, if and only if when no physical objects exist in it or on it.
Like time, it seems problematic to say it exists. Space is available. Time passes. But can they exist? In Meinong, only physical beings exist. The abstract beings like time and space absist, rather than exist.
It seems too naive and simple, and even obtuse to say they exist, just because we use them, and can talk about them.
We are close on our view of time here. My reasoning was telling me that time is a general concept or set which contains (placeholder) for all the temporal objects and events and gives us the tool to describe them.
Why does the object move? How can it move if there's no dimension of time? The reason we experience time is entropy. As a particle goes from coherence to decoherence it ends up in relation to entropy, forming a direction of energy and movement.
Then, our experience of time is just the resulting motion from entropic forces. Thus, time is a form of motion, of energy dissipating and spreading, of a physical process giving a momentum direction through space.
If you drop a stone from the top floor of 10m high building, the stone will fall onto the ground even if no one measured how long it took for the stone to hit the ground. The reason stone fell to the ground was the gravity force pulling the stone from the earth. It has nothing to do with time.
Time only emerges into the equation, because it is measured by someone, and says it took 3 seconds for the stone to hit the ground. But it was totally unnecessary for the movement.
Objects move because of energy or force, not because of time.
1.43 seconds, actually.
And it will take that long, measured or not.
Quoting Corvus
Force is defined as mass times acceleration, and acceleration is change in velocity over time. Energy is force times displacement. So both are inversely proportional to the square of the time taken - less time, more force, more energy.
So you again are exactly wrong.
The universe will keep on working as it has been, but human civilization would be much different from now. Once upon a time, long time ago, the cavemen must have lived without language and concepts of time or space.
We were talking about why the object move. Not how long it takes to move.
Again, you are talking about wrong things here.
Do you even read the posts when you reply to them?
Quoting Corvus
You were talking about force and energy, both of which are time dependent:
Quoting Corvus
Energy and force are defined in terms of time.
You seem to be talking about some high school physics stuff. But here we were talking about why the objects move. Not how long it takes to move.
Indeed, and your explanation was that they move because of force and energy; yet force and energy are defined in terms of time. Hence, on your own account, they move because of time.
The stuff you claim does not exist.
Are you saying that if you don't measure time, the force and energy doesn't exist?
I'm pointing out that if you have force and energy, then you must thereby also have time.
But whether you bring in time or not, the object still moves by the force.
Think this way. Do you mean that before time was invented, the stones never fell from the high cliff down the river?
Force and energy are both physical constructs. Time is part of the construction.
Please read above.
Nothing moves but that a period of time is involved. If it moves in zero time, the force involved would be infinite.
Quoting Corvus
Not at all. The notion of time being invented is a nonsense.
Quoting frank
Yes.
It sounds like a claim of appeal to the equation in high school physics.
Quoting Banno
Do you claim that time was given down by God to humanity?
No.
Only that there is time.
And that claiming that there is force and energy but no time involves a contradiction.
Where did time come from then?
Quoting Corvus
I don't know - indeed, the question may well be useless. We don't need to know where time comes form in order to understand that force and energy involve time. What we might seek is consistency.
That sounds unclear, and meaningless.
Quoting Banno
I can push my book here on the desk without knowing anything about time, and it moves. If I measured time it took to move from one side to the other end, I know the time. But otherwise, time is not involved in the movement at all.
Rubbish. Moving the book will take time, whether you know it or not.
Time is an extra variable to calculate the value of energy, but for the movement of the object, it doesn't get involved at all. The object moves quite happily without knowing anything about time.
If we don't know anything about time, does time exist?
This shows a deep misunderstanding of both movement, and knowledge.
Movement involves an object being in one location at a given time, and at another location at another time. Hence movement involves time.
And some things are true, even if they are not known.
Quoting Corvus
You might not know anything about time, but the rest of us have quite a good understanding.
If you only measure it.
Quoting Banno
We are talking about time here. What is something?
Quoting Banno
Wrong answer. Not talking about me here. The question was if you don't know anything about time, does time exist?
No. If an object has moved, then it is in a different location at a different time. That's what "movement" is.
Quoting Corvus
We do know things about time. Quite a bit. Including that, contrary to your OP, it exists.
Movement doesn't care about time, but it still happens. You get the time value when you measure it with the stop watch.
Quoting Banno
What do you know about time? Please tell us.
A category error. Caring is not the sort of thing that movement does. Movement does require time.
Quoting Corvus
Yes. You seem to think this implies that time only occurs when measured. That does not follow.
Quoting Corvus
Later.
If movement was from human or animals, then the mover don't care about time for movement. Mover still moves. Movement still happens. Caring was a bit of metaphor, but you don't seem to understand it.
Quoting Banno
How else do you get the time value without measuring? You seem to be now stepping into mysticism.
Quoting Banno
Ok
What has any of this to do with the definition of movement? An object moves if it is at a different place at a different time. Hence movement involves time. Talking of "care" here is a category error.
Quoting Corvus
Presumably if you have a value for the time passed, then you have made a measurement. But that does not imply that without a measurement there is no time. Time may pass, unmeasured.
Quoting Corvus
So you understood my "Later". It seems you do know something about time, despite your protestations to the contrary.
It wasn't about definition of movement. It was a statement that movement happens without time. Mover doesn't care about time, but still moves.
Quoting Banno
But you didn't get any accurate useable time value apart from "passed". What's the point?
Quoting Banno
Time is a concept. "Later" means some future, which is an element of the set of time. I never protested about anything.
I just said you seem to be talking wrong things not even reading or understanding the posts that you were supposed to reply to, and keep giving out wrong answers, and then in deep illusion that I was protesting about something. I was just answering to your questions, because you seem to be curious about the topic of time.
Movement presupposes time. Movement is being at one place at one time, and another place at another time. The claim that movement does not involve time involves a misunderstanding of movement.
Quoting Corvus
So what. If there is a past, then time has passed, and therefore time exists.
Quoting Corvus
You seem to know quite a bit about time. Odd, if it doesn't exist.
What I have done here is show that saying time does not exist leads to quite a few inconsistencies. Specifically, today, I have shown that movement, force and energy all involve time.
If you think my answers are wrong, it might be becasue you are asking the wrong questions.
Going back to the OP, this:
Quoting Corvus
has been shown to lead to inconsistency.
So how did rocks fall down from the hill to the river before invention of time?
Quoting Banno
Can you access the past? Is the word "passed" useful for time value?
Quoting Banno
Time is a concept. Later is a word to mean future. It is not time itself. It is a word. Your misunderstanding seems to be coming from mistaking a word as time. They are not the same. Anyhow, you say it exists. Please demonstrate and prove it exists.
Quoting Banno
As said, the original point I was talking about was why the objects move. But you came up with the whole loads of strawman wasting much time talking about the irrelevant details coming from misunderstanding the words as time.
Quoting Banno
It wasn't inconsistency. It was an assumption of the OP.
Demonstrate and prove time exists.
Time wasn't invented.
Quoting Corvus
Yep. I am here replying to your post, made in the past, while you are reading this thread, after I wrote it.
Quoting Corvus
Most certainly. "Past" even more so.
Quoting Corvus
You've said "time is a concept" several times, as if that meant something. You have demonstrated that you understand the concept. Asking for further proof is superfluous. But I might offer more, some time...
Quoting Corvus
You said
Quoting Corvus
And I have shown this to be in error by demonstrating that movement, force and energy all presuppose time. There is no movement, force or energy unless there is time.
Quoting Corvus
Already done.
I asked you but you never answered. Where did time come from, if not invented?
Quoting Banno
That is archive of the post, not the past itself.
Quoting Banno
It is just a word. It is meaningless on its own. You should know that, if you studied language.
Quoting Banno
It is my inference so far, but it might change. Hence the OP was launched for debates. The OP is not about consistency or inconsistency, truth or falsity. OPs start with assumptions for further discussions and coming to possible conclusions.
Quoting Banno
I have explained to you with the examples why movements and movers don't need time, but still move.
Time only appears when you measure it.
Quoting Banno
You seem to think words and numbers are time. Surely your understanding of time is incorrect.
You need to first explain what "existence" "exists" means, and then explain what time is, and why time exists.
I did answer, quite directly:
Quoting Banno
Quoting Corvus
It has a sense, it has a use. You know that.
Quoting Corvus
Indeed.
Quoting Corvus
And i have given you counter arguments that show that movement requires time. The very notion of movement requires a different location at a different time. And I have shown that your conclusion "Time only appears when you measure it", does not follow from your argument.
Quoting Corvus
No.
Quoting Corvus
I've no idea what you might mean here by "existence" exists - sure the word "existence" exists... surely you are not suggesting otherwise? In the past I've given you many examples that show what time is. I can give you more, later. I just gave you another.
Then to say," time exists" and "movement requires time." are groundless claims.
Quoting Banno
Only if you further clarify what you meant by it. A word itself doesn't mean anything, or it can mean many different things.
Quoting Banno
It sounds like your counter argument is coming from your psychological state or appeal to authority.
According to your counter arguments, all the cavemen before invention of time couldn't have moved to hunt, and no rocks fell down the river, and no rivers flowed due to no time.
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
"existence" and "exists" are both in the quotation marks meaning they are different words. The former is a noun and the latter is a verb. Wasn't it obvious?
You never said what time is, and why time exists. You never explained what "existence" and "exists" means either. These concepts needs to be defined objectively and agreed for the validity, before you can assert "Time exists."
Pointing to the old postings, and claiming "Time exists" is not a proof or definition of time.
Rubbish. You know what time is, despite your claims to the contrary. And you know what movement is, despite your claims that it does not require time.
Quoting Corvus
"Past"? Or "Passed"? Either way, you are flummoxing. You know what both of these are. The time for saying otherwise has passed, and your OP is in the past.
Quoting Corvus
More rubbish. Movement requires that the object that moves is in one place at one time, and at another place at another time. Therefore it requires time. You haven't addressed this. And it has nothing to do with psychological states or authority. GO ahead and give a different definition, if you can, that does not presuppose time.
Quoting Corvus
What twaddle. Again, time was not "invented". Nor does my argument imply any such thing. Present an argument, rather than making tangential assertions, if you can.
Quoting Corvus
Despite what you say here, you have shown that you understand "past", "passed", "future", "Later" and so on. In that very paragraph you make use of the notion of "never" in a temporal context. We use these words effectively, and understand their use. Your every post shows the inadequacy of your contention that time is not understood and does not exist. You will, in due time, reply to this post, and in that very act you will show that you are mistaken that time does not exist.
You confirmed that you don't know anything about time. Remember your own posting?
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Past what? What has passed? Words themselves don't mean much. They have to be in correct grammar, and must have proper objects they refer to in the real world, to be meaningful.
Quoting Banno
Only if you believe time is needed. Without knowing anything about time. movements still occurs, and movers move.
Quoting Banno
You seem to be denying the official historic facts here. The first record of time was 4241 BC in Egypt or Sumerian region. Are you saying, time was handed down by God or time crashed into the earth from the outer space?
Quoting Banno
This is what I meant. Your idea of time comes from idea of words. You think words are time. This is not true, and it is a grave misunderstanding of time and even the words.
Quoting Banno
More misunderstanding here. You seem to think past archive is time. We have record of postings which we can refer to. The archives are the objects. They are not time. I am not saying time exists or doesn't exist yet, as you seem to be imagining. I am saying there are many aspects to consider in time. It is not a simple and naive topic saying the words are time, and the use of the words are time.
Therefore, time exists.
Prove it. Tell us what time is first.
The duration of time that it took you to respond to my post coincided with the beating of my pulse, in seconds.
What do you mean by the duration of time? We are talking about time here. Duration of time sounds unclear. What is the relationship between duration and time? Or are they same?
I am trying to see good arguments on the existence of time. I am not saying your description of time is right or wrong at this stage.
You are being quite carelss. You asked:Quoting Corvus
To which I replied: Quoting Banno
Not that we do not know anything about time. Others will understand that one might well knwo something of a topic, yet not everything.
Quoting Corvus
You have used this phrase several times. We are here making use of words in a context, with purposes; these are not words themselves, whatever that might mean. You do use "past", "present" and "future" correctly, so it is evident that despite your claims to the contrary you do understand what time is, and further your use of temporal language demonstrates that you believe time exists, despite your inconsistent assertions.
Quoting Corvus
You need time. It separates out each of your responses, one from the other. And again, movement, force, energy and the other physical concepts of which you make use each require that there be time in which they might occur. Movement still occurs without knowing anything about time, becasue time exists regardless of our knowing about it. It is somewhere in this that your confusion inheres. you somehow have convinced yourself that time requires mind, perhaps form misunderstanding Kant or @Wayfarer, and have worked your way into a right mess.
Quoting Corvus
You claim that there was no time before time was measured. No 4242 BC. That's ridiculous. The reasons were given previously.
Quoting Corvus
Not at all. You and I are both embedded in time, existing in time regardless of words or ideas or concepts. You show this by the very fact that you reply to these posts one after the other. Time exists. You will demonstrate this yet again when you reply to this post, after I post it.
Quoting Corvus
You have expressed a most confused and contrary view of the nature of time, that is bellied by your actions as well as by your words. Makes for a fun thread. But perhaps not for you.
On the contrary, the arguments are before you, but your confusion forbids you recognising them.
Again, you post one reply after the other.
My understanding is not that time doesn't exist, but that it has an ineluctably subjective aspect. Meaning that the reality of time is not solely objective but is in some basic sense subject-dependent. Whereas, as I'm discussing in another thread, we're accustomed to regarding only what is objective as fully real. What is subjective is usually relegated to the personal.
Quoting Corvus
My view is that this is not extreme.
The confusion to which that view contributes is well shown in this thread.
Sure. Your account is much more sophisticated and much more coherent. But there are similarities.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. And yet time might pass, unnoticed. (My emphasis. What we consider to be the case and what is indeed the case are not the very same.)
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet some go a step further, as in this thread, and insist that time does not exist, when at most they can only conclude that they can say nothing.
Nice :lol: I can almost guarantee he won't get it.
Quoting Banno
Yes, this is indeed the "step too far"saying that we cannot know anything about anything without the mind (well, duh!) and then concluding that therefore nothing exists without the mind. The epitome of tendentiously motivated thinking!
As Ive patiently explained many times, I do not say that nothing exists without the mind. I say that without the mind, there can be neither existence nor non-existence. The idea that the universe ceases to exist outside of any mind is simply imagining its non-existence. That too is a mental representation.
The error that Im pointing to, is taking the mind-independence assumed by naturalism as a metaphysical axiom or a statement about the actual nature of reality. Thats where the actual confusion lies. What reality is outside the purview of an observer is precisely what Kant means by the in itself. It is not nothing, but it is also not anything. (Although @Banno has a grain of truth in pointing out that really nothing can be said of it, it is nevertheless required to sometimes point out what it is that nothing can be said about. )
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauers Philosophy] the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion.[/quote]
The same error. Proposing that nothing can be said and then saying something for which there can be no warrant.
I don't care if you ignore me, that's your prerogative. I didn't address you anyway, you responded to something I said addressed to someone else.
It does seem to be the case that our mind - our particular cognitive apparatus, with its characteristics and limitations - 'creates' the world we experience from an undifferentiated reality. We bring the world into being by apprehending it and participating in it, by having language. However, it seems to me that describing what the world might be outside of our particular viewpoint, our conceptual tools and awareness is impossible.
I think this can be a hard notion for people to grasp - it's hard enough to put into words. We're still faced with using words like 'reality' and 'world' when we mean something ineffable
Do you think that this noumena or preconceptual world might be something like an undivided whole? A major part of higher consciousness seems to be effort to go behind appearances and in some way engage with this.
The challenge for me is determining what can be usefully said about any of this and whether speculation has any real purpose. Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is puncture our arrogance: the assumption that we truly know the world, that there is a singular reality upon which we should all agree.
Earlier today I was served up yet another youtube talk on this very thing, by an Oxford cognitive scientist (which I almost posted but decided not to). I do see a strong connection between cognitivism and philosophical idealism. I can't see how it's plausibly deniable, although from experience here, it seems mostly misunderstood, and it also triggers a lot of resistance. 'What? You mean you think the world is all in your mind :rage: ?!?'
Quoting Tom Storm
The way I'm currently thinking about it, is that the in-itself, the world as it would be outside any conception of it, is not anything, by definition. In fact, perhaps even Kant errs calling it 'ding an sich' ('thing in itself') because it implies identity, a thing-ness. I prefer simply the 'in itself'.
Those terms, noumenal and noumena, are laden with many meanings. Prior to Kant, 'noumenal' meant 'an object of pure intellect' (nous). But Kant adopted the term within his own framework and put his own particular meaning on it. It lends itself to a kind of speculation, but wondering what is 'beyond' or 'behind' or 'above' appearances is like thinking about what might be beyond thought (I think :yikes: )
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, part of me wants to say there is. But that that world is not simply the world defined in terms of sense-experience and empiricism. There is much more to it, but that 'more' is not another intellectual construct. I was indelibly impressed by a quote attributed to Heraclitus by John Fowles, in The Aristos. 'The many live each in their own private world', he said, 'while those who are awake have but one world in common.'
Good point. The moment we use language to articulate notions of "non-ness" we're a bit lost.
Quoting Wayfarer
How do you feel about those who might say, ok then, there may be this additional realm of 'in itself' out there but the notion is ineffable and so contested, so complex and difficult to approach that I am going to stick with the things I can experience directly?
I agree with the view.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again your point is inline with my point here, although not exactly the same ideas as mine, as you pointed out.
I tried hard to help Banno understand the points, but he refuses to see the point. His shallow and wrong ideas seem to be coming from his belief that some words are time, and our uses of the words are time. He points to the word he wrote "Later" must be time, because I said "OK".
But Ok could have meant anything such as "Ok, Banno you obviously ran out of your ideas and doesn't know anything about what you have been saying." But he misinterprets "Ok" as simply to mean "I know what you mean." hence the word "Later" must be time. Nonsense.
He also confuses the archive of postings are time too. I will no longer waste time trying to help him understand the points.
