4 ms·

‘time’ is created by human beings to make sense of gravity [TED Video]

48 points by tfh 16y ago

korch 16y ago
I liked this. He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds, that we are incapable of conscious experience outside of the context of time, and therefore everything we can possibly cognize is bounded by a set of a priori constraints which we can recognize.
- jjs 16y ago
  He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds If by "original" you mean, in response to Hume's earlier statements on the origins of the idea of time. :-) http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/ http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/ http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_1:_Of_the_understanding/Part_II http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_...
  - crazydiamond 16y ago
    Not to mention the eastern sources, namely Buddhism and Hinduism that have said so thousands of years ago.
    - balding_n_tired 16y ago
      Indeed Schopenhauer quotes them...
      - crazydiamond 16y ago
        iirc, Eckhart Tolle breaks time into clock time and psychological time. Perhaps, he does this to make it easy for audiences. But basically he does not debunk time. Psychological time is a mind created state which allows for the existence of a personal story. When one stays in the present moment, one breaks out of psy time, but clock time still exists. I hope i have not misquoted him.
    - jjs 16y ago
      I allude to that elsewhere in this thread. :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736
  - korch 16y ago
    I'm a philo nut. I've read Hume's Treatise, as it of course is well documented in Kant's into to Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant started his whole journey into creating his system of Transcendental Philosophy because of Hume's deep questioning of the reality of causality. Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion, but it was only a century after Kant's era that the holy texts of those religions were translated for Europeans. Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to have read the Upanishads and other Eastern religious texts, and then to also work Eastern ideas into the historical backdrop of Western philosophy.
    - jjs 16y ago
      Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion Bear in mind that in the ancient world, there wasn't necessarily a sharp distinction between "philosophy" and "religion". There is evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans considered the "Brahmanas" (Hindus) and "śramanas" (Buddhists) to be simply different schools of philosophers. From wikipedia: In the 2nd century CE, the Christian dogmatist, Clement of Alexandria recognized Bactrian Buddhists (śramanas) and Indian gymnosophists for their influence on Greek thought: "Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the śramanas among the Bactrians ("Σαρμαναίοι Βάκτρων"); and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour's birth, and came into the land of Judea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called śramanas ("Σαρμάναι"), and others Brahmins ("Βραφμαναι")." Clement of Alexandria "The Stromata, or Miscellanies" Book I, Chapter XV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Hellenistic_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Hellenistic...) Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. To the contrary, see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Expansion_of_Buddhism_to_the_West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Expansion_o... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Greco-Buddhist_interaction_.282nd_century_BCE.E2.80.931st_century_CE.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Greco-Buddh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_the_Roman_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_the_Roman_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_trade_with_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_trade_with_India
jjs 16y ago
"Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." —The Gateless Gate, Koan 29
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
pnelly 16y ago
Superb... It interests me that the talk is dated '30th November 2010' ... I thought that somehow he had managed to give a talk from the future and put it on the interwebs backdated a few months... Of course then I realised that this is the date of the forthcoming talk..
Robin_Message 16y ago
Sorry, what? Is this guy a crackpot or have I missed some kind of joke? "The speed of light is created by our minds?" Then why do machines perceive it? Why do we notice no changes in it between minds? Why does all of our simple Physics work (e.g. refraction) assuming a fixed speed? Just because you want it to be true doesn't make it true.
- TeHCrAzY 16y ago
  We made the machines, they are our product, and will reflect that. This is at a much higher level than mere machines. However, I don't think he really explains a great deal. Much of his talk builds up upon itself, without ever seriously trying to back the claims.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Just because we built a machine to measure something doesn't mean it produces what we expect. Arguably, most of science is simply trying to account for the unexpected.
- hugh3 16y ago
