There is no past, nor a future, unless they are active in a present frame

And really, the headline says it all. How can there be a past, if there is only a present time is ever experienced?


The answer was simple to me... time could not exist unless as an eternal present. The brain does something to ourselves, it allows us to feel a past and hopefully, times yet to come. The deep psychological and biological connections of the brain can only be understood a system akin to ''dragging'' through instantaneous moments of space. We not only act like bradyons, the particles of fields which move below the speed of light, but this is itself an indication how we experience any dilation of time at all. If we did not have this peculiar mechanism, could an eternal being stuck in the present be god him or herself?


Does that explode the philosophical menbrane?

 

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Personally i always believe time travel exists and our past is not as solid as one is taught.

 

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Time, future, past and present are mere concepts, so i agree with your premise.
Still, why would somebody who holds no (psychological) concepts of past and future be considered a god ?:bugeye:

 

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Einstein of course unequivocally showed that both time and space are not absolute.
That is now a fact and beyond question.
We look into the night sky every night at our closest stellar neighbour outside the Sun, and we are seeing it as it was 4.3 years ago.
When NASA received its long awaited signal from the MSL Curiosity that it had reached the top of Mars atmosphere, it had already been on the ground for quite a few minutes [around 7 from memory]
The supposed thought paradox, "the twin experiment" shows that time travel would indeed be possible if we had the technology to achieve near relativistic speeds.
The Alcubierre drive space warp methodology although still speculative, does not contravene any know laws of physics or GR.
So yeah, any sufficiently advanced civilisation, could indeed travel into the future as I have described, although the past would be more difficult.

 

Because on the large scale of things, you are part of the eternal present we call existence. The big bang, probably isn't infinite. I've been arguing for a while now, infinities are largely abused and their understanding in the use of calculus is weak.

But if nothing exists other than the present moment all we really have in ''space'' are photographs of instantaneous situations on the quantum level which happen to dilate because there is no such thing as a true definition of when events can happen, meaning causality breaks down at the quantum level.

 

Nor did he show they were equivalent... Minkowski did this, who was his ''teacher.'' High praise in finding a symmetry which seems to fit changes in systems so well, but superfluous at best since changing systems doesn't require a time dimension. In GR Einstein changed coordinates using a diffeopmorphism constraint on positions in space, which pretty much did the same thing as Lorentz boots did, they required a fundamental law that the laws of physics themselves where the same in every coordinate frame.

 

Isn't even our awareness of the present questionable? I mean by the time I can consciously tag this moment as now, it has slipped by and become a new moment. There is a time delay between now as it exists for us as bodies in the world, and the now that gets processed as THIS moment we are conscious of. So it seems that even the present, as a static frame of reference, is but an illusion in a ceaseless flow of information--a convention we find useful much as we do the other conventions of the past and the future.

 

I can see how time future and time past are mere concepts, but is that true for the present?

 

The brain has time keeper cells, which pulsate, like a metronome, which allows the brain to keep time/beat. A time stamp is added to memory, allowing us to perceive sequence of events, from which logical order will appear. For example, the metronome of time, stamped onto memories, takes snap shots of the movement of the prey as he transverse distance, allowing the predator to track his prey; anticipates the future. Concepts of past and present come from an awareness of the time stamp process in sequence.

There is another wild card, connected to long term and short term memory. If we only had short term memory, then the time stamping process would only be in the short term, with longer term memory more dissolved and forgotten. One could live and react in the present (short term sequence of events) but will lack long term memory of a more distant past, from which one can anticipate a longer term future. Long term future needs long term memories. The predator can cut his prey off at the pass by anticipating the future sequence of events. Longer term memory of his past, allows him to anticipate further into the future, knowing where the prey will be tomorrow by remembering where it was yesterday.

Humans needed a good long term memory before it could open up the mind beyond the present. Language and alphabets were important for creating a foundation for long term memories; letter, numbers, words, rituals, laws, stay the same. By tweaking the ratio of long and short term memory one can create all types of states of mind.

Say one had no short term memory, but only had long term memory stamps. One can remember the past and use that to anticipate the future in the long term, but the present would not make sense, unless it was defined in the context of the past and future; drone. Without the short term memory, in the now, loses that unique feeling within time, and becomes lump as another day of routine.

Say one had good short term memory, and a good long term memory, but a weak mid term memory. In other words, they remember their youth, and can live in the present and future, but are not too aware of their short term past. This may be someone who sits in the bar thinking of glory days, reliving those memories in stories of the present, while the days seem to blend into the next, as they drift toward old age and retirement.

By tweaking the scope and ratios of long and short one can change how one views the world around them. Conservatives tend to use long term traditions, while liberals are more the new. There is a different ratio of long and short, which makes it harder to create a meeting of the minds with the same data. Each applies the data differently.

 

Off course the present is very real, just like the future will be very real and the past was very real,
but without the concepts of future and past, there would be no need for a concept of present imo.

