No-God and Time

[AMCrenshaw]

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it? To time?

AMC

p.s. This could be quite fun. Looking for philosophic, scientific, aesthetic, and religious views.

[loquax]

Ho ho, ho ho ho. I do believe that time has a beginning and an end, beginning at the big bang, and ending whenever.

The biggest question in my mind relates to dividing time into units, and the nature of infinity. There are loads of time paradoxes based on dividing time infinitely. I guess a solution is that time is divisible into base units; units of time that can't be any smaller.

Does any of this have anything to do with god? Course not.

I also believe we experience time VERY differently to, say, a butterfly.

[KTC]

I believe in the Heart Sutra.

Thus, Sariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas; no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance, up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom no attainment, and no non attainment.

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SAVAHA

[Unique]

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it? To time?



Eternity is forever without end. Our relationship to it - we don't last that long.

In my personal view, our bodies don't last that long. Our souls, spirits, life force - may or may not last that long depending.

Those who don't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps their life force ceases to exist. >poof< Game, set, match. It's over. I hope this to be true. That's what they believed, ergo, that's how it should be.

Those who believe their soul continues, either in another plane or again in this one at some point in time. This is also good.

Those who have chosen to follow Christ - there are two views of thought. We sleep in Christ until resurrection and know nothing until judgement day; others believe they go immediately unto the bosom of Christ to wait for aforementioned judgement day.

For me - I don't care which one it is. Sleeping, I know nothing. Awake, I still have no travails here on earth. Win/win.

Native American philosophy - all life is interconnected. From earth we are born, nourished, and should return again to nourish new life. This makes sense to me.

Putting our bodies in boxes and then encased in concrete - an anathema to me. What a waste of N-P-K, water, and real estate. Perhaps there are too many of us now to do things properly. I don't know.

What was the question again? :p

[Ruv Draba]

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it?
The first rule of science is to admit what you don't know.

We're a species with only a few thousand years of recorded history, and the lives of organisms on our planet span only scores of years. Our universe operates on time-frames of billions of years or more. We have nothing like the species experience or knowledge to talk about existence in terms of geological periods, much less cosmological periods.

We know what we do when we're ignorant: we invent self-serving myths, typically around magic, survival and the propagation of our cultures and species. In short, when we think about things far beyond our own experience, we drive ourselves into individual and cultural psychopathy.

That's why I dismiss this question as irrelevant to a practical, sensible and useful life.

Here's what it would take for me to have a view about eternity: it would take us discovering that the universe is full of long-lived races with massive recorded histories, at least some of which have survived all the changes and cataclysms that we know the Universe to be subject to.

If that occurred, we'd begin to have the information we need to think about eternity -- but I suggest that we'd be asking questions, not inventing our own answers.

That hasn't happened, and even if it happened tomorrow, it would take waaaaay longer than my lifetime to work through such information and even decide what the important questions are.

Ergo, eternity is not a question that our generation needs to worry about, or any forseeable generation either.
To time?Inasmuch as time means anything to us, I think that it means a flow of changes that we can't reverse. Time's physically very orderly, in that changes seem to occur at the same relative rates - which makes it very easy to manage.

The best thing about time is also the thing we most regret: its irreversibility. Along with its orderliness, being irreversible gives us causality and consequence, the understanding and management of which is probably the highest human accomplishment. But, being irreversible, it undermines most of the reasons we want to manage it in the first place: to avoid irreversible consequences. :tongue

[Unique]

The best thing about time is also the thing we most regret: its irreversibility

According to Einstein time was like a river that flowed both ways. Too bad he died before the rest of us could understand how that worked. For humans, time appears to flow in one direction only. That may not always be the case. Shamans have been known to bend time, cease to exist in this time.

I rather think of it as the phenomenon the Navigators in Dune used to move those transport ships. And just because I can't do a specific thing does not mean that it cannot be done.

"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it."

YMMV

[AMCrenshaw]

Does any of this have anything to do with god? Course not.

Of course it does. A lot of traditions only think of eternity in terms of God. Because, as some one else stated, Eternity is forever without end and we are not.

Our universe operates on time-frames of billions of years or more.

What does that say about the minutes it takes me to write this read these posts and write this response?


That's why I dismiss this question as irrelevant to a practical, sensible and useful life.

The question of eternity? I agree actually (but that doesn't mean I won't ask the question, anyway; it matters to others).


