Philosophy Now Forum

Posted: **Sun Aug 22, 2010 11:43 pm**

Godfree wrote:Now that doesn't make any sense at all . We can create a vacuum here on earth, they have done it . As long as the vessel they are emptying can hold the pressure than can remove all of the matter . The vessel does not shrink, it still contains the same amount of space. The space is still there . ...

We can't create this 'vacuum' that you wish GF, at least according to modern Physics, as the 'vacuum' is seething with 'virtual particles' that appear and disappear all the time, so we can't get rid of all the 'matter'. If there was no 'matter' inside I assume that the vessel would have to collapse as there would be no 'matter' strong enough to hold itself 'up', is my guess. Is this what a 'black-hole' is supposed to be?

Posted: **Sun Aug 22, 2010 11:57 pm**

Hi Mike,

Mike Strand wrote:Hi, Arising_uk, nice to see you in the science forum!

I didn't fully understand Barbour's book but found it fascinating -- a fun challenge. I came away with the impression that Barbour was saying we can do physics without the time (t) parameter, and that in some sense time and the passage of time were illusions. My personal impressions only.

The last I heard was that Time is reversible in Physics and their calculations could work either way, so as such time as a parameter (t) could be done without? Although I'd think it a bit odd if Time can be done without in Physics as how would Quantum Electro-Dynamics work without its clocks? What area of Physics was he referring too?

I expressed my own thoughts on the concept of time in earlier posts (February 06 and 07, 2010, back on page 4). I would be gratified if you read them and had any comments, but that's your choice.

I would have read them but I'll re-read. I generally only comment if I truly disagree with something or I think I've not understood it.

I think Barbour's view as expressed in the book "End of Time", while beyond my ability to understand very well, will not easily be accepted by most scientists -- again my own impression. Descriptions and theories about the world that appear to contradict our notion or intuition about time make me suspicious, but that's no proof against them!

Is he a scientist? As scientists generally appear too busy to read much else.

Posted: **Mon Aug 23, 2010 2:49 am**

To Arising_uk: Julian Barbour is a theoretical physicist. In the book "End of Time" he takes a serious look at physics and quantum theory from a viewpoint that avoids the time parameter. When I read the book six or seven years ago, I exchanged a couple of emails with him, to which he was kind enough to reply. Sorry, it's been awhile and so I can't give you any brief insights. One impression I got was a collection of "Nows" which we somehow interpret as passage of time. He has (or had) computer discussions with other theoretical physicists which you can probably find through google.

Posted: **Mon Aug 23, 2010 9:31 pm**

I believe it was Hawking who tried to suggest that as the expansion of the universe slowed stopped and reversed , so would time ,, and time would go backwards .
He has since admitted an error in his maths and changed his mind.

Posted: **Tue Aug 24, 2010 12:46 am**

Nikolai wrote:We believe in the passage of time, even though we cannot perceive time’s passage, and our belief in time is so confident that we assume to assign the objects we encounter at various points along time’s passage.

Our friend hands us two objects: one is a fossil and the other a terracotta jug, freshly baked from the kiln.

When we first look at these two items there is nothing about them that reveals their age. They are just two pieces of matter, albeit different in colour and constitution. The only way we can age them is to first recall our belief in time’s passage and then assume that the objects are of different age – in this case we assume that the fossil is older than the terracotta. But there is never any justification for this: we only ever perceive things in the present; the fossil in our hand is, at this point, still as fresh or as ancient as the terracotta.

But, for no reason, we do go ahead and assume the fossil as ‘old’, and then we analyse it and discover certain attributes about it – for example we might notice varying proportions of chemical isotopes. These proportions are then also assumed to be characteristic of age, because they are associated with the ‘old thing’ – the fossil.

And henceforward, each time we encounter an object whose chemical constitution is similar to the fossil, we call that thing ‘old’ also, forgetting that the fossil’s antiquity was only ever assumed in the most arbitrary fashion.

All this is delusion.

We only perceive things in the present. The fossil in our hand is as timeless as the terracotta – both of them exist only in the here-and-now that completely transcends our arbitrary designations of age.

The age of the fossil is a story we tell…in the present. At what other time can such a story be told?

There is a key problem with the entire thread of your argument. It bothered me for a short while, then I hit on it. For you to make your argument you have to invoke a temporality. It is the same temporality that your argument denies the validity of. This is called performative self-criticism.
The problematic temporality you use is encapsulated in your use of the idea of "the present". If the present is all there has ever been, then we would have no use for such a concept and your use of it denies your argument.
And the very fact that I am responding to your post means that there is a succession of events. If there were only the present then no response would be forthcoming..