He also cannot see the fact that I am in the position to see the arguments rather than claiming either time exists or not. I have been asking questions, if time exists, and asked for his definition of time and proof for existence time, to which he evaded and avoided giving out any clear answers for the questions.
My stance was not claiming time doesn't exist. The OP was open for debates, not claim. Banno fails to see or remember this point, and makes it as his slogan for attacking the OP.
I fully agree and support your point here.
I will be joining the policy, not to waste time talking about anti philosophical nonsenses.
Taking mind-independence for granted, as a metaphysical axiom, is completely pointless because it provides no ontological principles through which one could understand the assumed mind-independence. Without any such principles, we have nothing to base judgement of truth or falsity about mind-independence, and these judgements are therefore based in persuasive rhetoric, such as claims like "it's science".
This is why Aristotle proposed the law of identity, 'a thing is the same as itself'. This is meant as a first principle of mind-independence. As a metaphysical axiom it can be debated, accepted, or denied. But since it is the traditional first principle of mind-independence, denial of it prevents understanding of mind-independence, without an alternative proposal.
The law of identity is derived from, or based in, the observed temporal continuity of things, the tendency for things to remain as they are through a duration of time. approached this issue much earlier in the thread.
That might work for some things, but not for things like Descartes' wax. What exactly are we observing that tells us it's the same wax as it melts and then solidifies as a puddle? This looks like more of a read-only memory feature. In other words, we're built to think in terms of identities with changing properties with change always appearing in association with something relatively changeless.
It seems clear it is held in the cup. The shape of the cup is such that it can hold coffee. No need for a separate entity, "space".
Consider this: You are a school principal. Every classroom can hold no more than 25 students, by law. You are given X students this year. As a manager, you develop an accounting trick: instead of thinking in terms of students, you think of slots, that is, empty places in a classroom. After all, that is the limiting resource, you have plenty of students. After juggling the slots around on your spreadsheet, you conclude to the school board "I'm sorry, I can't fit that many students, there aren't enough slots!"
"Slot" is a noun, and your statement is true: you don't have enough slots. If you had more, you truly could fit all the students. Yet, "slots" don't actually refer to anything in the world. They refer to an idea, specifically an absence of a student, turned mentally into a thing.
This is what I mean as placeholder, and this is what I am suggesting space is. An idea you mentally frame, nounify, and pin onto your mental map of the world. But it doesn't actually refer to any entity in the world, it is a (very useful) idea, absence formalized into a mental thing of its own, and thoroughly reified by constant use.
Now do I actually believe all of this? Not necessarily, but I think it is valid idea, worth pushing until it breaks.
On the other hand, you can make the same sort of arguments for time you make for space. When you watch a clock, or any physical process evolve, you are experiencing time. You experience it every time you say to yourself, "this is happening right now", and that present utterance and moment transforms irreversibly into a memory, pointing to the past.
Time functions as a real constraint on what is possible. It is likely possible for you to arrive in Paris from wherever you are, within a day, if you really had to. And it is likely completely impossible for you to arrive in Paris in an hour. The only difference between these two requirements is one of them has an inadequate amount of time. How could time function as a physical constraint on what is possible and what is not, if it didn't exist?
My overall point is, if time falls, so does space. Since they really are the same sorts of things.
Wayfarer's account does not consist in cogent argument, so in the context of discussion I have no sympathy for it. His account says that he understands something "deep and difficult" that anyone who disagrees with his conclusions doesn't, mustn't understand. This is the same game played by ideologues, would-be gurus and fundamentalists in all times and places. This is part of the problem, not part of any solution.
It is arguable that this mindset is a significant contributor to the problems humanity faces. I have no sympathy for it. And I have experience; when I worked as a landscape contractor I employed quite a few followers of Osho, and Da Free John and I was entangled for years, many more years than I otherwise would have been, with the Gurdjieff Foundation due to my being married to a woman who was devoted to the "spiritual leader" there. Now there was nothing really sinister I ever witnessed about that organization, and I knew hundreds of people there from all walks of life and most of them were decent people.
Now, of course Wayfarer will say they, Gurdijieff, Osho, and Da Free John were charlatans, not the real deal like the Buddha, but their followers will just say he doesn't understand: the exact same "argument" Wayfarer constantly presents to his detractors. How do we know what shenanigans the Buddha might have got up to with his disciples? All we have are scriptures written many years after the death of Gautama.
Of course, the principle of letting go of attachments may well be a good one for personal tranquility and peace of mind, but all the superstitious, otherworldly stuff is the real problem. It leads to devaluation of this life. For me what is important is how one lives this life, because that's all we know.
Wayfarer pushes the idea of direct knowing, of intellectual intuition. I have no problem with someone following their own intuitions, or even their own fantasies: I do so myself, but I am not arrogant enough to count my intuitions or fantasies as reasons for anyone else to think or believe as I do. Doing that opens the door to ideology, guruism and fundamentalism, as I said earlier, and I will have no truck with that.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think it is the case at all. It seems implausible that a completely undifferentiated, amorphous "reality" could give rise to the vastly complex world, with all its regularities and the shared experience which makes it possible to study and understand its workings.
I agree that we are pre-cognitively affected, and that everything we do understand is only on account of our cognitive capacities. We know, form observing animal behavior that they perceive the same environments we do, albeit in different ways according to their sensory equipment.
All we know about how we are affected precognitively comes via observation, analysis, conjecture, prediction and experiment, in other words via science. All we know about the way the world works is only possible via observation, analysis, conjecture, prediction and experiment, via science.
Why is it not plausible that organisms with sensory equipment have evolved to perceive what is there? How long would we survive if our perceptions were not mostly accurate? Do we reject such an idea just because we cannot know and understand absolutely everything with absolute certainty?
The only cogent arguments are those which are justified by observation and logic. What possible argument can there be to support the veracity of intellectual intuition or direct knowing other than personal conviction?And personal conviction is not an argument at all, it is only effective when "preaching to the choir', and I don't see how that is going to help us with our common problems, considering how different people's personal convictions are; following that path can only lead to more division.
A pity you have fallen for this.
Before we go further, notice the collective here, the "Our" in "our particular cognitive apparatus".
With that in mind, there are three questions that I'd like answered. Firstly, how is it that there are novelties? How is it that we come across things that are unexpected? A novelty is something that was not imagined, that was not in one's "particular cognitive apparatus". If the world is a creation of the mind, whence something that is not a product of that mind?
Second, how is it that someone can be wrong? To be wrong is to have a belief that is different to how the world is, but if the world is their creation, that would require someone to create a world different to how they believe the world to be. How can we make sense of this?
Finally, How is it that if we each create the world with our particular cognitive apparatus, we happen to overwhelmingly agree as to what that construction is like? So much so that we can participate on a forum together, or buy cars made in Korea.
Far and away the simplest explanation is that there is a world that we share, and that world is as it is apart from what we might believe. Then those who create a world that differs too greatly from how the world is find themselves unable to make much progress.
The simplest explanation is that there is a world that is as it is, and that sometimes we believe things about it that are wrong. And sometimes we come across things in the world that are entirely novel and unexpected.
Quoting Tom Storm
Perhaps it's hard because it is wrong. @Wayfarer and Kant and others invent a world that is beyond our keys and chairs and bodies, and then say that we cannot talk about it - the little man who wasn't there. They then go on to tell us that the "in-itself, the world as it would be outside any conception of it, is not anything, by definition" - to speak about that about which they cannot speak. It's not that their thinking has gone a step further than others, but that it hasn't taken the last step, to realise that if nothing can be said or done with the "in-itself", then it is an utterly void notion. The better approach is not to mumble about a mysterious unknown, but to acknowledge that what we have is only the shared world about which we can speak and in which we act.
There is an "our" only becasue there is a shared world.
Indeed. I'm afraid Wayfarer's is a sleeping draught. We live in a shared world, more's the pity.
I quite agree. It's no coincidence that Heidegger and Nietzsche are becoming again fashionable in a world that denies truth, that claims there is not a how things are but only what we choose, and so witlessly hands even more power over to the already powerful.
But how things are remains, regardless of what the oligarchs claim. The truth will out.
As always you misconstrue the nature of 'mind'. What you are saying is that idealism claims that the world is the creation of your mind, or my mind, or at least some individual's mind. That is not what is being claimed, it is an all-or-nothing interpretation of the matter. As I've often pointed out Kant himself acknowledged the validity of empirical realism - within its scope. Kant took pains to differentiate himself from Berkeley in this regard, describing Berkeley's idealism is problematic and dogmatic. Kant does not deny that there is an objective realm and a world separate to the individual mind. So your criticism of idealism is based on a too simplistic an idea of what is being argued for.
Kants transcendental idealism does not claim that the world is a mere figment of individual minds, but rather that the structure of experience is provided by our shared and inherent cognitive systems. Novelty emerges from new external data interacting with our fixed frameworks. In Kants view, while the mind supplies the framework for experience, it must work in tandem with the manifold of sensory impressions. The unexpected quality of new data is what we call novelty. It doesnt imply that the mind conjured it from nothingit simply had to update its organization in response to an input that wasnt fully anticipated.
Error occurs when our interpretations fail to match that data. When someone holds a belief that is incorrect, it is because there's a mismatch between their mental constructs and what is going on. Although our experience is structured by the mind, it still emanates from the external world. A belief is in error when that mental structure misrepresents or fails to adequately capture the sensible data.
Consensus arises because we all operate with fundamentally similar mental structures. This preserves the objectivity of the external world while acknowledging the active role our minds play in organizing experience.
Remember my argument is that what we regard as mind-independent has an ineluctably subjective element or ground, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Not that the world is 'all in the mind' in the simplistic sense in which you will always take it.
Quoting Banno
The referent for that proposition is wholly and solely within your mind. That is one thing that is wholly 'mind-created'.
I never said otherwise! It's only your continuous and tendentious misreading of what I'm saying that is at issue.
Quoting Wayfarer
In any case we cannot understand those structures other than via science, and in vivo they are precognitive, part of the in itself, which would indicate that the in itself has structure, and so is not undifferentiated at all. Structure without differentiation is logically impossible.
If structure exists independently of any mind, then it exists independently of all minds, unless there is a collective mind, and we have, and could have, no evidence of such a thing.
yet
Quoting Wayfarer
So is there stuff that is independent of mind, or not?
Yep.
It's not a yes/no question.
Are these points truly incompatible with the argument? Husserl, for one, suggests that we seem to share a world because language, social practices, and culture shape our common approaches - intersubjective agreement. Additionally, we share a similar cognitive apparatus, so why wouldnt there be commonality in our sense-making? Why wouldnt there also be moments of surprise when our expectations clash with new experiences?
Moreover, our shared bodily structure means that our perception of space and movement is largely similar. However, despite these commonalities, it seems that our relationship with reality is one that we construct, shaped by both our physical and intellectual limitations. What we take as "real" is not simply given but filtered, interpreted, and structured according to the constraints of our perception and cognition.
Quoting Banno
I agree with this and put this to Wayfarer in my response -
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Janus
Isn't the famous argument by Donald Hoffman and others that evolution does not favour seeing the world as it truly is, but rather seeing it in ways that enhance survival and reproduction.
Quoting Banno
I'm here to explore philosophical notions that may seem counterintuitive; why not? This is a philosophy forum, after all, and exploration is key. @Wayfarer ideas are deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, and while realists may disagree, that doesnt mean we shouldnt engage with alternative perspectives. Speculation is part of the philosophical process, isn't it?
Well, not for you. You need to conflate belief and truth. But to admit agreement, error and novelty, you have to admit that sometimes our beliefs can be incorrect - can be at odds with how things are.
Again, if you read carefully, you would have understood it was something I was not obliged to deny in the first place. It is only characteristic of what you think I said.
How can there be intersubjective agreement without a shared word independent of each individual's beliefs? What is it that this "language, social practices, and culture" take place in, if not a shared world? Where is that "similar cognitive apparatus" if not in the world? What is a "shared bodily structure" if not something more than the mere creation of your mind?
Quoting Tom Storm
Hoffman. Fucksake.
His argument supposes that there is no tiger, only the booming and buzzing background quantum thingy.... and yet he still runs away from the tiger.
If you hold him down he happily admits that there is a world independent of mind, including tigers that he will run away from, but that saying there isn't sells more books.
There are two descriptions of how things are, one that involves quantum handwaving, another that involves tigers. One is useful for publishing books, the other for surviving in the Indian forest. Must only one be the only true depiction?
Added: That is, I disagree with his "the world as it truly is" as there being only one true account. The thing in the forrest is both a quantum thingy and a tiger.
That someone is wrong is a judgement. There is no necessary relation between a judgement of "wrong", and how the world is. This is because a judgement is always a matter of choice. Therefore the question of "how is it that someone can be wrong?" is answered with "because we have the power of choice to judge someone as wrong".
I have read carefully. Repeatedly. For years.
And I do not see that you have answered these questions, but rather that you backtrack on your claims when i point out their problems. If you read carefully your own responses on error, consensus and novelty, you might notice that you are agreeing with what I have said. But then in your next post you will renege.
IF you say the keys are in your pocket when they are in the door, then you are wrong.
Your reading is underwritten by an emotional commitment to realism (whether naive, scientific or metaphysical). But your return to the objects of domesticity - crockery and cutlery, cups in the cupboard - reassures you of the reality of the common-sense world. It is also why you so often express both resentment and hostility in this matter - because it threatens the common-sense understanding of the world. I can sense the exasperation in your posts - how can he say that? that is preposterous! They're not written to provoke, but this matter does provoke, because it calls into question one's innate sense of how the world is. But then, isn't that part and parcel of philosophy proper?
Quoting Banno
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Each of these supposes a world, independent of our beliefs, in which there is "external data" that is novel, shared or at odds with those beliefs.
Yet you say that this too is created by mind.
You want your cake and to eat it.
I'm not saying I agree with Hoffman, just that there are arguments against evolution as providing a true picture of reality. A similar argument is put by Alvin Plantinga - the evolutionary argument against naturalism.
I think Hoffman will tell you that the Tiger is still a risk to human survival, just not what we think it is.
But I am not a Hoffman acolyte.
Quoting Banno
Just because language, social practices, and culture take place within a "shared world" does not mean this world exists independently of human minds.
Doesn't Husserl and later phenomenology argue that our sense of a common world is constituted through experience, communication, and mutual recognition - not discovered as something external.
I have some sympathy for the idea that humans create meaning and value and that these are largely contingent rather than inherent. Perhaps we live in a reality that, in itself, lacks intrinsic form or meaning; it is through our perception, interpretation, and conceptual frameworks that we impose structure upon it.
Our shared biology and cognitive capacities provide a foundation for commonalities in perception, ensuring that, despite individual differences, much of what we experience aligns. Likewise, our participation in culture and community shapes our values and collective notions of truth, reinforcing a sense of shared understanding.
That said, this does not mean that we might deny scientific and empirical truths. What it highlights is that even within objective inquiry, our engagement with the world is mediated by the frameworks we use to interpret and explain it. Science itself is a human endeavor, shaped by methodologies, paradigms, and theoretical models that evolve over time. However, this does not undermine the effectiveness of scientific practice in describing and predicting phenomena - it just shows that knowledge is always developed within a particular context.
Or something like this. I think it is stimulating to ponder these things. Not all of us are certain our world-views are correct. :wink:
Important to know that this is true in one way, but not in another. It is empirically true that there is vast world outside my knowledge of it - heck, I only know two or three people in my street. You think that is what is meant by 'mind', hence it makes no sense to you. But there's another meaning in play, another sense of 'mind' altogether - not the personal, individual ego, but mind as it structures our experience-of-the-world. But I know that is likely to trip you up, as you'll probably say, what is that? What evidence can there be for it? Which is already to ask a wrong question, as it presumes it is something you're outside of. (This came up in the Rödl thread.)
That's why Kant acknowledges that transcendental idealism and empirical realism do not have to conflict, per Kant and Empirical Realism (Larval Subjects).
That's enough out of me, I have to do some quotidian chores.
Yep, and the common problem is that they suppose one description - usually that of the physisist- to be the "true picture". This, incidentally, is a point of agreement between @Wayfarer and I - the rejection of a physical hegemony.
Quoting Tom Storm
He seems to think that once it is described in quantum terms, it ceases to be a tiger. I'll point out that it is still a tiger. With big, sharp, pointy teeth.
Quoting Tom Storm
Perhaps, in which case the problem for them is to avoid solipsism. The answer here is that the world is not constituted by experience, communication, and mutual recognition, but sits independently of, yet is understood via, experience, communication, and mutual recognition. It's that problem of mistaking what one believes to be the case for what is the case. So Quoting Tom Storm
...and therefore there is a shared biology that is "external" to our cognitive capacities. Biology will not work as an explanation of commonality unless there already is such a commonality - the shared world.
Nothing odd about that, except that the world already has some structure apart from that mind, and hence novelty, error and agreement.
Your next step is usually to hint at some panpsychic undermind that permeats space and time...
But it doesn't, Banno. 'The world' outside any mind has no structure or any features. Structure and features are imposed on it by the mind. This doesn't mean that the structure and features are invented from whole cloth, either. They are dependent on the kinds of beings we are. Human beings will naturally see features and structures that are determinable in accordance with their sensory capabilities and prior understanding. In one sense, they pre-exist the mind discovering them, but in another, they're dependent on our consensus agreement - weights and measures, units of distance and duration, qualities and quantitative attributes, which we decide and inter-subjectively agree on.
And it's not a panpsychic undermind, but the mind - the mind that you and I and every other sentient being is an instance of. Granted, perhaps something like Hegel's geist (although I'm no Hegel scholar.)
The point about time, again, and this is a thread about time, is simply that it cannot be said to be real, in the absence of an observer.
You can't know that. that's the step too far. All you can say is that you do not know what that structure might be. At least until it is understood, by coming "inside" the mind.
But there is the false juxtaposition, of what is inside and outside the mind, what can be spoken of and what cannot.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmm. The Claytons panpsychicism, the panpsychicism you have when your not having a panpsychicism. (Australia reference).