Inasmuch as time means anything to us, I think that it means a flow of changes that we can't reverse. Time's physically very orderly, in that changes seem to occur at the same relative rates - which makes it very easy to manage.

The best thing about time is also the thing we most regret: its irreversibility side point: have you read Time's Arrow? . Along with its orderliness, being irreversible gives us causality and consequence, the understanding and management of which is probably the highest human accomplishment. But, being irreversible, it undermines most of the reasons we want to manage it in the first place: to avoid irreversible consequences.

Time is interesting to me for a lot of the reasons you bring up. I wonder how irreversible it is in so far as we have managed it. Which is to say that while Time as a physical phenomenon flies like an arrow, the majority of it is somehow frozen. So when we study history, it seems that what we consider fact is not the whole, accurate picture. I think this much is obvious, but it still makes me curious that our understanding of past events is mutable, and, in fact, involved in a time that flows both directions, if not outright in circles. (My understanding of a time period is forward, while the time I am understanding moves progressively backward).

I reduce time to its natural properties. Included in those natural properties are people's perception of and determination by time: the clock bell, the biological time of habit (I eat dinner at 7 or earlier, because I go to sleep at night), the inner experience, death, seasons, etc.

As most of you know about my thoughts and the ego, I won't have to go into that. But it seems that our consciousnesses arise from a no-thing that has in it no conceivably measured time (call it the timeless), and emerge in bodies and societies that are always, while alive, in time. Isn't this being-in-time primarily suffering? Our bodies are effectively dead just as they are born, especially when you considered our notion of how old the universe is. Too pessimistic? :)


Does anyone believe in timelessness (a dimension of our existence where All of Time, rather than/or eternity, exists? A sense that the future must exist, even if only in the imagination; or that we have no conceivable reason to see why the future will not exist. A sense that the past is still happening now, because, perhaps, of its irreversibility? 'Is there only now, and nothing to remember?' What does History have to do with Time? Do fictional representations of time ever have validity? Anything real? What does the lack of God mean for eternity, philosophically? How much of the present are we consciously and/or actually present in (things to consider: prolepsis, anticipation, memory) ?

[loquax]

Of course it does. A lot of traditions only think of eternity in terms of God. Because, as some one else stated, Eternity is forever without end and we are not. Yeah but I'm an atheist!

[veinglory]

I consider the nature of time beyond my day to day experience of it, and my use of it to order my appreciation of history and anticipation of future events, to be largely moot. A matter for those interested in that sort of thing. Whether time and/or space are infinite or not doesn't really effect me, and so doesn't really interest me. I don't even have an opinion on it.

[Higgins]

Of course it does. A lot of traditions only think of eternity in terms of God. Because, as some one else stated, Eternity is forever without end and we are not.


I think time is an area where modern religions have systematically failed to be as articulate as older modalities of religion. For example, in Mesoamerican religions, humans and gods worked cooperatively in keeping time and the order of the universe flowing -- as can be seen everywhere in the Classic Mayan obsessions with exact dates and a calendar more accurate than any other up until the 16th century.
And to take another example...if we take upper middle class post-Napoleonic modes of mourning for the dead...they only make sense if "eternity" is essentially an ideal and more or less timeless place. What interests me about upper middle class mourning of around 1808 to 1908 is that it is at once totally accessible (its traces are everywhere) and as conceptually remote as the Classic Mayan sense of human and divine cooperation in running the time system. Plus some things associated with it may explain why post-traumatic stress is seemingly a post 1908 problem.

[MumblingSage]

Higgins
And to take another example...if we take upper middle class post-Napoleonic modes of mourning for the dead...they only make sense if "eternity" is essentially an ideal and more or less timeless place.
What sort of modes are you speaking of here?

Unique
Those who don't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps their life force ceases to exist. >poof< Game, set, match. It's over. I hope this to be true. That's what they believed, ergo, that's how it should be. That seems kind of cruel to me. H.P. Lovecraft might look forward to oblivion, but I know plenty of 'want to be believers' who would give anything to be, as they would think, 'wrong'.

[deathwizard]

Through meditation, you witness in great detail the forward movement of time. Everything has a beginning, middle, and end -- in a linear, not circular fashion. As for eternity, we cannot fathom the vastness of time and space. A billion years might as well be an eternity. What's the difference, to creatures with lifespans of fewer than 100 years?

[Niniva]

Time by definition must be infinite because we know there was a "before the big gang." I can't believe that the big bang is a singular event in infinite time and infinite space; big bangs must happen infinitely often here.

