Does time exist?

Originally posted by vistesd
Here is a now, and there is a now,
and in between there moos a cow.

I try to catch her, but once again
she runs away twixt where and when.

🙂

You win.

Well played, sir.

Originally posted by dottewell
You win.

Well played, sir.

Just the mood I'm in... 😛

The metaphysics of time
should always rime—

and if it does not,
Here and Now will both be shot.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
The Theory of Relativity, if it is false, can be proved to be false. All you need is one reproducible measurement that disagrees with the theory.

Christians are never willing to describe God in enough detail that his existence could be disproven even in principle.

Once God reveals Himself that question is over too, so what?
It is a belief we are talking about, one wrap in logic the other experience.
Kelly

Originally posted by sonhouse
Time is DEFINED as a dimension. That doesn't MAKE it a dimension. There is a big differance. For instance, what if the universe was being drawn through some higher dimensional sieve and it dissolves before and behind the sieve, we think time must exist because we REMEMBER stuff in the past, we see signs of past activity but that doesn't actually PROVE there ...[text shortened]... in real time, like RIGHT now, oops, now that's in the past. Get the main concept here?

The sign post up ahead, the twilight zone.
Before, during, and after desribe a points in reference to some event as soon as you have a 'event' all three words apply. It is simple direct and to the point, refusing to believe that isn't so is simply putting ones heads between your legs and turning off the brain.
Kelly

Originally posted by twhitehead
Time is not described specifically by atheists or a concept used specifically by atheists. Time is described in many scientific theory's. Are you trying to imply that science is atheistic in nature?

By many today, yes.
Kelly

Originally posted by twhitehead
Do you just not understand English very well or are you deliberately misinterpreting what he said?

He said that a mile is not a thing like a cow or a pen , it's as simple as that. He also implied that it doesn't belong to the world of the conceptual either . Now does this mean he thinks the mile exists in the ether , or the mile exists in a non- dimension?
I know of only two states of existence , mental and external reality. Something can exist in both but it can't exist in neither of them. So if you rule out one (which dotty seemed to do) then there is only one catagory left. Unless he can invent a new one.

Originally posted by KellyJay
The sign post up ahead, the twilight zone.
Before, during, and after desribe a points in reference to some event as soon as you have a 'event' all three words apply. It is simple direct and to the point, refusing to believe that isn't so is simply putting ones heads between your legs and turning off the brain.
Kelly

Before, during, and after desribe a points in reference to some event as soon as you have a 'event' all three words apply.

But that’s just because an “event” is a happening “in a certain place during a particular interval of time,” by definition (from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary). We simply cannot sensibly ask about “a time before time” or “a place outside of space.”

Look, I’m as easily bewitched by language as anyone, as we impose our perceptual and conceptual grammar on the world (which we really cannot escape doing, I think). So we might speak of the instantiation of time-space dimensionality as an “event”—but there is really no such thing as an “event” until there is time-space dimensionality. And since our ability to think is dimensionally determined, just as are our perceptions, we simply need to learn to stop at that “singularity.” And that is, I admit, a difficult discipline for our wondering minds, that want to go on wondering about a “beyond beyond the beyond” or a “then before ‘when’” or a “someplace outside of ‘where’.”

But at that point, we move beyond the language of description and explanation, and enter the realm of poetry—which is why so much religious language (including my own) is poetic: that is the best we can do when confronted with the ineffable...

Originally posted by vistesd
[b]Before, during, and after desribe a points in reference to some event as soon as you have a 'event' all three words apply.

But that’s just because an “event” is a happening “in a certain place during a particular interval of time,” by definition (from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary). We simply cannot sensibly as ...[text shortened]... including my own) is poetic: that is the best we can do when confronted with the ineffable...[/b]

I thought you had left the forums for good! Is this your Lenten penance? 😉

Look, I’m as easily bewitched by language as anyone, as we impose our perceptual and conceptual grammar on the world ...

How do we know that if we cannot know the world as it is and make a comparison? Why can it not be that the world is as our perceptions (and, yes grammar) make it out to be?

