Thread: Does time exist?

Yes

"Time" is just the name given to the whole idea that something happens, then another thing, then another thing and so on...

These "things" I refer to are not much, I'm talking about every moment that goes by, every infinitely small moment is one of these "things".

If time didn't exist then we would be able to see the past, present and future all at the same time. Basically what I am saying is that time is what splits apart.

time does exist.

if a human were moving at just below the speed of light, said human would age very little during his/her trip, while everyone on earth would age normally.

Originally Posted by Riot Maker

time does exist.

if a human were moving at just below the speed of light, said human would age very little during his/her trip, while everyone on earth would age normally.

I don't know why you would bring that into it. Thaat hardly proves that time exists. What it does do is it explains why that would happen IF time existed.

Besides, this is a philosophical answer he is looking for. The question isn't as much "Does time exist", it is more like "What IS time?" or "Does time REALLY exist, is it REALLY time?"

If you get what I mean.

Time exists as a 4th dimension. We only see it peace by peace because we can only observe 3 full dimensions. to explain it is impossible to us, best way to immagine it is like a 2d character seeing a 3d object pass in front of him would see a cross section of it.

Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA it makes a lot of sense.

Originally Posted by sheogorath

Time exists as a 4th dimension. We only see it peace by peace because we can only observe 3 full dimensions. to explain it is impossible to us, best way to immagine it is like a 2d character seeing a 3d object pass in front of him would see a cross section of it.

Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA it makes a lot of sense.

Except there is also the theory that the 4th dimension contains the Ephireans who are bascally our opposites, just as our solar system and everything else has an opposite. Anyway, I think time is all perspective and does not exist.

Originally Posted by sheogorath

Time exists as a 4th dimension. We only see it peace by peace because we can only observe 3 full dimensions. to explain it is impossible to us, best way to immagine it is like a 2d character seeing a 3d object pass in front of him would see a cross section of it.

Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA it makes a lot of sense.

That cross section analagy is for the 4th spacial dimention. Not time. 2 totally different things.

Originally Posted by slash112

That cross section analagy is for the 4th spacial dimention. Not time. 2 totally different things.

That was weird.

I've found that a lot of people I know typically look at time in one of two ways:

1) a continuous line that starts with the earliest point in past and moves forward from there, where the future is downplayed until it becomes the present. [which I find the most problematic]

2) How I personally used to see it, where only the present is fixed [sort of in the middle] and with the past and future continually expanding on either side in opposite directions.


Both of these seem easily skewed by the individual, because the present is always defined in terms of their own existence.

Spacetime is a fixture that occurs independently from the observer, and therefore, to me, seems the least problematic. If you haven't already, maybe learning more about it would answer some of your questions or provide more insight.

hi have you had a look at david ickes views on this...I find it very interesting is time man made? also i think of the universe where does i go? where does it end?? you bake your brains thinking about it!!

but do have a look a david icke re "who are we" its on you tube and all i say is keep an opan mind

Originally Posted by slash112

I don't know why you would bring that into it. Thaat hardly proves that time exists. What it does do is it explains why that would happen IF time existed.

Besides, this is a philosophical answer he is looking for. The question isn't as much "Does time exist", it is more like "What IS time?" or "Does time REALLY exist, is it REALLY time?"

If you get what I mean.

Exactly, the word exist is hard to define, but you "know" the question. I will spend "time", hah, in my Christmas vecation exploring this topic, I study philosophy and time is a real cool subject. You know, if tomorrow is a illusion, why the fuck construct a illusion about tomorrow.

I dont have any good physics knowledge behind me, but a friend of mine is studing physics and I am going to meet up with him, take a few beers and discuss time. But there are physicists that deny time I think.

When you were born, there was now. And all you ever has experienced is now, but your brain is cutting it up into bits and makes a "past" out of it, or calculates a future. But that is all about sorting out memorys, and in reality we are not living in time. This is my thoughts, any comments? I just want to explore this topic and critisism is just great, flame on.

I, too, think that time is a very interesting subject. In fact, I recently wrote a short story of a man living backwards, obviously not noticing it himself. His death is his birth and his thinking is "thinking" thoughts into oblivion. There's a good chance of this story actually being published in the near future, but the editor brought my attention to a short story written by Ilse Aichinger in 1949, titled Mirrorstory. The translation can be read here:

http://www.angelfire.com/creep/zarat...rrorstory.html

Quite an intriguing and poetic perspective on time, might I add.