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing can be believed without a mind. But that is different to nothing's being the case. You conclude that there is no time without an observer, but there is no observer to check your claim. That's your step too far, again. If someone counters that there is time, unobserved, how are we to decide which is correct? We cannot. Yet you do.
it's an act of faith.
(Added: and the next step is to move on to quantum hand waiving without the maths, and obtuse references to supposed authorities in physics who are outside of their area of specialisation... as Davies.)
Don't know it that's accurate - your argument assumes that a shared biology requires a pre-existing external world. How do you rule out the possibility that biological commonalities emerge through evolutionary and developmental processes. Shared biology and cognitive capacities don't presuppose an independent "shared world" in the metaphysical sense. Couldn't they arise from genetic inheritance, environmental pressures, and social interactions?
No, I reject that emphatically. Again, 'before h.sapiens existed' is itself mind-dependent. That doesn't mean it is all in the mind.
Yours is the act of faith.
What is the "evolutionary and developmental processes" apart from "a pre-existing external world"? What does evolution take place in, if not the world? Quoting Tom Storm How could there be a genetic inheritance apart from the physical world? There being genes is that there is a physical world. I can't see what it is you are proposing, if it involves evolution both occurring in and bringing about, mind.
De re and de dicto. Believing that there was a time before humans is mind-dependent. There being a time before humans, isn't. You are making an error in scope. That our access to a fact is mediated by minds does not imply that the fact itself is mind-dependent.
Time itself is mind-dependent. Given that, we know there was a time before h.sapiens evolved. The two levels, again. It is logically possible that the Universe and everything in it was created so as to appear to have a specific duration. It's the evil daemon argument all over again.
Horses' mouth.
Begging the question. Or better, how could we make sense of the sentence "Time is mind-dependent"?
We know time passed before humans evolved, before Earth even formed. So it could not be that time only passes in the presence of mind. Of course, that we know time passed before Earth was formed is indeed mind dependent. But that is not what you want to say, is it? You still insist on taking that step too far.
Saying that time is mind dependent is like saying the moon didn't exist before folk noticed it. It had to be there in order to get noticed.
If you wish to introduce and evil daemon, the level of scepticism required will remove any capacity for rational judgement. Sure, the world was created just before you read that sentence. If that's what you need in order to make your doctrine coherent, then your doctrine is feeble.
Fair enough. Someone like Kastrup would respond that genes (physicalism) is what consciousness looks like when viewed from a particular perspective. Which Im sure you would regard as bullshit.
Im not proposing anything in particular, just holding up what seem to be interesting arguments to me. I guess I would prefer not to propose there is no world at all - there seems to be something, perhaps just flux to which we provide a type of coherence.
Well, bullshit in the way that it is pretty much self-serving pop nonsense. If genes are explained by consciousness, then it is circular to then explain consciousness in terms of the evolution of genes.
It's dreadful stuff, really, that any undergrad ought be able to undermine. But critique is unfashionable.
So why not just go with that. After all, it works.
As I said, that's a judgement. Do you dispute the obvious?
Presumably that argument is based on the understanding of evolution of species which is in turn based on the assumption that the fossil evidence is giving us an accurate picture of what organisms existed, when they existed and how they related to one another in terms of structural developments.
But the theory has no justification if it assumes that our senses, and hence the fossil remains, do not give us an accurate picture of the reality, or in other words does not give us an accurate picture of the evolution of species. It is a performative contradiction and as such I cannot take it seriously.
The irony is that @Wayfarer can offer only psychologistic explanations of how Western culture has arrived where it has with the additional assertion that we have lost something of the ancient wisdom, when most of the critiques of those ideas are not psychologistic in nature but purely based on critical thinking that examines what we have the best evidence for.
Psychologistic explanations of how idealist thinking is based on wishful thinking could be given, since those ideas which include the possibility of enlightenment, personal salvation and redemption including ultimately immortality would seem to be, for many at least, more attractive than the deflating realist idea that we have just one life.
Time flows, but it doesn't have to exist. It is like God. God creates, but God doesn't have to exist.
Quoting hypericin
Time flows. Space doesn't flow. Therefore they are not the same sort of things.
So manifestly tiresome, I should think, to be put in a defensive position, the accusatory ground for which having been seriously misunderstood. Or perfectly understood but miserably disavowed.
Given that Kant has already been invoked, as he usually is, it is permissible to further posit the transcendental illusion, whereby your defense of existence/non-existece, with respect to mind**, is mis-taken by antagonists in their collective proclamations regarding only existence (of)/non-existence (of), under the same conditions.
How foolish to ask of existence without mind, absent conjoined temporal qualification, when it is from mind the question is asked, in which that very qualification is immediately presupposed.
Existence is not an existent, from which follows existence belongs to mind alone as a pure conception; existence is given iff there is that mind capable of its deduction, and, that in which such deduction resides.
On the other hand, that which is conditioned by the pure conception, re: that which is an existent, merely indicates that on which the cognitively functional part of the human intellect performs. Cognitively functional in juxtaposition to the aesthetically pleasing.
(** reason, in all congruent instances)
All that to say this: even without any possibility of apodeictic empirical justifications, re: proofs, I agree with what youre saying.
:rofl: :naughty:
Quoting Banno
Technically, those are mathematical definitions which are not the same thing as the 'ontological' connecting tissue of the universe they refer to.
An objects 'extension' is not the same as the ACT of 'measurement'. A measurement takes time as you have to roll out the measuring tape and set it at the ends of the object. An object IS (tenseless) extended. That is a property it has regardless of time under a naive presentist manifest image of the world.
This is also distinguished from other operative definitions of force such as it being a 'reading on a force-meter'.
However, we can all agree that if there is no one to measure a force, to ascribe a value to it by operational standardization, or give a mathematical definition that there WOULD still be interactions. Casual omph's in nature and these we call or dub forces.
This is a perfect example of the sloppy language that can be used in physics which doesn't distinguish between: Instrumental/operational definitions, ontological definitions, mathematical definitions etc.
THOSE ARE ALL DIFFERENT! Even though they be used in the service of a similar referential/descriptive goal. That minor misunderstanding is what prompts this individual to complain about the prevalence of 'reified' usages of the word force in physics.
Then there are those who consider alternative definitions of force such as this person who consider them as,
Yeah, well, you know .no ones gonna admit to being done with all this thinking, but might still judge that everyone else seems to be done with his.
We should go back to Kant.
"We dispute all claim of time to absolute reality [absolute Realität], namely where it would attach to things absolutely as a condition or property even without regard to the form of our sensible intuition. Such properties, which pertain to things in themselves, can also never be given to us through the senses. Therefore herein lies the transcendental ideality of time, according to which, if one abstracts from the subjective condition of our sensible intuition, it is nothing at all, and can be considered neither as subsisting nor as inhering in the objects in themselves (without their relation to our intuition). " - CPR (A36/B52)
Everybody should go back to Kant, but most everybody is done with all this (kind of) thinking.
Im more affirming your arguments than denying them, except for the opening statement, which I find catastrophically false, if only with respect to the CPR, re: space is no more real than time, and thereby doesnt exit as do the real objects that are conditioned by it.
Pretty simple, really: space doesnt move, and time doesnt change, yet the movement of things in time is the ground of all empirical knowledge whatsoever. How to reconcile one with the other, is what the hoopla is all about.
Fairdos. I am still thinking, and try to perceive time. But time is not perceivable like the other objects around me. I still use time, and tell the time. But that doesn't convince me time exists. Time is a concept or as Kant put it a priori condition for human perception. If time is a priori transcendental condition, then it doesn't exist. We have them in our minds. :)
Investigate someone elses metaphysical exposé of time, youll get a different set of premises for its explanation, right?
Just ordered a book on time. It is filled with various articles by 30 different academic contributors. It is called "Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality"
What's your view on time?
Things might exist, unbeknown.
What a surprise, to discover ants under the floorboards. What a mistake, to have believed the tank contained enough fuel. How odd, that we agree on such things. Things tend to be thus-and-so despite our beliefs.
Perhaps existence is known "if there is a mind capable of its deduction, and in which the knowledge might reside". But existence doesn't care what you know, and happens anyway.
As The Man says, without the subjective constitution of our senses in general, time is meaningless. Which translates to, as far as Im concerned, time is only meaningful should I have occassion to determine some phenomenal duration relating two instances of it, or, some phenomenal coexistence related to a single instance.
Which still leaves the inception of time and space into our subjective constitution .assuming of course there is such a thing to begin with ..for which some pure formal metaphysics is required.
Or so it seems.
One needs minds in order to have meaning.
But that does not imply that there is no time without mind, or that time is mind-independent, or that events do not occur in temporal sequences unless measured.
Understanding time requires a mind. That does not imply that time requires a mind. That's a step too far.
Of course, but irrelevant.
Quoting Banno
True enough, insofar as youre using understanding as a verb denoting a cognitive activity within an intellectual whole, which nevertheless presupposes that which is being understood.
Understanding, as a noun representing a specific cognitive faculty, has its function predicated on the conditions of time alone, at the exclusion of space, which logically cannot be given by that which uses it. Hence, time, in and of itself, as a stand-alone conception, requires something for its validity, even if it not be understanding as such, but still within the human intellect somewhere. So .pure reason.
FYI, in Kant the former here is a metaphysical conception of time, the latter is transcendental exposition of time. The former regards its use, which we empirically verify every time we use a watch, the latter regards its origin, and that in the strict syllogistic method of propositional logic a priori, which we cannot empirically verify at all. With the empirical verification possible on the one hand in conjunction with observation, and the empirical verification impossible on the other in conjunction with the logic of infinite divisibility, arises the ideality of time. And space.
All of which makes explicit, the premises for this particular metaphysics being granted, events cannot be said to occur in temporal sequence, which implies experience thereof, unless the relative times of each are measured. Furthermore, events cannot even be supposed as occuring in temporal sequence, without such a priori condition as ground for how it is possible all of those conceptions relate to each other, regardless of any eventual or subsequent measurement.
For what its worth .
What an appalling sentence.
What could it mean, and why should it be given any credence?
Yesterday, upon the stair...
Quoting Mww
Again, they cannot be said to be in a sequence, but that simply does not imply that they are not in a sequence.
Quoting Mww
Not so much. It shows again the step too far, in Kant, in your post and in @Wayfarer's work.
Some intelligible scientists and philosophers already have been talking about nonexistence of time.
Hume was also saying time doesn't exist. Could then time be the quality of ideas of objects perceived by mind in Hume?
"The idea of time, being deriv'd from the succession of our perceptions of every kind, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation, will afford us an instance of an abstract idea, which comprehends a still greater variety than that of space, and yet is represented in the fancy by some particular individual idea of a determinate quantity and quality.
T 1.2.3.7, SBN 35
As 'tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time, nor is it possible for time alone ever to make its appearance, or be taken notice of by the mind. A man in a sound sleep, or strongly occupy'd with one thought, is insensible of time; and according as his perceptions succeed each other with greater or less rapidity, the same duration appears longer or shorter to his imagination. It has been remark'd by a[8] great philosopher, that our perceptions have certain bounds in this particular, which are fix'd by the original nature and constitution of the mind, and beyond which no influence of external objects on the senses is ever able to hasten or retard our thought. If you wheel about a burning coal with rapidity, it will present to the senses an image of a circle of fire; nor will there seem to be any interval of time betwixt its revolutions; meerly because 'tis impossible for our perceptions to succeed each other with the same rapidity, that motion may be communicated to external objects. Wherever we have no successive perceptions, we have no notion of time, even tho' there be a real succession in the objects. From these phænomena, as well as from many others, we may conclude, that time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone, or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover'd by some perceivable succession of changeable objects.
T 1.2.3.8, SBN 35-6
To confirm this we may add the following argument, which to me seems perfectly decisive and convincing. 'Tis evident, that time or duration consists of different parts: For otherwise we cou'd not conceive a longer or shorter duration. 'Tis also evident, that these parts are not co-existent. For that quality of the co-existence of parts belongs to extension, and is what distinguishes it from duration. Now as time is compos'd of parts, that are not co-existent; an unchangeable object, since it produces none but co-existent impressions, produces none that can give us the idea of time; and consequently that idea must be deriv'd from a succession of changeable objects, and time in its first appearance can never be sever'd from such a succession.
T 1.2.3.9, SBN 36
Having therefore found, that time in its first appearance to the mind is always conjoin'd with a succession of changeable objects, and that otherwise it can never fall under our notice, we must now examine whether it can be conceiv'd without our conceiving any succession of objects, and whether it can alone form a distinct idea in the imagination.
T 1.2.3.10, SBN 36-7
In order to know whether any objects, which are join'd in impression, be separable in idea, we need only consider, if they be different from each other; in which case, 'tis plain they may be conceiv'd apart. Every thing, that is different, is distinguishable; and every thing, that is distinguishable, may be separated, according to the maxims above-explain'd. If on the contrary they be not different, they are not distinguishable; and if they be not distinguishable, they cannot be separated. But this is precisely the case with respect to time, compar'd with our successive perceptions. The idea of time is not deriv'd from a particular impression mix'd up with others, and plainly distinguishable from them; but arises altogether from the manner, in which impressions appear to the mind, without making one of the number. Five notes play'd on a flute give us the impression and idea of time; tho' time be not a sixth impression, which presents itself to the hearing or any other of the senses. Nor is it a sixth impression, which the mind by reflection finds in itself. These five sounds making their appearance in this particular manner, excite no emotion in the mind, nor produce an affection of any kind, which being observ'd by it can give rise to a new idea. For that is necessary to produce a new idea of reflection, nor can the mind, by revolving over a thousand times all its ideas of sensation, ever extract from them any new original idea, unless nature has so fram'd its faculties, that it feels some new original impression arise from such a contemplation. But here it only takes notice of the manner, in which the different sounds make their appearance; and that it may afterwards consider without considering these particular sounds, but may conjoin it with any other objects. The ideas of some objects it certainly must have, nor is it possible for it without these ideas ever to arrive at any conception of time; whichsince it appears not as any primary distinct impression, can plainly be nothing but different ideas, or impressions, or objects dispos'd in a certain manner, that is, succeeding each other.
T 1.2.3.11, SBN 37
I know there are some who pretend, that the idea of duration is applicable in a proper sense to objects, which are perfectly unchangeable; and this I take to be the common opinion of philosophers as well as of the vulgar. But to be convinc'd of its falshood we need but reflect on the foregoing conclusion, that the idea of duration is always deriv'd from a succession of changeable objects, and can never be convey'd to the mind by any thing stedfast and unchangeable. For it inevitably follows from thence, that since the idea of duration cannot be deriv'd from such an object, it can never in any propriety or exactness be apply'd to it, nor can any thing unchangeable be ever said to have duration. Ideas always represent the objects or impressions, from which they are deriv'd, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply'd to any other. By what fiction we apply the idea of time, even to what is unchangeable, and suppose, as is common, that duration is a measure of rest as well as of motion, we shall consider[9] afterwards."
ADDENDUM : The bolds are by the OP
Yeah, ol Daves Treatise is pretty good reading; lot simpler than the German-language counterarguments that came later.
I dont see a connection between time and the idea of objects, though, when it comes right down to it. Depends on what you mean, I guess. Time and objects as such, real things .thats different, and we do see a connection therein, via the categories.
Kant's original texts in English seem to have some parts with ambiguous translations dating back 100 years, which can cause ambiguities and difficulties in understanding. But still, they are good classic philosophical texts. I prefer Hume's work, which has no translatory layers.
Well, what Hume seems to be saying is that, some folks, be it philosophers or the vulgars imagine time exists as we see even now. But time is not perceptible. Only objects we see are the objects themselves and durations of the movements. Hence time cannot be objects existing in the world. Simple.
I agree with that idea.
We use time, tell time and measure time thanks to the invention, the solar movements of the earth and the mechanical device called watches and clocks which ticks with regularity and accuracy. But time itself doesn't exist in the universe. If tomorrow the earth stops rotating around the sun, the use of current time system will cease to exist, and the civilization will plunge into chaos.
Hume's expression of the vulgars in his original texts means the ordinary folks who never read any philosophy.
HA!! Yeah, Schopenhauer uses the word, too. Not as pejorative as we tend for it these days. Kant was a little more kind, just calling out as common rather than vulgar.
Still, we see changes in meaning for words in our own language, in addition to translation difficulties in others.
Hume has a mistaken premise, that sense perception consists of a "succession" of distinct perceptions. This is not consistent with experience, which demonstrates that we actually perceive continuous motion and change with our senses. This renders the quoted argument from Hume as unsound.
Consider, that there is a fundamental inconsistency between the observed continuity of movement and our conceptual representation of it, as demonstrated by Zeno. Hume describes our conceptual representation of motion as a "succession of changeable objects". He negates the Zeno inconsistency by describing sense perception as distinct perceptions. Then the continuity of movement is left out of the representation, as completely unreal. However, this is done by denying the reality that sense perception actually consists of continuous change rather than as a succession of objects. Accordingly, it also rids us of the fundamental Platonic principle of skepticism, that the senses deceive us. But it does this through his false premise, describing sensation as a succession of distinct perceptions. This false premise also produces the conclusion that time is not real, in a way related to how Zeno proved that motion is not real.
Interesting point. But think of the old movies shot by 8mm camera with the roll films. The movement in the film is made of each single still image. When the single images are run through the projector with the light, it gives us continuous moving motion. The continuous movement and motion is recreated in our brain by the latent memory. In actuality, they are just single still images running continuously in fast speed in order to recreate the recorded motions.
Hume is seeing our visual perception in the same way. His idea of perception is that we have the single impressions and the matching ideas of perceived objects coming into our senses continuously creating the perception just like the old movies made of 8mm films.
At any chance, we can stop the perception, and pick the single impression and ideas to investigate its contents. In that sense, no ideas and impressions are identical, as they are separate entities to each other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In Hume, what is not captured in impressions and ideas are not real. Time has no matching impressions or ideas. The moment you see the time now, it passes into past. It is ineffable, ever evanescent and fleeting illusive part of human mind.
Continuity is another idea which is generated from each single separate impressions and ideas of the movement. It is an idea, which cannot be divided or separated, which is distinct from the actual continuity itself.
