Philosophy discussion
Science and Mathematics
>
Metaphysics of Time
date
newest »
newest »
Andrew wrote: "Hi Fortunr,Yes, it’s a pleasure to discuss things with such eloquent and thoughtful contributors like your good self, although sometimes I feel there is just too much ground covered to discuss any..."
Hi Andrew, you mentioned "While this latter ‘relationist’ argument is appealing to many modern physicists because it appears to conform with relativity, they are nevertheless uncomfortable with time as an emergent property." I am sorry, could you please expand/explain the second part of this sentence, as I am not sure I got your point here. Thank you Andrew.
Andrew wrote: "Hi Fortunr,Yes, it’s a pleasure to discuss things with such eloquent and thoughtful contributors like your good self, although sometimes I feel there is just too much ground covered to discuss any..."
Hi Andrew, I fully understand and respect your point of view and I agree that there is so much ground covered here that maybe this is not the best venue to address all the issues in a structured and ordered way... unfortunately, when trying to cover a fundamental issue such as the concept of time itself, as addressed by philosophy AND by the modern scientific understanding , there are so many interconnected points to cover that it may seem an hopeless task to achieve anything in a methodologically correct way..
but on the other hand I think the concept of time is so important to our human condition that this is something that is worth taking the "time" (pun intended :) and risk to discuss (even if a theoretical physicist on one side, and a professional philosopher on the other side, would not necessarily be happy with the "compromise" or "approximate" terminology, language and methodology that you need necessarily to use when trying to reconcile or synthetize the two different perspectives). When Heisenberg himself tried to "cross the bridge" between the two perspectives, he (unsurprisingly) drew strong criticism from both parts of the scientific community as well as most of the "professional" philosophers....
Anyway, while I do feel that any discussion about a fundamental concept such as time must be necessarily grounded on the modern scientific understanding, I would also like to press further the point that scientific inquiry does NOT provide all the answers.
I would like to list some of the fundamental limitations, unanswered questions and conceptual boundaries that the scientific inquiry has not been able (so far) to overcome:
- why is the dimension of time on one hand inextricably linked to the other spacial dimensions in the space-time continuum, but on the other hand it has specific characteristics of its own, completely different to the other dimensions (such as its mono-directionality) ?
- what existed BEFORE time ? St Augustine very cleverly posited that there was no "sooner", and that time ITSELF was created when the Universe was created. And this is in synch with the current mainstream scientific understanding of "Creation": according to the modern understanding of the Big Bang, time itself was created as part of the initial symmetry-breaking chain of events that also caused the separation of the elementary forces of the Universe. So, it does not make physical sense, according to this view, to ask what happened before time itself was created. Fascinating theory, but is this a satisfactory theory or just a clever intellectual trick to avoid answering this question ?
I do not know... please also note that other very recent scientific theories (like the so called "brane" theories) are challenging this very conception. In such theories, the central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a "brane" inside a higher-dimensional space. In particular, the so-called "ekpyrotic" theory hypothesizes that the origin of the observable universe occurred when two parallel "branes" collided, and this happens cyclically (I love this theory, because it means that the death of the present Universe is just an event in a never-ending cycle, not the death of everything). And every time a new Universe is created, the "clock" is reset - clock at time 0 being equal to 0 entropy.
- what causes a translation through the dimension of time ? Why is the Universe moving through time ? And is time a primary, genuine, real "entity"/concept/dimension, or is time by itself just an illusion, just a "derived" concept, time just being a useful convention to express the really primary concept, the primary concept being the inexorable increase in entropy that happens after any thermodynamic event ? And once the Universe has achieved the "heat-death" in a few trillion years, and entropy has reached the maximum level, will time still "pass" or will it "stop"?
As a final point, I do agree with David Gross' statement (but we should also keep in mind that his position in this as well as in other matters is by no means not challenged from within the scientific community itself), that some basic conception of time seems to be necessary in order to express the laws of Nature. However the conception of time itself (not to mention that of space, and of most of all the other so called "apriori" concepts) has changed so significantly with the progress of modern science that it is clear that such conception is to be considered as much an "output" as well as an "input" of scientific discovery, a "placeholder" of something subject to scientific revision and discovery exactly as anything and everything else, as I tried to highlight with several examples in previous posts.
