Objectivity.
- Thread starter Wizard of Whatever
- Start date
Но не для тебя. А если никого не останется живого, то Луна тоже перестанет существовать?
Wizard of Whatever
Valued Senior Member
No, yours aren't. I accept that yours are not. Accept that mine are.
It would still exist if life perished, just as it did prior to conscious organisms evolving. It just won't be a "picture" arising from neural processing of sensory information, anymore. Or the conceptual understanding of it as a natural satellite revolving around the earth, anymore. And anything else brain dependent.
It will still exist in its mindless "dark" (so to speak) as whatever it ultimately is -- an organization of excitations in quantum fields, or some other abstract framework or ontological speculation that an authority figure might submit as an example of a material manner of being. Usually (cautiously) left alone as a general placeholder.
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Nope. The Moon exists even if no one is there to watch it.
If I die someone else will see it. If humanity dies, then a wolf somewhere will see it. If all life on Earth is destroyed, then when life arises again, they will see it.
Because the Moon objectively exists.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Except in philosophy, apparently...
James R said:
Why should I accept that? It sounds completely delusional and you've given me no reason to believe it.
Интересно посмотреть, как выглядит реальность, не пропущенная через сознание. Мы же моделируем реальность не просто преобразовывая в мозге различные излучения, но и сравнивая один момент времени с другим. Вернее, сравнивая положение материи в различные моменты времени. Так называемая длительность, без которой ничего не может существовать. Так вот вопрос: существует ли эта длительность вне нашего мозга? Что является носителем этой длительности вне мозга?
Time outside your head would have to accommodate the rate of change at the subatomic level. The maximum unit for that would be a Planck time. And that's purely if you accepted the "presentism" interpretation of what time is, where only this temporary "now" exists (a particular global state or configuration of the universe which will be immediately replaced by the next one).
Humans consciously experience change at a rate that is measured in variable millisecond durations. That's vastly too slow (or temporally large) to serve as the measuring stick for the rate that the universe would objectively be changing (above). Again, that's if the so-called "flow of time" or the replacement of one now with the next one was real, rather than dependent on brain cognition speciously "moving" from one co-existing different state to the next in the human body's worldline.
There are three views about the nature of time: presentism, eternalism, and the growing block universe (GBU). There's actually a fourth, called the "shrinking block universe", but it is rarely espoused by anyone. "Presentism" is widely regarded as the stance that the "naive realist" or average person entertains. You can see graphic depictions of the three here, although the labels and descriptions probably won't translate to Russian if they're part of the image: The reality of time
Carroll also uses "possibilism" as an alternative name for the GBU.
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
(Deleted remnant of earlier text never posted)
His theory proposes that time is not a fundamental dimension, but rather an illusion emerging from the changing, static configurations (“shapes”) of the universe. It posits a relational, rather than absolute, view of space and time, where only the relative positions and arrangements of objects (shapes) hold physical reality. I read a couple chapters of his book, and SDT seemed just hopelessly untestable.
Julian Barbour's Shape Dynamics theory might be a fifth, though some see it as a cousin of BU.
His theory proposes that time is not a fundamental dimension, but rather an illusion emerging from the changing, static configurations (“shapes”) of the universe. It posits a relational, rather than absolute, view of space and time, where only the relative positions and arrangements of objects (shapes) hold physical reality. I read a couple chapters of his book, and SDT seemed just hopelessly untestable.
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If there is no consciousness, there is no one to "look."
Well, if you are looking for "time's arrow" it's entropy - the process of moving from order to disorder. We will always see this process, and often use it as a cue to determine the "direction of time."
If you are asking "what determines how long we perceive events to be?" that's a big mess.
