What is time?Follow

Ahh.

Don't like that one too much, but the rest aren't that bad.

You can't imagine time going on without us? Really? I think most people do that.



I described it. Time passes, even when no humans, or life, existed. We see the traces of it. Simple.



I can imagine a table being made of things other then atoms. I can invent the math to go with that alternate reality.

I agree time is essential to human experience.

What is just flatly bizarre is to think human experience is essential to time passing.



What is the difference? Is light not something I experience, but something I use to do the experiencing?



This says nothing about why time cannot pass independent of human experience.

You've already indicated there is no experiment we can do which would tell the difference. Which is fine. As we discussed, there is scientific and non-scientific knowledge.

No, no it doesn't.



Exactly. Quantum mechanics. That's constantly at the forefront of research. It has nothing to do with this discussion. As you have already acknowledged there are no experiments which can tell the difference between whether or not you are right or wrong.

If you have actual knowledge that supports your view that we actually create objects by observing them, I'm interested. Let me give you an example: let's say you have religious knowledge. You could point me to a passage in a particular book. I could read that book and I would have access to that knowledge. Right now, I think the knowledge you are appealing to is pure reason but I see lots of appeals to emotion like when you said "taint of human experience" or "the peak of anthropocentric arrogance". I'm sure you realize that to many people, it would seem arrogant to claim time started when humans started and ends when humans end. And I'm sure you've thought about that and have some reply. Using the standard of "but that makes us seem arrogant" to determine what is true does not strike me as useful. It is arrogant to say we know some laws of nature or the age of the universe or can make vaccines to protect us. I'm not asking you to make an argument that makes humans appear not arrogant.



That all seems to have happened before humans were alive. Scientists talk all the time about how old this meteor strike is on Earth and the age of rocks and stars and even the age of the Universe. What would you like them to say? I think you pretty much said that these statements are meaningless when you said:



So if a scientist finds a rock that is - how old exactly? older then the first human? older then the modern physics concept of time? Then it is meaningless to discuss it's age?

Of course, the point I was replying to is that you said: "It's not even possible to imagine the alternative, much less describe it." in reference to time passing without humans. So I think not only is it possible to imagine it, most people do.

That makes no sense to me. Plenty of things exist independent of human existence. We have the "scientific right" to talk about it.

Is anyone else starting to notice a pattern with pensive?

Oh, ok. Must just be me then.

"what's the alternative to tables being made of atoms?"

A really f'n heavy table.

On Topic: Time is easy. If sh*t happens, time exists. You don't need people for sh*t to happen so time exists whether your big head is here or not.

The breakdown in understanding time that some people have is how they view it. Time is not something we understand in the same way as width is not something we understand. We can't understand it because we and nothing we can perceive can exist without it. We exist within its boundaries, without width, we don't exist (there is no such thing as a 2D object, no, a picture is not a 2D object); without time, we don't exist.

Arguing about whether time exists if we're not here is like arguing whether the universe exists if we're not here. It's unfathomably ignorant to think that the universe just blinks out of existence when the last human dies.

Nobody I know has ever said the earth (or any other entity, living or otherwise) "experienced time". Time passes. We as human beings have the power to observe the passage of time, nothing more.

I'm not trying to insult you here, but you do realize you're full of ****, right? You're merely abstracting things in whatever way contorts the view to match your own warped perspective.

Read again what I wrote.



Note what I said we were observing and stop trying to twist things into some ridiculous anti-discussion about impractical matters of irrelevant thought. That's the problem with philosophy - people tend to want to observe that which cannot be observed and then talk about it as if it was tangible.

This is phenomenally ironic considering what I'm trying to get across, exceptionally frustrating that I can't communicate what I want to. I mean I know I'm not the best at communicating sometimes, so I'm going to ask you on faith to realize that the view concerning time that I express is born purely from a desire not to observe what cannot be observed.



Do you sort of get what I mean by saying that time is a psychological coping mechanism? Space is also. They're the ways we can think, the logic elements which define thought, and nothing more. A sun blowing up doesn't mean that time enters into the universe, anywhere. It means that a sun blew up. What part of that is temporal in any way aside from a retro-active consideration of it, by humans? Point it out to me; show e something that's "time."



I'm not sure how I can phase this differently, and I'm not very good at analogies. If you didn't have this discussion though, nothing at all would be testable. The defining conditions of concepts necessarily can't be subject to the rules of those concepts themselves, but the concepts, or backgrounds can enable the existence of the things: the conditions of what it means to be a cat, aren't cats; the conditions of what it means for something to exist in time, are not themselves temporal. You can't use the words that describe things which exist in time to describe time proper, but if you don't attempt to describe time proper, you lose knowledge and comprehension of the things that exist in time.

I'd wager many of you don't actually understand what Pensive is saying in regards to the space time continuum. Of course, it's possible that I don't, either. You could rephrase the argument thusly: our understanding of spacetime does not match the reality of the phenomenon.

Philosophers use space and time to refer to our perceptions, rather than what might be occuring in actuality. That doesn't mean that they think nothing is happening in actuality.

Kavek's weak arrow of time hits you for 230 damage (piercing).

Yes, I do understand what you are saying. If you reply directly to the apparent contradictions which I have already pointed out to you, that would help.

By the way, no, they don't define thought, or limit it. Our definition of time can, and has, changed in science. Science strives to have definitions consistent with our experience as much as your definitions seem at odds with it.



We can measure how long ago that (seemed) to have occurred. Time passed since then and stuff happened during that time. It all hangs together: all the time measurements make sense together. You could say "light is a psychological coping mechanism" and that "a sun blowing up doesn't mean that light enters the universe" and "what part of that is luminescent in any way aside from a retro-active consideration of it, by humans?" and finally: "point it out to me: show me something that is light" and you would be equally wrong.

Of course light is a word in a language, English, which purports to describe something in the real world. Just like time. The way we are using these words can be wrong. Just wrong. Light seems to be made of photons and electromagnetic waves. Both particles and waves at the same time. That's science. It accounts for stuff like that, already, without Pensive coming along and saying it is all a psychological coping mechanism.



Of course it would.



This has nothing to do with science. Your understanding of time and my understanding of time have no effect on the measurements we take. You could, for example, be convinced time is speeding up and build a clock which runs faster each moment. If you describe exactly how that works (you know, with math) I can translate your findings into my understanding of time (my clock, my math) and find our measurements agree. Yay! Science works.

Pensive claims things exist before we observe them, but do not experience time. And once we observe them, they do experience time. Yet Pensive also claims that the history we observe did happen. But it didn't happen in time. So "time" is what happens when humans are looking and "ptime" is a new word for what passes when humans are not looking. But both of these are psychological coping mechanisms by humans - and it doesn't matter. Maybe Pensive would like a third term for the true time: which we don't even know about: "ttime" or something. That is the thing which really passes - and all what we know are only approximations to this.

What is the difference between time and ptime? Can you measure it? There is no way to tell. Because all experiments measure ptime: we are never "there" - we are always "here" looking at some voltage or graph which is some measure we can correlate with time. Some measurements just have a bit more accuracy then others.