Interestingly enough, string theory itself as proposed by David Gross and others (or actually I should say string "theories", as there are multiple, sometimes contrasting string theories around) proposes a conception of space-time and of the fundamental nature of the Universe that are even more fundamentally different to the "classical" conceptions than Quantum Mechanics and Relativity! I would also like to highlight that, contrarily to what most people think, the more "mainstream" versions of String Theory do not contrast or disprove Quantum Mechanics (Gross himself, just one year after receiving the Nobel for his contribution to... quantum mechanics!!, admitted: “Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory,” he said. “But now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break.”).
(Just a disclaimer: while I have studied relativity and quantum mechanics for years, my knowledge of string theory is pretty superficial (I never got to the deeper mathematical levels of String Theory), so my opinions on string theories rely on secondary sources and as such they might be biased or even incorrect).
Fortunr wrote: "Andrew wrote: "Hi Fortunr,Yes, it’s a pleasure to discuss things with such eloquent and thoughtful contributors like your good self, although sometimes I feel there is just too much ground covered..."
My limited understanding of the relationist view is that time can be reduced purely to events and the relations between them. An event does not move or change and neither do any of its relations, and so the “flow of time”, where future changes to present and then changes into past is an illusion; just a subjective feature of our perception. After all, most of us are aware that time speeds up when we are enjoying ourself and slows down when we are bored.
Now, as you know, Einstein’s special theory of relativity also incorporates the idea that there is no present or past. Just as there are no genuine spatial properties like “being west of”, there are no genuine temporal properties like “nowness”. What we think of as time (past, present, future) 'emerges' from the relations between events e.g. this one is sequentially before that one. Time is a dependent, not an independent variable. This might be what is behind your advancement of entropy as a way of understanding time? [Actually this is very interesting, because on this reading Kant might be considered to be in the relationist camp with his a-priori (representational) norms of inference such as before and after, greater and smaller].
As you know, my difficulty with this point of view is precisely this elimination of the subject. So, for example, if we think about memory, it is not just a replay of events. We have phenomenal knowledge that the events are past; that they are not the same as present events. Our memories have this additional quality that is not captured by physical theories, unless you know better!
Andrew wrote: "Fortunr wrote: "Andrew wrote: "Hi Fortunr,Yes, it’s a pleasure to discuss things with such eloquent and thoughtful contributors like your good self, although sometimes I feel there is just too muc..."
Thank you Andrew for taking the time to expand this point.
Fortunr wrote: "When Heisenberg himself tried to "cross the bridge" between the two perspectives, he (unsurprisingly) drew strong criticism from both parts of the scientific community as well as most of the "professional" philosophers..."Hi Fortunr,
I added Physics and Philosophy to my to-read list. Thanks for the recommendation.
Schrödinger was another physicist who tried to "cross the bridge". He explored ancient Greek philosophy (in Nature and the Greeks) because he believed that there might be something wrong with the philosophical foundation that classic physics was built upon.
Scientists also work within a philosophical framework, though it is perhaps not as pronounced as that of philosophers. A scientific theory is an interpretation of experimental data, and it is often the case that numerous theories can describe the same set of data, which one the scientist chooses depends on his/her philosophy. Experimental evidence drives the advance of science by eliminating the bad theories, and forcing the scientists to face their own errors and continue working. I can't think of an equivalent that would advance philosophy.
Someone criticized Schrödinger as a bad philosopher, though a good physicist. I suspect the same was said of Heisenberg. Again, it's a mystery to me what is "good" or "bad" in philosophy.
Re: PlotinusHe wrote a treatise titled "On Time and Eternity", which I believe would be of interest to Andrew and Fortunr. Hopefully I'll get around to write a summary soon, once I've digested it. :)
Nemo wrote: "Fortunr wrote: "When Heisenberg himself tried to "cross the bridge" between the two perspectives, he (unsurprisingly) drew strong criticism from both parts of the scientific community as well as mo..."Hi Nemo, thank you very much for the very valuable information. Greatly appreciated!
Nemo wrote: "Re: PlotinusHe wrote a treatise titled "On Time and Eternity", which I believe would be of interest to Andrew and Fortunr. Hopefully I'll get around to write a summary soon, once I've digested it..."
Hi Nemo, it would be great to have your review/summary once you have digested it. I am looking forward to it.
I hate to break it to you, but infinity is not a number.
Where did this -1/12 number come from? Who are "they"?
It doesn't even make any sense. Can you provide a link?
Here you go,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XT...
It is the purest nonsense, treating divergent series as convergent, and violating common sense, let alone the foundations of mathematics. (I think Kallee is a joker!)
Martin wrote: "Here you go,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XT...