Posted: **Thu Aug 26, 2010 9:57 pm**

Hi Chaz

For you to make your argument you have to invoke a temporality. It is the same temporality that your argument denies the validity of.

It is impossible to describe in words the state of non-temporality. Even though terms like 'eternity' and 'the present' are used, they only make sense in reference to the past and the future - and these don't exist.

Eternity is like an intuition, incommunicable to others, yet my attempts shall make perfect sense to anyone who intuits what I talk about.

The best I can do in this thread is to illustrate that the antiquity of, say, a fossil is a deeply subjective judgement. We cannot perceive age in itself, we can only infer it through the comparison with another object. But this second object we must assume to be old. Why? Because everything is perceived occurs in the present, out of time. We never encounter anything in life other than NOW.

All that we call the past might also be the future, if that's the way we want to view it. A 'memory' of the past and a 'prediction' of the future are indistinguishable, in themselves. They are both just thoughts in the here-and now, but one has supposedly 'happened' and the other hasn't. To think that any given thought is certainly from the past and is in fact a memory requires a judgement that is as arbitrary as making one flower certainly and definitely beautiful and an other ugly, or one joke funny and another unfunny.

Now, I'm sure you are just thinking: oh, here we go - another 'is beauty intrinsic or relative' question.

Guilty as charged; but the difference here is that so few people actually recognise time as being subject to this kind of analysis. Most philosophers and scientists rather take the conventional view of time as a given and forget just how vague and hazy a notion time is - really nothing more than an opinion. Like beauty, there is nothing to suggest that time exists at all outside of our own conceptions about it.

The really compelling experiences of living outside of time come in the contemplative practices - prayer, meditation etc - in other words that practice that thwarts the thinking intellect which is the creator of time . It is no coincidence that terms like eternity tend to be the preserve of the spiritual paths; it is also no coincidence that many spiritual people seem capable of such perplexing phenomena as clairvoyance, past-life memories etc. They really have transcended the commonsense view and opened their intellect to other ways of viewing time. I think Einstein in his own way managed to do this - when he wrote to a grieving widow friend of his it was quite clear that he was thinking outside the usual time-bound, finite boundaries that we think encompass our earthly existence.

And the very fact that I am responding to your post means that there is a succession of events. If there were only the present then no response would be forthcoming.

A circular argument - the term response presupposes the arrow of time. Maybe my post and your 'response' appear together, NOW. That I wrote my bit first is just a fancy of your own mind, maybe. Until your understanding of the word Present is supplemented by the intuition I talked about, you are going to be unable to understand the Present without reference to the past or the future.

I know that through an excess of rhetoric I may have called Time an illusion. Precisely speaking this is not the case. The illusion is the notion that Time certainly elapses. We fall into illusion each time we unreflectively talk about the past, or plan for the future without deploying the kind of scepticism I'm talking about here.

Best, Nikolai.

Posted: **Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:40 am**

Nikolia, I find your claims to be just a wee bit unbelievable.
"the past and the future don't exist"if the past doesn't exist , where did those dinosaur bones come from , why am I old , and where did we get this language we are using.
You can argue that the future hasn't happened yet , but the past has a mountain of evidence to prove it was there.
" the past and the future are indistinguishable"
you must be on some pretty good shit , unless your stuck in"Ground hog day"
change is the only constant,, tomorrow will indeed be different than today.
So your into spirits and believe in past lives???
that is a leap of illogicality that I'm simply not capable of.
I guess thats the same logic??? that you use to work other things out???

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 11:57 am**

Hi Godfree

Godfree wrote:if the past doesn't exist , where did those dinosaur bones come from , why am I old , and where did we get this language we are using.

When you take the perspective that I have in this thread, Time doesn't seem to exist per se, rather it ceases to be a certain objective fact about the world. The best parallel is something like 'goodness'. We can either view something as a definite good thing, or, we can view it's goodness as depending on the situation, the state of mind of the appraiser etc.

In your questions in the quote you have assumed that Time is a definite fact and that is why you cannot conceive that a dinosaur bone can be anything other than old. The age of the bone can be viewed merely as something we say about the white dusty object in our hand. Whether it actually is old or not is completely unverifiable.

As the age of any object is always, like goodness, ultimately unverifiable we are in position to assume that Time has any objective existence at all. In many things in life we are comfortable we this position. Few of us insist that a joke is intrinsically funny, we recognise that it might depend on perspective. I just wanted to point out that Time and its existence is precisely the same.

You can argue that the future hasn't happened yet , but the past has a mountain of evidence to prove it was there.

