4 ms·

> geometry sitting around doing nothing The problem is even worse, because without some time-like process, that geometry can't even be observed. The problem he

by ud_0 5y ago

> geometry sitting around doing nothing The problem is even worse, because without some time-like process, that geometry can't even be observed. The problem here isn't mathematics, it's the practical aspects of the universe. > timeless universe within which I sit with the illusion of time I'm not sure what the definition of illusion is here, but the universe does have an evolving state and that's not an illusion according to any meaning of the word I can think of. Time as a general measure of the speed of this evolution is not a human concept either, there is no difference in the way living matter is subjected to time vs how "dead" matter is. Where there's room for interpretation in my opinion is whether time is a real dimension, or if it's just a dimension-like phenomenon. It may in the end well boil down to something like "time is just the local tick rate of matter", which is a position that may only be provable if we could somehow discern whether the past actually exists physically (as opposed to being destroyed as the universe's state evolves like an array of cellular automata would).

meroes 5y ago
Maybe this will change your mind slightly?: There's a bouncy ball in a box with pressure sensing walls. Each wall feeds the pressure data to HDD physical storage. The ball is released from the top wall at some random angle toward the bottom. The storage devices spin at 100prm and in sync. Looking at the data from the 6 storage devices, I would see the first entry is from wall_ceiling, recorded at plate rotational angle 0pi. Then the next entry in the collection is from wall_floor say at 1pi. Then wall_left at 1.5pi then wall_ceiling again at 2.1pi, then wall_right at 3pi. The ball-sensor-storage system alone never needed a "flow of time". The data printout at the end is just a piece of paper with a few columns of numbers. A function is also a column of numbers. And so is a circle or any other polygon. You may think the printout went from 1 entry to 2 entries to 3 entries...that surely was a flow of time. No. A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time. It is entirely internal. The printout system does not have a flow of time. It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing. At each step the printout is entirely given by the behavior of the other particles in the system. Why not our brain states too? When you see "blue" you are seeing 480nm wavelength photons hitting your retina and cones. When you feel continuous, each brain state of yours is kind of a running average of your previous brain states (memories). Or something like that. Maybe some kind of recursive build up of memories at each instant. But you say you must "flow" even for brief moments to perceive something. Even if it's in discrete steps that's fine with you. But you have to be willing to go one step further to get their arguments. There is only assemblages of particles. And somehow certain assemblages lead to self-reference and awareness, of which we call conscious experience and "flow of time". Can a function "feel" something? Who knows. But the course of human scientific endeavor has taken us very far from where we started.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing. This is the part that seems suspect: it seems like motion is taken to be fundamental, but time is not. This seems just as arbitrary as taking time as fundamental, and motion as derived (simply the totality of positions at different points in time). But overall, given the position and momentum of a particle at step 1, can you predict its position at step 6 without knowing some quantity that is equivalent to the length of time between step 1 and step 6? And if you do require such a quantity, does it matter whether we use time or something else? > A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time. Sure, but there is much more to time than this human subjective experience. A lot of our knowledge of physics relies on the notion of time to actually function. It's true that we already know that some of our fundamental physical theories are flawed (since they are currently incompatible with each other), and perhaps removing time from them COULD be a necessity for unifying them, but this is far from a given. I very much doubt you could reformulate special relativity without ending up with a concept that is completely isomorphic to what we think of as time. Note that a physical representation of a continuous "you" is a much more dubious concept than time itself, and I think it is one that is anyway incompatible with most physical theories/interpretations, as arguments like the Ship of Theseus or teleportation have shown forever.
- ud_0 5y ago
  I appreciate the effort, but it doesn't matter how many times I read your post, I don't see what's being accomplished there and it honestly feels both condescending and unneccessarily complex at the same time. Even in your example, there is clearly state change (how could there not be). In particular it's the casual anthropocentrism that doesn't sit right with me, but it's so much more. You're mostly concerned with human perception and philosophical aspects that have roots in human feelings. If your main objection to the existence of time is that it doesn't fit in with your definition of consciousness, that means we're not even remotely talking about the same thing. We might use overlapping words, but that's it. Consciousness is not a scientific concept. Penrose did a lot of damage trying to legitimize it with his quantum woo, but it's fundamentally incompatible with scientific considerations outside of psychology.

by ud_0 5y ago

meroes 5y ago

Maybe this will change your mind slightly?: There's a bouncy ball in a box with pressure sensing walls. Each wall feeds the pressure data to HDD physical storage. The ball is released from the top wall at some random angle toward the bottom. The storage devices spin at 100prm and in sync. Looking at the data from the 6 storage devices, I would see the first entry is from wall_ceiling, recorded at plate rotational angle 0pi. Then the next entry in the collection is from wall_floor say at 1pi. Then wall_left at 1.5pi then wall_ceiling again at 2.1pi, then wall_right at 3pi. The ball-sensor-storage system alone never needed a "flow of time". The data printout at the end is just a piece of paper with a few columns of numbers. A function is also a column of numbers. And so is a circle or any other polygon. You may think the printout went from 1 entry to 2 entries to 3 entries...that surely was a flow of time. No. A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time. It is entirely internal. The printout system does not have a flow of time. It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing. At each step the printout is entirely given by the behavior of the other particles in the system. Why not our brain states too? When you see "blue" you are seeing 480nm wavelength photons hitting your retina and cones. When you feel continuous, each brain state of yours is kind of a running average of your previous brain states (memories). Or something like that. Maybe some kind of recursive build up of memories at each instant. But you say you must "flow" even for brief moments to perceive something. Even if it's in discrete steps that's fine with you. But you have to be willing to go one step further to get their arguments. There is only assemblages of particles. And somehow certain assemblages lead to self-reference and awareness, of which we call conscious experience and "flow of time". Can a function "feel" something? Who knows. But the course of human scientific endeavor has taken us very far from where we started.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing. This is the part that seems suspect: it seems like motion is taken to be fundamental, but time is not. This seems just as arbitrary as taking time as fundamental, and motion as derived (simply the totality of positions at different points in time). But overall, given the position and momentum of a particle at step 1, can you predict its position at step 6 without knowing some quantity that is equivalent to the length of time between step 1 and step 6? And if you do require such a quantity, does it matter whether we use time or something else? > A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time. Sure, but there is much more to time than this human subjective experience. A lot of our knowledge of physics relies on the notion of time to actually function. It's true that we already know that some of our fundamental physical theories are flawed (since they are currently incompatible with each other), and perhaps removing time from them COULD be a necessity for unifying them, but this is far from a given. I very much doubt you could reformulate special relativity without ending up with a concept that is completely isomorphic to what we think of as time. Note that a physical representation of a continuous "you" is a much more dubious concept than time itself, and I think it is one that is anyway incompatible with most physical theories/interpretations, as arguments like the Ship of Theseus or teleportation have shown forever.
ud_0 5y ago
I appreciate the effort, but it doesn't matter how many times I read your post, I don't see what's being accomplished there and it honestly feels both condescending and unneccessarily complex at the same time. Even in your example, there is clearly state change (how could there not be). In particular it's the casual anthropocentrism that doesn't sit right with me, but it's so much more. You're mostly concerned with human perception and philosophical aspects that have roots in human feelings. If your main objection to the existence of time is that it doesn't fit in with your definition of consciousness, that means we're not even remotely talking about the same thing. We might use overlapping words, but that's it. Consciousness is not a scientific concept. Penrose did a lot of damage trying to legitimize it with his quantum woo, but it's fundamentally incompatible with scientific considerations outside of psychology.