Things cannot be mere perceptions since there are mental phenomena, thoughts for example, which are consistent. This consistency is because any thought resides on other thoughts, etc. This consistency however requires something that thoughts reside within, what we call the brain, therefore saying that things are mere perception is false!
But if you don't trust your own perception, then where does your knowledge come from? Is your knowledge based on your imagination and blind faith?
The point though, is that sense perception is as a continuous movement. So, when Hume represents it as a succession of still frames, he already applies the conceptualized version of motion, across this gap of inconsistency, to represent sense perception in a way which is not true. In doing this, the reality of time is lost to him.
If we take your film example, the sense perception is "continuous moving motion". We have good reason to believe that the reality of the situation is a succession of still frames, because the still frames are produced, and run through the machine. We can stop the machine and look at them. Therefore we have all the evidential backing required to support this conceptualization of a succession of frames as true.
In the case of Hume's succession of perceptions, we have not got the required evidence to support this conceptualization. It is conjecture, speculation. Then, he turns this speculative representation back onto sense experience, to describe sensation this way, with only arbitrary separation between distinct still frames.
Now, the true or real passing of time (when actual change occurs) happens between the distinct still frames, with the film moving from one to another. This is what happens when one frame replaces another. But since the distinct frames are arbitrarily assumed by speculative theory in Hume's representation, the reality of this process whereby on frame replaces another, is completely left out. Therefore we lose the reality of time, which would be the true principles whereby the distinct frames (or moments in time) are identified, and the changing of one to another could be represented.
Quoting Corvus
We can do this with the "movie". We can take the film out of the projector and show the distinct frames. However, we cannot do this with sense perception. We cannot remove a distinct frame. We produce an arbitrary frame, by applying the conceptual precepts of description onto the active sense perception. So any distinct impression analyzed is an arbitrarily created object, produced for the purpose of analysis. It it is not a true stopping of the perception, nor is it analogous with stopping the projector and looking at the distinct frames, because of that arbitrariness. And it is that arbitrariness which causes us to lose the reality of time. That time is not real, is a conclusion produced by the incorrect thinking, that arbitrarily created still frames are real.
Also, this is a feature of relativity theory. If we take arbitrarily created reference frames, and arbitrary rest frames as "real", we similarly deny the reality of time. So taking relativity theory as "true", rather than simply a useful way of representing motion, is a denial that time is real.
I think that Hume did not understand the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind mostly perceives things but it is the main source for the generation of thoughts. These thoughts then are stored in the subconscious mind for further analysis in the future. It is through the constant exchange of thought between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind that we can develop consistent thoughts, whether a thought is true or not is the subject of investigation of the conscious mind.
Quoting Corvus
It is based on the collaboration between my conscious and subconscious mind. And it is not blind faith!
Conscious or subconscious mind is actually psychological concepts. They are irrelevant to knowledge or reasoning. So Hume was right not to say a lot about them.
Quoting MoK
Conscious or subconscious mind means the degree of being awake from sleep. They don't provide you with any knowledge at all.
But are the continuous movements possible without perception? All movements, motions and objects are only meaningful and possible, when perceived via senses.
Yes, they are concepts but these concepts are based on extensive study of the brain. Why do you stick to the idea of perception when I already refute it? Why don't you study a little psychology? It is necessary when it comes to time!
Quoting Corvus
They are very relevant to knowledge and reasoning. People with Alzheimer cannot function well, cannot think, and cannot recall memories because a part of their brain is damaged.
Quoting Corvus
He couldn't possibly say a lot about them since there was no knowledge of them in his time. He was false! Therefore, you are false.
Quoting Corvus
Why don't you study a little bit of psychology so you can back up your thoughts? You deny physics, psychology, and science! All things you know are outdated knowledge which is false.
It wasn't denying. It was just a clarification saying , that they are irrelevant to philosophical debates.
Philosopher: Ill tell you how I think;
Psychologist: Ill tell you how you think.
(Sigh)
Because you are mixing psychology and physics in philosophical debates in random and chaotic fashion, it seems to be creating confusion and illusion in your mind. Hume was not false. Hume was intelligible and sensible.
If your knowledge is based on your conscious and subconscious mind just woke up from sleep, no doubt that you are in full of confusion and illusions. You must rely on your perception and reasoning for your knowledge.
Philosophy goes deeper into the roots of the idea trying to capture the arche of the concept. Psychology and physics only talk about what are visible and obvious, and what is given by the measurement and experiment.
So do you think that things like electrons, quarks, subconscious minds, conscious minds, etc. are real?
Quoting Corvus
Philosophy and science go hand in hand without science you cannot do good philosophy and vice versa.
You cannot do proper philosophy without a good science and vice versa!
Quoting Corvus
Hume was false. He was an intelligent philosopher though. I am sure he would deny his philosophy if he was alive now.
The subconscious mind does not sleep at all. That is the conscious mind that sleeps.
Quoting Corvus
Where is your perception when you are asleep? Why does your perception start to work when you are awake? How could you do reasoning if reasoning per se is a form of perception?
We know them, and use them. But to say they are real can be problem in logical sense. You need to make clear in what sense "real" is real. Philosophy doesn't deny them. But it is trying to make sure in what sense you are using the concepts, and whether they make sense when used in the arguments.
You seem to be emotionally defending them as if they were denied. No. Nothing is denied.
Quoting MoK
No. They are not in the same level. Philosophy inspects and analyze the misuses of the concepts and imaginary ideas of science, hence philosophy makes science more robust in logic and theory.
They are not friends or lovers. Philosophy is higher level authority in the ladder if you will.
Science needs philosophy. Philosophy doesn't need science. No philosophers will go out in the white gown, and conduct experiments and tests and measurements. They just read, think and speculate for analysis and reasoning pursuing truths on the universe.
Quoting MoK
Hume is one of the most important philosophers in western philosophy. To say Hume is false is like saying, philosophy is false and all knowledge is false. Nonsense.
The conscious mind means that you woke from sleep. Subconscious mind means that you have a part of mind which sleep all the time, but you think it doesn't.
Quoting MoK
Perception only happens when you are fully awake and alert. All your knowledge on the universe comes via perception. Perception is also backed by reasoning and logic. Without perception, you don't have knowledge.
They exist so in this sense they are real.
Quoting Corvus
I didn't say they are on the same level!
Sure you are wrong. That is the reason that most of the outdated philosophers are wrong.
Quoting Corvus
Philosophers need to read about science if they want to do good philosophy!
Quoting Corvus
It is not nonsense at all. It is nonsense to accept his outdated philosophy now.
Where did you get that from? Why don't you study psychology a little before commenting on the conscious and the subconscious mind?
Quoting Corvus
Where does all your knowledge reside when you are asleep? It cannot disappear into oblivion! How are you informed about a specific knowledge when you are awake? You are not aware of all your knowledge at once. Are you?
Quoting Corvus
I think by perception Hume means the conscious mind. It is a very important part but it is not all things that define a person with the capacity to think rationally.
Where do they exist?
Quoting MoK
You forgot what you said.
Quoting MoK
Electrons for example exist and move around the nucleus. They can be found free as well. Quarks exist within protons and neutrons. The conscious and subconscious minds refer to different parts of the brain.
Philosophy doesn't get outdated. We still go back to the ancient philosophy and the Renaissance times for referencing on what they said. Science outdates. Did you read Popper?
Quoting MoK
Philosophers read everything not just science.
Quoting MoK
Problem with nonsense is that it doesn't know it is nonsense.
They are just theories and postulations from what they saw. They don't exist as entities.
Philosophy does get outdated! Consider the case of Hume.
Quoting Corvus
Good for them. You should do the same.
Quoting Corvus
Exactly!
So you are denying all the body of knowledge that was created by scientists! That is not a good habit since you are denying all the things that you are using daily as well!
It is a common sense knowledge. You don't need to study psychology to know that.
Quoting MoK
The knowledge is kept in memory when asleep. When you awake from sleep, they can be accessed via reasoning. Conscious mind means that you are just awake. Dogs and cats are conscious, and some plants can be conscious, but they don't have knowledge because they are only conscious but nothing more.
Quoting MoK
No. It sounds like you haven't read Hume. Read above. Thinking rationally requires more than being conscious.
Hume is till being read and studied actively all over the world.
Quoting MoK
I have already done so, so why do it again.
Quoting MoK
Without doubt !!
No, when did I say anything about denying? You keep saying it. :D
It is not habit. To say habit for clarification is a categorical mistake. Have you read any Popper? Yes or No?
It is not common sense knowledge at all and that is why you are wrong. We are only aware of the conscious mind's activities. The term the subconscious mind was first coined by Freud before that we didn't know anything about it.
Quoting Corvus
Do you have access to your memory? The memories are stored in a part of the brain so-called synapses. Do you have direct access to synapses? If not how can you recall a memory?
Quoting Corvus
Yes, thinking also requires the subconscious mind. That is something that Hume was not aware of in his time!
You said it here:
Quoting Corvus
Quoting Corvus
No. Why is it relevant to our discussion?
Freud's theory of sunconscious mind is subject to debates, because it is not something which can be proven objectively. If you think it is some holy grail principle of psychology, then you haven't read much psychology, it appears.
Quoting MoK
Philosophy don't care about where the content of memory gets stored in brain. It just knows that we have memory, and memory is in the chain of many mental operations.
Talking about biological aspects of memory in brain is a strawman fallacy in philosophical debates.
Quoting MoK
Again, please read the top reply here.
I said it to remind you keep saying it, not me.
Quoting MoK
Popper said that all science gets outdated and replaced with the new theories all the time. If science cannot be proven false, then it is not science. It proves your point were all wrong so far.
I would advise you reading K. Popper's book in full, if you are into science.
I am not defending Freud's theory of subconsciousness here. I just said that the term subconsciousness was first coined by him. There has been too much research on the topic of the subconscious mind since then. Anyway, I was pointing out that Hume was not aware of the subconscious mind at his time so he could not possibly have a correct theory of minds. I think that the subconscious mind is very smart. The current research indicates that the subconscious mind is smarter than what we think. You might find this article interesting.
Quoting Corvus
That is a part of the philosophy of the mind. You cannot simply ignore it! Could you?
So are you denying that there are things like electrons, quarks, etc.? Are you denying that you have a brain? You don't have direct access to your brain either.
Quoting Corvus
No, I think there are limits that each theory works well, so I don't think that we can replace the outdated theories since the outdated theories have their own use at the proper limits. For example, the Newtonian theory works well in macroscopic limits but it cannot account for the quantum force which only becomes important at the microscopic level. That is why we need quantum mechanics to describe quantum phenomena. We however don't use quantum mechanics when we want to design a car. We use it only when we want to design a quantum device. So every theory has its own use.
I don't think I need to read his book!
That there is an "ontological connective tissue" to be referred to remains undecided. What we have is an accurate description of what happens. What more could you want?
You brought Freud into the discussion suddenly, hence I was giving out my opinion on Freud.
Quoting MoK
Subconscious mind is unverified esoteric idea, Hume wouldn't have had been interested in it, even if he was alive now.
Quoting MoK
Subconscious mind cannot be verified, or used as basis for reasoning. It is just a postulated character of mind. It is hidden or sleeping most times, hence it cannot give you any knowledge on the world.
It can be used for explaining the reason for irrational aspect of human actions, but it is not taken as objective or verified knowledge.
Quoting MoK
The classic philosophy of mind doesn't include physical brain as its topic. It is more a topic for cognitive science, neurology or clinical psychology.
You are back to keep repeating "denying". I never said anything about denying.
We all have brain, and that is all we know. Going further than that is off-topic here.
Quoting MoK
I was recommending you reading Popper, because you seem to think science knowledge is eternal.
Saying Hume is outdated and wrong is not a sound or intelligent statement. You could argue certain parts or some of Hume's ideas or theories are wrong with your hypothesis, verified premises and conclusions for your points.
But just saying Hume or any classic philosopher is outdated and wrong with no reason or supporting arguments is not a philosophical statement.
If you read it, it will refresh your incorrect ideas on science and philosophy, I am sure. But it is your choice of course.
The issue is whether continuous movement is even possible at all. Since we understand and conceptualize movement as as a succession of instants in time, continuous motion is outside our ability to understand. That's what Zeno demonstrated. This produces the issue of whether our senses deceive us when we perceive motion as continuous.
We perceive motion as continuous because it appears as continuous. If continuity means without stopping, then it is not deceiving our senses at all. There are two points on continuity.
1) Can continuity be divided into instances?
2) Or is continuity one entity, which is not divisible?
When the baseball flies in the air towards the wall, it appears continuous motion of flying without stopping in our vision. However, if we take a photo of the ball while it is flying with high speed shutter settings such as 1/10000 sec. then it can be captured in perfectly frozen image. What seems to be clear is that continuous movement is the result of our perception. Without perception, continuity doesn't arise in the movement, or even the movement itself.
Whatever the case, time is not needed for the motion logically. If time is needed for any movement, then the time needs time for its own movement (flow), and the time needs time for its own movement (flow) ... Ad Infinitum. If this was the case, then nothing can move or flow for waiting for its own time to make it possible to move or flow. But in reality, movements take place without time, and movers move freely as they wish with no idea or need of time.
Time flows without time. Because time can only flow with time doesn't make sense. Hence things flow / move without time.
The people who espouse such skepticism usually make analogies to dot pictures, digital imagery, or macroscopic patterns that arise out of simple ruled simulations.
However, there could be a deficit to such thinking if not one that explicitly contradicts itself. In that such attempts to make it clear what it even means for there to not be causation (naive naturalistic occasionalism), not be objects but only mere structures (ontological structural realism), or processes (process philosophy of a naive sort). All these seem to always presuppose in their talk something behind which gives rise to the exact patterns that are everything we know or ever will know.
The dogmatism that one expresses towards saying we've come across certain ontological tissue means a focus on different lines of thinking which could be more fruitful.
Part of scientific thinking is the selfish and strong headed physicist who declares nature as having been uncovered with all its secrets lay bear. From that great strides can happen that someone who plays only in the most safe of descriptive assertions cannot compete with unless they also join in the game.
I'm starting to lean in the direction, something partially attributed to Nietzsche I believe, that one's philosophical viewpoints are reflective of their personality/psyche. Ergo, when someone is so dissuasive about certainty (or ontological assertions) it almost looks like some other personal fear incarnate. Projection onto others the pain and suffering of a bad past experience with the intellectual priests of your time. That or fear of and avoidance of conflict that could imply a desire to fence set rather than jump down to enter the conversation in a serious manner. Course, this isn't unique to skeptics and can be easily extended to dogmatists.
However, to me, the only interesting stuff comes from those who actually decide to stop fence sitting, get off their ass, and then indulge in the conversation.
I can only take so much 'I don't knows' and neo-positivist 'that's not mere description so its meaningless' or pragmatic 'only descriptions' before I walk away from their dull un-creative viewpoints that will only make connections in the most bogged down manners possible.
Like a nominalist who tries to not speak in abstractions and therefore creates a language no one will use nor find any usefulness from.
These abstractions and fantasies prove their usefulness despite assertions to the contrary that nothing fantastical/abstracted/metaphorical can have any pragmatic use to talk about the 'real' world.
Even to a descriptivist there could be preferences for different abstract representations even if they imply nothing different to the description itself. I.E. they still quibble over metaphysical notions that are devoid of experiential consequences if I want to translate this back into philosophical parlance.
There is a loose bijection here between descriptivist's and ontological realists then.
So... you have a personal preference for a complete answer that is wrong over an incomplete answer that is right?
Why should I care.
If what appears as a continuity is really a succession of distinct locations, then the senses are deceiving us.
Quoting Corvus
Then it appears like you would say that perception is deception.
Quoting Corvus
I don't understand this claim. How would the ball's existence at one location be distinguished from its existence at another location, other than on the basis of this being at two different times? Or would the ball just be everywhere all at once?
Quoting J
The ear is very complex, and it's parts are moving, so there are physical entities which are moving. It's just that description, that the tones are moving, which is inaccurate. In reality if there was a physical entity called the melody, it is an arrangement of parts, which can't really be moving because that would mess up the arrangement.
Yes, and so perhaps the mind spatializes the succession as well as the continuity.
Yes, that's it. Yet the illusion is extremely strong.
Why shouldn't a tone move? Why restrict movement to physical objects alone, or to changes in place. The PIE root is *meu?-, to push away; found in emotion, and momentous, and mob, and mutiny...
And I don't see any reason to suppose that a pitch "moving up and down" is metaphorical - high roads are of more import, not altitude; is that too high handed? Is it high time I got off my high horse?
Continuity is a pretty clear notion. Instantaneous velocity makes sense. That such things confuse some when considered in fine detail does not detract from the fact of their practicality. It's what can be done with such language that counts.
I think that this is the point. The mind spatializes the thing which we sense as a temporal continuity, and it is the spatialization which creates distinct frames in succession. But the spatialization of time does not provide an accurate representation.
Quoting J
Sense perception is the only means we have for understanding the world around us. If the understanding of the world which sense perception produces, is an illusion, then the illusion is bound to be a strong one. As philosophers, we take on the task of getting beyond the illusion. This is illustrated by the famous allegory of the cave. The illusion is so strong that most will not even understand that it's an illusion.
Quoting Banno
If a tone changes, up or down, it becomes a different tone. The same thing happens to colour.
Yep. Or almost. The tone moved up, or down. Which tone moved up? That one. Then it moved down. The tone of that tone changed... The first "tone" is an individual, the second an attribute. The attribute of that individual changed - perhaps in pitch, perhaps in timbre, perhaps in volume.
It's the same tone, with a different tone.
The colour of that wall changed - did you paint it? The colour of that wall is still the colour of that wall, even if it moves from red to green. The more things change the more they stay the same.
:lol:
In a discussion framed in time, you said:
Quoting Banno
Are you drawing a distinction between language on the one hand and practicality, the what can be done on the other?
Quoting Banno
Do these things refer to a practicality within language, or a practicality among things being done?
What counts? The one (ie. velocity, continuity, practically any thing), its other language, or both?