This is rather like saying that a Robin William's impression of a drunk Frenchman is evidence of his sense of humour! All the evidence for time that you speak of appears to us in the present. We have no way of asserting that it comes from the past for it may have spontaneously arisen. You should read my thread on The Fundamental Philosophical Error for more on this view, which is central to Buddhism.

Godfree wrote:So your into spirits and believe in past lives???
that is a leap of illogicality that I'm simply not capable of.

What we consider to be memories of our past lives are completely unverifiable. What we consider to be our personal identity is nothing more than a story based on the notion that we are unique individuals that endure throughout time. When this view is recognised as mere belief, as many contemplatives have found, the 'memories' that pop up we have start to become wider and more varied than when we considered ourselves as individuals. This is why contemplatives often develop the ability to see the past and the future in a quite different way than the conventional view.

Best wishes, Nikolai

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 12:54 pm**

Hi Nikolai

Your argument is perfectly valid, it is possible that memories could be 'implanted', giving to the implantee a perception of a past that did not actually happen. One issue I have with this though, is that if all our memories are like this, then logically our implanted memories would need to be continuously updated (i.e. at each moment we would need new memories to maintain the illusion of the passage of time). This does of course result in the same effect as if time were 'just passing', the only difference being the perceptions we have from moment to moment may not be 'real' in the strictest sense (though if this were actually happening, then they'd be as real as anything). That's the only issue I'd have with what you're saying, the passage of time seems continuous, and the continual updating of 'false memories' would thus be necessary, as well as an update of the world itself (even if it's just in our mind), unless we were just living the same moment over and over, or if the robots had taken over and we were trapped in some kind of simulated reality...

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 1:19 pm**

Hi Bytesplicer - I've been enjoying your posts

hat's the only issue I'd have with what you're saying, the passage of time seems continuous, and the continual updating of 'false memories' would thus be necessary,

Unfortunately, in order to discuss the concept of timelessness we must employ words and concepts that are assumed to correspond to things that exist in real life, and in time. The moment we try and talk about it we tacitly reject (and indeed destroy) our own thesis!

What you call the 'continual updating of false memories' is a process that can only be understood as occurring in time. As Time is not necessarily accepted as a fact, then neither could the process of implantation you talk about. Thinking about things 'in the world' requires Time (and space) before it can occur. If we are to reject Time then we must be willing to depend on insights that aren't, from the common view, rationally reached.

Ultimately, an alternative perspective to Time cannot be talked about but only lived - as a way of being. Doing things without thinking about them is to do things out of time - in eternity if you like. In the common experiences this occurs unconsciously or automatically - " I just drove here without thinking about it".

But I think there is a way of both doing these things AND being acutely aware at the same time. Without my experiences in meditation I don't think it would have occurred to me that we can have awareness without the time-creating thoughts that usually go with it. This is why, as I said, terms like Eternity seem to be the preserve of contemplatives - and through them get associated with the everyday religions which are so often more hopelessly rooted in time than they like to think.

Anybody who has a knee-jerk rejection of spiritual terms like Eternity shall dismiss this thread as illogical. And from a certain perspective it is! Thank you for recognising that my argument can also be quite valid. I'm only sorry that I couldn't agree that the argument you offered represents that validation.

Best, Nikolai

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 1:52 pm**

Hehe thanks, I'm glad someone is! I'm gonna stop posting soon, been flooding the forum with my verbiage and outstaying my welcome, so it'll be back to lurking for a while!

All fair arguments, and you are correct that it is very difficult to talk on such things, deeply rooted as they are. My own idea of time is based on relative energy exchanges, pretty straightforward in that no energy exchanges = no passage of time, with larger exchanges causing increased or decreased passage of time depending upon how much energy is 'in motion', relatively speaking. Another way to think of it is if one could maintain the exact pattern of energy in an object that object would essentially exist 'outside' of time.

From that viewpoint (which admittedly, is a bit dubious), it is at least plausible that one could slow or alter one's own energy exchanges (relative to the world) through meditation (and a very disciplined mind!) and achieve the state of which you speak.

Posted: **Sun Sep 05, 2010 10:00 am**

Nikolia , we seem to be speaking a totally different language.
when you say "it's age is unverifiable"
once again I say , you must be on some pretty good stuff.
Logic tells us that if we have a piece of rotten fruit in our hand , it was a healthy piece of fruit and it got old, in some cases this process happens in a few days and we can see the rot taking place . It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that time has past , and that all things are slowly rotting.
Us included. Change is the only constant.
You will inevitably draw illogical conclusions , if you use untrue statements in your figuring.
Bytesplicer , I would not be too concerned about the idea that you have overstated your case or your verbiage was flooding the forums to the point that you had overstayed your welcome , I joined in july and I think I'm over 150 posts by now , your dragging the chain a bit , spit it out man , verbiage to the max...

