Moments and events

[Buffy]

And that's my point, I guess, that time is not perceivable outside of the sense of it that is manufactured internally. We persist through many 'nows' and retain an image of previous nows.

...and that's why I bring up Existentialism. In my mind ( ;) ), the fact that there is a sequence of instants is no different that the ticks on my ruler and altimiter. Are the all artifacts of my brain? Sure! Do I degrade the status of time because I don't have full freedom of movement within it? No, but you *and* a lot of people do, and it takes effort that most people don't have the time or *opportunity* to expend.

 

When I was very little, I was a pure existentialist: I imagined the world as a stage around me, and nothing outside my sight and hearing and smell etc existed until I was there. Bizzare thoughts for a little kid. This starts to impinge on your thesis here, because its emphasizing the fact that you can make space just as much an "artifact of mind" as time....

 

All I am saying, is to give time a chance! :)

 

Quantum-chronologically yours,

Buffy

[Turtle]

Turtle: I see. That was a lot easier to understand than his uh, stuff and to me, you seem smarter than him. You got the point across a lot more efficiently. Or was he only addressing the folks who could figure him out and making fun of those who couldn't? If that was the case, then what was the point of all his work and what kind of person would appreciate that?

 

___Fuller does not address an exclusive group of folks, rather he addresses every-one. The parts of Synergetics I quoted have their antecedents in the start of it, & there Fuller introduces the "Scenerios of the Child". Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking is a logical step-wise construction in the same way as Newton's Pricipia or Mandhobrot's Geometry of Nature or Hofsteder's Godel, Eascher, Bach, etc..

___As to getting the point across more efficiently & smarter, that is exactly to the point of this thread. My now moment, smarter or not, is predicated on Fuller's past now moments which he used to elucidate geometric truths. Fuller is not making fun of anyone; he is trying to lift every one up.

___Do we each need to re-invent an axe before we go to chopping wood? Knowledge is not machine power; knowledge is machine fuel. :)

[Buffy]

Buffy's discussion of quantum time, sequential states, or "time packets" reminded me of a book by an English physicist, Julian Barbour.

Relatively interesting... pun fully intended.

Barbour's a nut case, but it was indeed him I was alluding to: He wants to go quantum but then he insists on there being no "Planck time" in between the instants so he insists he can collapse all time down to zero. The interesting fallacious arguments you can construct if you have enough math never ceases to amaze me....

Reading some of the previous posts I thought... Our concepts of "time" and "now" are not really the same. Yet describing now always seems to be done using time. Maybe that's part of the snag.

I agree. If "now" is a frame in a film (even running at Planck-Frames-Per-Second!), you still do have the space in between that you're "not capturing" and that's precisely why some conjecture that time is indeed a continuous dimension (although I don't think I agree with that). But there's your difference, and its certainly fun to babble and postulate about it, huh?

 

Strawberry or Pistachio,

Buffy

[InfiniteNow]

I agree. If "now" is a frame in a film (even running at Planck-Frames-Per-Second!), you still do have the space in between that you're "not capturing" and that's precisely why some conjecture that time is indeed a continuous dimension (although I don't think I agree with that).

 

Getting back to the opening post in the thread... there does somehow seem to be a certain eternal, infinite, and continuous dilation of that frame (referring specifically to the film concept). It's easy to see NOW as quantized (an "event") and also to see those quanta running one after another like a film... frame by frame, but (and maybe I'm stuck on this point unecessarily) it has a continuity to it... like NOW is also all enveloping.

 

 

<Joins Buffy in her chorus of "Give time a chance," but since I cannot walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, keep screwing up and singing "Give peace a chance" instead.>

 

;) ;) :) ;)

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

InfiniteNow

[InfiniteNow]

...and that's why I bring up Existentialism. In my mind ( :hihi: ), the fact that there is a sequence of instants is no different that the ticks on my ruler and altimiter. Are the all artifacts of my brain? Sure! Do I degrade the status of time because I don't have full freedom of movement within it? No, but you *and* a lot of people do, and it takes effort that most people don't have the time or *opportunity* to expend.