I think Im saying the same thing but would say it like this:
In a field of overlapping fields, I gather or isolate tone A. Then I put it down and subsequently isolate tone B, which is higher in pitch. Ive identified two individuals: low tone A and then high tone B. Next I gather tone A and subsequent tone B together as one Tune. So calling it a single changing tone is possible by gathering differently from the well of overlapping fields, and seizing two tones in one tune. Ive still just gathered one thing, but that one thing is two tones.
Close to what you were saying. Im just not putting the agency in the tone, Im not saying the tone moved up or down. And Im not making it so that I have to explain how, because of the language Ive used , how A becomes B, how A becomes not-A. Im recognizing that identifying tone A is the same as identifying subsequent higher tone B, is the same as identifying the changing Tune C. Its identifying anything at all. To explain the change you need to fashion a seemingly wider, longer single unit, namely, the single tune, fashioned or identified with the many different single tones it is. Its all singles, whether it is identity (tone) or identities with motion (tune).
There is a probably terrible song in there somewhere called singles only or maybe nothing changes.
Did you know that the conscious mind has limited memory so-called working memory? At any given time, it can access only three to five items. If the answer to this question is yes, then where are the rest of the memories held? Moreover, accepting that the rest of memories are held somewhere that I call subconsciousness, how could the conscious mind access these memories without a constant flow of information from the subconscious mind?
Quoting Corvus
See above.
Perception is the mental presentation of reality. Calling perception as deception sounds like a typical vulgar or children's understanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ditto. :D
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Time doesn't exist until measured. Time doesn't exist in space and time. Objects and movements have nothing to do with time. Time emerges when objects and movements are perceived as a secondary quality. How and why should the ball exist everywhere all at once? That's not a philosophical reasoning.
When subconscious mind is sleeping all the time, how can it remember anything? Memory is not stored in anywhere. The content of memory is not cheese or bread or water. We just remember past events and objects, or we don't, if forgot. Memories are the types of ideas we recall from past. They don't get stored. Storage only makes sense for physical objects.
Quoting MoK
See above.
The subconscious mind is always active and does not sleep! Dreams are created by the subconscious mind.
Quoting Corvus
Now you are denying that memories are not stored in the brain! Did you know that people with Alzheimer cannot recall their memories because a part of their brain that holds memories is damaged?
Can you prove that?
Quoting MoK
This is off-topic. This thread is not about Alzheimer folks. You can discuss this in the lounge mate.
Because they we are perceiving the phenomenon in impressions and ideas, we can analyze them with reasoning. We can stop them, rewind them and even predict them too. You seem be talking about the reality which is not accessible via perception totally disregarding the way our perception works.
It is not perception is deception, but all we have is perception on the reality in Hume and Kant. The reality itself is not available to us.
The dreams are produced by the subconscious mind. Moreover, the subconscious mind remains active even when we are asleep, constantly processing information and regulating bodily functions like breathing and heart rate, while our conscious mind rests.
Quoting Corvus
It is very related to the topic!
A wrong premise. We see some images in dreams. Dreams are not produced by subconscious mind.
Quoting MoK
It is a medical topic.
I am done with you.
Well, confused mind cannot last too long in its vacuous journey of blabs.
You constantly deny things, such as elementary particles, subconscious minds, etc. You are basically denying science in general. When things are discussed with you to the depth, you then say that you are not denying anything at all! And I am going to ignore your insult! I am done with you!
If you have nothing to say, you just say "denying", which is not true. Nothing was insult to you, but just counter arguments against the nonsense.
Looks like equivocation to me.
Quoting Banno
Again , equivocation. Consider the difference in the meaning of "colour" in the follow two phrases. "The colour of the wall is green", and "the colour of the wall".
One of the interesting things you can do with language, equivocate.
Quoting MoK
Trying anything more than that would probably cause a migraine.
Why don't you criticize your knowledge constantly? Why don't you appreciate when you learn something new by saying ok I learned something new, instead of denying that you didn't deny anything?
Yes, probably. I know that migraine can disrupt the conscious mind's ability such as thinking though.
Pointing out your misunderstanding is not denying, but giving you the real truths and guidance to your learning journey.
I am not going to continue such an exchange since it is not a debate!
The point though, is that Hume represents sense perception as a succession of distinct perceptions. But in reality sense perception consists of continuous activity, because it has temporal duration. And what is actually sensed is the activities which occur in time. The distinct "impressions and ideas" are only created when we impose breaks into the continuity of perception.
So for example, the wall is described as "green" at t1, and as "red" at t2, and these are distinct impressions or ideas. However, sense perception has provided a continuous activity, during which the wall was painted. Whenever we break down sense perception into distinct impressions or distinct states (the colour of the wall was green, then the colour of the wall was red), we completely avoid describing the temporal aspect of change (the colour of the wall was changing). So we intentionally remove the temporal aspect from the phenomenon, to work with a less accurate representation, because it is easier to work with.
Quoting Corvus
So if we do this, analyze the phenomena as distinct impressions or ideas, we have already imposed those breaks onto the continuity of the phenomenon of sense perception, to divide that continuity into a multitude of distinct impressions. Therefore this analysis is not giving us a true representation of sense perception, as continuous phenomenon, because it is analyzing distinct impressions which have been artificially created by breaking the continuity down.
Reality events happen once uniquely in space and time. The phenomena of the movement is captured by perception at the moment when it happens. The movement of the object is captured as it appears in the space i.e. in continuity. Continuity is also an idea which has the matching impression in reality.
But once it has happened, you cannot get back to the same movement again. It passed. The new movement could be recreated for observation. But it wouldn't be the same movement as the original movement.
Taking out a slice of the movement out of the continuity is only possible in the course of reflection of the ideas. Human mind can achieve this, because it has memory and reasoning which can recall the perceived ideas and analyze them with the rational investigation.
I don't believe that Hume meant we perceive the movement slice by slice as the broken images. Well it can happen in the old film movies which creates the illusion of the movement via running the stills images continuously on the project screen using the latent memory of mind.
Hume was explaining how human mind works especially on perception. He was not talking about the reality itself.
The point though, is that there is no such thing as "the moment when it happened". Movement requires time, duration, temporal extension, whereas "the moment" implies a point in time with no extension. This means that there is no such thing as the moment when a movement happened.
That's why @Banno's conception of "instantaneous velocity" is self-contradicting nonsense.
Quoting Corvus
The problem is that there is more than one way to take "a slice of the movement".
In one way, we can assume two distinct states, at t1 and at t2, each with a corresponding description (the room is green, and the room is red, or object is at point A and object is at point B). From this we can infer that a change from A to B occurred during that time period. We can make all kinds of assumptions about what happened between A and B (the room was painted, the particle took every possible path), what caused this change, etc.. But these would just be assumptions without the empirical evidence required to support them.
In another way, we can describe the activity which occurred between t1 and t2 (the room was being painted, the object was moving, the wave function). In this way we are actually describing the continuity between t1 and t2, what happened in that duration of time.
The important point is that the two are very different types of descriptions. And, if we take the first way, the description of two distinct states at t1 and t2, and assume that this way provides a description of the activity which occurs in the duration of time between t1 and t2, we are accepting a false assumption. It does not provide that description.
Quoting Corvus
Yes he did clearly mean that. He described a "succession of impressions", rather than the continuity of change which we actually sense.
Quoting Corvus
He falsely described perception as a succession of impressions, rather than as a continuity of activity.
It was just an explanation on how perception works. You can read about, and use many different methods on describing how human mind and perception works from different point of view and angles. I feel that Hume and Kant's explanations are very intelligible one.
We can say, "The melody moves higher, then lower." This is true, if we allow "melody" as an item to be talked about (as we should) and if we allow the metaphor of "higher and lower frequencies" to be analogous to physical highs and lows. But a melody is not a physical object. While comprised of physical stuff, it is our way of perceiving successions of tones. No physical thing moves when a melody occurs. And the only reason this is interesting is that, as we listen, we could swear that we hear something moving. I don't know whether this is a baked-in mental construction, or whether we're taught to think this way from such a young age that it seems unavoidable. All I know is that, acoustically, pitches can't move. There is no "there" there to move.
Quoting Banno
Seriously, it's a good example. We watch the finger with the slide move up the guitar string. This is certainly "movement" if anything is. What do we hear? A series of tones that change pitch, at intervals that are in fact specifiable acoustically, but indistinguishable to the human ear. So we want to say that "the tone moves up." But it doesn't. Each tone changes in the direction of higher and higher frequencies. But there is no substratum that starts at A, then moves to Bb, then to B natural . . . etc.
Oh, and as for the "higher/lower" metaphor with frequencies: Frequencies are measured in hertz, and numbers are assigned based on cycles of vibrations per second. The more cycles, the larger the number. So this is the metaphor of, say, 1,000 being a "higher number" than 500. It's an absolutely standard and acceptable use of "higher" as long as we don't confuse it with physical height. Having more of something (hertz, in this case) doesn't render it physically higher.
That is sort of the reason I'm trying to be better about being too dissuasive about esoteric philosophies because they may be implying something that, when properly translated into my language, is not all that peculiar or useless.
Whether you want to treat this language difficulty in analogy to trying to figure out what a child wants who has limited language capabilities or in similarity to trying but failing to put simply an extremely complicated collection of concepts is up to you.
However, it gets even stranger if you flip this in the opposite direction to see what comes out even if rather unnatural. It will, because of its unfamiliarity, come out as purely poetic to speak of motion or change as some sort of music. One that in a non-spatial sense varies.
It's peculiar that some metaphors are fine in one direction but when flipped to perform a similar but opposite duty that they come off as so out of place.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not Banno. Physics and mathematics.
Meta is unable to understand basic calculus. He and Corvus should have fun together.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, Meta, I was pointing out that was an equivocation.
Then it just becomes a language holism problem. If you make static nouns of a certain sort extremely central then it wouldn't be mysterious if it becomes strange why all our verbs now seem 'unreal' or difficult to explain in our base terms.
In that context, is the cinematographic view of time as 'frames of a universal movie' really the only respectable manner in which a physicist can talk about it? Is there literally no other language/metaphor one can use or create to go past the ones which clearly hold the throne now?
Here's a bit of tab for a slide...
It marks the beginning and end of the slide, the D, and the end, the E; however the slide does not consist in these two notes, but the movement between them. The tone of slide blues is very different to that of, say, a straight folk pick, and a portamento is distinct from a glissando. Notice that the move can be counted as a unit, and that it is distinct to the individual notes. We do not hear a series of distinct notes - unless the artist is incompetent.
Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong.
Denying continuity here is mistaken.
I'm not sure that you disagree. But I am pretty confident Meta disagrees. Corvus on past experience probably agrees and disagrees and thinks that's fine.
I agree. Im also saying identifying one single tone is a collection recognized as such as well.
"May be...'. We make maximum sense of the words of others when optimise agreement. It remains that sometimes what folk believe is different to how things are. Sometimes we are wrong.
I don't see that physics does adopt "the cinematographic view of time as 'frames of a universal movie'". Certainly classical and relativistic physics assumes continuity. Some recent theories may use discrete mathematics - Lattice Quantum Field Theory, Cellular Automata, or Loop Quantum Gravity, for example. Not central and not accepted.
And it may be worth considering what is going on here. The physical world does not care whether we choose continuous or discrete mathematics to best describe it. It is what it is, regardless of whether we describe it one way of the other. The choice between discrete and continuous mathematics is not a choice between how things are, but about what we say about how things are.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is, melody is a cultural, not a physical, item.
Actually, we do not hear a series of tones, we here a slide, which is a sound of changing pitch, consisting of no distinct tones. That's the point of my discussion of Hume's misrepresentation of sense perception. Hume describes sensation as a succession of impressions, which is consistent with "a series of tones". But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide. It is only when we apply the conception of distinct tones, to the sound which is heard, that we conclude there is a series of tones.
That it is not a series of tones which is heard, is demonstrable through the Zeno process. If a person was hearing a series of tones in a slide, we'd be able to say which distinct tones the person hears. Since we can't we have to conclude an infinite number of tones, as the slide is infinitely divisible.
Quoting Banno
Yes, it's Banno's conception. You present it, and claim that it's justified by physics and mathematics.
Quoting Banno
We are discussing what is heard, and that is the perception. The point is that there is no "phyiscal entity" which corresponds with what is heard, because what is heard is a changing sound which is not a physical thing.
Quoting Banno
By what principles do you count a move as a unit?
Quoting Banno
A philosopher who is seeking truth does care. That is the difference between you and I. You don't care what we say about how things are, so long as what is said serves the purpose at hand. And language has evolved to facilitate common purposes. I want to be able to speak the truth about how things are, and that requires a much more thoughtful and deliberate use of language.
Quoting Banno
This is where it gets philosophically interesting. A slide from D to E is composed of nothing but physical stuff. But then lots of items that aren't physical as such are also composed of physical stuff. The familiar example of the football game . . . no ghostly material in use, yet it seems completely wrong to say that the game is a physical item, or least it does to me. I would argue roughly the same thing for musical "movement." No surprise, this gets us into terminology, because it comes down to whether "entity" is the right thing to call a slide. If you're not happy with "perception," how about calling it an "event"? The main thing I care about, in such talk, is that we don't picture a tone moving from T1 to T2 in the same way that a rabbit moves from P(lace)1 to P2. If asked, in the latter case, "What's moving?" we can point to the rabbit. The same question, in the former case, can't be answered at all. There's no entity or object that has the attribute "moves from D to E".
This fits nicely with what I was saying to @Banno. Terminology again . . . we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can. But if you'd rather reserve the term "hear" to mean "can distinguish acoustically," that's fine. Then we would say that I don't hear a series of tones when I hear a slide, I "process them auditorially" or some such, and when I do that, being human, I don't hear the discrete pitches. If a hundred people all speak at once, do I "hear what they're saying"? Depends how you want to divvy up the terminology. It doesn't really matter.
"But that's not what we actually sense, which is a continuity of change, a slide."
OK -- again, as long as we don't take the illusion of movement as real.
I don't see what to make of this. In your own words, Quoting J
and
Quoting J
Measurements might well be discrete. The sound is not.
Quoting J
Volume or pitch move.
Quoting J
Well, if you do not recognise them, in what sense are they discrete? As you said above, a better program with more memory could add more data points...
That you could think this is somewhat astonishing. Did you not study calculus?
So sound is not a physical thing. I give up.
Actually, no! :grin: But I recognize why calculus would be relevant here. Thinking about it, I realize I may have been wrong in saying that pitches are theoretically divisible ad infinitum. There must come an interval too short for a sound wave to vibrate. So, unlike numbers in that regard.
Here's why I don't think "movement" is the right way to describe what a slide does:
1) Achilles moves from point D to point E.
2) A slide moves from D to E.
These look the same but are not. In 1), Achilles goes on a journey from D to E. We could call that "the journey of Achilles". In 2), "slide" is the name of the journey; it's the equivalent of "the journey of Achilles." Unlike with 1), we're not describing a situation in which some entity (call it Slide) stands ready to set off from D, does so, and then arrives at E. There is no guy called Slide doing this. "Slide" is what happens, just as "the journey of Achilles" is what happens. But in 1), there is a guy called Achilles that we can additionally talk about. I maintain there is no such comparable figure in 2). If you try to substitute "pitch" as the protagonist, the thing that moves, you run into the basic acoustical fact that if a pitch moved, it would no longer be the same pitch. We can again see the dissimilarity with Achilles -- he doesn't change every time he moves on his journey (at least with common ontological commitments). We hold him constant; but there is nothing to hold constant in 2).
Sound produces the illusion of movement -- it fools us into believing that something is going from D to E, where in fact there is only the going, which proceeds pitch by pitch.
The pitch moved from D to E.
Speaking of sliding, the delta blues beat comes from laboring songs, songs that are meant to coordinate action so everyone does the same thing at the same time. It creates anticipation. I wonder if laboring songs may have been part of the emergence of a sense of time. As ancient monument builders dragged giant stones, was the concept of a precise moment in the future coming into consciousness? When we all pull on the rope together?
Sounds like an irrelevant word dug up from ChatGpt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Revisiting Hume, it seems the case that he is not saying that we perceive movements via the sliced impressions. As I said previously, we can perform the operation of inspecting a single impression or ideas in our reflecting operations by mind after the perception.
What Hume seems to be saying is that impressions of movement are perceived as continuous movement via the principle of association of the ideas and impressions based on the contiguity of space and time.
Is continuity a single movement of smooth, undisturbed and conjoined movement from start to the end of the movement? Or is it an illusory appearance of the many instances of the sliced images? What is your own idea on this?
Quoting Corvus
:roll:
That would be awesome
As I said, there is only a series of tones in conception, and when that conception is applied. That's what the software program does, applies the conception. We do not hear a series of tones, evidenced by what you say, we "can't recognize them".
Quoting Banno
OED: Sound 1) "a sensation caused in the ear by the vibration...". Sensations are not physical things. Therefore sounds are not physical things, just like colours are not physical things. Get with the program!
Quoting Corvus
The point though is that the creation of "a single impression", is a product of that act of reflecting. It is not the direct product of sensation, so it is not an accurate description of perception, it is a description of how perception appears when revisited in the memory. This makes the "single impression" a mental abstraction rather than a sense perception.
Quoting Corvus
There is no real start and end. The start and end are arbitrarily assigned by the sensing being, for whatever purpose.
Here's someone at Oxford who's as crazy as I am, Frank Arntzenius: https://philpapers.org/rec/ARNATR
[quote=Are there really Instantaneous Velocities?] I argue that, despite the fact that there have been interesting and relevant developments in mathematics and physics since the time of Zeno, each of these views still has serious drawbacks.[/quote]
Which supports my view, that time is meaningless without there being an awareness of duration. In that sense the expression the world before time began is not entirely metaphorical.
Ill head off the predictable objection that we know of a vast period of time before we existed. Yes, we are aware of that. That period is measured in durations of years, which are based on the period of time it takes for the Earth to complete an orbit of the Sun.
But in Hume, reflection and inspection on perceived ideas are also perceptions. Every mental event is perception.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Think of a security camera monitoring a set space in your garden. When it detects a movement via infrared lighting, the sensor in the camera triggers recording. When the motion ends, or goes out of sight, the detection operation switches off, ending the recording of the image of the object which triggered the recording.