I recently discussed this with a friend (who's also studying philosophy, by the way ), and although he strongly disagreed, I personally don't think the flow of time has an immanent direction. Furthermore, often enough time is associated with quantities, ratios and numbers. Yet there seems to be at least some evidence to indicate that numbers are nothing but* a mental construct**. Sure, they help us get by in the world (view) we're used to but in essence they are just one facet of nature itself, like lilac petals or an apple hanging on to a branch. Like many other facets of nature, they are sometimes used to describe the laws and dynamics of nature itself, but such attempts often fall flat in my opinion. Indeed, mathematics is called the universal language and fine minds have discovered great things, little particles, including the physics behind them, and such. But that doesn't rule out the possibility that we're still creating our own world(s). The universe is where you look. Use the goggles of math to look into other worlds but maybe they weren't there before you decided to do so. You know, like with the measurement problem.

I don't want to stray too far from the issue of time, but I think that people live in stories, they live in the symbolic realm. That is what probably separates us from other animals. The ability to replace an object, in our minds, with a symbol (a word, a picture etc.) for it. Now, when an animal is running about in a forest, its mind is probably perfectly concentrated in the here and now. When a person is taking a walk in a forest, he/she might not even notice the trees, because he/she is actually living on another plane. One might be thinking about work or about relationships, and some sort of an autopilot is helping navigate between the trees. Only the calling of a bird or some other noticeable interference may bring one back to the present moment.

And the thing separating the present and the symbolic world, I believe, is the plasticity of the latter. An Estonian thinker called Argo Moor has discussed this in great lengths. You can rearrange things in the symbolic world, you can cut out things you don't like, you can censor and paste, the symbolic world can be manipulated with easily. The same can't be said about the present moment. It just is. You can't leave anything out. It just is, in all its fullness.

And coming back to the issue of time - I think time is just a part of the symbolic world. It's something you can ponder about when taking a walk. It's something your memory creates. But often enough it's just a hassle, really. It's something separating you from a meeting you're expecting, it's something that drags you along, until you're old and wrinkly, soiling your sheets, it's something to be fought with botulinum toxin, it's something to be captured, to be kept track of using clocks. Sadly, often enough it boils down to time being just a concept separating you from the little joys of life, from the taste of a great meal when you're in a hurry, from the laughter of your children when you're trying to meet a deadline...

** I'm not trying to undermine the importance of mental constructions, though. On the contrary, they are our tools as creators. And time is, in my opinion, just something created using those tools.
* Tere was an interesting Radiolab episode concerning numbers:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/09

here's my take on it: time is just a concept, but it's a concept we use anyways to function in life. I believe it's enlightening as well as beneficial to realize the illusion of time, but there's no sense in trying to continuously force that notion.

additionally, we anchor our concepts of time we the visual aids of clocks, which evolved from sundials. but no matter how you look at it, you are still just observing a spatial relationship (where the hour/minute hand stands on the clock, or where the shadow hangs on the sundial) - therefore, the co-dependent link between space and time....or the space-time continuum.

Time as a physical entity does not exist, but it is an observable phenomena and concept. You cannot "feel" time, but it is there...sort of. Time is the word we use to describe a long series of chain reactions between particles set in motion during the Big Bang. From that point, all particles have followed a set of rules and collisions, ultimately bringing us up to today. The past (previous collisions between particles) and the future (particles that will collide at a later date), as well as the present (which is such a tiny slice of time) are the definition of "time."

Probably didn't make a lot of sense, my apologies. Writing in a hurry.

Time is not real, and I have a deductive argument to prove it.

Premise 1: In order for something to be "real" it must exist
Premise 2: In order for time to be "real", so to must the past, present, and future
Conclusion A: Therefore, in order for time to be "real", the past, present, and future must exist.


Simple enough right? Continue reading...


Premise 3: By nature, the "past" is defined as that which has ceased to exist
Premise 4: By nature, the "future" is defined as that which has yet to exist
Conclusion B: Therefore, by nature neither the past or future exists


Again, not too complicated right?


Premise 1: In order for something to be "real", it must exist
Premise A: In order for time to be real, so to must the past, present and future
Premise B: By nature, neither the past nor future exists
Conclusion C: Time is not real.



You see, Conclusion C is justified by the fact that: Something must exist to be considered "real", the past and future are inherently non existent, and since time depends on the past and present to be real for itself to exist, time cannot be real.

^^ That was great.

Did you make that up yourself, or have I just been living under a rock?

Yes, its an OK argument ethen, but the whole exist term is a bit fuzzy, and its my fault asking that question. But, do you define exist as the same as real?

I think some of the premises to Einsteins relativity is that if you have two twins. And you send one of them far away to space, and let him/her come back when the twin on earth is 80 years old, the human that comes out of the spaceship is around 25years old. I mean, wtf, this cant be some crazy astronaut diet that keeps the twin young. But this is maybe just theory and not proven?