(Infinity is a much easier concept for me, am I doing it wrong? I just look at one thing. Blow that image up until the view is a factor of ten larger (or smaller) than it was. Repeat until my imagination gets tired, and I remember that I am still no closer to infinity than I was when I started. In this way, I'm bigger than the known universe very quickly, and the next leap is more than ten times bigger than the known universe. The next leap is one-followed-by-a-hundred-zeroes times more than the known universe. After a few more leaps, there aren't enough molecules in the known universe to represent the factor of the known universe that I'm imagining, but I've made all of what, fifteen leaps? That really isn't enough to tire out the imagination yet!)

The future is already existent in one sense; everything will either do A, B, C, D, E, or some other option. This is going to happen, and nothing will stop it from happening; therefore, the future is already set from now until eternity. Our sun will burn out. Our planet will no longer be habitable. In fact, before either of these events, we will have another Ice Age of some size, another period of rapid mutation in life, another die off and rise of different life right here.

We will die out entirely to be replaced by more evolved humans or something else entirely; I know this because I am a giant among ancients but a midget among modern men. I have sat in furniture from the eighteen hundreds, and it feels like a child's toy.

We are changing over time, and we are different from who we were. Is anyone familiar with the Flynn effect? You actually are smarter than your ancestors were. Every decade, intelligence tests must be reset so that the average IQ remains 100 for young adults. The bar has to be raised.

We are stronger and faster than we were, too. The five minute mile used to be a dream, now it's a goal for amateurs, since the pros are nearing the three minute mark.

Women and men are becoming more alike as mate criterion shifts from gender roles to greater equality, making the female place kicker a reality and bringing the female baseball pitcher into possibility.

Time is a wonderful thing; we get better over time. Time is a terrible thing; we will die and be forgotten along with all of our knowledge. But life is a miracle, we will be replaced somewhere in this infinity of time and space.

Now then, the eternity of the soul is another matter entirely. I don't believe in a soul. The echos of a life may last a few years, but there is no eternity, just the infinity, which is mostly void anyway.

(Quite a bummer, really... I wish I could spend eternity with my hubby in this strange extended honeymoon that we call a marriage.)

[Ruv Draba]

What does that say about the minutes it takes me to write this read these posts and write this response?Why should a league have anything to say about a cubit? Really, both measurements are defined in terms of human utility - they say something about humans rather than about each other.

But here's the thing: a cosmological time-scale has no obvious human utility at the moment. Our appreciation of it is at best aesthetic, and pretty poor even at that.

Minutes however, have heaps of human utility. It's perhaps our most bargained (and stolen) measure these days.

The question of eternity? I agree actually (but that doesn't mean I won't ask the question, anyway; it matters to others).We're writers; we're allowed to go on about meaningless stuff. It just behooves us to remember that beauty isn't always truth. :D

Time is interesting to me for a lot of the reasons you bring up. I wonder how irreversible it is in so far as we have managed it.I smell a 'there is only the subjective' argument here. :D I'd strongly disagree with it. Time forces us to agree with one another more than our self-interest would prefer. (Try catching a bus between scheduled routes and see how well your subjective perception works).

But if you're talking about history, well that's not a physical quantity. It's just stories and facts and theories about events and what influenced them. History (I mean the human activity of study) depends on time, but time pays no regard to our study of history.

I reduce time to its natural properties. Included in those natural properties are people's perception of and determination by timeOur perception is a physical property of the thing perceived? That's like saying my reputation is somehow attached to my molecules.

Isn't this being-in-time primarily suffering?Trees abide in time, and so do comatose patients. Do either suffer? I doubt it.

The suffering you're talking about is not a property of time, but a property of: a) our physical condition and b) the operation of our minds. The application of time to suffering is simply how it varies with respect to changes in everything else.


Does anyone believe in timelessness (a dimension of our existence where All of Time, rather than/or eternity, exists?Someone might, but not me. :) We know that our appreciation of time is largely a function of our minds, but the application of time on us occurs anyway. We can create perceptions that feel timeless, but we can also be hypnotised to enjoy the taste of cold pork lard. This says nothing more than that our perceptions are manipulable via our minds.