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
Do you maintain that the mind and the universe are somehow separate?

Of course not. Do you maintain that everything that exists in the mind exists? One could argue that a mile does infact exist because it exists as a small electrical charge that runs as a circuit of neurons through the brain , but I'm sure that is not what dotty means by a mile existing.

Originally posted by lucifershammer
I thought you had left the forums for good! Is this your Lenten penance? 😉

[b]Look, I’m as easily bewitched by language as anyone, as we impose our perceptual and conceptual grammar on the world ...

How do we know that if we cannot know the world as it is and make a comparison? Why can it not be that the world is as our perceptions (and, yes grammar) make it out to be?[/b]

I thought you had left the forums for good! Is this your Lenten penance?

LOL! It might be! I actually left the internet altogether for about three months. Good to talk with you again, my friend.

How do we know that if we cannot know the world as it is and make a comparison? Why can it not be that the world is as our perceptions (and, yes grammar) make it out to be?

Good questions. I am really grinding the mill of my mind on the grist of this discussion as I go along, but my first responsa—

(1) I don’t know what you mean by “comparison” here. I tend to use the word “world” in the same sense as “universe” (or the Hebrew olam)—that is, as the totality, the all-of-all-of-it, with due regard to the notions of multiple worlds/universes. The problem is that the totality has no proper comparison or adequate analogy: we draw all our comparisons and analogies from within, so to speak. To what can one compare the All—or, to use religious language, the One without a second? Whenever there is a second (or more), then the two “worlds” are either in relationship, or not; if they are in relationship, then a new totality is defined...

You see, here, how I must use the language of dimensionality to even talk about such stuff? To speak about the “whole” is as difficult for metaphysics as for religion.

(2) The world may or may not be as our perceptions/grammar (the “grammar of our consciousness,” so to speak) make it out to be. The fact is, as I see it, that we cannot get out of the architecture of our consciousness to know. There are great minds who are objective realists, representational realists, transcendental idealists, and on and on. I don’t know how to label myself.

I think that we have experiences of the world (and/or of our own minds: the old Zen paradox of the inner and the outer) in which our grammar breaks down—so-call “mystical,” or unmediated, or pre-conceptual experiences. I think that our mind (think metaphorically of right-brain/left-brain stuff) immediately begins the attempt to translate such experiences into conceptually coherent terms: images, words, etc., much as sensory input is translated by the visual cortex into a picture in our head (hence, visions, auditions and such). In other words, there is an attempt to translate the experience into terms that fit the innate “grammar of our consciousness.”

And we also consciously attempt the Sisyphean task of translating what is ineffable—because it transcends our “grammar”—into effable terms. This takes the form of poetry, parable, allegory, Zen koan-like paradoxes, etc.—also music, art, dance. I think that this process is fundamentally aesthetic, according to our aesthetic urge and our aesthetic grammar. I don’t think that experiences that transcend our ability to properly conceptualize them means that they “come from” a supernatural realm—if by supernatural, one means “extra-natural,” or outside the natural totality. Therefore I do not, provisionally, admit the supernatural category—and I might call myself a non-aligned, non-supernaturalist, mystical monist...

The big mistake is to think that the effable translations necessarily accurately represent the ineffable reality. The fact is that we cannot translate such experiences—which lie at the root of every religion—without imposing the grammar of our consciousness on them.

In the end, I do not know whether or not we can know the thing-in-itself—but I do not think that we can know whether or not we can know the thing-in-itself, because the architecture/grammar of our consciousness is part of it, rooted in it: I like to use the word “entanglement.”

I think that, using quasi-religious terminology, that the ultimate justification for religious expression itself is as an aesthetic response to experiences of the ineffable mystery; as I said in another thread, I think that religion is properly closer to Beethoven than to biology—a sentiment that I doubt you will be surprised to hear from me! 🙂

My brain’s running down, and I have a few chores to do, so I’ll catch you later.

Again, good to talk to you again!

Originally posted by scottishinnz
It would if the game was all that ever existed.