  OK, I didn't watch the entire thing, but I skipped around for long enough to satisfy myself that he was setting off a lot of the old crackpot detectors. 1. There's a bit where he puts a quote from Descartes next to a quote from himself. 2. "You might think you are cosmic. But I hope to convince you you are not cosmic, you are Earthlike. And it's all because of a hypothesis I had..." 3. And the inevitable "conclusions" slide where it turns out that his hypothesis solves (in some way which can't be explained in a twelve-minute talk) all the major problems of physics today (dark matter, grand unification etc) So, Dr Ockels, I'm sticking you in the "provisional crackpot" bin, but if you'd like to explain your theories more carefully, on paper, and with a bunch more equations, I'll have a look at 'em.
- gnosis 16y ago
  It's questionable whether any being can know what another being perceives (or even if the other being perceives at all). Whether machines "perceive" and what it is they "perceive" (if they do "perceive" at all) is even more questionable. Some have even questioned whether even the individual self perceives, and the very existence of a self and of minds, etc. You don't have to be a crackpot to entertain such ideas. You just have to be interested in philosophy (or religion, as the Hindus came up with the idea that the entire world is illusory... many thousands of years ago).
mattheww 16y ago
Just so we're clear, there is no real physics in this talk. There is no information in this talk. It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd. Physics is in fact independent of the actual value of the speed of light. The idea that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in all reference frames is a postulate of special relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity are confirmed by numerous experiments. Edit: Note this is also a TEDx talk, not regular TED.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- ynniv 16y ago
  To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd Try to not take life so seriously. The speaker is being philosophical, which will not change the physics we have already documented but could help us think outside the proverbial box. There is no information in this talk. Go outside, get some sun, smell some flowers. Not all life is hard math. Most of science isn't even hard math. By the time science involves hard math, we usually have an intuitive sense of what the answer will be and just have to verify it. It takes an immense amount of aimless philosophical wandering to arrive at a question which has a mathematical answer.
  - bshock 16y ago
    I appreciate mattheww's viewpoint. I take life very seriously, perhaps because I have only a finite amount of it. I read this site because I'm looking for a certain type of information, and I'm grateful to learn if a link does not contain that information.
sbarre 16y ago
Time is simply a perception and measure of movement right.. If there was no movement (at all), there would be no way to measure time..
- crazydiamond 16y ago
  If the mind were not there --- thoughts and memories -- we would not remember a previous moment, we would be in the now. So there would be no time perceived by us. We would of course then not invent instruments that keep track of time. Is it possible that our clocks don't keep track of time, but of our notion of time. Just wondering??
  - klochner 16y ago
    And if a tree fell in the woods . . . ?
  - Groxx 16y ago
    The only way I can see that working requires two things: 1. We create (physical) reality to some extent at least. By thinking time exists, we are able to create something which can track the progression of something which only exists in our thoughts. 2. Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time. The sun rises, then sets, it doesn't re-wind part way through the day, or simply appear in the middle of the sky. 2b. Unless, of course, this is all a / your dream. Not to say that this is impossible (just try to disprove it), just convoluted and counter to most of what we (seem to) know.
    - crazydiamond 16y ago
      > Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time No, but perhaps we are taught the same idea from childhood. Actually believe there is a tribe where the notion of time does not exist, and their language reflects that. Some linguistic expert found that all his language theories failed w.r.t their language. Just as an aside, for a ray of light, there is no time. Its always now.
scott_s 16y ago
I'm with everyone here that this talk had little actual information, but I did take away one neat observation. Back when he was an astronaut, when his shuttle landed and he stood up in gravity for the first time, he felt like he was on an elevator going up at 1g. I think it's neat because his brain had learned during the space flight that any acceleration means motion. Once he was back on Earth, his brain had to re-learn that the constant 1g we feel does not mean motion. I think that has more implications for how our brain works and interprets stimuli than it does physics, but it's still neat.
Groxx 16y ago
He started by berating the audience for pretending to understand the universe and mysteriously declaring, “I know what it is that you don’t know yet and it will change your life”. Wow. Spoken like a true theoretical scientist. Of course they're right; time will show they're all right. Except those others who only thought they were right: they're morons.

