Is time an abstract idea?

[coberst]

Is time an abstract idea?

 

Time, motion, and change are such basic philosophical concepts that we see them being considered by all philosophers throughout Western philosophical thinking. These are fundamental concepts about which philosophers theorize and they are fundamental concepts about which every DickandJane deal with constantly in their ever-day actions and thoughts.

 

All of these concepts are abstract ideas that are constructed of multiple metaphors resulting from literal ever-day experiences. Our society thinks of metaphors as being the venue of poets; however, metaphors are not arbitrary or culturally and historically specific. “Rather, they tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and stable, non arbitrary, and widespread throughout the cultures, and languages of the world”

 

Most importantly we must recognize these metaphors as being abstract but also that they are grounded in specific experiences.

 

Philosophers have theorized as to whether time really is; is it bounded, is it continuous or divided, does it flow like a river, is time the same to everyone, and is it long or short. These are common questions for DickandJane but philosophy seems to discount most of these human quizzes as being irrelevant. Often philosophers point out paradoxes embodied within these questions.

 

We have a rich and diverse notion of what time is. Time is not a thing-in-itself that we conceptualize as being independent. “All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events …We define time by metonymy: successive iterations of a type of event stand for intervals of “time”.” Consequentially, the basic literal properties of our concept of time are consequences of properties of events: Time is directional, irreversible, segmentable, continuous, and measurable.

 

We do have an experience of time but that experience is always in conjunction with our real experiences of events. “It also means that our experience of time is dependent on our embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events…Experience does not always come prior to conceptualization, because conceptualization is itself embodied. Further, it means that our experience of time is grounded in other experiences, the experiences of events.”

 

It is virtually impossible for us to conceptualize time as a stand alone concept without metaphor. Physics defines motion, i.e. velocity, in terms of distance and time, thereby indicating motion is secondary to time and distance. However, metaphorically we appear to place time as dependent upon the primitive sense of motion. “There is an area of our visual system of our brain that is dedicated to the processing of motion.”

 

MOVING TIME METAPHOR

 

“There is a lone, stationary observer facing in a fixed direction. There is an indefinite long sequence of objects moving past the observer from front to back. The moving objects are conceptualized as having fronts in their direction of motion.”

 

The time has long past for that answer. The time has come. Time flies by. Summer is almost past. I can see the face of trouble. I cannot face the future. The following days will tell the story.

 

In this metaphor I conceptualize time as an object moving toward me. The times that are in front of me are conceptualized as the future and the times that have passed me are the past. The present time is that time that is now beside me. This is why we speak of the here and now. My position is a reference point, thus tomorrow is before me and yesterday is past me. I can see the future and the past is gone forever.

 

MOVING OBSERVER or TIME’S LANDSCAPE

 

The second major metaphor for time represents a moving observer wherein the present is the position on the path in which the observer is positioned.

 

In this metaphor the observer is moving through time. Time is a path that I move through. Time, i.e. the path can be long or short, time can be bounded.

 

There is trouble ahead. Let’s spread this project over several days. We reached summer already.

 

In this metaphor we construct temporal correlates with distance measurements: long, short, pass, through, over, down the road, etc.

 

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

[Michael Mooney]

I'm pretty much on vacation from hypography, but saw your post, and since debunking "time" as a reified entity is one of my primary philosophical/scientific interests, I want to call your attention to the "What is Time?" thread...

 

http://hypography.com/forums/philosophy-of-science/3650-what-is-time-58.html#post249111

 

...specifically my take on it, here edited from the second to last post there:

 

Time is the *concept/measure* of event duration.

This can be any "event" from a designated period of cesium's radioactive decay (as calibrated in atomic clocks) to Earth's "great precession" cycle of around 26,000 years.

Most familiar "timed events" of course are Earth's period of orbit and rotation, and fractions thereof, down to seconds and very small fractions of a second.

 

However, none of these periods of "time" are ontologically real as entities or a malleable medium of any kind. They are, as you said, merely concepts or measurements of designated events, beginning and ending with the observer's 'clicks of the stopwatch.'

 

So, in truth, *now,* the present *is* always present, not sliced into units of time in the real world/cosmos.

The future is not yet real and present and the past is not still real and present, and there is no "time" between future and past. Time is the convention of event duration from one designated now to another.

 

So, "spans of time", as above are as real as we make them. There is no cosmic counter clicking at every complete earth rotation, orbit, etc. Yet we can "be on time" to work by common consensus on the *convention, time,* and we can plug in "time" as a component of velocity and calculate and execute a round trip to the moon or speak in terms of "light minutes or years" as measures of distance.

