2 ms·
We bend clocks, not time. We bend them for convenience and it has nothing to do with whether time is an “unyielding fact”.
by dpark 5y ago
We bend clocks, not time. We bend them for convenience and it has nothing to do with whether time is an “unyielding fact”.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoThere is no time outside of our ability to measure it. Every such measuring device is a clock. Separating the two is a pointless reification of time.
- dpark 5y agoOf course time exists. Measurement does not create a thing. It quantifies it. Time exists regardless of measurement, just like mass, volume, voltage, etc. If time did not exist outside of measurement we would have no reason to measure it. We created clocks (and other devices) to measure the passage of time, but we were well aware of its passage before we measured it.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoOur awareness of such events is itself a quantification. Just as we can estimate distance we can measure with more refined instruments. The same applies to all physical quantities.
- dpark 5y agoI am completely lost as to what your point is. Do you believe that mass also does not exist unless we measure it or are you saying there is something special about time?
- kelseyfrog 5y agoI'm making the radical constructionist point based on Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.
- dpark 5y agoI asked a pretty straightforward question that shouldn’t require me reading hundreds of pages for you to answer. I feel like this is headed toward a low-value philosophical discussion about how nothing really means anything without an observer or something like that.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoNearly all knowledge is socially constructed and appears as though it isn't through the process of reification. This is different from the realism-idealism divide. That is about as simple as I can make it. It is probably just as useful as saying a spinor is a square root of a vector. While simple, it doesn't do much to illustrate the point. A background in constructionism can however be had at the expense of reading 189 pages.
- PeterisP 5y agoThe physical reality of time is limited to the concept of time differences - how much time elapses between two events. On the other hand, the notion of assigning a particular label (e.g. "9 o'clock" to some moment of time) is arbitrary and determined by social consensus or political aspects, physical reality plays little role in that.