48 points by tfh 16y ago

korch 16y ago

I liked this. He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds, that we are incapable of conscious experience outside of the context of time, and therefore everything we can possibly cognize is bounded by a set of a priori constraints which we can recognize.

jjs 16y ago
He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds If by "original" you mean, in response to Hume's earlier statements on the origins of the idea of time. :-) http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/ http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/ http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_1:_Of_the_understanding/Part_II http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_...
- crazydiamond 16y ago
  Not to mention the eastern sources, namely Buddhism and Hinduism that have said so thousands of years ago.
  - balding_n_tired 16y ago
    Indeed Schopenhauer quotes them...
    - crazydiamond 16y ago
      iirc, Eckhart Tolle breaks time into clock time and psychological time. Perhaps, he does this to make it easy for audiences. But basically he does not debunk time. Psychological time is a mind created state which allows for the existence of a personal story. When one stays in the present moment, one breaks out of psy time, but clock time still exists. I hope i have not misquoted him.
  - jjs 16y ago
    I allude to that elsewhere in this thread. :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736
- korch 16y ago
  I'm a philo nut. I've read Hume's Treatise, as it of course is well documented in Kant's into to Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant started his whole journey into creating his system of Transcendental Philosophy because of Hume's deep questioning of the reality of causality. Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion, but it was only a century after Kant's era that the holy texts of those religions were translated for Europeans. Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to have read the Upanishads and other Eastern religious texts, and then to also work Eastern ideas into the historical backdrop of Western philosophy.
  - jjs 16y ago
    Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion Bear in mind that in the ancient world, there wasn't necessarily a sharp distinction between "philosophy" and "religion". There is evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans considered the "Brahmanas" (Hindus) and "śramanas" (Buddhists) to be simply different schools of philosophers. From wikipedia: In the 2nd century CE, the Christian dogmatist, Clement of Alexandria recognized Bactrian Buddhists (śramanas) and Indian gymnosophists for their influence on Greek thought: "Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the śramanas among the Bactrians ("Σαρμαναίοι Βάκτρων"); and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour's birth, and came into the land of Judea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called śramanas ("Σαρμάναι"), and others Brahmins ("Βραφμαναι")." Clement of Alexandria "The Stromata, or Miscellanies" Book I, Chapter XV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Hellenistic_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Hellenistic...) Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. To the contrary, see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Expansion_of_Buddhism_to_the_West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Expansion_o... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Greco-Buddhist_interaction_.282nd_century_BCE.E2.80.931st_century_CE.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Greco-Buddh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_the_Roman_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_the_Roman_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_trade_with_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_trade_with_India

jjs 16y ago

"Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." —The Gateless Gate, Koan 29

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

pnelly 16y ago

Superb... It interests me that the talk is dated '30th November 2010' ... I thought that somehow he had managed to give a talk from the future and put it on the interwebs backdated a few months... Of course then I realised that this is the date of the forthcoming talk..

Robin_Message 16y ago

Sorry, what? Is this guy a crackpot or have I missed some kind of joke? "The speed of light is created by our minds?" Then why do machines perceive it? Why do we notice no changes in it between minds? Why does all of our simple Physics work (e.g. refraction) assuming a fixed speed? Just because you want it to be true doesn't make it true.

