Time does not exist.

For all things philosophical.

Moderators: AMod, iMod

uwot
Posts: 6093
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 7:21 am

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by uwot »

Terrapin Station wrote:It tells the whole story in terms of what forces are in the most general sense. They're processes--changing relations of matter. In other words, my ontology doesn't exclude forces insofar as they exist.
Personally I find it useful to distinguish between changing relations of matter and the forces that influence them. The Earth goes round the sun, to use a simplified example, because there is a gravitational attraction, but the orbit and the gravity are not the same thing; nor even the same type of thing, in my book.
Terrapin Station wrote:"That point of light is in a particular position relative to the 'fixed stars'" is an empirical claim.
Fair enough.
Terrapin Station wrote:The quotation marks indicate that it's a claim. Per correspondence theory, the claim is made true via "matching" a fact--namely, the state of affairs that is that point of light in a particular position relative to the "fixed stars." What is unavailable is a proof of that claim, since it's an empirical claim, and we could be wrong about any given empirical claim.

Well, there is no proof in a logical or mathematical sense, but whether a point of light is where the empirical claim places it, is readily determined by the simple expedient of measurement.
Terrapin Station wrote:That would could be wrong about any given empirical claim is one of the cornerstones of the sciences.
Everyone makes mistakes, which is why peer review really is one of the cornerstones of the sciences.
Terrapin Station wrote:All claims are potentially revisable.
The don't generally last long enough. As you said somewhere, events are mapped in 4 dimensions. Unless the point of light in question is a 'fixed star', its position relative to them will change with t.
It seems to me that you are confusing empirical claims and metaphysical hypotheses, or perhaps paradigms; these do change, but the empirical data on which they are based remains the same.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

uwot wrote:Personally I find it useful to distinguish between changing relations of matter and the forces that influence them. The Earth goes round the sun, to use a simplified example, because there is a gravitational attraction, but the orbit and the gravity are not the same thing; nor even the same type of thing, in my book.
Well, the thing is that I don't believe that forces exist outside of changing relations of matter. I don't buy that there are any real (as in extramental) abstracts.
Well, there is no proof in a logical or mathematical sense, but whether a point of light is where the empirical claim places it, is readily determined by the simple expedient of measurement.
Provisionally verified, yes. That's not a proof, though. We could be wrong for any number of reasons.
It seems to me that you are confusing empirical claims and metaphysical hypotheses,
The bulk of metaphyiscs is ontology. Empirical claims are ontological claims, so they're metaphysical claims.

It's weird that you'd not be aware that "Empirical claims are not provable" is the received view a la Science Methodology and Phil of Science 101, because you seem to be somewhat educated about this stuff otherwise.
uwot
Posts: 6093
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 7:21 am

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by uwot »

Terrapin Station wrote:What?? You can't see what in the dark...
Anything I can see with the lights on.
Terrapin Station wrote:...and how is that support that noumena are not the same as phenomena, or that phenomena are not accurate with respect to noumena?
As I understand Kant, there is the thing in itself, the empirical representation, and our mental rationalisation of the empirical representation; the ding an sich, the phenomenon and the noumenon respectively. I think you are mixing up your ding an sich with your noumenon. Noumena are mental constructs, theories, hypotheses and can be any old nonsense. Whatever. The thing in itself, is not any particular colour, for instance, it just happens to reflect certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulate human retinas. What we see depends on, among other things, the source of light that illuminates it.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

uwot wrote:
Terrapin Station wrote:...and how is that support that noumena are not the same as phenomena, or that phenomena are not accurate with respect to noumena?
As I understand Kant, there is the thing in itself, the empirical representation, and our mental rationalisation of the empirical representation; the ding an sich, the phenomenon and the noumenon respectively. I think you are mixing up your ding an sich with your noumenon. Noumena are mental constructs, theories, hypotheses and can be any old nonsense. Whatever. The thing in itself, is not any particular colour, for instance, it just happens to reflect certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulate human retinas. What we see depends on, among other things, the source of light that illuminates it.