Motion and movement have start and end points, hence they trigger the sensing mechanisms of the cameras or monitoring devices. Start and end point of movement also allows you to be able to measure the time it took for the movement completion for further analysis on the energy it generated and velocity of the movement etc.
Many important philosophers in history and the contemporary physics folks view time as emergent properties from human mind.
We can guess about anything before we existed. But it neither can be proved nor disapproved.
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
This is indicative of the problem I am talking about. Hume does not acknowledge the difference between sensing (simple observation as time passes), and the analysis of what has already been sensed. By saying that for Hume "every mental state is a perception", you confirm that Hume does not recognize the difference.
What I am arguing is that sensation consists of a continuous flow of change and motion, whereas the analysis consists of representing this continuity as distinct states, perceptions, impressions, or ideas. There is a fundamental difference between these two, the continuous flow of sensation, and the succession of discrete impressions. This difference implies that this type of analysis is fundamentally flawed. It's based in the false premise, or assumption, that a continuous activity can be truthfully represented as a succession of discrete states.
The problem is demonstrated by the example of a movie being a succession of still frames. It may be the case that what appears through sensation to be continuous activity, is really a succession of still frames. But to justify the claim that the apparent continuity really is a succession of frames, requires that we determine the stops and starts, the distinct frames themselves, exposing the mechanism by which the distinct frames are changed and displayed to us one at a time. When in analysis, we simply apply arbitrary stops and starts, we do not base that division into distinct frames on anything real, the frames are arbitrarily assumed and projected onto the apparent continuity. Therefore the whole assumption of a "succession of discrete impressions" is completely ungrounded, because the frames are mental constructs arbitrarily created, and this renders the premise that what appears through sensation as continuous activity is really a succession of discrete moments, as completely unsound.
Quoting Corvus
The sensitivity of the trigger is set at an arbitrary value, and the range of possible values has physical limitations. Also the detector has a limited spatial range. The start and end of the motion are determined relative to these arbitrary features.
But see above. The pitch changed. There is nothing called "pitch" that can move yet be self-identical. Unless we're OK with saying, e.g., "The logic of the argument deteriorated as he went along" and maintaining that "the logic" is an item that holds steady, and be said to deteriorate (compared to what standard?). Sure, there's something like "logic" in the world, but it isn't much like Achilles in terms of what we can say about it.
Are we gnashing over usage here? To some extent. I talk about pitches and melodies "moving" all the time; it's standard English. I just wanted us to reflect on how differently this idea of movement must be understood in such a context. And I firmly hold out for the position that, literally, acoustically, a pitch cannot move. In what (conceptual?) space is it moving? Why can't my software detect the movement?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm fine, then, with adopting the other usage I suggested:
Quoting J
But I think you're questioning whether even the most sophisticated software can "hear the pitches." That is, you're wondering if "discrete pitches" is something a perceiver brings to the auditory stream, rather than locating or identifying them there. A fair question, but then there would be nothing special about this question as applied to music. It would be the huge, overhanging question of the extent to which our subjectivity creates the reality it seems to encounter.
Nice. As you may know, this question of how we retain previous moments as we listen, and project future moments, is integral to a composer's skill. Can I reasonably expect a listener to remember that a song chorus has been played twice before, and recognize (at least part of) it the third time? Can I expect her, hearing it for the first time in the song, to project the likelihood of its repetition? The answers to these kinds of questions in turn depend on how a composer imagines their audience -- what cultural familiarities and listening skills are presupposed.
I wish you all the best in your attempts to help Banno to resist the bad habit of equivocation, but I'm afraid it will be fruitless.
Quoting J
The issue, is that the software will definitely hear "the pitches", but only because it is designed to pick those designated pitches out. So the hearing of distinct pitches is a feature of the software, and that's not necessarily a feature of our sense apparatus. The device would be set to distinguish specific frequencies as they occur, and it would record "hearing that pitch". The problem is that the machine would not be distinguishing that as a distinct and separate note, it would just be registering the time when the transmitted frequency passes the designated range. So it's an artificial and arbitrary creation of "a pitch".
Quoting J
That's right, I see nothing special about this question as applied to music. The same issue, in a more general sense, is what I am discussing with Corvus. That is the question of whether we sense distinct and discrete perceptions, impressions, or ideas, (as described by Hume), or whether we sense a continuity of changing information.
Interesting. I'm tempted to respond, "Well, if 'a frequency passing into a designated range' is not a standard understanding of what pitch is . . . then what would you suggest?" This would be too glib, but I am curious what you have in mind that would not be "artificial and arbitrary." Or does any use of "pitch" have to be that way?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. Music makes a good laboratory to examine some of our intuitions here, because (most?) acousticians accept the idea that the "movement of sound" is an illusion. We could just as well use film, I suppose, and talk about how individual frames do not move, but taken together create the illusion of a "moving picture."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Speaking of bad habits, I don't know why so many on this forum seem compelled toward personal disparagement. It is perfectly possible, and surely preferable, to respond post by post without deleterious characterization of others' alleged strengths and weaknesses.
For that reason, philosophers who advocate for strange dissections of the light-cone seem to try their best to break out of that mold.
Quoting Banno Exactly! So if philosophy/mathematics can't tell a DAMN THING about how the real world actually is then WE NEED TO MOVE ON to where we can actually have a fruitful debate or discussion.
If you want to talk about what things there really are or are not then you relegate it to ontology. . . but without direct access to the world around us past the spectre of skepticism then we might feel that epistemology is more worth it. . . but there are great philosophical limits to that which have been beaten into us for centuries.
So what happens when we are unsure about the ontology or how to even approach figuring it out and may even be skeptical its even possible to do so? Well, you abandon that line of inquiry of course! It's leading you no where if it doesn't allow you to make any intellectual progress aside from sitting in the corner being as skeptically neutral as possible.
So we move on to what happens after that. . . after underdetermination plagues our theories and their interpretations. . . we move on to non-empirical virtues (unification, simplicity, counterfactual reductions, etc), to aesthetics, to the politics of it, the sociology, the history, or more importantly to its PEDAGOGY as to how its taught.
There are much more fruitful discussions to partake in than the question of what the world REALLY is or how we gain access to it if philosophy is going tell us after much introspection that its altogether a pointless endeavor. Fuck them then! Let's just go on to a different topic that can actually be pushed forward to something new.
This analogy is not about music or composition. It's about the fact that music comprises individual sounds which, by themselves, are not music. It is the awareness of the sequence of sounds. This analogy is then applied to the awareness of duration. What ties together the succession of moments into duration?
I know. I just thought the point about composition was interesting, sorry.
Isn't sensing via impressions, and the matching ideas for thoughts, reasoning and reflective analysis in Hume? So, there is a clear division between the live sensation and knowing, thinking, reflecting, remembering in Hume. The former are via impressions, and the latter by the matching ideas.
Impressions and ideas work under the principle of association of contiguity, resemblance and cause and effect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Doesn't it depend on how fast the movement was? When you are observing a fast movement of an object, let's say, firing a gun at a long distance target. You will not see the bullet flying due to the high speed it travels towards the target. All you will perceive would be loud banging, and see the smoke, and instant bullet holes on the target. You haven't seen anything, but the movement still happened from the bullet movement starting point i.e. the barrel, to the end of the movement, the target. With the high speed of the object movement, the continuity was not visible but it was still there.
Now think of a movement of a Chinese man doing Tai Chi. His arms and legs move as he performs the Tai Chi practice. The movement is well visible, and even stoppable while the movement is being made. The speed of the movement of the arms and legs are so slow, the impression coming into the perceiver appears smooth and continuous. The impression of the movement is not deceiving anyone, but it just appears as continuous, and that is just the way perception works.
Great video. Thank you for the info. Much appreciated. :pray: :cool:
I was really inspired to see someone who has a similar ideas to mine on the topic.
The sound changed in pitch. What changed? The sound. What was self-identical (a phrase that only a philosopher would use)? The sound, the tone, the note - it moved from low to high.
Quoting J
The pitch of the note moved.
Quoting J
Yep. Let that be your guide, rather than an esoteric rant. At some point, one can only laugh and walk away.
Philosophy is a pointless endeavour.
What else am I supposed do?
@Wayfarer Hey! I found this book going on about organicism and new metaphors in biology. Thought it would be interesting for you.
Here is a quote of interest that piqued mine. . .
Only if you choose to view it as such.
But if you have a choice, better not to spend your time here.
I'm off to plant some flowers.
Does look interesting, albeit (groan) yet another book. I don't know if you've had much interaction with the sometime contributor here, Apokrisis, but he has a lot of interesting things to say about biosemiotics, a field I didn't even know existed until he came along. That has lead me research into that field, and also into the phenomenology of biology, subject of books by Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson. Also Terrence Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature'. I think there'd be some crossover to that book you're mentioning. I notice:
Surely rings true for me. Positivism, especially the Vienna Circle type, is that attempt to restrict the scope of philosophy within the bounds of science, which of course came to grief with the realisation that the setting of those bounds was itself a matter for philosophy.
I think he has a PhD in biophysics. This thread seems to be in a rut of sorts. He might add something original to the discussion. My own ideas, shallow as they are, is that time certainly exists and is a continuum of instances, like the points on the real line. How to isolate an instant? Take a photo.
I noticed in your reply to Banno, that you accept the idea that the wave would have to hold that frequency for a period of time to be recognizable as the designated pitch. So, wouldn't it be necessary that the source maintain a spcified frequency of vibration for a duration of time, in order for us to have a "pitch"?
Now take the example of the slide. Suppose that throughout the duration of the slide, there is an even, and continuous changing of frequency. From this premise we wouldn't have any pitches at all, because each moment would provide a new frequency, and there would be no duration of any specific frequency, therefore no "pitches" as defined.
However, notice that I spoke of a "designated range". Having a range of frequency which provide the criteria for any specific "pitch", adds another parameter. This allows that the machine could detect some pitches, because the frequency of vibration could be within the designated "range" for the designated period of time. Then, the breadth of the range, and the speed of the slide, become important factors.
So we have three very important factors, the specified range, the required length of time within the range, and the speed of the slide. Two of these are very clearly completely arbitrary, the range, and the required duration within the range. These would be programed into the machine through some arbitrary choice. The third factor, the speed of the slide, appears to be somewhat objective, because it is the object being analyzed, but it's really not. The described slide is simply artificially created from the purpose of the thought experiment, and not representative of anything real. We assumed something unrealistic in the first place, a perfectly even, continuous slide.
Quoting Corvus
The point being that ideas and perceptions are not properly separated or distinguished.
Quoting Corvus
No I don't think so. The fact that some motions are too fast to sense doesn't affect the fact that we sense motions.
Quoting jgill
As I've explained above, that is an arbitrarily created "instant". So it provides nothing toward proving that real time consists of a succession of instants.
Hume distinguishes ideas from impressions, and the rest of perceptions too.
Ideas are faint copies of the matching impressions. Only ideas work under the principle of the association i.e. contiguity, resemblance and cause and effect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your saying "we sense motions" sounds like contingent acts of guessing. Not accurate perception. Your visual sensation can never capture the motion of a flying bullet. You would be just guessing it. That is not perception. What does it tell you? Continuity is an illusion created by your mind, and it is a concept. It doesn't exist in reality.
That looks like an arbitrary distinction. Faint/clear?
Quoting Corvus
Perception is not accurate, that's the point. We create accuracy with conception, and that is why we need proper principles to distinguish between perception and conception. This allows us to understand how conception obtains such a higher degree of accuracy. Kant for instance, proposes the a priori intuitions of space and time, as the condition for sense impressions.
Hume makes clear statement on the definition of ideas in his Treatise and Enquiries too. Impressions are sensations which first appear into our minds with liveliness and vivacity. Ideas are the matching copies of the impressions which are faint in vivacity and liveliness. This makes sense. When we remember past events, the images and ideas are not as lively and vivacious as the impressions from live perception.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course perception is not 100% accurate. Nothing is. But it is far more accurate than guessing or imagining.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think that is a guarantee for absolute accuracy on perception. Space and time as a priori condition for perception in Kant is just the foundation his transcendental idealism is based on. What Kant was aiming at was possibility of Metaphysics as Science, not accuracy of perception.
I would be surprised if there were a proof to the contrary. Isn't all of non-analytic philosophy speculation?
I think I see where you're going with this. A sound engineer could say (quite correctly), "Well, we hear a range of frequencies between A430 and A450 as an 'A', so even though this range includes mostly pitches that are technically sharp or flat, for all practical purposes we can specify this range as 'A'; just about no one can hear the difference." Is that what you mean?
Yes, that's what I mean, there would be a range which would qualify for any given pitch. But remember we are talking about a machine using software to detect distinct tones, not a human ear. With human hearing, the issue is much more complicated, as you note, with your reply to Banno.
The whole issue is much more complicated than it seems, because it's extremely difficult to produce a pure tone. It's always contaminated with overtones etc.. This is the subject of the Fourier transform. But the shorter the time period, the less certainty there can be about the frequency, and this problem manifests as the uncertainty principle.
https://tomrocksmaths.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/unravelling-the-secrets-of-musical-tones-with-fourier_s-methods-lai-yuk-chiu.pdf
But your example is not a speculation, it's an arbitrary designation: 'this photo represents an instant'. If you said that a real instant in time might look like a photo, that would be speculation. But we really do not have any idea what a real instant would look like, because we haven't determined any parameters yet. Our models of time represent it as an infinitely divisible continuity.
The second video on their discussion put down the final nail on the coffin of the time realists shallow and misled slogans where their misunderstandings come from.
Youtube is not perfect. It gets bad names for the commercialism and mindless ads sometimes, but there are also excellent academic discussions videos like these ones. One just has to look for the rare diamonds in the muds. Saying all Youtube videos are ads are from the shallow minded folks with no genuine effort to search for the gems in the platform.
Music played faster or slower speed than the original version will sound not right. Nothing is different than the speed of the playing in the music implies that human mind has perceptual ability to detect the correct speed of music just by listening to them?
Time and frequency are directly related, the basis of the Fourier transform. Increasing or decreasing the speed actually changes the pitch, ask Alvin and the Chipmunks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_time_stretching_and_pitch_scaling
So changing the speed of a recording is a completely different thing from changing the speed at which a person plays the particular notes.
https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/dsp-book/dsp_book_Ch10.pdf
Sure. Good point. However, what you are talking about seems to be the reproduction of music theory. My point was more on the perceptual aspects of the music listeners.
A person listening to an artist playing an instrument rapidly (decreased time between particular notes), will hear something completely different from a person listening to a recording which is speeded up.
This is because increasing the speed at which you play an instrument does not change the way that the notes are created so it does not effect the frequency of the individual notes. But increasing the speed at which a recording is played does change the way that the notes are produced from the recording medium, therefore the frequency of the individual notes is altered.
Yes, I agree. But still I was talking about how the different speed of the same music reproduced via the recordings will be noticed by the listener as incorrect and correct just by listening to them. That judgement comes from a priori concept of temporality or musical aesthetics in human minds rather than the music itself.
I wasn't talking about difference in perception of live music performance and reproduction of the music from the records. I was only talking about the perceptual differences and the judgement of the listener on the same music reproduced in different speeds. Please listen to the recordings of the same music played in different speeds.
Kastrup puts it much better than I could:
[quote=Bernardo Kastrup;https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-red-herring-of-free-will-in-objective-idealism/reading/]Under objective idealism, subjectivity is not individual or multiple, but unitary and universal: its the bottom level of reality, prior to spatiotemporal extension and consequent differentiation. The subjectivity in me is the same subjectivity in you. What differentiates us are merely the contents of this subjectivity as experienced by you, and by me. We differ only in experienced memories, perspectives and narratives of self, but not in the subjective field wherein all these memories, perspectives and narratives of self unfold as patterns of excitation; that is, as experiences.
As such, under objective idealism there is nothing outside subjectivity, for the whole of existence is reducible to the patterns of excitation of the one universal field of subjectivity. Therefore, all choices are determined by this one subject, as there are no agencies or forces external to it. Yet, all choices are indeed determined by the inherent, innate dispositions of the subject. In other words, all choices are determined by what subjectivity is.[/quote]
@Banno
As far as we know each subjectivity is not connected with all the others.
Dreadful stuff, seeing as you asked for my opinion. The phrases "unitary and universal" and "bottom level of reality" and "prior to spatiotemporal extension" ought set one's teeth on edge; they are vague to the point of incoherence. The magic hand wave of "The subjectivity in me is the same subjectivity in you" contradicts the very use of terms such as "subjective" from which it derives.
Wayfarer, you do not have my memories, nor I, yours. That's kinda what "subjective" is. It is not shared.
The science you castigate and beg to become more "subjective" functions exactly because it works to overcome subjectivity by building on what we do share.
This is what I tried to explain on our little walk.
Of course we're going to notice the difference, it changes the pitch. It's like Alvin and The Chipmunks. They take a recording and speed it up. It's noticeably not normal.
:smile:
For you, probably. Funny how folk who point out problems with your posts mostly haven't understood you.
The reasoning is easy enough to understand, it's the premises which are not believable. Apparently, you cannot fathom the idea that people can readily understand all your arguments and yet disagree. And this from someone who you might remember mounted some of the very same arguments in the early days. Luckily, I came to see the error of my ways.
I have no problem with you believing what you believeit is your tireless search for authority to confirm your beliefs, and your unrelenting dogmatism which shows in your refusal to even consider any counterarguments, that I find unpalatable. The claim that those who do not believe as you do must not understand is the quintessential mark of dogmatic thinking.
I'd be happy if you go back to ignoring me now.
There are those who agree with you, it seems - but whether they understand you, that's a different issue.
There remains the enigma mooted by Kastrup, that what is known only to oneself is also known to all. Unaddressed, save for the hand wave.
That passage was extracted from a longer essay and quoted in response to what I consider your fallacious description of idealism. The point being that objective idealism does not make the world dependent on the individual mind.
No, not what is known, but the capacity to experience. That is what is common to all.