 

Although our apprehension of the environment may be discontinuous[1] and visual perception may have a "snapshot"[2] discreteness about it that contributes to this need of a specious present... These segments nevertheless span several milliseconds and some of their component properties lag and overshoot each other integration-wise. I.e., these brain-spawned moments don't remotely qualify as indivisible and elemental enough to be objective, fundamental "nows". Likewise, cognition is a drawn-out process: Recognition of objects and awareness as linguistic thought extends over a boggling number of Planck time units. This doesn't even address one interval / procedure of cognition potentially being intertwined with the next one before it fully ends.

"Evidence" of change as our perceived sequence of appearing / disappearing events [as opposed to changes co-existing along / constituting the form of a spatial structure] requires a memory. Where states usefully categorized as "before / past" are compared to the likewise holding / storage of a so-called current state and the imaginative anticipation of "after / future states". Such functionally organized, biotic complexity is missing from both the macroscopic universe in general and the quantum level. There would be no experience of and no intellective survival interest about a "flow of change" organized as past, present, future outside of conscious agents (those with the capacity to engender / entertain said concepts).

[1] Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously
http://medicalxpress.com/print256193806.html

[2] Christof Koch: If NCCs [neural correlates of consciousness] arise within the various processing centers in the brain at different times, shouldn't each of the attributes be perceived with a time lag? How is the brain able to integrate all these individual activities? Neurobiologist Semir Zeki of University College London has been researching this problem for many years. By measuring how subjects perceive squares that can randomly change color as they move on a screen, he has shown that a change in color of such an object is seen 60 to 80 milliseconds faster than a change in the direction of that object's movement. That is, one attribute is registered at a different time than another attribute of the same moment. This finding suggests that there may not be much truth to the presumed unity of consciousness --at least not when we are looking at extremely short time spans.

[...] Our perception seems to be the result of a sequence of individual snapshots, a sequence of moments, like individual, discrete movie frames that, when quickly scrolling past us, we experience as continuous motion. [...] we experience events that occur more or less at the same moment as synchronous. And events that reach us sequentially are perceived in that order. Depending on the study, the duration of such snapshots is between 20 and 200 milliseconds. We do not know yet whether this discrepancy reflects the crudeness of our instruments or some fundamental quality of neurons. Still, such discrete perceptual snapshots may explain the common observation that time sometimes seems to pass more slowly or quickly. --The Movie in Your Head; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 2005 ​

 

Yes, I'd say biologically, we are deluded about the nature of what ''change'' actually means, if it even happens globally. There are two solutions which makes time superfluous and they are not observer-dependent. One is that change is how we define time, that means it leads us to our second axiom in nature, that physical change is a causal notion of a real dimension in space, while yet, change happens in space one doesn't normally say, it is a dimension itself.

 

Or at least... one shouldn't normally say... yet normally many do quote the sci-pop agenda of pushing an existence of time and an arrow of directionality when it can be fully understood as a psychological arrow of time, a delusion again of the mind thinking it is somehow special.

 

Yes, that is an older model of a more better understanding of the General theory of relativity, in which we find time globally disappearing.

 

According to George Ellis (aside from his own paper to suggest otherwise) admits there is nothing 'special' attached to the present moment in physics. In other words, everything might as well just happen at once; we drag through what we sense as time, measured by duration of changes in the outside world - yet if there was no change, how can intelligent being define a time passing by? Without relative changes in the universe, we wouldn't be able to even prove a ''concept (at best)'' description of time.

 

Reiku hasn't been able to learn relativity by trolling the physics & math threads so he thought he'd come darken the doorstoop of Philosophy.

 

No, as I told you before, what I really have interest in is psychology. I can taste the anger in your post, like some sharp driven object into someone's proverbial rib cage, but not mine.


I could sweep the floor with you when it concerns the general and special topics of relativity... I think I am actually one of the few here that can actually talk about the fundamental problems of relativity making you and me, distantly apart. I know there are inconsistencies with quantum mechanics when interpreting relativity, the question is do you? The answer is inexorably, no, as always. The reason why, is because since I have been here, you have been making.... posts that have no critical value to audience here other than the same people who have the same agenda, just to... troll the hell out other peoples threads because you have nothing creative yourself to even demonstrate... not even in your last 10 posts.... probably let alone a 100.

 

Anyway.... there is a toy model of time I can present which explains our understanding of time... and that is by identifying the duration of time \(\Delta t\) equal to the perception of events, which has been elaborated in post 11 by CC. The present can be given simply as \(t_1\), the past \(t_0\) and the future as \(t_2\). Through mathematics, we find out interestingly \(t_1\) is the conjugate of \(t_2\) making the past complimentary to the future. We obtain this by saying the future is a collection of the present moment added with a dilation \(\Delta t\)


\(t_1 + \Delta t = t_2\)


equally the past can be found as


\(t_1 - \Delta t = t_0\)


As with all conjugates, they can be factored giving


\(t_{1}^{2} - \Delta t^{2}\)


This is the commutative ring of the factored expression given.

 

I recollect entire threads being deleted when they were started by the sockpuppet of a permanently banned member [after the latter got re-zapped]. That "seems" to have ended, but... Ye unwary posters out there with a penchant for many replies and an introducing of sub-topics be warned...

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Of course. That would explain a lot.