I hate to get sidetracked by this but first, a few references:

========================================================

From Britannica.com:

"Noumenon, plural Noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon"

From Wikipedia:

"In Kantian philosophy, the unknowable noumenon is often linked to the unknowable 'thing-in-itself' (in Kant's German, Ding an sich), although how to characterize the nature of the relationship is a question yet open to some controversy."

From a Philosophy Now article:

"The world as it is before mediation Kant calls the noumenal world, or, in a memorable phrase, Das Ding an sich, a phrase which literally means “The thing in itself”, but whose sense would be more accurately caught by translating it as “the thing (or world) as it really is”(as distinct from how it appears to us). He calls the world as it appears to our senses (after mediation through our tools of understanding) the phenomenal world."

From the Stanford encyclopedia:

"it follows that things in themselves are noumena in the negative sense"

(However, note that the Stanford encyclopedia gives a much more detailed, nuanced, discussion of the two terms, where they make distinctions as well.)

========================================================

But I don't want to argue about whether "ding an sich" is the same as noumena/the noumenal world, and partially because I'm not at all a fan of Kant. As the Stanford entry makes clear, although not in so many words, Kant says a bunch of garbled, apparently inconsistent crap.

What I'm more interested in is that you're not telling me what I asked: "how is that support that noumena (or ding an sich if you prefer on the distinction you believe should be made) are not the same as phenomena"

An answer to that would go something like this: "That is support for noumena (or ding an sich) not being the same as phenomena because . . . . . " and then you'd explain how it's a support for it.
User avatar
SpheresOfBalance
Posts: 5688
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:27 pm
Location: On a Star Dust Metamorphosis

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

Hobbes' Choice wrote:
Terrapin Station wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote:

You are putting the interpretive horse before the evidential cart here.
You cannot have the luxury to assume that the human devised scheme of the world is a collection of purely objective and natural categories.
It seems to me from the way that attofishpi wrote what he did that he would believe that events are objective. If he doesn't, that's fine. He can clarify that. The aim is just to get attofishpi to respond and to think more about his views in this context.

I certainly believe that events obtain objectively, but then again I also think it's nonsense to say that time doesn't exist.
The objective is not evident.
evident [ev-i-duh nt]
adjective
1. plain or clear to the sight or understanding: His frown made it evident to all that he was displeased.
It was evident that the project was a total failure.

Incorrect, if you see and/or smell and/or taste and/or hear and/or feel the object it is evidently there. Only the 'complete truth' of it might not be evident.

We have only access to the subject.
No, we are all both subjects and objects, so we have access to both.

The object is is a construct designed to even out observer bias.
Nope, first, observer bias varies depending upon the observer in question. Second, the particulars of an object is to itself, absolutely true. While the observer is capable of discerning some of the objects particulars, it is not necessary that one know it completely, to know some of it. I show you(subject) a gun(object), you see, feel, smell, hear, taste, measure and otherwise define it, can you not then create one if you also know of and use the tools needed to create one? Did you not know the object so as to create it? Of course you did, otherwise you could never have created it.

Objectivity is that which your language community has agreed upon is the truth devoid of the subject,
Nope, objectivity is what's left when all subjective bias has been eliminated.

Subjectively it may be music to someone, but objectively it will always be sound.
Picasso's work might subjectively be called art but objectively it's just paint on canvas.


but it is still far from the thing in itself.
Ones knowledge of a thing doesn't have to actually be the thing in and of itself for one to claim to know it. Above, did you not make a gun without being the gun.

Objectivity is about agreement between observers, though it is characterised as 'reality'.
So the above gun you built is only a gun between observers that agree it's a gun, and not a gun in and of itself? Hogwash!
User avatar
SpheresOfBalance
Posts: 5688
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:27 pm
Location: On a Star Dust Metamorphosis

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

Terrapin Station wrote:
Hobbes' Choice wrote:
Terrapin Station wrote:Dude, follow the conversation.