I note that people who 'meditate themselves into timelessness' don't manage to get vast amounts of constructive thinking done. This tells me that their minds are reducing some function to produce this effect. (On the plus side, you can appreciate colours and other sensations more)


A sense that the future must exist, even if only in the imagination; or that we have no conceivable reason to see why the future will not exist. A sense that the past is still happening now, because, perhaps, of its irreversibility? I'm not persuaded that the future exists - except in a story sense; and there are many stories. The past is discernible mainly because time and motion tend to be orderly. There's no reasonable doubt that the past did exist, and there's fairly strong agreement in most cases as to what it was - but that's not an argument that it does exist.

What does the lack of God mean for eternity, philosophically? From my perspective, lack of god and lack of eternity point to the same thing: that we're inventing language for ideas we can't define constructively, can't identify physically and can't really use, except for pacification and social manipulation.

[Angelinity]

I believe in the Heart Sutra.

Thus, Sariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas; no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance, up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom no attainment, and no non attainment.

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SAVAHA

i second that.

human perception is by definition limited and flawed by its own physicality (we cannot truly relate to a reality with more than 3 dimensions) in the scheme of an 'infinite' universe that is possibly one of an 'infinite' number of universes, each a drop in an ocean. but an ocean of our reality has depth and breadth and shores, and critters living in it... so where does this take us.

if there is a God or Creator or a true reality, they lie well beyond our comprehension as physical beings. Time and Eternity are real when the concepts are applied to our 3-dimensional universe, but beyond that...

[loquax]

I really don't see how ancient/mysterious philosophies can explain time better than modern day science. When we don't understand something, we tend to mystify it, and through doing so we seem to gain a deeper understanding. I don't believe a minute of it. Never in history have we understood more about space and time than we do now. I think looking back only serves to cloud things.

[AMCrenshaw]

But here's the thing: a cosmological time-scale has no obvious human utility at the moment. Our appreciation of it is at best aesthetic, and pretty poor even at that.

If your bad deeds were frozen in-time for an eternity, would that perhaps help you think about your deeds (:) assuming nothing else more practical worked!) ? I don't have much time, but I thought you'd find that interesting.

I've found the vastness and immediacy of time humbling.

Someone might, but not me. We know that our appreciation of time is largely a function of our minds, but the application of time on us occurs anyway. We can create perceptions that feel timeless, but we can also be hypnotised to enjoy the taste of cold pork lard. This says nothing more than that our perceptions are manipulable via our minds.

Of course I meant, Is it possible to see the past and future at work now. It's very possibly impossible. But I think it's possible.

There are two quotes from Jeanette Winterson I always found entertaining:

"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours,
but no tenses for past, present, and future. That division does not exist.
What does that say about time?"

"Matter, that thing the most solid and well-known,
which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body,
is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light.
What does that say about the reality of the world?"

I wonder why our divisions of time are so much more practical. All maths are completely arbitrary, even if they work, for example.

AMC

[Bartholomew]

I think time has always, and will always exist. The Big Bang would have had to have started with some sort of matter and chemical reaction to explode outward. That matter would have had to come from somewhere.

Loquax; The Buddha's theory about eternal time come from a logical observation.

Cause --> Effect --> Cause --> Effect. He could see no logical starting point for such a chain, so he reached the conclusion that starting and stopping are human concepts, not intrinsic absolutes.

[deathwizard]

You have to achieve a peaceful state with a clear, focused mind. While in that state, you simply look around and see what you shall see. At this point, linear time becomes a blatantly obvious phenomenon.

That's not to say that linear time can't be multidimensional. But I believe, at least, that it moves inexorably forward, whether layered or not.

[Ruv Draba]

If your bad deeds were frozen in-time for an eternity, would that perhaps help you think about your deeds (:) assuming nothing else more practical worked!) ? I don't have much time, but I thought you'd find that interesting.Well, someone could take a photograph of my bad deeds, or videotape them. I think that would be confronting for just about anyone. On the other hand, I think that reviewing them every day would eventually desensitise me to them - in the same way that watching car-wrecks or amputations does.


"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours,
but no tenses for past, present, and future. That division does not exist.
What does that say about time?"I think that this misconception was originally from Whorf (of Sapir-Whorf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis) fame), and came without linguistic examples. It's since been debunked - e.g. here (http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&id=XSeGmS4uXykC&dq=%2Bhopi+%2Btime&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=UJgkZyn5y3&sig=tvYd9hynJxfSLgw6vhvEuWvuWGY&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP1,M1), and in the analysis of how Hopis plan their agriculture.