This just keeps on getting more interesting

One thing to consider here is the notion of change. The common view is that change takes time. Still, we can only experience change, like everything else, in the present.

The key question from that perspective, in my opinion, is: has an 80-year-old being experienced "more" presentness than a 25-year-old?

Or asking the same question a bit more poetically, bringing in the aspect of intensity:

Who lives in slow motion, the fruit fly with a life expectancy of a few months, whose wings flap 200 times a second, or a 1000-year-old dragon whose cold heart beats once a day.

Continuing in that spirit:

Maybe all we have, and need, is Attention. By shifting that we momentarily and timelessly hop from square to square on the chessboard of the Universe. Squares close together also share a greater resemblance with each other than with those farther away. Taking greater leaps, skipping a lot of squares on our way, we might wake up one day to find the world somehow different, maybe even brand new. I know I've had that feeling many times. I'm guessing a lot of people have.

This analogy can't be taken literally, of course, but still...

Originally Posted by manbearpig

Yes, its an OK argument ethen, but the whole exist term is a bit fuzzy, and its my fault asking that question. But, do you define exist as the same as real?

I did try to keep it as simple and clear cut as possible, but maybe I simplified it too much. I define "real" as "that which exists", and I can apply that same definition to "existence", so yes, I suppose you could say that I equate the two. A less formal break down of this argument would go as such:

In order for something to be considered "real" it must exist in the universe. The "past" does not exist in the universe because, by definition, the "past" is that which was existent, but no longer is existent. The "future" does not exist in the universe because, by definition, it is that which will exist, but is not existent yet.

As you can begin to see, the notion of existence seems to be inherently present tense. It wouldn't make sense to say that something "is" existent if it used to exist, but no longer does. Similarly, it wouldn't make sense to say that something "is" existent because it will inexorably exist, but does not exist at the moment. Thus, if "will exist" and "used to exist" cannot fall under the definition of "that which exists", then it would follow that it cannot fall under the definition of that which is real.

Originally Posted by Hercuflea

^^ That was great.

Did you make that up yourself, or have I just been living under a rock?

I'm happy to say yes, I did formulate this argument on my own. I have other interesting ones as well (like a universal theory of morality among Automatons, and also a deductive argument that refutes the Global Skeptic's assertion that we cannot know anything...but this is more just an expanded version of Descartes most famous argument.

Originally Posted by SourCherryBoy

This just keeps on getting more interesting

One thing to consider here is the notion of change. The common view is that change takes time. Still, we can only experience change, like everything else, in the present.

The key question from that perspective, in my opinion, is: has an 80-year-old being experienced "more" presentness than a 25-year-old?

Or asking the same question a bit more poetically, bringing in the aspect of intensity:

Who lives in slow motion, the fruit fly with a life expectancy of a few months, whose wings flap 200 times a second, or a 1000-year-old dragon whose cold heart beats once a day.

Continuing in that spirit:

Maybe all we have, and need, is Attention. By shifting that we momentarily and timelessly hop from square to square on the chessboard of the Universe. Squares close together also share a greater resemblance with each other than with those farther away. Taking greater leaps, skipping a lot of squares on our way, we might wake up one day to find the world somehow different, maybe even brand new. I know I've had that feeling many times. I'm guessing a lot of people have.

This analogy can't be taken literally, of course, but still...

I had a similar thought once and likened time/change to a VHS cassette. Imagine there is a VHS cassette that is aware of its own contents, as if they were that VHS's own memories and experiences. It wouldn't matter if (from our external point of view) that cassette is playing at 100x the regular rate or 1/100x the regular rate, from the perspective of the VHS the passage of "time" would be the same either way (x number of frames between "event A" and "event B"). This is because the VHS's scale of time is determined by the "rate of change" within a specific context. No matter how quickly or slowly the rate of change may be to us (in our own context of time), the movie's own perspective of the rate of change will always be the same.

What if this sort of phenomena happens when we die? What if, in the few minutes of brain activity we have once the rest of our body has died (disconnecting us from th external world that otherwise keeps the "pace" of time/change), we find ourselves existing in our own context of time/change that is separate from that of the external world. Similar to having a dream that seems to last for hours but is only just a few minutes of "world time", we could live what seems like years (or more) in that few minutes of disconnect when we exist purely in our own context of time/change. (This idea is also found in the movie Waking Life, btw)

Originally Posted by SourCherryBoy

One thing to consider here is the notion of change. The common view is that change takes time. Still, we can only experience change, like everything else, in the present.

This. 'Chronological' time (change) does exist. Psychological time (our own creation) only exists in our minds. Its our way of trying to measure and quantify change objectively, when after all change is interpreted subjectively.

I think that sometimes we just zone out for a bit and it seems faster