You said, "The objective is not evident. We have only access to the subject."

I said, "What do you take to support that claim? (Evidentially or logically)" (Or in other words, "What do you take to evidentially or logically support that claim?"--I was looking for the specific thing(s) you take to be a good reason to believe the claim in question.)

You said, "Demonstrably empirically, obviously, definitively."

So I asked, "How would you demonstrate that empirically?"

What is "that"? Well, it's the claim we've been discussing, obviously. Namely this claim: "The objective is not evident. We have only access to the subject."
Dude, I am following the conversation. So tell me what I asked, and stop obfuscating.

The subject is given; what do you mean by the object?
I did tell you what you asked. You asked "What is 'that'?" I told you exactly what 'that' was referring to, as well as explaining why it was ridiculous that you had to ask.

"What do I mean by the object?"

I didn't say anything about any object. You said something about the objective and the subject. I asked you what you take to empirically and/or logically support the claim you made. You still haven't told me.
And he never will, because he knows obfuscation so well.
User avatar
SpheresOfBalance
Posts: 5688
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:27 pm
Location: On a Star Dust Metamorphosis

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

Terrapin Station wrote:
uwot wrote:Well, if you ask different physicalists what they mean by 'physical', you are likely to get different answers.
Yeah, that's definitely the case, although what we all agree on is that for any x that exists in any sense, x is physical.

The problem with terms is that other people use them too.

That's a problem because often people have different things in mind that they either use the term to represent or that they see as upshots or associated ideas, beliefs etc. of what they use the term to represent. But folks naturally assume that "this person" is using the term in just the same way, with just the same upshots/associations as "the previous person," and that's often not the case.

Of course on the other hand the only reason that any term is understandable in the first place is that other people use them, too. So that makes just sticking to idiosyncratic neologisms impractical.

At any rate, a lot of people parse "physicalism" as having some sort of dependent relationship on the field of physics. I don't use the term that way. My physicalism is simply an issue of me believing that only matter, relations (of matter) and processes (changing relations of matter) exist.

I disagree with many popular views in the sciences, and I have no particular allegiance to received or popular views in the sciences.
Granted, but as theists in particular keep reminding me, absence of proof isn't proof of absence.
A cliche that's clearly wrong (well, aside from the word "proof") when stated like that.

Aside from the word "proof" because empirical claims aren't provable period.

Absence of evidence, rather, is clearly evidence of absence.

If you believe that you left your car keys on a particular table, then the absence of evidence that they're on the table is clearly evidence of the absence of one's keys on the table in question. No one (sane at least) doubts that.
He was talking of gods which has never been shown to exist, keys have. That there is no evidence that a blompodilia exists does not necessarily mean that one doesn't. In fact, absence of evidence, is not necessarily evidence of absence, it might seem so, but it's not necessarily so.


The cliche arises from induction rather. For anything that we can't check exhaustively, we can't say that there couldn't be evidence of the thing in question around the next corner that we do check. But, aside from supposing an infinite number of places to check, the more we do check for something in appropriate places and find an absence of evidence, the better the reason for believing that counts as evidence of absence.
uwot
Posts: 6093
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 7:21 am

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by uwot »

Terrapin Station wrote:What I'm more interested in is that you're not telling me what I asked: "how is that support that noumena (or ding an sich if you prefer on the distinction you believe should be made) are not the same as phenomena"

An answer to that would go something like this: "That is support for noumena (or ding an sich) not being the same as phenomena because . . . . . " and then you'd explain how it's a support for it.
Well, I made a start here:
uwot wrote:The thing in itself, is not any particular colour, for instance, it just happens to reflect certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulate human retinas. What we see depends on, among other things, the source of light that illuminates it.