TeHCrAzY 16y ago
We made the machines, they are our product, and will reflect that. This is at a much higher level than mere machines. However, I don't think he really explains a great deal. Much of his talk builds up upon itself, without ever seriously trying to back the claims.
- Groxx 16y ago
  Just because we built a machine to measure something doesn't mean it produces what we expect. Arguably, most of science is simply trying to account for the unexpected.
hugh3 16y ago
OK, I didn't watch the entire thing, but I skipped around for long enough to satisfy myself that he was setting off a lot of the old crackpot detectors. 1. There's a bit where he puts a quote from Descartes next to a quote from himself. 2. "You might think you are cosmic. But I hope to convince you you are not cosmic, you are Earthlike. And it's all because of a hypothesis I had..." 3. And the inevitable "conclusions" slide where it turns out that his hypothesis solves (in some way which can't be explained in a twelve-minute talk) all the major problems of physics today (dark matter, grand unification etc) So, Dr Ockels, I'm sticking you in the "provisional crackpot" bin, but if you'd like to explain your theories more carefully, on paper, and with a bunch more equations, I'll have a look at 'em.
gnosis 16y ago
It's questionable whether any being can know what another being perceives (or even if the other being perceives at all). Whether machines "perceive" and what it is they "perceive" (if they do "perceive" at all) is even more questionable. Some have even questioned whether even the individual self perceives, and the very existence of a self and of minds, etc. You don't have to be a crackpot to entertain such ideas. You just have to be interested in philosophy (or religion, as the Hindus came up with the idea that the entire world is illusory... many thousands of years ago).

mattheww 16y ago

Just so we're clear, there is no real physics in this talk. There is no information in this talk. It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd. Physics is in fact independent of the actual value of the speed of light. The idea that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in all reference frames is a postulate of special relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity are confirmed by numerous experiments. Edit: Note this is also a TEDx talk, not regular TED.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ynniv 16y ago
To suggest that this implies something about physics is absurd Try to not take life so seriously. The speaker is being philosophical, which will not change the physics we have already documented but could help us think outside the proverbial box. There is no information in this talk. Go outside, get some sun, smell some flowers. Not all life is hard math. Most of science isn't even hard math. By the time science involves hard math, we usually have an intuitive sense of what the answer will be and just have to verify it. It takes an immense amount of aimless philosophical wandering to arrive at a question which has a mathematical answer.
- bshock 16y ago
  I appreciate mattheww's viewpoint. I take life very seriously, perhaps because I have only a finite amount of it. I read this site because I'm looking for a certain type of information, and I'm grateful to learn if a link does not contain that information.

sbarre 16y ago

Time is simply a perception and measure of movement right.. If there was no movement (at all), there would be no way to measure time..

crazydiamond 16y ago
If the mind were not there --- thoughts and memories -- we would not remember a previous moment, we would be in the now. So there would be no time perceived by us. We would of course then not invent instruments that keep track of time. Is it possible that our clocks don't keep track of time, but of our notion of time. Just wondering??
- klochner 16y ago
  And if a tree fell in the woods . . . ?
- Groxx 16y ago
  The only way I can see that working requires two things: 1. We create (physical) reality to some extent at least. By thinking time exists, we are able to create something which can track the progression of something which only exists in our thoughts. 2. Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time. The sun rises, then sets, it doesn't re-wind part way through the day, or simply appear in the middle of the sky. 2b. Unless, of course, this is all a / your dream. Not to say that this is impossible (just try to disprove it), just convoluted and counter to most of what we (seem to) know.
  - crazydiamond 16y ago
    > Jungian collective unconscious: we all seem to have the same idea of time No, but perhaps we are taught the same idea from childhood. Actually believe there is a tribe where the notion of time does not exist, and their language reflects that. Some linguistic expert found that all his language theories failed w.r.t their language. Just as an aside, for a ray of light, there is no time. Its always now.

scott_s 16y ago

I'm with everyone here that this talk had little actual information, but I did take away one neat observation. Back when he was an astronaut, when his shuttle landed and he stood up in gravity for the first time, he felt like he was on an elevator going up at 1g. I think it's neat because his brain had learned during the space flight that any acceleration means motion. Once he was back on Earth, his brain had to re-learn that the constant 1g we feel does not mean motion. I think that has more implications for how our brain works and interprets stimuli than it does physics, but it's still neat.

Groxx 16y ago

He started by berating the audience for pretending to understand the universe and mysteriously declaring, “I know what it is that you don’t know yet and it will change your life”. Wow. Spoken like a true theoretical scientist. Of course they're right; time will show they're all right. Except those others who only thought they were right: they're morons.