:wink: But did your corgi learn it's limitations? Did it learn that it cannot do high school algebra? That would be pretty cool.
The physicalist explanation would be that 'the whole of existence is due to the excitations in electromagnetic fields', which is the way atomic structures are nowadays understood.
So - what's wrong with it? Why is one universal field of subjectivity any more or less credible than atomic theory?
I don't know how to explain this, since your asking the question seems to show a misunderstanding of what a field is in physics. A field is a mathematical function assigning a value to every point in the given space.
How the fuck does subjectivity give, or be understood as, an assigned value to every point in a space? What could that mean?
There's a chasm here, that you apparently do not see.
As far as we can tell there are only Indvidual minds. When are you going to wake up to the fact that I understand Kastrup's 'arguments' perfectly well, and yet do not agree, in fact find them nonsensical. I understand his analogical idea of dissociated alters, and I think it's clutching at straws. We have zero evidence of any hidden connection between minds as far as I am aware..
You can't condescend upwards.
Quoting Banno
Oh, the irony.
As it happens, Kastrup, whom I'm quoting, is perfectly conversant with quantum physics, indeed his first job was at CERN. There's a blog post of his on the concordance of idealism and quantum physics here.
Becasue that is what is required of a field in order to be a field.
IF he doesn't give us a way to calculate the value of the field of subjectivity at each point in whatever space he is talking about, he is not talking physics.
Even if, and I want to make this perfectly clear, even if he is "perfectly conversant with quantum physics".
A meaningless comment...or is it just more appeal to supposed authority. Poor form for a would-be philosopher either way.
Quoting Wayfarer
More argument from authority. Kastrup has a degree in computer science not in quantum physics. In any case it is implausible that quantum mechanics has any determinable implications for the metaphysical realism vs idealism debate. If all our concepts evolved from experience in the macroworld it is not surprising that what we find in the microworld might seem paradoxical.
Certainly doesn't seem any stranger than some contemporary formulations of physics.
Your general thesis doesn't seem that difficult to follow.
Humans do not have direct access to reality because our perception is filtered through our senses, our cognitive apparatus and shaped by language. Our senses provide a limited and subjective view of the world, interpreting stimuli rather than presenting reality as it truly is. Language further confines our understanding by categorising and structuring our experiences, shaping our thoughts within predefined concepts and cultural frameworks. We never perceive the world directly but only through the lens of our biological and linguistic limitations, leaving us with a constructed version of reality rather than an objective one.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not dissimilar to David Bentley Hart's account of God as the very "Ground of Being" itselfthe necessary reality that makes all existence possible. Rather than a finite entity within the universe, God is the infinite, transcendent source from which all things derive their being.
No, very easy to follow...just very difficult to agree with.
Kastrup has PhD's in computer science and philosophy.
Where Kastrup entered the conversation again, was in the other thread, as the commentary you provided on Wittgenstein was from Kastrup's website, The Essentia Foundation. It contained this paragraph:
That was what prompted me to google 'Objective idealism', and the quote I gave here, was from an essay by Kastrup on that subject. It was provided to distinguish objective idealism from the trivalising way in which it is generally depicted as implying 'the world is the product of an individual's mind' or is 'all in the mind'.
Quoting Banno
Bernardo Kastrup's 'field of subjectivity' is a way of describing mind or consciousess as a universal that manifests through manifold particular forms. In plain language, he's saying that what we think of as individual mindsyour or my consciousness, that of living beings generallyare not completely separate but rather are localized within a broader, all-encompassing field of awareness. But that should be a separate discussion. I brought up Kastrup because of a comment made in another thread.
Quoting Janus
:rofl: The 'nature of the wave function' is the single most outstanding philosophical problem thrown up by quantum physics. To this day, Nobel-prize winning theorists still do not agree on what it is, and that disagreement is completely metaphysical as a matter of definition (i.e. cannot be resolved by observation, but related to the meaning of what has been observed.)
Thank you Tom.
Quantum physics is a physical, not a metaphysical science...it is the paradigmatic physical science. What is observed is the behavior of putative microphysical entities. The disagreement about how to understand some of that behavior is not surprising, given that we have no reason to assume that the microphysical can be conceptualized using ideas that evolved in the macroworld.
Which is not physics. That's becasue in physics a field is a space with a value at every point. If he does not present a way to understand what that value might be, he is talking through his hat.
And if he is not doing physics, then we ought not see his expertise in physics as supporting his argument.
The bit where you think you have the answer, but don't.
@Wayfarer
This could be so, and is similar to Whitehead.
Again, consider Einstein's Block Universe as a broadcast of the experiential
No worse than thinking there's no question.
There's a difference between recognising a question and accepting an answer. Sure there's a question here - a profound one. But you jump to a conclusion that does not work.
Handwaving waffle about physical fields of subjective experience does not help. It's too easy to show it to be garbage.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Quite right .
Then it doesn't help. Those "excitations of fields" have a value. What is the value of the subjective field three centimetres in front of of you nose?
Quoting Bernardo Kastrup
That's not presenting an analog. Calling it an analogy is what folk do when their explanation doesn't work. so that they can follow up with "you just don't understand... you can't see the analogy"
Like you did earlier.
The question is not apt, because the subject is that to whom experience occurs. The subject never appears as that. Another person may appear objective to you, but the fact that you refer to them with proper pronouns (he or she) recognises that they too are subjects of experience.
I can see Ive opened a can of worms by bringing in Kastrup. I might start another thread on him. But Im logging out for the evening, have a nice one.
Cheers. Have a good evening.
Not helping.
How do you know slowed or fastened reproduction of the music is not normal? I was pointing out, it is a priori concept of temporality in our minds which can tell they are not normal, rather than the music itself.
Hence human mind has innate temporal knowledge of time? Would you agree?
Time is a concept derived from the change, the flux, the process and becoming of nature.
In a universe where there was no activity, no flux, the concept of time or the word time would simply become meaningless. Much the same could be said of the concept of empty space (no such thing).
You ought to consider that if an author's arguments appear nonsensical to you, you in fact, do not understand the author. This is because to understand requires acknowledging what the author intends, and no author intends to argue nonsense. So if you find an author's arguments to be nonsensical it implies that you do not understand the author.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
You are clearly not distinguishing between "field" in mathematics, and "field" in physics. In physics, "the field" is the thing represented by the mathematical field. Here, you are insisting that the mathematical function called "field", is the field in physics. That is incorrect.
This is explained quite well by physicist Richard Feynman for example, when he explains how an electrical charge moves through the electromagnetic "field" which surrounds a copper wire, rather than moving through the copper wire itself. This is the principle which drives the induction motor for example.
Now, the field is active, and this activity is represented by the changing values of the mathematical representation. What "a field" actually is, is not well understood by physicists. The field is active, and the activity of the field is understood, and represented as if it is a wave activity. That wave representation allows for predictive capacity. However, since the medium of these waves (the aether) has not been identified, the supposed "field" itself, within which the apparent waves are active, remains elusive to the human intellect.
Since "a field" in physics refers to a thing (not a mathematical construct but what is represented by that construct), and the existence of this thing has not been supported by principles which are logically coherent, its essence (what it is) remains a matter of speculation. This allows many different metaphysical theories, (such as the one Wayfarer proposes) to propagate.
No, I do not agree with this. If the music is sped up or slowed down only a miniscule amount, I cannot tell the difference without comparison to a designated "normal". If given two different samples, of the same piece, one altered slightly, I would not be able to tell which one, I would be guessing.
In fact, fifty or sixty years ago it was common practise for recording artists to alter the speed a little bit, in some songs they released. As a listener you would never know that a song was altered, until you tried to play along, and found out that you had to change the tuning of your instrument.
So I do not believe it is an innate ability to recognize that the speed of a recording has been altered. I believe that to recognize that the speed has been altered requires comparison with some designated "normal". So this ability is a feature of learning how to compare a sample with a "normal". This itself, the ability to compare a sample with a normal, may be an innate knowledge, but it is a general capacity, and doesn't amount to the specific "temporal knowledge" which you are talking about.
I wonder if you are familiar with Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven song. If you are, then the above recordings will demonstrate that they sound totally different from the top (30% slowed down) and bottom (normal) guitar solo in the song. And one can tell which one is the normal speed. and which one is slowed down in speed.
If you still cannot tell the difference, either you have never listened to Led Zepps in your life, or you are a tone deaf. :D
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A general capacity for what? It sounds vague and unclear.
You are comparing it to the norm.
Quoting Corvus
The general capacity to compare something to a norm. You don't seem to be paying attention to my post.
Of course all comparison needs criteria for what is norm. If not, how can you compare anything?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, if you played the above 2x recordings to someone (a indigenous tribe man in a jungle or someone who doesn't like western classic rock music) who never listened the song in his life or a tone deaf, then he won't be able to tell the difference. In that case, where is the general capacity?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I do. But when I see vague points or ambiguities in the post, I will point them out. :)
So the point is that the ability to recognize a piece of music as at a speed other than the norm, is not an innate ability. It requires the criteria of the example which serves as the norm, and this example is not provided innately.
Quoting Corvus
The general capacity is not demonstrated here, because that capacity is the ability to compare, and there is nothing being compared in this example.
Listening is an empirical sensation, but the judgement on the listened music as normal or not normal is a mental operation from the innate capacity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not sure what you mean. There are 2x piece of guitar solos given above in the recording. The top one is 30% slowed down in speed, and the bottom one is the normal one. Anyone can have a listen to both recordings and make comparisons.
Nonexistence is also existence.
.The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real ... a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have....
.....A field is any physical quantity which takes on different values at different points in space....
.....There have been various inventions to help the mind visualize the behavior of fields. The most correct is also the most abstract: we simply consider the fields as mathematical functions of position and time....
(Feynman lectures, (CalTech, 1956), in Vol. II, Ch 1.5, 1963)
-
Quoting Wayfarer
Nahhhh I get it. Pretty simple, really. It all begins with an idea, in this case, fields. Forgetting the altogether unremarkable commonplace rendition of field as merely grass-y ground, the idea of fields as quantitative values in space or fields as subjectivity, are nothing but the idea under which distinguishing conceptions are subsumed, but without contradicting the bare notion itself.
This field possesses, e.g., momentum and energy, that field possesses, e.g., sensibility and discursive/aesthetic judgement;
This field is the condition of every object to which it relates, that field is the condition of every subject to which it relates;
That the relations are different does not contradict the validity of the respective conditions. That every particular kind of thing called a subject belongs to a subjectivity field is no less logically coherent than every particular kind of thing called an electron belongs to an electromagnetic field.
Whether thats of any benefit or not, whether theres any explanatory gain ..dunno. As my ol buddy Stephen says ..nobodys right if everybodys wrong.
From math to woo. A little like the aether.
Objective idealism begins from different premisses. It doesn't begin with the presumption that the quantifiable objects of empirical science are foundational or fundamental and that the observing mind can be explained with reference to them. In a sense, it incorporates the Cartesian principle of the primacy of mind, cogito ergo sum - that the existence of the observer can't plausibly be denied - even while eschewing the infamous mind-matter division that is also Cartesian. It points out that whatever is observed, measured, known, is always observed, measured and known by an observer, who as a matter of definition is not amongst the objects of analysis.
Aside from Bernardo Kastrup, other objective idealists are C S Peirce and (arguably) Plato (although the term 'idealism' was not coined until the early modern period.)
:up:
The electromagnetic field has vector values at every point in space. Photons are ripples in the field - the photon can be described by a frequency and a direction, or by its energy - values in that field.
If there is a field of subjectivity or consciousness or whatever, it would need to be defined by the values attached to the points in space across which the field is spread. Presumably zero for empty space, and then... what? How will subjectivity be measured or calculated? What are it's units?
Moreover, if it has no units, and yet is somehow to explain the physical world, how does one get from the field of subjectivity to the measurable values of the electromagnetic field? Where do they come from? What equations show the relation here?
An issue not unlike that faced by Cartesian dualism in its inability to explain how one consciously moves one's hand.
I still call bullshit.
And I don't think much of his friends.
Isn't this a religious-like flaw of begging the question or an infinite regress?
Our consciousness is Hard to understand, so we push it onto a Greater Consciousness as the experiential basis underlying reality, making it really HARD.
Why presume the ultra complex as First when we can see the simplex as First and the more complex as coming later?
You do see here that the points of the field each have an associated value, don't you?
So the question is, what are the values in the supposed field of subjectivity?
I was not giving a physics lesson, only pointing out your equivocation with the word "field".
Quoting Wayfarer
Photons are the excitations of the electromagnetic field. Each different type of particle has its own type of field. The real difficulty for quantum physics is in establishing the relations between one field and another. For instance, quarks and gluons are supposed to be distinct fields, essentially massless, yet through the strong nuclear force they make up hadrons which are massive. And due to the nature of the strong nuclear force they cannot actually be separated in practise.
[quote=Wikipedia]After a limiting distance (about the size of a hadron) has been reached, it remains at a strength of about 10000 N, no matter how much farther the distance between the quarks.[7]:?164? As the separation between the quarks grows, the energy added to the pair creates new pairs of matching quarks between the original two; hence it is impossible to isolate quarks.[/quote]
So the gluon "field" actually represents the strong nuclear force which is responsible for creating massive hadrons from quarks which are almost massless.
https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsquarks-and-gluons
Quoting Banno
Since fields are massless, the real question is where does mass come from.
It would take a lot more explanation, or conversely, a great deal more reading, to elaborate on what this means, and as the various contributors here think it's all bullshit, I'm not inclined to try. There are plenty of other topics to talk about.
The 'collective mind' is not a separate entity, not some ghostly blob hovering over culture. It's more like expressions such as the European mind or the Western mind. In these cases, there are, on the one hand, individual mindseach with its own personality and proclivitiesbut also a vast pool of meanings, references, and, of course, language, which is common to all of them. That is the 'collective' nature of mind, and it closely resembles ideas found in Hegels philosophy.
Whereas Kant emphasizes that knowledge is shaped by the individual minds cognitive structures, Hegel highlights the collective dimension of knowledge. For Hegel, knowledge is not merely an individual achievement but emerges through historical and social processeshence concepts like the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). There is a tension between individual perspectives and the need for universal concepts. This is why, in Hegelian thought, consciousness develops dialectically: individuals grasp reality through immediate, personal experience, but this experience must be mediated by shared categories of thought and language. The ideas we have of the world are not merely personal; they are shaped by a linguistic and conceptual framework that has been historically developed through collective reasoning and cultural transmission.
As for the concern about the common content of experience, the explanation lies in the interplay between shared cognitive structures and intersubjective meaning. While universal cognitive structures explain how we perceive, the content of our experience - and therefore the meaning we attribute to them - is influenced by common linguistic categories, shared cultural contexts, and biological constraints. This does not require positing a separate collective mind but simply recognizes that cognition is always situated within a web of inherited meanings and social interactions.
Finally, regarding whether this perspective can be empirically proventhis is not an empirical hypothesis but an interpretive model of epistemology. It is not something that can be tested in a laboratory but rather a framework for understanding how knowledge and meaning emerge in human experience. Demanding empirical validation for such conceptual frameworks is again an appeal to verificationism, a discredited aspect of positivism.
Right, it's an abstract entity, an idea, not an ontologically substantive being then. Commonalities of conceptual schemas and worldviews, which do of course evolve and even radically change over time, as I already said cannot Quoting Janus
so you haven't really answered the question.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Janus
I'm not demanding empirical verification for a substantive collective mind, It is clear that empirical evidence in the sense of direct observation would be impossible in principle.
If we were all joined to a real collective mind that could determine the content of perceptual experiences rather than just the forms of perceptual experiences (which is itself explainable by the structural similarities between individual human bodies, brains, and sensory organs) then although that hypothetical entity, just like the individual human mind, could not be directly observed, we might expect to observe so called psychic phenomena that could lead us to infer the existence of such a collective mind.
I already know that the ideas of such collectivities exist, but such entities, if not substantive, are merely abstract concepts. I'm not asking for empirical evidence at all, but for an explanation as to how such socially and historically and biologically mediated commonalities of the forms of human perceptual experience could possibly explain the commonalties of content of human perceptual experience, and that you have certainly not provided. As I see it this is the central weakness in your position. You would be more consistent if you believed in a substantive (not merely abstract) "mind at large" as Kastrup does.
You never fail to mention positivism, apparently in an attempt to discredit what I argue, rather than dealing with it point by point on its own terms. Consequently, I've given up on addressing your posts, and was assuming you would do likewise with mine. However, if you continue to address me and yet still fail to address the critical points, then I will continue to call you out on that.
You mean, not a thing, therefore, not real. What you mean by 'substantive' means 'can be verified scientifically'. There's no conflict between the fact that ideas and languages change, and that they are real.
Quoting Janus
Just be clear about this: I've answered it, but you either don't understand that answer, or don't accept, the answer. So instead of constantly complaining that I'm evading the question or not answering it, just recognise that. OK, you don't accept it, but don't say I'm not addressing it. I am saying that the cognitive systems through which we view the world are also constitutive of the world we view, meaning that the world is not really mind-independent in the sense that empiricism presumes.
Quoting Janus
Because you constantly appeal to what is empirically verifiable by science as the yardstick for what constitutes real knowledge. If I had time, I could provide many direct quotes from you, saying that. It's not as if I'm accusing you of something radically objectionable: positivism is an identifiable and powerful influence in modern thinking, and you frequently appeal to it and to verificationism. Folllowed by 'and what about OSHO?!?' ;-)
Social processes such as general changes of worldview are real, but they only exist in the individuals, books, computers and other media and so on, in which they are instantiated, manifested, recorded.
The fact that you and I may have generally similar perceptual organs, brains and worldviews cannot determine the content of perceptual experience, it can only determine its general form. If you believe that is wrong, then you would need to explain how those commonalities could explain the specific shared content of our perceptual experiences. You haven't done that.
Actually, you and I don't even share the same worldview, and yet I have absolutely no doubt that if we were together, we would be able to confirm that we both see precisely the same things in the surrounding environment.