 

When I was very little, I was a pure existentialist: I imagined the world as a stage around me, and nothing outside my sight and hearing and smell etc existed until I was there. Bizzare thoughts for a little kid. This starts to impinge on your thesis here, because

its emphasizing the fact that you can make space just as much an "artifact of mind" as time....

 

Space is an artifact of the mind. Space and time are not different in that regard.

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

InfiniteNow

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Turtle:

Do we each need to re-invent an axe before we go to chopping wood?

Good point. In all fundamental things, I'd say it's safer to re-invent. If you accept A as true, then all things that led to A are also accepted as true. Whenever something doesn't make visual sense to me I don't allow it in. Hence my retardation.

When two guys get together and discuss sheetrocking, they always slip in how long it took them. Or rather, how long it didn't take them. And they miss the whole point of what they did or at least a significant part of it.

There's our identity and there's how we appear in the eyes of others and finally, how we appear to ourselves. How we appear to others always implies some kind of reward and has a definite religious connotation to it, strange as that may seem. Sorry, that thought forced its way out and I had no control over it. :hihi: Perhaps it was the religious connection that bubbled up and demanded to be seen.

I guess, Turtle, what's the hurry? When I'm on my deathbed and realize that I'm experiencing the final nows of my life, I suspect that I would embrace even the most boring experiences in the past as totally as I would a first kiss, if I had the opportunity to do it over again.

Another aspect of 'now' is its connection to the perceptual and being conscious. When we get planted butt-up and used as a bicycle rack, all the humor and beauty and meaning stops.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Buffy:

I imagined the world as a stage around me, and nothing outside my sight and hearing and smell etc existed until I was there.

And in an internal sense, in the 'mountain range' that DoctorDick speaks of, you were correct. The move away from existentialism took place when you realized that you were just looking at the map, not the territory.

[lindagarrette]

I personally think there are time quanta tics, but just as with Planck-length squiggly things, they can't be compressed, nor are they empty. If they are quanta or continuous does not matter in being able to define the experience of time in physical terms as a sequence of (possibly infinitely divisible) states. From the stand point of consciousness, it has continuity and therefore provides a measurable fourth dimension, that is no less real (but just as relative!) as the other three we feel more "comfortable" with.

 

Mathematically, I always tried to throw away the visualizations that compress the higher dimensions into 2D or 3D that we can "understand". They are at best inadequate and are quite misleading as well. It is hard for folks who have not had post-Calculus math to really get multidimensionalism, but once you do, and see how solid it is, it becomes very easy to deal with "Einsteinian" worldviews entirely from a mathematical viewpoint and see how solid they are too. Einstein really did not deal directly with quantum-time, so that's not really relevant here, but he did show how time is just another dimension and its not so special...

 

Always tomorrow but never today,

Buffy

From PhysicsLink.com: The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the ‘quantum of time’, the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10-43 seconds.

 

This description is completely artificial. There is no use for the time "dimension" in quantum theory. Time only has meaning in the space/time universe. Even there, it is a coordinate, not a dimension.

 

I don't have an opinion, one way or the other. I just have the results of scientific investigation. What reason could there be to include Time in a quantum algorithm? Maybe someone can give me an example. Where would it fit?

[questor]

it seems that this discussion involves ways to measure time, which is about all we can do. as far as i can tell, time does not travel, it just exists. it has no mass, no speed, no particles, no force, but exists everywhere.was there a time when there was no time? how could that be? was time born at BB?

what evidence is there of that? time is not esoteric like gravity, it just IS.

the only thing we can do is measure the passage.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Questor:

it seems that this discussion involves ways to measure time, which is about all we can do. as far as i can tell, time does not travel, it just exists. it has no mass, no speed, no particles, no force, but exists everywhere.was there a time when there was no time?

Close your eyes then open them. What do you see? You see now.