"Matter, that thing the most solid and well-known,
which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body,
is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light.
What does that say about the reality of the world?"Aesthetically, we have a new perception for matter, so that affects our art. In terms of the decisions we must make though, I'm not clear that it changes much. Matter still behaves as it does.


I wonder why our divisions of time are so much more practical. All maths are completely arbitrary, even if they work, for example.Maths are not arbitrary - either in pure or applied forms. A result like Rolle's theorem (http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&id=XSeGmS4uXykC&dq=%2Bhopi+%2Btime&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=UJgkZyn5y3&sig=tvYd9hynJxfSLgw6vhvEuWvuWGY&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP1,M1)say, is both a logical consequence of basic axioms, and a critical result for the application of mathematics to the physical world.

There simply isn't much fat in the axioms of mathematics, because mathematicians constantly trim any fat down. (And they're much better at doing that than any other branch of philosophy.)

If you want to discard Rolle's theorem, you'll have to throw away axioms that almost certainly, you'd much rather keep - like the existence of zero, or addition that behaves reliably across all numbers.

We have multiple number systems because our symbolic representation of numbers is cultural. We also have competing models for physical systems. But there's a strong reason that we don't have much competition in mathematical systems - it's because fundamentally, all mathematicians are talking about the same thing.

[Bartholomew]

Maths are not arbitrary - either in pure or applied forms. A result like Rolle's theorem (http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&id=XSeGmS4uXykC&dq=%2Bhopi+%2Btime&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=UJgkZyn5y3&sig=tvYd9hynJxfSLgw6vhvEuWvuWGY&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP1,M1)say, is both a logical consequence of basic axioms, and a critical result for the application of mathematics to the physical world.

There simply isn't much fat in the axioms of mathematics, because mathematicians constantly trim any fat down. (And they're much better at doing that than any other branch of philosophy.)



Even basic arithmetic depends on the human perspective that things can be grouped together. We say 5 and 5 are 10 because it is convenient and helpful to do so. It is no more a fundamental truth than, say, the ability to conjugate a verb. It exists the way it exists because we deem it so. It is a precise and accurate language--perhaps the most precise and most accurate language--but it is still just a language. No matter how closely you examine a line in real life, you will not find Y=MX+B. Just as you wouldn't find the word line.

But damn, aren't those phrases handy to have?

[Woodsie]

This in interesting to me and since you opened it up to all or most view points, I'll chime in my answer.

I do believe that eternity exists. It's also my own belief that our relationship to it takes on different forms as you move through it. For example, in the human body you decide your eternal destination and when you leave the body, through physical death, you enter into the eternity that you have chosen. As for our relationship to time, I believe that time, as measured by the sun and moon, exist only as a measuring device for those still in the physical body.



Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it? To time?

AMC

p.s. This could be quite fun. Looking for philosophic, scientific, aesthetic, and religious views.

[Unique]

I really don't see how ancient/mysterious philosophies can explain time better than modern day science. When we don't understand something, we tend to mystify it, and through doing so we seem to gain a deeper understanding. I don't believe a minute of it. Never in history have we understood more about space and time than we do now. I think looking back only serves to cloud things.

That is true only if we have never (humanity) reached this pinnacle before. Who is to say that human experience hasn't happened over and over again. Written records would not survive; nor would technology survive.

Humanity climbing up out of the muck, over and over again, as it were.
The Adam & Eve story over and over again. Perhaps we've done it faster this time. But personally, I don't believe this is the first time we've reached this pinnacle of "modern" science.

Someone upthread made a Hopi reference. Here is another one. If you can watch YouTube, wrap your mind around Hopi Renewal time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7cylfQtkDg). I find it fascinating and making a comforting kind of sense.

As always - YMMV

[loquax]

I think the pyramids would at least show evidence of light fixtures in the ceilings.

[Angelinity]

I think the pyramids would at least show evidence of light fixtures in the ceilings.

you're assuming that our technological breakthroughs are the only viable solutions/options. personally, i find our method of distributing energy through a maze of cables and wires rather clumsy and amateurish. Tesla had some simple and 'radical' ideas -- but that's a road we chose not to travel.

[loquax]

Looks like we're catching up (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080821/ts_afp/usitinternetenergychipcompanyintel) with the Aztecs.

In all seriousness, I've read my fair share of Graham Hancock, and I think it has some merit. I find it infinitely easier to believe in aliens than gods. But when you throw spirituality in there, it just doesn't work for me. The universe is profound enough without adding the supernatural to the mix. To quote Arthur C Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

If we went back in time a thousand years and showed off our cell phones, our televisions, our microwaves, would we be viewed as Gods? Would the people form spiritually related explanations? I think so, such is man's method of coping with a lack of understanding.

