What is time?Follow

The two most well known uncertainty relations are between: (space and momentum) and: (energy and time). The momentum is the product of mass and speed. Since space and momentum have direction, the actual relations number three: one for each spacial dimension. That is, by measuring the x-position, the x-momentum is not known - but if done correctly, the y and z components of both position and momentum could be left unaffected.

So by smacking a particle with, say, light of a very small wavelength you can know both where it was and when it was there. You won't know how fast it was going at that point in spacetime. Of course, this small wavelength light has knocked the heck out of the particle in question thus it is not known what speed it has now or where it is.

In before:

Then you vastly limit yourself and you will never make much of an impact.

Your attitude is also a different side to the same coin, by the way.

Edited, Jul 21st 2009 3:40pm by Belkira

Unless my beliefs are that a party system debases the integrity of government, and allow people not to become intellectually involved.

The lack of faith in the party system is one of my beliefs, so someone who 'belongs to a party but shares all of my beliefs' is a contradiction.

Thanks for playing, though.

What would the difference be? And how can we know? Is there any experiment we can do to tell the difference?

Okay. What would the difference be if time was independent of human experience?

I think you said that: time is not independent of human experience because: it is an integral part of human consciousness.

So is distance an integral part of human consciousness too? I assume the answer is yes. I could be wrong. I don't understand but I'm building up to a question which will help me understand. So I'd say that mass, temperature, pressure, color, light intensity, flavor, and everything we can observe and measure is "integral" to human experience, too. Again, maybe I'm wrong. So then what about actual objects, such as the Statue of Liberty or Pluto? Many humans are conscious of them, some are not. They are not "integral" to us. So they actually do exist (or could exist) independent of human experience?

Now I'm thinking your answer will be yes or no, but perhaps I've missed the point.

If the answer is no, then things are dependent on human experience: we create by observing (say, a new planet). I'm compelled (perhaps mistakenly) to assume we create it's entire back story at that time: (say, the record of all the asteroids which struck it, etc). So let's take a crater which, let's say, we find out was due to an object which bounced off the planet. The object is out there, somewhere, and left this mark. But we don't see the object. Did we create that object too? But we have not observed it - only it's effect. This is very woolly territory indeed since everything interacts with everything in a messy, complex way. Do we create a new object when we resolve it from the background?

If the answer is yes, things exist without us, but don't experience time. Even if, when we find them, it looks like they did.



I'd say the knowledge gained through the scientific method is one kind of knowledge, say scientific knowledge. And there are other sources of knowledge. People put various weights on various kinds of knowledge. If, instead, you'd like to call scientific knowledge something else, say information and knowledge gained from other sources is the only kind of thing that you want to call knowledge that is fine. It's just a little non-standard. When people look at the Statue of Liberty, I think most would say they know what color it is.

What I mean is that without an account of consciousness, that knowledge doesn't actually mean anything, and is not significant as obtaining truth. Developing an account of the human consciousness can show us when our assumptions and inferences about the world are made legitimately. What do i mean by legitimately? Well that would be a broad description for any judgment which does not arrogantly overstep the bounds of epistemology. If you don't have that in mind, then you're liable to make all kinds of weird inferences about the universe, out there, without recognizing how the human interacts with the universe and changes it.

What I'm saying is that it's kind of weird and self defeating to attempt the scientific quest for knowledge without at least first establishing that it's something that you can actually do.



I'm not convinced that this question is even intelligible, and therefore also not answerable. If I actually could answer the question, I'd undermine my entire point, because doing so would indicate that I could separate time and space from my mind, and think about a universe where the two are not totally bound together. Is it even possible for you to conceive of a universe not governed by space and time, where space and time are not indivisible parts of your psyche? I can't think of one.



Yeah, but more precisely, space is.



There are two things to say here. The first is that all of those things are made perceptible in the first place by the projection of space and time onto objects; they enable the understanding of all of those things in the first place, and the second is that those qualities themselves are nothing more than effects of the various arrangements of objects in the world, depending on what you ean by them. Temperature is a quality of objects, of how fast they move, but it's appearance and experience aren't, and those experiences (and just the experiences, not the objects themselves) are dictated by our projection of order onto the world.



Yup. Time lets us understand them so that they're intelligible, rather than all batsh*t crazy.

Edited, Jul 22nd 2009 7:26pm by Pensive

My reply is that it's not even possible to conceive of an existence where independent time could be the case. It's not even possible to imagine the alternative, much less describe it. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's like asking: "what's the alternative to tables being made of atoms?" There isn't one: the atoms themselves are constitutive of the table itself, as time is to human experience. The dis-analogy though is that atoms are things, and time is not a thing.

Time isn't something that you experience, rather, you use it to do the experiencing. It's a means by which you experience things in the first place, to cook your sensations into an orderly meal before digesting them.

The third one's kind of going over my head.

Don't forget to bring your towel.