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The argument is deeply flawed. 1) A term doesn't become imaginary just because it turned out to be physically more elaborate than its initial meaning. The con

by vog 9y ago

The argument is deeply flawed. 1) A term doesn't become imaginary just because it turned out to be physically more elaborate than its initial meaning. The concept of time never vasnished. It just changed a bit. It is still one of the axes of spacetime. 2) The logic itself is flawed. Saying "Time might only exist in your head ... because of spacetime" is like saying: * "Magnetism might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism" * "Electricity might only exist in your head ... because of electromagnetism" * "Atoms [meaning: individable parts] might only exist in your head ... because of electrons/protons/neutrons" 3) Even from a purely philosophical view, pointing out time here is meaningless. Every word describes a concept, a model, so anything including spacetime might exist just in our heads. Pointing that out specifically for time makes no sense.

saimiam 9y ago
I thought the point was very clear - if gravity is too slow (not sure what this means) to force decohered particles to move in a single time direction, then the notion that a decohered particle is moving forward in time must come from our personal predispositions. I'm just a layperson reading this article - happy to be corrected.
- vog 9y ago
  That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself. But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions. Yet, isn't it strange that all human cultures have developed the same notion of the forward time direction? Wouldn't we expect some islands to have developed the other convention, just like there are some places where cars drive on the left rather than right side of the road? Or, is it our human brain? Then, shouldn't we observe some animals or plants with an apparently different perception? More importantly, however, this disagrees completely with physics, ancient as well as modern physics, because of, well, experiments. [1][2] The forward/backward time directions are more comparable to up/down space directions (in a gravitational field), which are very distinct from each other. The direction of time can be measured in so many different ways, almost none of them really connected to our personal perception. It's the whole world around us that makes a clear difference between forward and backward time direction, not just we in our heads. [1] Those led to the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, which modern physics does question in its fine-grained details (as with gravitation, etc.), but not in principle, because it is so clearly visible in experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics [2] See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
  - johnchristopher 9y ago
    > That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself. > But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions. Isn't just the whole Prigogin/Einstein argument ? (small scale gives the illusion events are rewindable vs higher scale givea the illusion events aren't rewindable).
  - saimiam 9y ago
    According to these two lines in the article - The question of time's arrow is an old one. And to be clear, it's not whether time exists, but what direction it moves. Lanza is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations. - everything we see in universe is essentially because of a personal predisposition towards seeing time a certain way. Even the 2nd law is because we see time the way we do. If time is a lie, then all physics becomes a lie. Btw, I'm going to stop digging now. I have no idea of what I'm talking about except what I read in the article.
    - vog 9y ago
      > is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations This "theory" is old and well-known. However, we are not merely limited by our (biological) sensors, but by our sensors+actors. That is, we can't see too far in the sky, but we can build telescopes. And microscopes. And other strange machines with whom we interact mostly by looking at numbers those spit into some computer. Science has long overcome our biological limitation, and is more driven by our technological limitations: What if our computer programs which evaluate our experiment's sensory data are wrong? What if the CPU is defect? Or the wiring with the sensors is bad? Better take some more computers and let them calculate the stuff again. And take some more humans to evaluate everything. And better repeat whole experiments from time to time. But that's what we are doing (or least: know we ought to be doing) all the time. There's a lot to criticize here with design of studies and repeatability of experiments, but our biological limitations play a fairly small role here.
chc 9y ago
It seems pretty clear to me from reading the article that the headline is simply using "time" as a shorthand for "the arrow of time," and the article tends to refer to the arrow explicitly. This is a common usage (e.g. "if I could turn back time"), so I don't feel like it's particularly objectionable.
- vog 9y ago
  Even with that interpretation, the article is flawed, which I explained in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424006
coldtea 9y ago
You've missed the conceptional shift in the article -- it's not that time doesn't exist at all as a phenomenon, it's that the phenomenon that we perceive as the direction of time is just that -- a perception. Think of it in the same way that there's no green and red (the colors), just frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, that we just perceive as green and red.

by vog 9y ago

saimiam 9y ago

I thought the point was very clear - if gravity is too slow (not sure what this means) to force decohered particles to move in a single time direction, then the notion that a decohered particle is moving forward in time must come from our personal predispositions. I'm just a layperson reading this article - happy to be corrected.

vog 9y ago
That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself. But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions. Yet, isn't it strange that all human cultures have developed the same notion of the forward time direction? Wouldn't we expect some islands to have developed the other convention, just like there are some places where cars drive on the left rather than right side of the road? Or, is it our human brain? Then, shouldn't we observe some animals or plants with an apparently different perception? More importantly, however, this disagrees completely with physics, ancient as well as modern physics, because of, well, experiments. [1][2] The forward/backward time directions are more comparable to up/down space directions (in a gravitational field), which are very distinct from each other. The direction of time can be measured in so many different ways, almost none of them really connected to our personal perception. It's the whole world around us that makes a clear difference between forward and backward time direction, not just we in our heads. [1] Those led to the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, which modern physics does question in its fine-grained details (as with gravitation, etc.), but not in principle, because it is so clearly visible in experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics [2] See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  > That might question our notion of forward/backward time direction, not the concept of time itself. > But even then, this would imply that our forward/backward time direction is just convention, much like left/right space directions. Isn't just the whole Prigogin/Einstein argument ? (small scale gives the illusion events are rewindable vs higher scale givea the illusion events aren't rewindable).
- saimiam 9y ago
  According to these two lines in the article - The question of time's arrow is an old one. And to be clear, it's not whether time exists, but what direction it moves. Lanza is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations. - everything we see in universe is essentially because of a personal predisposition towards seeing time a certain way. Even the 2nd law is because we see time the way we do. If time is a lie, then all physics becomes a lie. Btw, I'm going to stop digging now. I have no idea of what I'm talking about except what I read in the article.
  - vog 9y ago
    > is the founder of biocentrism, a theory that space and time are constructs of biological sensory limitations This "theory" is old and well-known. However, we are not merely limited by our (biological) sensors, but by our sensors+actors. That is, we can't see too far in the sky, but we can build telescopes. And microscopes. And other strange machines with whom we interact mostly by looking at numbers those spit into some computer. Science has long overcome our biological limitation, and is more driven by our technological limitations: What if our computer programs which evaluate our experiment's sensory data are wrong? What if the CPU is defect? Or the wiring with the sensors is bad? Better take some more computers and let them calculate the stuff again. And take some more humans to evaluate everything. And better repeat whole experiments from time to time. But that's what we are doing (or least: know we ought to be doing) all the time. There's a lot to criticize here with design of studies and repeatability of experiments, but our biological limitations play a fairly small role here.

chc 9y ago

It seems pretty clear to me from reading the article that the headline is simply using "time" as a shorthand for "the arrow of time," and the article tends to refer to the arrow explicitly. This is a common usage (e.g. "if I could turn back time"), so I don't feel like it's particularly objectionable.

vog 9y ago
Even with that interpretation, the article is flawed, which I explained in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424006

coldtea 9y ago

You've missed the conceptional shift in the article -- it's not that time doesn't exist at all as a phenomenon, it's that the phenomenon that we perceive as the direction of time is just that -- a perception. Think of it in the same way that there's no green and red (the colors), just frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, that we just perceive as green and red.