A Justification of Time

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Prince_James, Jan 3, 2007.

  1. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    so when ever it is read it is always simultaneous with the reader regardless of when I posted it
     
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  3. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    But it still happened.
    When?
     
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  5. xcaleber Registered Member

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    ''Wow thanks for sharing that. This is the best explanation for what I have always considered to be true all along, but in a very easy to understand manner. Very interesting if you ask me.
     
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  7. Frud11 Banned Banned

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    Information and its measurement are a projection of a (human) neurobiological system. Information is always uncertain. There is no such thing as “complete” information. The human mind is capable of constructing models of reality. The existence of an external objective universe projecting information in our direction is a "given". We assume that something doesn't disappear when we aren't looking at it. How can you explain time or any other measurement as other than our own "mapping" of this information, that we accept is out there, outside of our brains?
     
  8. Gustav Banned Banned

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    ja

    couple of quotes

    the purpose of physical law is....

    “only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.”(bohr)


    Take space-time, for example. We organize our perceptions into events, and for many purposes it is illuminating to represent those events as points in an abstract four-dimensional continuum. This is so useful that most of us reify this abstract scheme, believing that we inhabit a world that is such a four- (or, for a few of us, ten-) dimensional continuum. The reification of abstract time and space goes so far back in human history that it's easy to miss the intellectual sleight of hand. The reification of electric and magnetic fields is more recent but also came to be taken for granted, until it started to unravel (for some of us) with the arrival of quantum electrodynamics. The strongest hints of how we have been fooling ourselves emerge when we try to reify quantum states, and thereby run into “the measurement problem” and “quantum nonlocality.” (mermin)

    reification
     
  9. machaon Registered Senior Member

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    If time were to suddenly reversed, we would not be aware of the change because we would be thinking in reverse. That being said how do we know we are not thinking in reverse right now? How is the direction of time relevant to our thought processes? I don't know. I am just curious as to how time is relevant outside the metabolic frenzy of the active brain. Intuitively, I would think that without motion there would be no time. So what difference would the direction of the motion (in time) make? Granted I am no Roger Penrose, but these questions seem persistent.
     
  10. Gustav Banned Banned

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    bah
    that too

    /flummoxed
     
  11. Frud11 Banned Banned

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    No, the idea is that time is a number (we 'make it up'), like temperature is.
    We 'see' change happen, but we have to change, to 'see' (anything); we have sticks poking up out of the ground (instruments), that can relate this idea, or notion, of ongoing change, and record and 'measure' things ("take the temperature", "take another temperature", "calculate the difference" or separation), and see pattern and order, but any observation is time-dependent.

    Substitute the word 'change' for time, and any sentence still 'works', usually. Distance, heat, and entropy are fundamental behaviours of the real world, and so is harmonic motion, or cyclic processes.

    Then I guess the question shifts to: why does change (entropy) only go one way? Why do we see an "arrow" of time?
     
  12. notme2000 The Art Of Fact Registered Senior Member

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    Isn't asking why still being a slave to that very force? As an answer always follows the question, and never in reverse. In a way, you are only enforcing it, and perhaps this is what keeps us from the 'answer'.
     
  13. Frud11 Banned Banned

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    Alternatively, the answer is the question.
     

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