Time exists only in the future.

[HexHammer]

Oh. Well could you briefly explain why it is inappropriate to direct you to my blog, HexHammer?

I've already read it, so why would I read it again in an inferior state? I was suggesting a cozy chatter to read up on it, thus it would be apporopiate for him, not me.

[uwot]

Oh. Well could you briefly explain why it is inappropriate to direct you to my blog, HexHammer?

I've already read it, so why would I read it again in an inferior state? I was suggesting a cozy chatter to read up on it, thus it would be apporopiate for him, not me.

There you have it, cozy chatters, an endorsement from HexHammer himself. What better reason to read my blog? http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/

[Ginkgo]

duzsek, you titled your post: "Time exists only in the future."

You have not acknowledged time exists only in your mind. All these other opinions (and that is what they boil down to) are afterthoughts. Mind's need to measure begets this concept of time we have conjured in our minds simply because mind is insistent in it's need to know. What we currently "know" about time increases with each generation as mind never is satisfied and will continue seeking answers to it's own questions. To believe or accept time 'only' exists in the future does not acknowledge this 'future' even exists. There is no future but a continuum of Now, the everlasting, infinite Now... past and future merely a device for mind to measure.

I think what you are saying is basically right in relation to duzsek's post.

There are of course a number of different theories of time. It is possible that time only exists within the mind and cannot exist outside of consciousness. We find a similar type of idea with Kant's apriori explanation for time.

If duzsek said, "Time exists only as a series of nows" then this would be the basis for a quantum explanation for time. One interesting idea is that within the quantum world there is no flow of time. In the classical world our minds just interpret time as flowing.

[mtmynd1]

One interesting idea is that within the quantum world there is no flow of time. In the classical world our minds just interpret time as flowing.

If we wanted to say there is 'no flow of time' or 'time flows' is merely a means for us to communicate in the best means we have at our disposal that 'time' is, first of all, a concept within the mind itself, i.e. time only exists in the (hu'man) mind. Secondly, we have to understand what we hu'mans do is talk. That is our best quality that suits us as a species. We spend an inordinate amount of energy, money, and especially our moments together "talking"... just as you and I are doing here on the board... along with everyone else!

To talk is only the beginning. We have a need to be understood! We can chatter our asses off over a bottle of wine or a couple of joints and what happens...we talk. So in order to be understood as well as possible, we use a common language that, together, we agree we comprehend, at least in definition.

That whole spiel was to clarify "flow" as a means of making the concept understandable to others. I should have written that in the first place but being hu'man I talk.

[Sal Scilicet]

Time is a word, nothing more. Like it or not’, try as we might, this word ‘time’ does not ‘refer’ to anything you can point a stick at. We use this word habitually, carelessly and thoughtlessly, just as we most often use every other word in our indispensable, memorised lexicon, as a convenient, strictly conventional, rhetorical device. In this case, to describe “the experience of sensory perception”.

Experience is necessarily intensely personal, never corporate or collegial. (“Consensus” – aka “groupthink” – is always reluctant compromise dressed up as “unanimous agreement”.) Nevertheless, nothing daunting, we use the first person pronouns “I” and “we” to happily create the pervasive illusions of “my self”, “the conscious mind” and “the body corporate” (otherwise known as “society” and “we the people”) and many similar such comforting rubrics. And we always get away with these blatant conceits because we all adhere to the unwritten dictum that (“in polite society”) one never bothers to explain what one meant (past completed) by the words one is obliged to use. “My words speak for themselves” is the universal, unassailable defence.

Just so. “My experience of time passing” is due to the observation that my optic nerve cannot transmit a complete picture of ‘the world out there’ to the visual cortex in my brain. Nor can my ears convey an entire symphony, complete sentence, or whole words, to the brain’s corresponding aural centres. (Let’s not even consider, at this stage, the imaginative and varied meanings we eventually attach to the raw data.)

The point is that my sensory perception is received, registered and processed linearly, or in an analogue order, one meticulous pixel after the previous. With the inevitable consequence that my brain’s cerebral response (whatever that might be) must occur in an equally meticulous sequence of neuronal firings. ‘Time’ passes before “the penny drops”.

We never respond instantaneously to the things we see and hear. What we respond to is what we have stored in memory, after the fact. What we frequently and conveniently overlook, in our frantic earnest to demonstrate that we understood perfectly well what was said and what we read, is that our sensory perception, acute as it may be, is never perfect. We are never fully informed about what the other meant by what s/he wrote or said. Most of what we blithely rely on as “seeing reality as it is” is pure guesswork. A little humility goes a long way.

[Ginkgo]

Time is a word, nothing more. Like it or not’, try as we might, this word ‘time’ does not ‘refer’ to anything you can point a stick at.

