Philosophy Now Forum

Sal Scilicet wrote: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.

Nonsense!

You can't put a stick to radiowaves, yet we use it excessivly in these information times.

Put a stick to feelings, General Patton couldn't and paid dearly for it, when the general public made an outcry as his brute behaviour bashing a soldier with his pistol for cowardice.

There are many things that we can't put a stick to as of such, but we can messure them, when 2 clocks were messured after 1 was stationary on the ground, and another were put in an areoplane, they would messure different times as predicted due to SRT, so it was proven beyond reasonable doubt, and you can put a stick to that.

It's beyond me why no other can come up with this anology, only showing how feebleminded thinkers they are, thus only cozy chatters, not philosophers!

Time is the consciouse awarenes of change.

HexHammer wrote:You haven't read the SRT explanation of time?

Depends, I've read Einstein's book for the layman,"Relativity"(have you?), which was pretty much about SRT and in it he talks all about measuring time and how we can safely assume we're measuring the same time if we find ourselves moving in a uniform way with respect to other uniformly movers. So in this respect I think that my statement about Time being our subjective measurement of change in matter on reasonably safe grounds so far but look forward to hearing rom you why not.

Now in his GRT I'd heard that there is no such thing as 'Time' just 'SpaceTime' with 'Time' being a spatial dimension but given that, in general, I think Time the bit between my birth and my death I think I'll leave such stuff up to the physicists and metaphysicians.

Memo duszek.

Please do not send me any more private messages in French, demanding to know, with insulting faux humility (“je m’incline”), under the discrete cover of your own secure (highly commendable) anonymity, “to whom you owe the honour”. Please do not ask me to reveal my alleged “true identity”.

Contrary to popular belief, to say, “I am”, does not reveal a real person. “I” is a convenient, conventional rhetorical device. With it we habitually create the evocative, persuasive illusion of “personality”, “individuality” and all the associated comforting familiarity of a “responsible, self-conscious, conscientious, moral agent”. This is just one of many indispensable, linguistically constructed illusions.

The first person pronoun “I” is merely a convenient public position of speech. Nothing more. The word does not “refer to” anything. “I” evokes the universally acknowledged person speaking, that’s all. This is the rhetorical position each one of us must adopt in order to express “a personal opinion”. Which can only be discursively formulated in standard, conventional rhetoric (clichés, metaphors and similes) that are then supposed to be taken for granted as “self-explanatory”.

“Sal Scilicet” is not a real person. Neither is “duszek”. Any more than a drivers licence, with recent photograph, is a real person. A real person is a mystery. A figment of the imagination. When a man says, “this is my wife”, he is not referring to a real person. He is using a convenient, conventional, semantic system for the purpose of engaging in efficient social intercourse. To create “my wife”. A commonly accepted cliché.

All that is required for this behaviour to appear to work so deceptively well is that everyone accepts the vocabulary and the rules of grammar and syntax. Meanwhile, the woman standing next to the man is not a real person either. Not even the bathroom mirror will tell you who you really are. What you see is a reflection of your face. Not “the real me”.

Our intended meaning can’t be conveyed by means of the words we use. We have to decide (guess) what the other may have meant. The perception that we often get it right (more or less, we can simply never be sure), builds the illusion that “my intended meaning” was accurately transmitted. It was not. Whatever meaning you attach is your own.

What we understand is what we have internalised as “the truth”. That is based on individual experience, intellect and opportunity. We must assume that what we see and hear will consistently confirm our assumptions. When we believe we detect “cognitive dissonance”, we rise to defend our assumptions. We all do this. We have no choice.

The people we really like and get along with are those who habitually make the right noises, those we like to believe confirm our assumptions. Those who don’t, are perceived as a threat. That seems to be a law of nature. If it were not so, our species could not have made it to here.

I do not expect you to agree with any of this. Not because I think you are stupid. We have never met. As I wrote to you elsewhere, in this silent arena we lack all the usual cues (sex, build, mode of dress, posture, body language, facial expressions, gestures, accent, intonation, tone of voice, inflexion, scent, ambient noises … and the context of the familiar social setting in which people meet to converse.)

Every participant is dealing with foreigners. “Who are you?” is impossible to answer. There is no reliable means available for independent verification. Some might quite rightly consider that a distinct advantage. Anonymity could perhaps even encourage some valiant attempt at unsentimental “objectivity”, forlorn as that enterprise often seems. Of course, pseudonyms also invite all sorts of poor etiquette, as we speak.

“Who are you?” is useful as a strictly impersonal, legal (drivers licence, passport) question … name, address, telephone number, date of birth, etc. For that specific purpose, the response may then be recorded as “who I am” (claim to be). But this adds no value to deciding whether I’m a suitable lover, bricklayer, teacher, parent, blog correspondent …

On any Internet forum “no one knows you’re (not) a dog”. That being (un/fortunately?) unavoidable, I could tell you anything “about my (ostensible) self”. I prefer not to insult your intelligence by expecting you to take whatever anecdotal stories I present on faith, at face value, as ‘evidence’.