[Ruv Draba]

Even basic arithmetic depends on the human perspective that things can be grouped together. We say 5 and 5 are 10 because it is convenient and helpful to do so.While that's true, 5 and 10 are really adjectives and not nouns (five is really 'fiveness'). Those adjectives apply to the physical world, and they're independent of us. To see this, consider:

We had arithmetic before we actually had the axioms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms)for it. Our original arithmetical methods were based on 'rules' discovered by observation of the world. Rules like: if you assign one stone to each chicken you have, then the number of chickens you have in total is always equal to the number of stones. (If you then trade the stones, you get a form of local currency that's easier to handle than handling large numbers of chickens)

While we chose the axioms, they're not at all arbitrary. They hold to real-world observable properties like invariance (one chicken is always one chicken, not two ducks), symmetry (one chicken plus a duck equals a duck plus a chicken) and distributivity (a chicken added to a duck plus a goose is the same as a goose added to a chicken plus a duck).

Since those properties are true in every culture and every locale, the numerical 'nouns' in our arithmetic (really just abstractions of the properties of our numeric adjectives) ultimately mean the same things physically everywhere - even if the actual methods for addition or division, say, vary slightly.

When you abstract the nouns into symbols to get mathematics, the same applies.

[donroc]

Keeping it simple, Eternity is the 6th dimension storehouse of all Nows past present and future as well as all 5th Dimesional alternative nows. My feeble mind cannot grasp more. AKA, The Great ALL-AT-ONCE.

[Dale Emery]

I can't make sense of the idea of infinite space or time. How could they be unbounded? My small brain can't grasp that.

I can't make sense of the idea of finite space or time. How could they be bounded? What's the nature of the boundaries? My small brain can't grasp that.

There. Did that help?

Dale

[Shadow_Ferret]

[Mod mess up here]

[AMCrenshaw]

I'd like to switch gears then. Ruv had already referenced this point, but I'd like further discussion about it. For those who have no practical relationship with the question of time, is it beneficial (in a manner, perhaps, more profound than entertainment) to experiment with the representation of time in literature? What can fiction tell us about time that science cannot? Anything?

AMC

[Sarpedon]

Nothing objective.

Subjective perhaps, though science has plenty to say about that.

[oscuridad]

While we chose the axioms, they're not at all arbitrary. They hold to real-world observable properties like invariance (one chicken is always one chicken, not two ducks), symmetry (one chicken plus a duck equals a duck plus a chicken) and distributivity (a chicken added to a duck plus a goose is the same as a goose added to a chicken plus a duck).



you do realise you just started a religion, don't you?

[Higgins]

What sort of modes are you speaking of here?


I was thinking of the upper middle class post-Napoleonic kinds of mourning where the dead get a fairly modest tomb, but the living burden themselves with rather sumptuous mourning gear...an iron tiara for example.

An iron tiara worn for mourning.

Or not...if you are above the upper middle class and it is between 1808 and 1908...


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Queen_Alexandra-Louise_and_Victoria.jpg/432px-Queen_Alexandra-Louise_and_Victoria.jpg (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Queen_Alexandra-Louise_and_Victoria.jpg)

[Ruv Draba]

For those who have no practical relationship with the question of time, is it beneficial (in a manner, perhaps, more profound than entertainment) to experiment with the representation of time in literature? What can fiction tell us about time that science cannot?
Fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies. From that perspective, fiction can tell us whatever we want - but that doesn't make it true.

From a psychological perspective, fiction is valuable because lies reveal something about the liars, and those who believe the lies. An alien reading our hundred or so years of time-travel fiction, for instance, could guess very quickly that we're bad at accepting change and at facing death, that we're highly self-interested and insatiably curious voyeurs.

I doubt that fiction casts more than psychological and sociological light on ourselves (though I'd love to meet someone who has no practical relationship with the question of time. I'd ask him to tidy my house. :D)

[Higgins]

What can fiction tell us about time that science cannot? Anything?


We know from scientific studies that the human brain handles time very badly. Memories have such bad time labeling that other cues have to be used to sort out time sequences and even a little bit of suggestion can cause people to sort their "memories" into different time sequences, foreshortening or recombining as needed under different stimuli.