That depends on how you regard time. If time "is had" by some other more basic property then it has no independent existence.

Experience is necessarily intensely personal, never corporate or collegial. (“Consensus” – aka “groupthink” – is always reluctant compromise dressed up as “unanimous agreement”.) Nevertheless, nothing daunting, we use the first person pronouns “I” and “we” to happily create the pervasive illusions of “my self”, “the conscious mind” and “the body corporate” (otherwise known as “society” and “we the people”) and many similar such comforting rubrics. And we always get away with these blatant conceits because we all adhere to the unwritten dictum that (“in polite society”) one never bothers to explain what one meant (past completed) by the words one is obliged to use. “My words speak for themselves” is the universal, unassailable defence.

Just so. “My experience of time passing” is due to the observation that my optic nerve cannot transmit a complete picture of ‘the world out there’ to the visual cortex in my brain. Nor can my ears convey an entire symphony, complete sentence, or whole words, to the brain’s corresponding aural centres. (Let’s not even consider, at this stage, the imaginative and varied meanings we eventually attach to the raw data.)

Are you are saying the first person perspective is viewing the world from a particular point of view? If so I agree.

The point is that my sensory perception is received, registered and processed linearly, or in an analogue order, one meticulous pixel after the previous. With the inevitable consequence that my brain’s cerebral response (whatever that might be) must occur in an equally meticulous sequence of neuronal firings. ‘Time’ passes before “the penny drops”.

I think your analogy is a good one. We do try and put the world together via the senses- pixel by pixel. However, most of what gets into the brain goes largely unnoticed. So in Platonic terms I guess we could say abstract categories are an important part of consciousness. By that I mean abstract categories are a neurological process. Abstraction enables us to know that any number of different types of tables all share basic features. As you suggest, it is when we focus our attention on particulars that the first person perspective presents itself.

[Sal Scilicet]

Time is a word, nothing more. Like it or not’, try as we might, this word ‘time’ does not ‘refer’ to anything you can point a stick at.

That depends on how you regard time. If time "is had" by some other more basic property then it has no independent existence.

Are you are saying the first person perspective is viewing the world from a particular point of view? If so I agree.

I think your analogy is a good one. We do try and put the world together via the senses- pixel by pixel. However, most of what gets into the brain goes largely unnoticed. So in Platonic terms I guess we could say abstract categories are an important part of consciousness. By that I mean abstract categories are a neurological process. Abstraction enables us to know that any number of different types of tables all share basic features. As you suggest, it is when we focus our attention on particulars that the first person perspective presents itself.

Thank you. But let’s not, for the purpose of the original topic, get too deeply embroiled here in the alleged nature, function and consequence of “abstract categories” vis-a-vis “consciousness”.

And no, I don’t think I was saying “the first person perspective is viewing the world from a particular point of view”. With respect, that is a circular argument, “providing evidence for the validity of an assertion, which assumes the validity of the assertion”.

I prefer to assume that “the world out there” is always going to be an elaborate, indispensable confabulation, a narrative, that only “I”, the person speaking, can hold as reliably – however temporarily – “real”. Not as a supposedly optional “point of view”. To the person speaking, there can be no other than what “sense” my brain makes.

(BTW, the linguistic conventions of grammar and syntax require that the person speaking is unavoidably obliged to adopt the “I” position. Whence come all those pervasive and alluring illusions, “the self”, “the mind”, “awareness” and “consciousness”. The words we use.)

How often do we surprise ourselves at what we say and write, in rapid response to what we see and hear, without benefit of a prepared script. The brain, I guess, responding spontaneously as it does to sensory stimuli, promptly elicits a new string of words, without any apparent conscious effort. Who is in charge here? (“The ghost in the machine.”)

Thus, “I” can only say that only “I” can know what meaningful sense “I” make of all “I” see and hear. “I” can never be sure what “the other”, commonly addressed as “you”, can and cannot observe. All we have to rely on are the words we use. And that not very clearly.

Suffice it to say, for the purpose of the topic at hand, whatever may have just occurred (in my subsequently recollected and verbally articulated “experience”) that provokes me to call “sensory perception” occurs by dint of single nerve fibres carrying distinct electrical charges in a strictly chronological order, “I” then verbalise as “time passing”.

[HexHammer]

Time is a word, nothing more. Like it or not’, try as we might, this word ‘time’ does not ‘refer’ to anything you can point a stick at. We use this word habitually, carelessly and thoughtlessly, just as we most often use every other word in our indispensable, memorised lexicon, as a convenient, strictly conventional, rhetorical device. In this case, to describe “the experience of sensory perception”.

I see you have a good knowledge of psychology and such, but totally lacks the understanding of Special Relativity Theory.