But if you close your eyes you can see yesterday and you can predict tomorrow but now? You need to open your eyes for that. That's the difference between 'the world, existence, the universe' and yesterday. Yesterday and tomorrow exist only in our minds. Now exists outside, in the world. Time exists only in our heads. The effect of change exists outside but is only visible internally when we compare slices of 'now', i.e. our memories.

We have a strong feeling of time internally. I think the mistake is in believing it is an external force.

There are big implications for this but I don't think they're easy to see or readily apparent.

[questor]

you have made the mistake of relating everything to man. rocks have no perception or memory of time, yet they age through the forces exerted through time. time exists outside of man. now is a human concept and has no effect on time.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

questor:

you have made the mistake of relating everything to man. rocks have no perception or memory of time, yet they age through the forces exerted through time. time exists outside of man. now is a human concept and has no effect on time.

So, when you look outside yourself at a bird flying, how do you know time is elapsing? By the movement of the bird, the beating of your heart, your breathing. But the bird is not in two places at once. at any 'now', it is in one place and one place only. Your sense of time is a function of the mind holding on to previous 'nows'. Those 'nows' don't exist where the bird is. it's only in one of them, the one we call now.

I am not saying that change isn't happening. Of course it is. My assertion is that time is not driving change, it is only an effect of change. Time is our perception of that change and the awareness of that time is internal only. As you say, the rock is not aware of time but it is certainly subject to change.

In my opinion, we consider time to be a driving force. For life, certainly (but in a different sense). For existence, no. I think that's a mistake that is made quite often. Time doesn't drive anything except lifeforms to do the things they do to survive and to persist intact through the finite series of 'nows' we call our life.

What that means is that I don't think time is the cause of a chemical reaction. I think it's something else that drives the reaction to take place. Time is the vapor trail in our minds.

[Buffy]

My assertion is that time is not driving change, it is only an effect of change. Time is our perception of that change and the awareness of that time is internal only.

More than that, time is a yardstick. It's there, just as the space in front of you is there. It's *perception* is based on an artificial measurement that is meaningful in so far as we have defined it in our brains. Change happens "within" it, just as a plant growing "changes" in the "upward" dimension as a function of "time" "changing". The variables are correlated for the plant growing. ld is right that it does not *drive* the change, the change in the time dimension is merely *correllated*.

 

Our biggest problem is that we can move freely within the dimensions of space, but not within time, but perceptually, they can be considered the same thing.

 

The "vapor trail" is yet another nice visual analogy of how you can "see" time, but it also has its limits...

 

Doors of Perception,

Buffy

[questor]

time exists whether or not people are there to observe it. the universe does not function as an extension of mankind. time is not a cause or a force. it is an effect of natural aging of the universe.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Questor:

the universe does not function as an extension of mankind

I agree totally.

time is not a cause or a force.

I agree totally with this too

time exists whether or not people are there to observe it.

This I disagree with. Change takes place. Time is change viewed by a consciousness. Consciousness being that which can perceive change.

It's the old falling tree in a forest conundrum. A falling tree makes molecules vibrate. Only a consciousness can turn that into sound.

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Buffy:

Change happens "within" it, just as a plant growing "changes" in the "upward" dimension as a function of "time" "changing". The variables are correlated for the plant growing. ld is right that it does not *drive* the change, the change in the time dimension is merely *correllated*.

But Buffer, when you say 'within' time you give it substance that it might not have. And when you say x is a function of time you imply that x is somehow caused by time. This is inadvertant, as you point out, but it causes a blindspot in the area of the cause of change. In other words, we now say that time passes and change occurs and the mind extends that to mean that time caused the change.

Such is the nature of the mind. And that, as DoctorDick has pointed out in another thread, is the nature of a blindspot. At least it does in turtle-brains like me. Maybe it doesn't affect you the same way or perhaps, because of the incredible power of your brain, it's worse. :hihi:

[questor]

Steve, the human consciuosness only perceives or measures time for that particular individual who observes it. the same amount of time passes for the rock or the universe, whether or not it was observed. if your definition of sound is a wave effect of atomic disturbance of the atmosphere, it occurs with or without the presence of man. time also occurs without the presence of man.