It would if the game was all that ever existed
SCOTTY

It still doesn't matter because unless you show that the game cannot start until there is a time dimension for it to start in then it makes no difference. One could equally say that the time clock for the game is dependent on the game itself and not the other way round.

Originally posted by twhitehead
There you go again trying to equate color with miles. Color is a property of which one specifically named value is blue. Length is another property of which one specifically named value is 1 Mile.
A baby can observe length and react to the size of objects just as much as they react to the color of objects. The human eyes determine colour, angle of incide ...[text shortened]... not determined by whether or not babies can see it or whether you are able to conceptualize it.

"the existence of something is not determined by whether or not babies can see it or whether you are able to conceptualize it." WHITEY

I would go with that . We have other ways of proving whether something exists or not other than conceptiualisation. Time seems to me to fail the proof and I'm still waiting for some proof.

This is the basic question , how do we determine whether something exists or not and does a "time" dimension fulfil this criteria? If not then time is faith.

Originally posted by vistesd
[b]Before, during, and after desribe a points in reference to some event as soon as you have a 'event' all three words apply.

But that’s just because an “event” is a happening “in a certain place during a particular interval of time,” by definition (from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary). We simply cannot sensibly as ...[text shortened]... including my own) is poetic: that is the best we can do when confronted with the ineffable...[/b]

The way you are speaking about the BB and the singularity is basically similar to time before the BB isn’t it? The singularity has been described as all energy, matter, and everything else being in some zero mass point at one time, as if that is something we can wrap our minds around, and the BB has something with no mass supposedly blowing up throwing all matter and energy throughout this universe, and you cannot think of time before the BB? Can we sensibly talk about the beginnings using science at all, or is it all just simply beliefs and faith about what could have happened? Having to say all energy, matter, and blah, blah, and blah were in zero mass sort of throws all natural probabilities out the window if we have to alter reality to fit in such warped descriptions in my opinion. Saying space time events are limited to space time boundaries, but where are those boundaries, and why are they there? How do you know that space and time are bound together where one couldn’t be here before the other and so on, the same with matter, energy, and everything else you want to talk about?
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
The way you are speaking about the BB and the singularity is basically similar to time before the BB isn’t it? The singularity has been described as all energy, matter, and everything else being in some zero mass point at one time, as if that is something we can wrap our minds around, and the BB has something with no mass supposedly blowing up throwing all ...[text shortened]... ther and so on, the same with matter, energy, and everything else you want to talk about?
Kelly

I think my point is that if there is any temporal fixed point called “the beginning of time,” then we cannot get beyond that point, and any talk about “before the beginning of time” is technically nonsensical (though perhaps wonderfully allusive in mythic poetry, which to me is no trivial thing in itself).

At any singularity where space-time dimensionality breaks down, so does our thinking, since the “conceptual grammar” of our consciousness includes dimensionality—despite the fact that we can construct grammatical phrases such as “before time” or “beyond space.” Even to construct such phrases, I have to use dimensional language. I have no conceptual grammar of non-dimensionality, and I really don’t know how to separate dimensional time from dimensional space—at least in terms of anything happening, that is, any eventuality at all. That is, I would say that in no-time and no-space nothing is and nothing happens—but that “nothing” is not a “something” that I can talk about either.

This is so whether time-space dimensionality is real (the realist position), or a function of the architecture of our consciousness itself (Kant)—so I really need not have faith in either of these viewpoints to say what I am saying.

If someone says, “God is a being outside of time,” I literally do not know what that means—and I don’t think they do either. I suspect that what people tend to visualize is the universe as a dimensional sphere nested inside a larger dimensional sphere, in which is God.

I think there are only two philosophically sensible choices if one wants to talk about God:

(1) God is a being, bounded by dimensionality like all other beings, even if such a God is the most powerful and most knowledgeable of all beings; or

(2) What we sometimes call “God” is being-itself—the totality in essence and expression, the ultimate one/whole which manifests in many transient forms—as opposed to a being—in which case dimensionality is a property of God. This is the way the word “God” is used, when it is used, in nondualistic (or monistic) systems like Advaita Vedanta—and is viewed as the heresy of pantheism in dualistic religions. I am a monist.