Go read up on it.

[HexHammer]

There you have it, cozy chatters, an endorsement from HexHammer himself. What better reason to read my blog? http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/

This is more confusing than tutoring, sorry to say mr uwot ..this isn't useable!

[uwot]

There you have it, cozy chatters, an endorsement from HexHammer himself. What better reason to read my blog? http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/

This is more confusing than tutoring, sorry to say mr uwot ..this isn't useable!

I'm sorry to hear that, HexHammer. I'm trying to make ideas that are usually only expressed in mathematical terms accessible to people who don't speak maths. It's very hard for me to judge how I am doing until people tell me. If you wish, I'll take you through it step by step. What's the first confusing bit?

[HexHammer]

I'm sorry to hear that, HexHammer. I'm trying to make ideas that are usually only expressed in mathematical terms accessible to people who don't speak maths. It's very hard for me to judge how I am doing until people tell me. If you wish, I'll take you through it step by step. What's the first confusing bit?

I greatful for your offer, but I must decline, various articles such as wiki's take on the matter will describe it very simply and clearly.

[duszek]

You cannot point to "time" in the real world, yes, but you can point a little bit to it, in a way.

You can point to a watch whose pointers or hands have moved in the meantime.
The pointer or hand pointing to seconds shows us all the time that time passes or gives us a reliable illusion of it.

You can point to a calander.

We need the concept of time and a device to measure the flow of "it" in order to coordinate our actions in the future.

In the stone-age men coordinating their hunting activities for the next day might have agreed to meet "behind this big stone" "when the sun starts to rise above the horizon". Or when "the rooster makes a wake-up call".

[cladking]

We measure time in order to be at a certain place in the future because other people want to be there too and so we can meet them.

To attend a lecture for example.

The present time does not exist because it is either not yet or already gone.

Past time is only relevant as experience stored in our memory which we use to make better plans for the future.

Time comes and then it will go.

Nobody knows all of its nature but it might be much more than merely a dimension and the root of all creation. It appears to be the only inexorible force. It marches on waiting for no man and it keeps all objects from occupying the same space. Perhaps even the big bang was an expression of its power after it had itself coalesced into matter.

There's no way of knowing at this time but time may exist only in the moment as we percieve. But in any case it appears to be the most fundamental aspect of reality. Understanding reality in the absense of being able to measure time is meaningless.

[duszek]

Time comes ?

I would rather say: The right moment comes.

The right coordination of circumstances for a particular action on the agent´s part.

Shall I go for a run now or a little bit later ?

Is my stomach up to it, after a big warm meal not long ago ?
Is the weather tolerable enough ?
Any further arguments to the contrary ?

And if not then I perform an effort of will and lift the limbs.

Because the right moment can go away again and I will have to postpone the run into the future.

[cladking]

Time comes ?

I would rather say: The right moment comes.

The right coordination of circumstances for a particular action on the agent´s part.

Shall I go for a run now or a little bit later ?

Is my stomach up to it, after a big warm meal not long ago ?
Is the weather tolerable enough ?
Any further arguments to the contrary ?

And if not then I perform an effort of will and lift the limbs.

Because the right moment can go away again and I will have to postpone the run into the future.

"Time" doesn't so much come and go as our experience of it does. A child is born and his time to have children will come. Time itself is immutable in reality (so far as can be proven) and changes things at a regular rate that we perceive to be highly irregular.

When I use the term "moment" I'm referring to a theoretical shortest unit of time during which activity based on chaos can occur. It's much shorter than the "moment" we decide to go for a walk. This decision takes time for synapses to fire and us to recognize the importance (maybe about .1 seconds?). The universe changes a great deal in this lenght of time. Future conditions are highly dependent on the events that occur in even a tiny fraction of a tenth of a second.

Reality doesn't exist in a human framework but it and all of nature exists in its own framework that we are hardly privy to. We have difficulty in predicting even the largest events or the implications and consequences of even the greatest changes. In the world of man that is dependent on others and our inventions prediction is often possible so it seems to us now days that we control it but actully we don't even understand the forces at play. We don't understand the rules under which reality appears to operate.

I don't really know where "time" fits in all this but the fact is that time is an important aspect of reality and without our ability to measure it we'd have a wholly different view of reality and a wholly different science. Reality, as we know it, couldn't exist outside time and its apparent passage. Statis is impossible in the real world except in the very short term. Without time anything in stasis could never have come into existence. Just as you can't shield against gravity neither can you shield time. Anything outside of these observations is science fiction at best or the codified logic of math. Math doesn't exist in the real world except to the degree it's logical. Reality is not dependent on math but some of her apparent "rules" can be discovered by math. This is because of the logic of nature and not the logic of math which duplicates it.