“Who” I claim to be (let alone who I am or believe myself to be) cannot add value to what I write. I insist that my text shall necessarily stand and fall on its merits (if any). It’s up to the reader to decide, by each our own lights, such alleged merits. No one else can help with that.

I have no idea who you are, or what you really think and believe. All I have is what you wrote. Here, we assume we are dealing with real people at our peril. Hence the ubiquitous acrimony.

Hello Scilicet.

There will be no private messages from me any more. C´est promis.

I realize now and rather too late that I should have waited for the circumstances to compose themselves into a "picture" of what kind of person I am dealing with.
Your real identity has never interested me.
Your last post has revealed everything that I ever wanted to know about you, thank you.

I am sorry and apologize for the inconvenience.


P.S. If someone says "n´est-ce pas" then it can be assumed that he or she likes a little bit of French now and then, n´est-ce pas ?
Or so I thought, but I seem to have been sadly wrong.

" … I should have waited for the circumstances to compose themselves into a "picture" of what kind of person I am dealing with.
Your real identity has never interested me. Your last post has revealed everything that I ever wanted to know about you, thank you."

What a shame that you are persuaded to so freely admit to the need to believe you can obtain “a picture of what kind of person I am dealing with”, purely on the basis of the text. A popular misconception, to be sure, fairly endemic on these Internet fora. And that is surely what Aristotle identified as the ‘ad hominem fallacy’ – preferring to address “the author” (a ‘straw man’ of our own creation) instead of the text.

Whereas I, in my turn, need to believe “the real person” is a mystery. A figment of the imagination. We cannot see “real persons” on the street, “in the flesh”, as it were. Yet you expect and believe you can identify a “real person” in a written text. You’re entitled to your precious illusions, of course. (As am I.) It just seems such a crying shame that you believe, if only you had but “waited for the circumstances to compose themselves, a picture of a real person” will miraculously emerge from the text.

You know that we can never “wait for the circumstances to compose themselves”. There isn’t time. We must react to the situation at hand, as we find it. That is how our miraculous brain has got us all the way to here. If it were not so, we could not drive a car at speed on the highway.

We react to stimuli. Mostly intuitively, without thinking about it. There isn’t time. We walk and negotiate stairs and can even ride a bicycle, without ever thinking about it. If we do recklessly pause to observe our actions, we hesitate, stumble and fall. That is also how we talk and interact with each other. Intuitively. The brain operates most of the time “on autopilot”.

If it were not so, we could not function in society. We would always be tongue-tied and “lost for words”. We are not. We are socially adept, competent. We blurt out our responses before we even realise what we just said. Sometimes we just manage to bite our tongue (“better not say that”). Sometimes we find ourselves thinking, “did I really say that?”

We have all been socially conditioned to perform roles as consummate actors. “All the world’s a stage and we the players on it.” So good are we at the roles we play, we are not even aware that we are performing on stage. From our earliest youth, we have intuitively internalised all the appropriate scripts, suitable to each situation as we find it.

We have learned, until it has become insensate (“second nature”), to embody elaborate characters, each one different, according to the situations and the people we love, meet casually, work with … and those we “do not recognise” (whose behaviour is contrary to our culturally determined expectations.) The trouble is, the coherent “person” we so confidently pretend to extract from the flimsiest evidence, such as a few lines of text, is a fabulous creature entirely of our own invention. A fictitious character with whom we expect to “communicate intelligibly”.

That is why, I believe, these contrived electronically mediated “discussions” are so fraught, inherently frustrating and for many ultimately so infuriating. We keep mistakenly expecting our wholly text-based, purely imaginary, yet nevertheless somehow morally coherent interlocutors (ephemeral figments all) to respond according to our own sublime expectations, to live up to our own, intensely private, magnificent confabulations.

What seems to me of paramount importance in all of this, is not that we ought not to behave as we are apparently genetically predestined to behave. What we ought (“in a perfect world”) to be ever vigilant to, every moment of our lives, is that our behaviour is always going to be fundamentally flawed, inherently prone to error, and that this, when all is said and done, is “what it means to be human”.

Change is the universal substrate of material reality and time is measured change. The past is remembered experience. The future is anticipated experience.

mtmynd1 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 08, 2014 4:04 pm 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.

m, your description of the mind’s concept that we call time is excellent.

Sal Scilicet wrote: ↑Wed Dec 03, 2014 5:14 am

duszek wrote: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.

Interesting topic. Timeless, in fact. I’m sure people have been wondering about such speculations since … time began.

I was driving behind a road-maintenance truck the other day. On the back was a sign that read, “Caution! Vehicle constantly stopping.”
Impossible of course. We know what is meant, but not what it “says”.

In English, the present participle allows us to turn almost every verb into an ongoing action: turning, ticking, dripping, saying, sleeping, eating … and stopping. How often do we hear each other say, “I’m only saying”. What we mean, of course, is that we really intended (past tense) to say (future tense) something else by what we actually just said (past completed).