Hence possibly the attraction of big narratives: finally a case where time goes like we like to think it does...though it never actually does. The whole idea of a simple narrative history is pretty much a fiction at least as far as the actual brain functions are concerned according to science.

[Shadow_Ferret]

*posts just to see if veinglory will screw with his post*

:D

[oscuridad]

I've been reading through and wondering this: by time, do you mean our perception of the passing of linear time, which is entirely a construct of our own, or space-time, which is probably the closest thing to God that exists: omnipresent - check
omnipotent - check (ish)
omni... oh well, two out of three... alright one and a half out of three ain't bad, which makes Meatloaf Jesus and Jim Steinman the Holy Ghost...

Just a thought.

[Higgins]

I've been reading through and wondering this: by time, do you mean our perception of the passing of linear time, which is entirely a construct of our own, or space-time, which is probably the closest thing to God that exists: omnipresent - check
omnipotent - check (ish)
omni... oh well,

I was wondering when somebody was going to bring this up. Well...when you talk about human perception of time you are on a lot of shakey ground. First there is the notion of the extended present in which consciousness experiences itself (something of a fiction in many ways) and then you have the past which is rather poorly remembered as far as time goes and then you have the future which is full of fictional constructs.

Spacetime....as the manifolds of all fields, is at least verifiable in all directions.

[AMCrenshaw]

We know from scientific studies that the human brain handles time very badly. Memories have such bad time labeling that other cues have to be used to sort out time sequences and even a little bit of suggestion can cause people to sort their "memories" into different time sequences, foreshortening or recombining as needed under different stimuli.

Is this a matter of handling time badly? Or History?

Oscuridad: Both.


Nothing objective.

Subjective perhaps, though science has plenty to say about that.

In another thread, it has been somewhat sorted out that the meaning of any given text is left to the reader. Whether or not this is true, think about that in terms of what fiction might have to tell us about time. It's true that science might have a lot to say to humankind about time (and our relationship to its forms), but it's also true that not a lot of people are going to understand the science. Stories come in here---that is, if knowledge can exist in ways outside of the knowledge of the physically/materially factual. For some it can't (and these people remind me of Plato, who declared, of course, that philosophers are the wisest men). As far as meaning is concerned, what do stories have to say that science does not.


AMC

[Higgins]

Is this a matter of handling time badly? Or History?



The brain stores things (the stuff that gets brought up as memories) in a way that makes everything about time very problematic. There's no inherently stored sequence labelling with any memories for example and people will apparently assemble very different stories out of the same memories depending on suggestive stimuli.

Histories are a different matter. People produce those without much trouble. The problem is that histories are invariably in need of checking.
For example, if you read some one's biography, you'll often find that what they state on the basis of their memories (especially in their autobiographic writing) is very inaccurate compared to contemporary accounts or even their own diaries.

[Higgins]

It's true that science might have a lot to say to humankind about time (and our relationship to its forms), but it's also true that not a lot of people are going to understand the science. Stories come in here---that is, if knowledge can exist in ways outside of the knowledge of the physically/materially factual. For some it can't (and these people remind me of Plato, who declared, of course, that philosophers are the wisest men). As far as meaning is concerned, what do stories have to say that science does not.


There's no reason to go so far as to contrast whatever people imagine that they do not understand under the heading of science with whatever they imagine that they understand about time. The human problem with time is clear from any good historical work because any good historical work comments on its narrative sources and in that commentary you can find conflations and re-arrangements of events in mind-boggling amounts. You really don't need a notion of some absolute "scientific" time to see the strange problems that people have just describing events in a good approximation to their actual sequence.
I've found that you can look at almost anybody's moderately complex narrative of almost any thing and find basic problems with their consistancy in relating their implied narrative time to any verifiable actual sequence in time. In fact you can tell when people start making things up because the time sequence suddenly gets a bit tighter before degenerating again into confusion. In truthful narratives, the narrator often has to pause and go back and reconstruct time sequences. The average narrator with something to hide often forgets to forget the time sequence.

[deathwizard]

I've been reading through and wondering this: by time, do you mean our perception of the passing of linear time, which is entirely a construct of our own, or space-time, which is probably the closest thing to God that exists: omnipresent - check
omnipotent - check (ish)
omni... oh well, two out of three... alright one and a half out of three ain't bad, which makes Meatloaf Jesus and Jim Steinman the Holy Ghost...

Just a thought.