 

It is also conventional to call "time" the fourth dimension added to the obvious spacial three which describe volume. Then we can avoid having two airplanes at the same coordinates in air-space at the same time. A very useful convention.

But "it" doesn't expand and contract as an actual entity of any kind, i.e., not "real" in that sense, or in the sense that each location has its own "time environment." "It" is always, perpetually *NOW everywhere.* (Same "it" as in "It is raining..." no agent "it" making rain happen.)

 

Thanks for the opportunity to again clarify what time is ... and is not.

 

 

Michael

[UncleAl]

Time is what an honest clock reads. Time is only valid locally. If you do not like oscillators, use radioactive decay half-life (except for elecron capture decay). An external observer must respect Relativity or do some fast explaining as to why Lorentz invariance does not obtain..

[lemit]

I agree with Uncle Al, from the little I understand of relativity. I would also add that time is a measurement of what we waste when we read--and of course, write--speculations like these.

 

And yes, I realize that at some time in the future this will probably be used against me. It is in avoidance of such counterattacks that I try to keep my posts short, like this one.

 

--lemit

 

p.s. I'm asking this as an old farmer: haven't we plowed this ground a few too many times already--the plow possibly being pulled by the proverbial dead horse?

[Michael Mooney]

After all this, (including the whole "What is Time" thread) has anyone here actually considered the ontological question, "What **IS** Time?"

 

I don't think so. What is it that is said to "dilate?" What is it that is said to be a local time environment for each and every observational perspective?

Yes, we all know that the speed of light is constant and that it takes "time" for it to travel from one locus of observation to another. How does that make time into a malleable medium "itself"?

 

Is there any room for discussion of the actual dynamics of why it is that clocks at different velocities (having been subjected to different forces of acceleration) keep time differently? Is the assumption that "time slows down and speed up" around clocks at different velocities considered a "proven fact" beyond all question? What is it again that slows down and speeds up?... some thing "time" or the clocks themselves? If not the latter, what exactly is this medium, time, that it can go slow-mo or fast forward?

 

Does anyone even understand what ontology *is* as a branch of philosophy of informative importance to science's assumptions about "time?"

 

Before we bury the dead horse, will someone here answer these questions... at last?

 

Michael

[coberst]

There are at least two kinds of ideas (concepts): concrete and abstract.

 

The warmth that an infant feels, when being held closely after birth, is a concrete concept. The affection one feels for another is an abstract concept. The warmth that often accompanies that feeling of affection might very well be constructed with the concrete warmth that that infant felt.

 

We construct abstract concepts from concrete concepts.

 

An abstract idea (concept) does not exist outside the human "mind", but it is important to keep in mind that everything that we think, know, and perceive exists outside of the human mind only in our projection of it as existing outside of the human mind. That which is outside the human mind exists but we cannot know it with certainty. We tend to think that the objects that we perceive are in fact existing as mind independent reality. But we can only know what we have processed as being "the thing-in-itself".

 

Objectivity is our shared subjectivity. Abstract concepts are constructed from concrete ideas (concepts). Abstract ideas are often objectified (reified) and treated as objects. We are meaning creating creatures and we constantly create and reify abstract ideas that we will live, die, and kill for. Freedom and time are examples of these reified ideas.

[Michael Mooney]

Thank you for sharing.

But how about those specific issues/questions I raised about how time is reified into something in and of itself? (Like clocks slowing down vs time slowing down.... We all know what clocks are. What is time that "it" changes pace for each location, and clocks just monitor the changes?

Michael

[coberst]

Thank you for sharing.

But how about those specific issues/questions I raised about how time is reified into something in and of itself? (Like clocks slowing down vs time slowing down.... We all know what clocks are. What is time that "it" changes pace for each location, and clocks just monitor the changes?

Michael

 

Time is an abstract idea (concept).

 

What is an abstract idea (concept)?

 

An abstract concept, according to SGCS theory that I am convinced is the best theory available at this point in time, is a concept constructed from one or more concrete concepts. We have a concrete experience, i.e. physical experience of the clock pendulum movement, or the metronome ticking, or the river water rushing by, or of today turning into tomorrow, and these conceptual structures are mapped into the subjective experience mental space that is labeled "time" and this makes up our understanding of the concept we call time.

[QuantumTantrum]

Time is not an observable, meaning it cannot have any physical meaning in physics. It doesn't even have a non-trivial operator. 

 

 

Time in Diracs opinion was not a fundamental property of the universe. Minkowski's four dimensional spacetime popularized the view that time has a real extension and is part if not the same as a dimension of space, except seen in imaginary terms.