Quoting Wayfarer
When it comes to understanding how the physical world works I believe science is the answer. I've already said many times that understanding human or even animal behavior cannot be achieved by physics. I've often said that the physical nature of the world is understood in terms of causes, and animal and human behavior in terms of reasons. So, it's obvious you don't closely read what I write, or at least do not comprehend it.
The fact that you and I see the same things is precisely because we belong to the same species, language-group, culture, and the rest. I'm not, again, saying that the world exists in your or my mind which is what you think I'm saying. We draw on a common stock of usages, meanings, and so on. But there are times when that breaks down - when individuals from two cultures meet, for example, with completely incommensurable understandings of the same thing, they will see different things. Again, I'm not denying objectivity or that there is an external world, but that all our knowledge of it is mediated.
Quoting Janus
But you also say that those reasons are individual, that they're subjective, that they're matters of individual opinion. Again that can be illustrated with reference to your own entries. The point about philosophy generally, is to ascertain the nature of that framework - the space of reasons, as it has been called - such that it's not just a matter of opinion or individual proclivities. Metaphysics, originally, was intended as the foundation of that enquiry, the 'philosophy of philosophy'.
I think that is wrong or at least incomplete: you are leaving out the things which are actually in the world. Species, language-group, culture cannot determine what is there to be perceived. I know form observing their behavior that my dogs perceive the same environment I do, even though I cannot say how exactly the things in the environment look to them or even, for that matter to another person.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've never denied that the ways in which we see things, the things we notice, as opposed to what is there to be noticed is mediated, as I've already said by biology and culture and even individual differences. An artist will notice different things in the natural environment than the hunter for example, but it doesn't follow that they inhabit different environments
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you seriously want to deny that there are differences between individuals, that people may do different things for the same reasons and the same things for different reasons?
.
Something that is not in question.
Quoting Janus
That's not relevant. What I'm criticizing is the view that matters OTHER than those that can be measured scientifically - such as values - are, therefore, up to the individual, that they're essentially subjective in nature.
What is your explanation for that? Quoting Wayfarer don't suffice.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Well then what was your point?
Everything we know about reality is shaped by our own mental facultiesspace, time, causality, and substance are not "out there" in the world itself but are the conditions of experience. So when you blithely assume that
Quoting Janus
In what does that causality inhere? Wittgenstein remarks that 'At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.' Why does he call it an illusion? I say it's because the perception of causal relations is itself mind-dependent. It is because we can form ideas of what things are, and then perceive the necessary relations of ideas, that we can establish causality in the first place. It's not merely 'given' to us in the way that naturalism assumes. Which is also the basis of Husserl's criticism of naturalism:
You are blithely assuming that. How do you know it's true?
Quoting Wayfarer
From the point of view of science that question doesn't matter. It may well be unanswerable. Whatever the explanation, the fact is clear that we understand the physical world in terms of causation, which includes both local processes and effects and global conditions.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I read that he's just pointing out that the so-called laws of nature don't explain anythingthey are merely formulations that generalize observed regularities. 'The Law of Gravity" doesn't explain anything it is just a statement that gravity always obtains and does not explain why gravity obtains. Newton was puzzled by such 'action at a distance'. Then Einstein came along and spoke of spacetime as a real existent thing that could be warped by mass, leading to the gravitational phenomena we observe. But again, this does not explain what mass is or why it warps spacetime or how we can visualize three dimensional space warping into a fourth dimension.
Science doesn't explain everything. It might even be said it doesn't really explain much, but it's the best we have, and it's really just an extension of ordinary observation and understanding. Of course, when you consider all the sciences it does form a vast and mostly coherent body of knowledge and understanding. We can understand how things work without needing to understand why they work the way they do in any absolute sense. The search for absolute knowledge appears to be a vain pursuit.
The Husserlian approach, and the phenomenological approach in general I am fairly familiar with on account of a long history of reading and study. It is rightly only concerned with the character of human experience, and as such it brackets metaphysical questions such as the mind-independent existence of the external world. Whether phenomenology yields any useful or substantive knowledge is a matter of debate. If Husserl makes absolutist metaphysical pronouncements based on how things seem to us, then for my money he oversteps the bounds of cogent reasoning. In any case I don't have much interest in phenomenology anymore since it didn't for me, to the extent I studied it, yield any knowledge I found to be particularly useful or illuminating.
Science for me offers a far more interesting, rich and complex body of knowledge. I'm not concerned with questions of 'materialism vs idealism' or 'realism vs antirealism' because I think these questions are not definitively decidable. I have views which are based on what I find most plausible, but I acknowledge that there are not definitive criteria for plausibility, which are not based on the very presumptions which are in question.
Apart from an interest in science and the arts, my main interest is the cultivation of critical thinking. That's the only reason I post on hereto hone those skills as well as my writing skills in general.
It's not an assumption, it is a philosophical observation and nowadays with ample support from cognitive science.
Quoting Janus
Right! 'The question doesn't matter'. And yet, you continually defer to science as the arbiter for philosophy.
Quoting Janus
But notice that Husserl says that consciousness is foundationally involved in world-disclosure, meaning that the idea of a world apart from consciousness is inconceivable in any meaningful way. That is the salient point.
Quoting Janus
But you have long since made up your mind, going on what you say.
Nonsense you don't know they're not "out there"...how could you when such knowledge is impossible in principle according to your own arguments?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's bullshit too. I'm always saying that much about the human cannot be understood adequately by science. The only areas I would say that science has something to contribute to philosophy would be metaphysics and epistemology. Certainly not ethics or aesthetics.
The great irony is that you are always saying I don't understand your position, when I do very well since I used to hold a very similar position myself, whereas you constantly show by your misrepresentations of my arguments that you either don't understand them, or else deliberately misrepresent them.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is again your own and perhaps Husserl's prejudice. I can readily conceive of a world absent consciousness. Of course, my consciousness is involved in the conceiving, but that is a different thing, an obvious truism. What you say is stipulative, it is not a logical entailment. You have no business stipulating to others what they can or cannot conceive of or what is or is not meaningful to them. It's dogmatism pure and simple.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think the question is of much importance, my views are not "hard and fast" but I know what seems most plausible to me at my current stage of understanding. You on the other hand seem absolutely obsessed with it and rigidly attached to your views. I've seen no change as long as I've been reading your posts.
It's virtually all you talk about (apart from your political concerns), continually repeating the same mantras. I don't know what motivates that, but I'm guessing that for you it's a moral crusade, and if so, i think that's misguided.
Anyway, we've been over this same old ground too many times, so I think it would be best to desist from now on, since it never goes anywhere.
:roll:
Quoting Janus
It's a philosophy forum. I write about philosophy.
I don't share your reverence for authority figures, and I said "perhaps" because it's a while since I read Husserl, I don't want to assume that your interpretations of his views are the correct ones and I have no interest in researching his work in order to determine whether or not they are. Life is too short.
Quoting Wayfarer
You write about your conception of philosophy imagining it to be "philosophy proper", and not very cogently at that in my view.
Rubbish, I say what my views are and defend them, with a great deal more argument than you do. Most of what you do consists in quoting your "authorities" instead of presenting your own arguments. And the fact that you think my questioning of your views consists in merely "taking potshots" just shows how superficial and lacking in any critical dimension your thinking is.
I'm not referring to what we may or may not call time as physicists. I mean for uniquely humans.
I think at the sensory level of our experience, sensation and feeling, like it is for the rest of nature, there is no time. Sure, we say "only the present" or "successive nows," but its because "we" humans are not at the sensory level so we can't but incorporate time.
We're at the level of perception, where Mind conditioned by history, displaces sensation and feelings with code evolved to project in dialectical (this/that) linear form,(narrative--subject and predicate, cause and affect) evolving "time" as a necessary mechanism of that moving process.
Even calling it linear or dialectical is just as illusory as time itself. But as long as we're born into history, we can't but move in that world of codes.
Thats one for the scrapbook! :clap:
So the question for you is, does every point in that field have a mathematical description, as do the points within physical fields? And if not, does that disqualify its description as a field?
I don't know whether idealism is real or not, but I have some sympathy for the arguments. I am keen to have a better understanding of philosophical ideas and to see how they are defended in discussions like yours. It does strike me that most people on this forum don't seem to change their views. They simply uncover more arguments and tools to defend them.
:up: :cool:
Quoting ENOAH
Agreed.
No.
Quoting Wiki: Field
Why call it a field? What is the use of such language, if there are no values attached to points in space?
Seems to be no more than a veneer of the scientism we reject.
Field as a mathematical term or field as an area of land devoted to growing crops? Or field as an encompassing environment of some sort, a philosophical notion. Spacetime is not a math field, but contains various entities like magnetic fields that can be represented as math fields.
"Understanding" quantum theory means following the math, as Feynman said. Perhaps that is true of time as well. The math of relativity theory weaves an astounding vision far beyond what we might have imagined. If one entertains Tegmark's speculations that the universe is a mathematical structure, then time is one also. A reification of mathematics.
The field of conscious awareness is how I intended it. Aside from physical fields in biology there are morphogenetic fields. "A morphogenetic field is a region in a developing embryo where cells communicate and coordinate to form a specific organ or structure. The spatial organization of cells within these fields is controlled by chemical gradients (morphogens), gene regulatory networks, and cellular signaling (biosemiosis). Morphogenetic fields guide pattern formation, ensuring that tissues and organs develop correctly in relation to the body plan." It would hardly be surprising if 'field' used to describe consciousness has resonances with the biological rather than the way it is understood in physics.
Quoting Banno
Because it's an apt description of the nature of conscious awareness. In this context it is being used phenomenologically rather than physically referring to the way awareness manifests as a unified, continuous whole rather than as collection of discrete elements (per the 'subjective unity of perception'). Within that field, specific phenomena - specific aspects of 'phenomenal consciousness' - manifest as qualia, the qualitative attributes associated with specific stimuli or circumstances or cognitive challenges.
Others seem to think that this works. But you will have to forgive me if I continue to be sceptical.
You limit "field" to "a physical quantity", then complain because Wayfarer's proposed "field" doesn't meet the criteria of your definition. But your definition is incoherent because "physical quantity" is self-contradicting.
No I. and not to "physical" but to "quantity". That's the definition of "field" in science and mathematics.
Subjectivity does not have a value at every point in some space. Indeed, it is not the sort of thing that can have a value. Moreover, from what I can work out, Wayfarer and others agree with this.
Hence subjectivity is not a field.
Quoting Bernardo Kastrup
What precisely is the matter with that again?
Quoting Bernardo Kastrup
is exactly wrong.
Quoting Bernardo Kastrup
We differ in "experienced memories, perspectives and narratives of self"... so what is left that is shared? What are those "Patterns of excitation" that are not "experienced memories, perspectives and narratives of self" and which also do not have a value?
There is nothing left here, for the field to consist in.
Why? What's wrong about it? A mere assertion does not an argument make.
You cannot know what the subjective "patterns of excitation" in someone else are, let alone they are the same as your own.
The fundamental level of self-awareness that characterises beings. What would remain if you had complete amnesia and forgot who you were.
Quoting Banno
Reply to that, if you would, instead of changing the topic.
Not a field.
You're the one who changed the topic, and you're now trying to shift it back within your comfort zone.
Where was it you lost those car keys? ;-)
Why not? If you were amnesiac, you would presumably be conscious, even if you didn't know who you were. Your autonomic and parasympathetic nervous systems would be functioning. You would see things around you in the room, and other people, even if you didn't know who they were. All of those would be part of your field of awareness.
Balls.
Here's were you invited my comment:
Quoting Wayfarer
To which I replied:
Quoting Banno
...becasue a field has a value at every point...
Hence my essay on the superiority of philosophical detachment to scientific objectivity. Here's a gift link for you.
Quoting Banno
Dogmatic? Me?
An almost complete backflip.
That is also part of the point of the essay I've referred to:
You are welcome to produce an alternative definition of "field" that does not invovle a value at every point in a space.
But if you do, you will not be able to claim that your field is anything like an electric, gravitational or other physical field.
And your analogy or metaphor or whatever it is will thereby lose any validity.
Already done: morphogenetic fields.
Stop blurting things out, just take a little time to actually think about it. I'll leave it with you.
Quoting Wayfarer
:rofl:
Quoting Wayfarer
Sound advice. Cheers.
But at least Gurwitsch understood what a field is.
Of course I understand that in the Austin/Davidson/Wittgenstein field of philosophy, no consideration whatever is given to the issue of the nature of the subjective unity of consciousness, and as you never tire of pointing out, hardly anyone in the academic world takes philosophical idealism seriously. Hence the eye-rolling. But the analogy stands as far as I'm concerned.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's not an analogy. Not a metaphor.
A hard-earned thirst?
Seems to me you are looking for a veneer of scientific credibility, which is odd. But in the end it's the bit where folk want, incoherently, to detail the ineffable, in this case the subjective.
This may not be relevant to your discussion with Wayfarer, but you are still confusing the map with the terrain.
The physical field is represented mathematically in quantum field theory, as having a changing value at every point. The points and values are a representation, of the thing which is known to physicists as a field. The physical field does not consist of points with a value at each point, the representation has points which have values assigned to them. The field appears to be more like a wave action.
The problem with your argument is that as points with values is one way of representing a physical field, but that does not exclude the possibility of representing the very same field in a completely different way. So it may be the case that Wayfarer has a different way of representing physical fields, which does not involve points with values. This simply would not be the conventional way of representing fields, which is commonly used by physicists.
For example, the classical way of representing an electromagnetic field is as an activity of waves. However, since there is no known medium (aether) therefore no way for the wave activity to be represented as interacting with physical objects, many features of the electromagnetic field cannot be accurately represented as wave activity. So quantum field theory uses the representation of points with changing values at each point. Therefore as active waves, and as points with changing values, is two different ways of representing the same electromagnetic field.
The two-slit experiment reveals the wave nature of field quanta like electrons and photons.
I think it's fair to say that 'field' is used in many contexts: different disciplines in science and the humanities are commonly referred to as fields. The philosopher Markus Gabriel presents an interesting pluralistic philosophy where the central concept is "fields of sense", and he mans by that something like 'fields of sense-making'.
That said a magnetic field, gravitational field, quantum field or grassy field are understood to be real, concrete entities, whereas the metaphorical application of the term 'field' to various disciplines including probably "visual field" or 'the field of consciousness' are kinds of abstractions which are easily reified.
In so far as Quoting Wayfarer
would pretend to a physical field, not an area of study or a paddock, it is muddled.
Whats continuous means a field that waves,
Naught else; Stillness is impossible.
A field has a changing value everywhere,
Since the vacuum eer has to fluctuate.
Change, change, change constant change, as fast as it
Can happenthe speed of light being foremost
The speed of causalityoer 13 billion years now,
From the simple on up to the more complex.
The vacuum has to eer jitter and sing,
This Base Existent forced as something,
Due to the nonexistence of Nothing;
When it tries to be zero, it cannot.
At the indefinite quantum level,
Zero must be fuzzy, not definite;
So it cant be zero, but has to be
As that which is ever up to something.
The fields overlap and some interact;
So, there is one overall field as All,
As the basis of all that is possible
Of energys base motion default.
From the field points ever fluctuating,
Quantum field waverings have to result
From points eer dragging on one another.
Points are bits that may form letter strokes.
As sums of harmonic oscillators,
Fields can only form their elementaries
At stable quanta energy levels;
Other excitation levels are virtuals.
[hide="Reveal"]From times shores toward oblivions worlds,
The quantum vacuum fields send forth their whirls,
The sea parting into base discrete swirls,
Unto stars and lifeephemerals pearled.
Quantum fields Presence, through transient veins,
Running Quicksilver-like, fuels our gains
Taking all the temporary shapes as
They change and perish allbut It remains.
Since the quantum fields are everywhere,
The elementaries, like kinks, can move
To anyplace in the realms of the fields.
As in a rope, only the quanta move.
At each level of organization
Of temporaries in the universe,
New capabilities become available,
And so they take on a life of their own.
The quantum vacuum field waves are the strokes
That write the elementaries letters
As the Cosmic alphabet for wording
Of the elements and the forces that
Phrase the molecules interactions
Unto the cells sentences that make for
The lives paragraphs of the species that
Experience the uni-versed story,
In a book from Babels Great Library:
The epic tales of the temporaries,
Their glorious triumphs and sad failures,
Amid complexitys unwinding spring.
The great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
As the strands of quantum fields webs of waves
That weave the warp, weft, and woof, uni-versed,
Into beings fabric of Earths living braids.
Quantum fields are the fundamental strokes
Whose excitations at harmonics cloaks
The field quanta with stability
To persist and obtain mobility.
As letters of the Cosmic alphabet,
The elementary particles beget,
Combining in words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and lifes glory.
The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes
The alphabet of the standard model,
Atoms then forming the stars words whose mights
Merge to form molecules, as the phrases,
On to proteins/cells, as verse sentences,
In to organisms stanza paragraphs,
And to the poem stories of the species.
Of this concordance of literature,
Were the Cosmos poetic adventure,
Sentient poems being unified-verses,
As both the contained and the container.
We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling this lifes deeper thirsts,
As new riches, through strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentencesuni versed.
We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beautys true pense,
Revealed through lifes participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.
A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
Its lifes image drawn in eternal truth.[/hide]
Thanks Tom, I appreciate your comment, but I'm afraid I cannot agree that Wayfarer's position or idealism in general is well-argued. The arguments always seem like, as I say above, mere hand-waving.
We can test it! I'll wave, and you vibrate.
Probably just as well, as you show little aptitude in philosophy.
You're welcome.
Even mathematics is a little sloppy in this regard. A vector field is not a mathematical field. The reason I prefer the expression vector space. And if that vector space changes values at each point over time it is a time dependent vector space (or field).
Likewise, we say "quantum field" but it's just "a kind of confabulation, hand-waving". And, because we don't really know what we're talking about, it has little if any explanatory power, as evidenced from the fundamental self-contradictory principle of "wave-particle duality". "Quantum field" is an incoherent description. And, depending on which model is referred to, the total number of fields assumed to be in existence varies dramatically, as described below.
https://www.physicssayswhat.com/2019/06/05/qft-how-many-fields-are-there/