I take it from your professed naive realism that you believe fire engines are red; that is just contingently true for most human beings, in my view.

As for noumenon/ding an sich, here's Kant himself: "The concept of a noumenon, that is, of a thing which must be thought not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself (solely through the pure understanding), is not self-contradictory, for we are not entitled to maintain that sensibility is the only possible mode of intuition." Make of that what you will, but to me he's saying it's a concept of pure understanding.
Londoner
Posts: 783
Joined: Sun Sep 11, 2016 8:47 am

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Londoner »

Terrapin Station wrote:
Londoner wrote:'nerves' . . . 'an experience of pain' . . . an "experience of seeing fibrous tissue'
Are those things identical to mental-content-only in your view?
It is good to practice your serve, but if the other player never attempts a return it becomes boring.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

Londoner wrote:
Terrapin Station wrote:
Londoner wrote:'nerves' . . . 'an experience of pain' . . . an "experience of seeing fibrous tissue'
Are those things identical to mental-content-only in your view?
It is good to practice your serve, but if the other player never attempts a return it becomes boring.
How about returning then rather than giving a boring answer where you don't directly address a simple question. If you can't straightforwardly, directly answer a simple question there's no way we can tackle anything more complex.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

uwot wrote:Well, I made a start here:
uwot wrote:The thing in itself, is not any particular colour, for instance, it just happens to reflect certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulate human retinas. What we see depends on, among other things, the source of light that illuminates it.
That's outlining or fleshing out the view. It's not a support for why we'd believe that view over alternate views.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

SpheresOfBalance wrote:He was talking of gods which has never been shown to exist, keys have. That there is no evidence that a blompodilia exists does not necessarily mean that one doesn't. In fact, absence of evidence, is not necessarily evidence of absence, it might seem so, but it's not necessarily so.
I addressed this in the paragraph you quoted that follows your comment.

I said this: "The cliche arises from induction rather. For anything that we can't check exhaustively, we can't say that there couldn't be evidence of the thing in question around the next corner that we do check. But, aside from supposing an infinite number of places to check, the more we do check for something in appropriate places and find an absence of evidence, the better the reason for believing that counts as evidence of absence."
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

SpheresOfBalance wrote:And he never will, because he knows obfuscation so well.
Yeah, some people will never directly/straightfowardly answer questions, whether it's because they don't understand them or because they're intentionally avoiding answering. With those folks, there's no way I'd ever write something long. I'll stick to a single point or question at a time so I don't waste to much time/effort until they're ready to have what I consider a conversation.
User avatar
Terrapin Station
Posts: 4548
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2016 7:18 pm
Location: NYC Man

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by Terrapin Station »

uwot wrote:As for noumenon/ding an sich, here's Kant himself: "The concept of a noumenon, that is, of a thing which must be thought not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself (solely through the pure understanding), is not self-contradictory, for we are not entitled to maintain that sensibility is the only possible mode of intuition." Make of that what you will, but to me he's saying it's a concept of pure understanding.
He's addressing the concept of noumenon there, how to think about it. So that's obviously going to be about thought in that regard--that's what concepts are, after all, and obviously it's what thinking about something is. But he says right there that a noumenon is a thing in itself.
uwot
Posts: 6093
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 7:21 am

Re: Time does not exist.

Post by uwot »

Terrapin Station wrote:
uwot wrote:Well, I made a start here:
uwot wrote:The thing in itself, is not any particular colour, for instance, it just happens to reflect certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulate human retinas. What we see depends on, among other things, the source of light that illuminates it.
That's outlining or fleshing out the view. It's not a support for why we'd believe that view over alternate views.
It's stating the bleedin' obvious. Our sensation of a fire engine is of a red, howly thing in a hurry. If you choose to believe that your perceptions are the thing itself, that is your business. In my book, the source of any phenomenon is not the same as the phenomenon, but there are idealists and, evidently, realists who disagree.
Post Reply