In my opinion, space-time and linear time co-exist naturally. Times moves only forward. We are in a perpetual state of beginning, middle, and end dominated by an ever-changing present. Ask me again, three beers from now.

[Bartholomew]

While that's true, 5 and 10 are really adjectives and not nouns (five is really 'fiveness'). Those adjectives apply to the physical world, and they're independent of us. To see this, consider:

We had arithmetic before we actually had the axioms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms)for it. Our original arithmetical methods were based on 'rules' discovered by observation of the world. Rules like: if you assign one stone to each chicken you have, then the number of chickens you have in total is always equal to the number of stones. (If you then trade the stones, you get a form of local currency that's easier to handle than handling large numbers of chickens)

While we chose the axioms, they're not at all arbitrary. They hold to real-world observable properties like invariance (one chicken is always one chicken, not two ducks), symmetry (one chicken plus a duck equals a duck plus a chicken) and distributivity (a chicken added to a duck plus a goose is the same as a goose added to a chicken plus a duck).

Since those properties are true in every culture and every locale, the numerical 'nouns' in our arithmetic (really just abstractions of the properties of our numeric adjectives) ultimately mean the same things physically everywhere - even if the actual methods for addition or division, say, vary slightly.

When you abstract the nouns into symbols to get mathematics, the same applies.

And matter exists in the forms we know because of their number of electrons and protons. But the numbering itself is arbitrary; yes, the system is perfectly consistent (Until you hit the weird, hypothetical math where oddities like Schrodinger's Cat could apparently exist.) -- but it only exists because we fathomed it so. Math would not exist without the human experience; it is utterly dependent on us.

You're saying that, (I think), we use math to precisely and accurately describe and manipulate our world, and that because of this precision and accuracy, mathematics must be innate.

I'm saying that the system is arbitrary, because it is based on a perspective. If that perspective changes--say, if all humans died and were replaced by quasi-sentient fungal nodes--math would cease to exist. One and one would still make two--if a human were around to see it that way.

To be sure though, we're arguing a very slight distinction. Your idea that math is innate is effectively no different from my idea that math is dependent on human consciousness--as, if we died, the nature of math would no longer be of any concern to us in either case.

[Ruv Draba]

And matter exists in the forms we know because of their number of electrons and protons. But the numbering itself is arbitrary; yes, the system is perfectly consistent (Until you hit the weird, hypothetical math where oddities like Schrodinger's Cat could apparently exist.) -- but it only exists because we fathomed it so. Math would not exist without the human experience; it is utterly dependent on us.A strong claim needs strong evidence, B. I'm still waiting to see any. (The math of Schrodinger's cat by the way, is consistent with the math of regular arithmetic - it's not an alternative system, but an extension)

We know that mammals can keep track of large litters of young - so they can differentiate individuals. If you can differentiate individuals then they can be ordered, and if they can be ordered then they can be counted. We know that arithmetic functions aren't culture-dependent. While I'm not saying that cats can count, I think that this argument shows that the necessary math-precursors aren't confined to the human species. There's nothing innately human about mathematics, unless you believe that differenting individuals and sequencing are pathologically human.

I'm saying that the system is arbitrary, because it is based on a perspective. If that perspective changes--say, if all humans died and were replaced by quasi-sentient fungal nodesI don't know what those things are, or how you know what they're like :tongue There may well be organisms that can't differentiate individuals or sequence, but clearly, many can. Even ducklings can arrange themselves in a line.

[Unique]

Is time truly linear or do humans just perceive it as such?

I've been reading some books lately that suggest that time is not linear but cirucular. And others in the past that suggested time could be 'bent'.
The description of a tesseract comes to mind. (Imagine my surprise when I learned that that was a real term and not one made up by Madeline L'Engle. (!)

I also wonder about the sheer volume of words for time in our culture; nanoseconds, milliseconds, eons, decades, days, weeks, hours .... we divide time almost infinitely. And yet other cultures, in their own languages can be as simple as now/not now. Why do you suppose that is?

Or the perennial question: 'If you didn't know how old you were, how old would you be?'

Lots to ponder.

Personally, I think if we are to ever travel in space, we had better learn how to 'bend' time or at least lose the thought of it being linear and trying to use burning fossil fuels hurtling masses of metal into the ether.

You can't get there that way. Perhaps Steven Hawking and his mathmatics has an answer. The math, perhaps, but the mechanics of it. Hmm. . . just a bit above my pay grade.

YMMV
>''<