Posted: **Sun Sep 05, 2010 11:08 am**

Haha thanks Godfree, I'll try harder!

Posted: **Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:21 pm**

Hi Godfree

Godfree wrote:Nikolia , we seem to be speaking a totally different language

Not completely different because I am not denying the time-based perspective you advance. I am merely supplementing it with a different perspective - the timeless perspective of the here and now.

Something like a 'memory' can be thought of in two perfectly valid ways:

1) As a thought based on something that actually happened in a different time to the present.
2) As a thought that is merely about some theoretical idea called The Past. Just thinking about something does not make it real. From this perspective there is no essential difference between a 'memory' and 'prediction'. They are both experienced as thoughts in the here and now, and cannot ever be experienced otherwise.

There is no way of knowing which of these perspectives is the truer. They both have equal validity. The error, which is a very common error, is adopting perspective 1 while remaining ignorant of perspective 2.

Godfree wrote:Logic tells us that if we have a piece of rotten fruit in our hand , it was a healthy piece of fruit and it got old

Yes, this is perspective 1. Perspective 2 tells us that all we have is a piece of rotten fruit and that speculation about whether it was once healthy or not goes way beyond what is empirically given. Previous states of health, and the schema of time that is invoked by the word 'previous' are all provided by the judging mind and have nothing to do with the thing that we are actually experiencing - which is a rotten piece of fruit.

So logic provides two perspectives on the fruit and we must be careful to remain mindful of them both.

in some cases this process happens in a few days and we can see the rot taking place

No, this is the illusion. We cannot see a process such as rotting taking place as our senses cannot see T=0, T+1, T+2 simultaneously. At T+3 we just see what we see and the 'antecedents' are provided to us by our imagination. Actually, we have no idea whether healthy fruit turns rotten or rotten fruit turns healthy; rotting is a process that occurs outside of the here and now, is therefore imaginary and all the different stages of the process are thus rendered equivalent.

Godfree wrote:It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that time has past , and that all things are slowly rotting.

I couldn't agree more - the conventional view is easily grasped. It is harder to recognise that there is more to the concept of Time than perspective 1.

Godfree wrote:Change is the only constant.

With your pithy paradox you have unwittingly summed up my position rather well. All things can be viewed as either changing (under the aspect of time) or constant (under that aspect of the here and now, eternity). As all things can be understood equally well by both perspectives the two perspectives are indistinguishable. Change is indeed the only constant! Change IS constancy.

All that is required is to be steadfast in the recognition that Time is not an objective fact of reality, but a judgement. Wherever we evoke time we can also evoke eternity.

Godfree wrote:You will inevitably draw illogical conclusions , if you use untrue statements in your figuring.

Thank you for the warning!

Best wishes, Nikolai

Posted: **Thu Oct 07, 2010 12:54 pm**

Hi Arising,

Re: viewtopic.php?p=53649#p53649

Thank you for your description of a 'Platonist' I can see that my views may overlap theirs in some ways. On the whole though, I get the feeling that labels tend to be generalisations and can cause as much trouble as they solve. I would confess to running a deliberate policy of ignorance of such things.

You wrote:No, I take it as things exist without us. That our 'things' only exist because of 'us' I take as interesting with respect to how we could live and perceive.

I am not suggesting that things can be perceived otherwise. My problem is that when viewed in that manner I am left with contradictions and infinite regressions; this tells me that things are not as they seem.

I wrote:The answers are simple; West Ham last won the F.A. Cup the last time the F.A. Cup was contested and yes you are going down this season.
I was reliably informed by a half dead cat.

To which you wrote:You can't have a 'half-dead' cat, that was the point.

I am thinking that the point is that the maths says that the cat is both alive and dead. The problem is that the same maths is better at predicting stuff than reality is. That is why I conclude West Ham both win and lose any match they play.

Thats why your latter answer was WRONG!!

Sorry, I still stand by my answer, they will have both stayed up and gone down. Perhaps you should have been more optimistic and asked "Are we staying up this season?" the answer is undoubtedly yes.

and whilst I understood the former its still wrong, as you left out 'the last time the F.A. Cupwas contested...by West Ham'.

Yes, I did leave that bit out, but I would argue it was unnecessary to include it because, as it is possible that West Ham may have contested the last time, that therefore it is certain that they won it.