It is the purest nonsense, treating divergent series as convergent, and violating common sense, let alone the foundations of mathematics. (..."
Oh cool - I just spotted this. In fact, this is not nonsense, but to see this I think it is helpful to look at derivations based on the Riemann Zeta function. The key is to note first that the domain of the series was extended to the complex numbers by analytic continuation. The result "-1/12" is a specific solution of the Zeta function for s=-1. The result actually finds practical application in certain results in quantum mechanics, so this is not just of theoretical interest to people like Riemann or Ramanujan.
I do not pretend to have an intuitive understanding of any of this - I just wanted to direct your attention to the mathemtically rigorous version of the numberphile video you referenced. The wikipedia article is a good introduction into this mess... :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann...
WarpDrive wrote: "Tomas wrote: "Is anyone else interested in this topic? From A theory to B theory; three dimensionalism versus four dimensionalism; expanding block versus shrinking block. Just testing the waters...."
Humans, including scientists, fail to grasp what time really is - it is a human tool for tracking change. Time is not part of the natural world - change is. This is why humans are foolish when they speak of going back in time - all they have to do is run their clocks backwards. What they really want to do is go back in change, and there are two ways of doing that - forcing it backwards in an enclosed system using the actual atoms, or working from a matter/energy/force/vector schematic of whatever it was in the past that you want to recreate (using substitute atoms). Since such technology is far in the future, you need a good philosophy to get life there (humans do not have one). The Philosophy of Broader Survival answers that call. It will be the philosophy of the future, where such technology will emanate.
I thought for a minute today was Thursday.But then realized it was Tuesday.
And so I time traveled, two days into the past.
Dozens more hours to study Wittgenstein.
Stolen time from what could have been.
Philosophy is meant to be practiced.
"A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922
Elena wrote: "Does Kant get a say too, or do we gag him and shove him into a corner? His idea that fundamental notions such as time must first and foremost (if not last) be discussed in reference to the a priori..."Good point. Kant is considered a pillar of the Western tradition of thought, but most philosophers entirely ignore him. The problem is that his analysis more or less proves the truth of the only philosophy most philosophers do not study, and do not want to study, since it is the associated with mysticism.
The situation is quite absurd and almost surreal.
WarpDrive wrote: "Tomas wrote: "Is anyone else interested in this topic? From A theory to B theory; three dimensionalism versus four dimensionalism; expanding block versus shrinking block. Just testing the waters...."
Have you read the mathematician Herman Weyl's book 'The Continuum'? He explains that extended time is not an empirical or experienced phenomenon but is a theory.
His mathematics is over my head, but the metaphysical implication of his analysis is straightforward. It implies the truth of the Buddhist explanation of time and space.
Philosophy
Books mentioned in this topic
Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (other topics)'Nature and the Greeks' and 'Science and Humanism' (other topics)
Yes, it’s a pleasure to discuss things with such eloquent and thoughtful contributors like your good self, although sometimes I feel there is just too much ground covered to discuss anything ‘properly’. A professional philosopher would be very dismissive about this type of discussion. Personally, I don’t have much time for highly technical analytical philosophy, but I recognize that it is important to be clear about our concepts.
Hi Nemo – I was thrilled you brought up Plotinus, whose metaphysics I greatly respect, and who I think is relevant to much of this discussion. For this neo-Platonist, 'matter' or 'substance' does not exist, but nevertheless underlies and gives rise to the existence and necessary imperfection of material objects in the world. Science has much to say about objects in the world, but cannot give us a 'theory of everything', because it is concerned with imperfect material objects. For Plotinus, matter is ‘pure potentiality’ and gives us a conceptual mechanism for understanding how change happens e.g. what it means for a rock to change character without change in composition. Something changes, yet something stays the same.
Likewise, when we philosophise over time, the fundamental meanings of terms such as “change” and “continuity” are in question. The main debate over time concerns which of these attains priority. Does time just require individual ‘events’ and the relations between them that 'emerge' (Leibnitz), or is there something like ‘absolute time’, a container for events (Newton) that explains continuity? Is the ‘flow of time’ an illusion, or can time be reduced solely to events and the relations between them? While this latter ‘relationist’ argument is appealing to many modern physicists because it appears to conform with relativity, they are nevertheless uncomfortable with time as an emergent property. After winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004, string theorist David Gross said:
“It is very hard for me to imagine a formulation of physics without time as a primary concept because physics is typically thought of as predicting the future given the past. We have unitary time evolution. How could we have a theory of physics where we start with something in which time is never mentioned?”