Firstly there are types of time sense - sub-second, seconds to minutes, Circadian, and longer term (months to years.) All of them are affected by EVERYTHING - arousal vs boredom, drugs and alcohol, age, body temperature, interest, things like that. We have identified a few brain structures that deai with time, like the basal ganglia and the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Our time sense is notoriously bad; at the second or sub-second level people often perceive unusual events happening out of order, or two different temporal events happening simultaneously. That's mostly because our nervous system is slow, so our brain does tricks to try to make our perception of time from various senses synchronous.
An abstraction like Platonia would certainly seem to defy testing. Even a musical composition(?) inspired by it...
- In Platonia (intro): What are we to make of time? Julian Barbour believes that our perception of time as an arrow is an illusion; instead, he has posited a vast metaverse called Platonia, a configuration space that contains every possible permutation of every iota in the cosmos. In this unimaginably large landscape all Nows, conceivable and inconceivable, past and future, co-exist as point instants – ‘reality-slices’. Each is complete with the mind contents of every sentient being that inhabits them, and this provides the false perception of continuity.
- https://iai.tv/articles/the-elegant-universe-auid-349?ts=1769325697
EXCERPT: We call this Shape Dynamics. It is much closer to the way Leibniz and Mach thought. It leads to a radically different way of describing gravity but one that still essentially agrees with the actual predictions of Einstein's theory...
[...] In your book The End of Time you argue that time is an illusion. How did the need for a quantum theory of gravity impact this?
Both Leibniz and Mach argued that time as such does not exist. It is not like a pre-existing line on which one can place different instants in which the Universe has particular shapes formed by the things that coexist in a given instant. Instead, Leibniz said, "time is the succession of coexisting things".
In my way of putting it, there is just a succession of shapes of the Universe and no pre-existing 'amount of time' between them. Mach, for his part, said: "It is utterly impossible to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things." The most direct application of these ideas in a context in which one tries to describe the whole universe in quantum-mechanical terms, which nearly all physicists think is essential, leads to an equation in which time does not appear at all. Nothing seems to happen.
Of course, if his Platonia is a geometrical "landscape" constituted of all possible configurations of the cosmos (the different ways that its particles or whatever can be spatially arranged), then a path through those shapes or forms might be meandering rather than a straight line. Possibly a Darwinian-like competition going on with respect to which one (as the next) is most similar to the last one, and thereby maintaining overall coherence.
Though, just like with the block-universe, the "movement" would apparently have to be a trick of brain consciousness, since everything is actually static. (Unless he's attributing wave function collapse to making the transition from one configuration to next possible: "Barbour suspects that the wave function is somehow constrained by the 'terrain' of Platonia."
- Experiment is arguably the master of theory in science. What cosmological observation would you most like to see?
Unambiguous evidence that the universe closes up on itself in three-dimensional space as the surface of the Earth does in two dimensions. I am then almost certain that Shape Dynamics would be the right way to describe the universe.
And how would this then inform the way we understand the universe?
There is a huge difference between a spatially closed universe and an infinite one. Indeed, the difference is literally infinite. In many ways a closed universe is an attractive concept because, in Einstein's words, "the series of causes of mechanical phenomena is closed". More ambitiously, it is the necessary condition for us to be able to hope for a complete self-contained description of the Universe. That is obviously an attractive possibility.
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Wizard of Whatever
Valued Senior Member
You're just a self-centered egotist, who can't understand any thing outside his own little box. So be it. I'm done here.
Egotism aside, I understand what you're claiming just fine. It is nonsensical and unevidenced, like I said. You haven't even tried to make an argument for it.
Good. You weren't contributing anything useful to the discussion anyway.
Wizard of Whatever
Valued Senior Member
One more thing, I contribute more than your diatribes. For a robot you are very wordy though.
Most things (outcomes) are objective, in that they don't need my awareness to make them real, like billvon describing the moon existing as a reality no matter who has knowledge of it or not. But, it's my awareness, my knowledge, my experience, of whatever is objective, that is subjective. That's how I tend to see it.
You must live in some kind of parallel universe.
Or are you just assuming that quantity is better than quality?
Wizard of Whatever
Valued Senior Member