odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
As to the circularity, in the utterance, the terms may bear this out. But the charge is inevitable and I yield to Wittgesteins Tractatus in which he say outright that he has had to speak nonsense I order to make his point. The term eternal present I actually borrow from first Kierkegaard then Wittgenstein. One has to suspend the attempt of rational categories to subsume the world. In the world things get nameless fast ininquiry when one gaze is on basic assumptions. What is the stoppage of time if not a cessation is something actual that would warrant the expression?
You would have to convince me the usual vocabulary and concepts relative to time are terminally problematic. Short of that, why the soup of nonsense?
So, what's the problem with the idea of an infinite past, or with the idea that time is a succession of moments only one of them is now?
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
2. Of course, it is an extrapolation from what we do know that justifies moving to what is not known. Empirical proof of infinite regressive time is not available. We are however constrained intuitively by the apriority of time: one event must precede another and this apodictically so.
???
apodictic
Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible.
There's nothing apodictic in the idea that "one event must precede another". It's merely our impression that it is so and it is perfectly conceivable that there may have been one initial event without anything coming before.
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
Try to imagine otherwise. You cant. Things true apriority puts the matter on a par with logic and math in terms of veracity.
You would need to make the distinction between on the one hand "imagination" properly so-called, which actually is quite limited, for example we can't imagine an actual infinity, and on the other hand "conception", which probably because it is abstract doesn't seem to suffer from the same limitations. So, while I can't imagine an origin of time or something like the first event of reality, that fact is that I can conceive of both and no problem. Really easy.
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
3 as to “what is the point”: what IS yesterday If not a recollection of yesterday?
Gobbledegook. If that was true you would be a mere and rather vague notion in my imagination rather than any actual human being.
Yesterday existed 24 hours ago for real.
What is true is that we don't actually know anything about the physical world since all we know is our own private subjective experience and then only now. Not much and so we have to rely on memory to remember what we did yesterday or indeed that there was something like yesterday. But while we don't know that yesterday itself really happened, you can't pretend you know yesterday is mere recollection.
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
We interpret the world through recollection and being here thinking of time is a gathering of thought from my past( which a localized societal past). As is the case with all concepts, all are interpretative. On analysis any reference to the now, the past or future is a regioalized affair, that is, contextualized in gathered thought moving toward some actualization in what will be. The question is, in this flux, is there anything that abides throughout? The concept of an eternal now is the only way to conceive this. And if approached conceptually merely, it is nonsense. But there is beneath the Jamesuam steam of consciousness, or at the center of the perceiving agent something that is utterly ineffable. The transcendental ego, the ego center which is never observed.
I don't think we need to indulge in that sorts of ridiculous antics. I'm sorry to hear Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein both could find a way to articulate their ideas. So much for our bright philosophers. So, instead, try this: we know what we subjectively experience now and we know it only now: pain, a smell, a kaleidoscope of colours, a memory of yesterday, an idea we may have, an intuition. We know these things whenever we experience them subjectively. All the rest we can only believe: yesterday's event recalled today, the tree we believe we're looking at, the wound we seem to be the cause of the pain we feel. Now (and here) is just what we know. The rest we have to conjecture or just believe, from memory or otherwise. That's a much more economical way to describe the situation we're in and there's no need for Wittgenstein's nonsense.
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
I think talk about the difference between yesterday’s is reducible to talk about differences that can be ignored or go unrecollected. To the extent one can do this, ignore recollection, one discovers an abiding Sense is the present. This is why there is such an element of mysticism in much of existentialism, why Husserl’s epochs is more than logic can say. Time never was the concept of time.
You should try rationality.
Personally, I don't feel the pull for any mysticism and yet I accept I don't know whether the material world exists at all. In fact, I doubt very much there's anything even remotely like what I think of as the material world. I think of reality most likely as something essentially like subjective experience, unless anyone could convince me reality is dualistic, which maybe it is since there no logical reason that it shouldn't be.
odysseus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:13 am
Hello EB. At my phone and can’t do this properly.
Nah. In my imagination it is working fine. Don't try to make excuses.
EB