The trouble is that we are often conveniently unaware, as there usually isn’t time to ponder these things too closely, that a lot of actions can only occur instantaneously, not ongoing. We say that a clock is “going” when we can hear that it is ticking. The clock isn’t going anywhere. What we mean, of course, is that we have heard the most recent series of “ticks” in anticipation of the next. Whereas a single tick takes no time at all, it’s really the series of ticks we describe as “ticking”. It’s really the measurable periods of silence between each pair of ticks that we observe.

Likewise, a moving body (such as the council truck) cannot really be “constantly stopping”. In fact, ‘stopping’ is altogether a nonsense word. Like ‘dying’, ‘coming’ and ‘going’. We habitually say things like, “I think the bus is stopping.” We don’t even realise that what we really mean is that the bus is slowing down, in anticipation of coming to a halt. To stop is obviously an instantaneous event (only observed when completed), that cannot be maintained for any measurable length of time. When we say the patient is dying, we mean that the dimensionless moment of death is imminent. To die takes no time at all. Real intense suffering, on the other hand, no matter how brief, always seems to take for ever. Like waiting (ongoing) for the kettle to boil (past continuous).

This is how we have become socially and culturally accustomed to use language to create all such absurd, time-bound illusions. To which, incidentally, we have all become rather fiercely attached. And that, in particular, includes this beguiling notion of “the passage of time”.

Sal, this is a well written explanation of how we use the word, “time”. Thanks.

duszek wrote: ↑Mon Dec 08, 2014 4:17 pm Point taken.

Possibly I used the word "exist" clumsily.

I will try to think of a better way of saying what I wanted to say.

How about "The concept of time makes sense only as a concept of time ahead of us." ?

Moreover, the concept of time is arbitrarily divided into past time, now and future time. But whatever time is, what we call past time is memories held in mind, not a thing of itself in the physical world. Similarly, what we call future time does not pertain to reality, as it is expectations held in mind about actions that might or might not occur. Present time is the now. It is the moment we experience in the current instant.

mtmynd1 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 08, 2014 5:04 pm

duszek wrote:
How about "The concept of time makes sense only as a concept of time ahead of us." ?

I'd have to say, that's close. You're still attempting to tie in this idea to some future, i.e. that which is only imaginative or what we presume from given evidence to suppose that which we call "future".

Let's start from a primal (early) idea of time and it is based upon night and day. If we accept time is an accumulation of moments, more moments equals more time, we are still in the present. It is (may be) far more complex for our mind to comprehend Now than it is understanding a past or a future. But mind continues evolving which makes our own evolutionary growth inevitable and there will be a day (future?) that acceptance in reality will supersede our insistence in dreams and drama to define our hu'manity.

m, again you have been expressing correctly about time. Your post is timeless!

Imagine yourself in a large open field. From the horizon you can see a plane coming. It is coming from your future but for the passengers, they are living now.

The plane flies directly over your head so both you and the passengers share now. The plane flies into the distance and enters your past but the passengers on the plane are still experiencing now.

How can we understand time?

Advocate wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 5:27 am Change is the universal substrate of material reality and time is measured change. The past is remembered experience. The future is anticipated experience.

I appreciate what you’ve said about past and future, but I’m not sure that I agree with you regarding time and change.

Perhaps what I will say will be consistent with what you’ve said here. Anyway:

Time “moves forward” through a continuum of serial Nows. Change occurs (at) Now. Time is not a measure per se. Time is change observed/experienced.

[quote=commonsense post_id=472952 time=1600893966 user_id=14610]
[quote=Advocate post_id=472825 time=1600835233 user_id=15238]
Change is the universal substrate of material reality and time is measured change. The past is remembered experience. The future is anticipated experience.
[/quote]

I appreciate what you’ve said about past and future, but I’m not sure that I agree with you regarding time and change.

Perhaps what I will say will be consistent with what you’ve said here. Anyway:

Time “moves forward” through a continuum of serial Nows. Change occurs (at) Now. Time is not a measure per se. Time is change observed/experienced.
[/quote]

Measurement is synonymous with quantification which is best understood as distinquishing between sides of a boundary condition ( < > = ~ ). "This thing ends here; increment your counter." Time is measured (experienced) change. Change is best understood as a universal substrate of Actuality because it allows time, space, matter, energy, causality, entropy, mass, gravity, etc. all to be understood in the same frame of reference, which is immeasurably useful. (heh)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... gq2BmR8qs/

Nick_A wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:27 pm Imagine yourself in a large open field. From the horizon you can see a plane coming. It is coming from your future but for the passengers, they are living now.

The plane flies directly over your head so both you and the passengers share now. The plane flies into the distance and enters your past but the passengers on the plane are still experiencing now.

How can we understand time?

The airplane analogy provides great imagery to illustrate the quandary of your final line.

However, I would not rely on the analogy too literally for an explanation of the enigma of time.

To begin with, when I first see the plane on the horizon it is actually in my Now. And just as you said, for the passengers it is their Now as well.

When the plane is directly overhead, that moment is Now for me. For the passengers, it is also their Now.

As I watch the plane fly away from me, it is always in my Now, just as it is always Now for the passengers.

Please bear in mind that I love the analogy of the plane traveling out of the future into the past. I simply admonish one not to take it literally.