LOL, I wouldn't want to refute the possibility.[That we could be a 'sim' running upon some 'hardware']However, as a solution it is only trying to sweep the problem under the carpet. You simply end up trying to explain how the hardware can exist, who built it and what happened before that.
Maybe, but these problems apply to religion and this religion would have the advantage of understanding that we might be able to interrogate the 'hardware' from within the 'software' via the 'meatware' I'd guess?

Religion? How did that one creep in? But I think this is too far off topic even for me.

It would appear to add more complexity than it removes.
What complexity has been removed with respect to the idea of a first cause by science?

Good question. For me, science has experimentally confirmed that the mathematical models (QM, special and general relativity etc) are better at predicting the world I perceive than the physical models that I hitherto trusted. With a bit of hand waving I am then able to dispose of causality and therefore the need for a first cause.

.....So I think the idea that its all a sim may be very useful as we could check the clock-speed, maybe bit and byte-size, what about RAM capabilities? I've seen odd papers that have the Universe embarrassingly over-hardwared(wired) with respect to what we perceive.

Don't you think it would be more efficient if it was simulated with an analogue computer? But maybe this is best answered in a separate thread.

To me Physics is constrained between two insurmountable obstacles. On the small scale they will chop matter apart until they run up against Planck's Constant, and in doing so, on the large scale they will create particles so massive that they will be black holes and so equally inscrutable.
Not sure who this 'they' is? But the ability to produce 'black-holes' may be "inscrutable" but it'd be bloody useful as a source of energy.

'they' are simply those who try. Black holes sound very tricky things to handle. Big ones would be practically impossible to make and existing ones are a long way away. Tiny ones would be easier to make but would take more energy to produce than they release. My understanding is that tiny ones would be hugely unstable and evaporate almost instantly.

However, I see this as a valuable pursuit as it will provide evidence that things are not as they seem and so give weight to some of the less intuitive possibilities.
What do they 'seem' like?

Do you mean what do things seem like to me? Pretty much the same as they seem to you as far as perception is concerned. I am not psychotic (in that respect anyway). My position is that the way things seem cannot be the way they are.

I think the answer is both infinitely simple and infinitely complex.
You think the answer is a contradiction?

No, I just appear to have picked up something that makes me write cryptically. Now where could I have got that habit from?

I do not have the language to do this justice (I visualise this, not calculate it) but from where I am looking I see I am intrinsic in nothing and by extrapolation, so is everything else. That is to say, take a lump of nothing, stare at it for a bit and you will see yourself (etc) there.

To write down the TOE is to limit it and so leave something out. It simply is. It is everything and nothing.
What is?

Sorry, my cryptic phase strikes again. I see a Theory Of Everything (TOE) as something that just unfolds itself out of nothing. Either you take it in its simple form (nothing) or its expanded form (everything). Sorry, no middle ground without leaving a bit out.

(By 'unfolding' I do not intend to imply a process, I think everything is entirely static. I do not think we exploded out of nothing. Rather, I think what we see is what nothing looks like.)

My position was from the most fundamental level possible. After lurking here for I while found myself less and less able to account for my own existence up to the point that I concluded that I didn't exist (in any manner that I had hitherto thought.) That contrasted with the inescapable thought that I think I do exist. Everything told me that I cannot exist but I think I do. (I think Psychonaut's posts should carry a mental health warning (and be compulsory reading.))
I agree about Psychonaut posts but I think you need to think about what 'thinking' means as opposed to 'thoughting' and in relation to 'knowing' whether one exists or not.

Just to clarify what I mean about Psychonaut's posts. They gave me means and practice at reasoning and, more significantly, the awareness to see the pernicious fallacies that I had accumulated throughout my life. It simply cut the ground from beneath my feet and I can no longer avoid seeing the cracks in reality and what that must mean. That hurts my brain.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by 'thinking', 'thoughting' and 'knowing'. Just guessing but when I see a conjurer do something impossible, I do not conclude that magic is possible. I conclude that there is something happening that I am unaware of. I see what you see; it is just that I think it is a conjuring trick.

I'm not bothered that my old model is broken as I have another that seems a better fit. I am bothered that I find the new model simultaneously unbearable and inescapable. I've been not following the few Zen threads with interest but I don't think it is the answer for me.
Nor me, what is it that you find unbearable?

What do I find unbearable about the new model? That's a tough one. Firstly, I was being melodramatic; it isn't, because I'm still here. Secondly, it shreds the basis of all my past hopes and fears and so precipitates a very uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Thirdly, the sheer scale of it hurts my brain; in contrast, the total perspective vortex sounds claustrophobic.

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