Thanks Rich… for contributing our first question for the 2006-2007 year!
A broad introduction to the question can be found [here]. We should probably begin our discussion next Thursday (Sept 21st) with:
6. Is the relational theory of time preferable to the absolute theory?
If the discussion continues to be engaging and productive, we’ll most likely continue with:
7. Does time flow?
8. What gives time its direction or "arrow"?
9. Is only the present real?
I find the last question particularly thought provoking...
One more link on "The Beginning of Time" might be worth a read, although it is laden with some philosophical/logical technicalities.
Feel free to post a comment to this thread, and begin our dicussion of "What is time?"
7 comments:
Hey Darrell,
Thanks for your thoughts… I think there is a difference between the measure of a thing, and a thing. For example… even before a little kid knows about inches, feet, and centimeters, they understand the concepts of height, length, and space. For example, my 2 year-old daughter knows that she is taller than her brother.
Can we do the same thing with time? If we stop talking about minutes, hours, days, months etc, can we still have a meaningful understanding of time, and explore what IT is, if anything?
I don’t know… any help… anyone?
Are you a presentist or an eternalist?
After some abbreviated online reading, here’s a few fragmented and longwinded thoughts…
I’ve tended to live life up to this point with a presentist mindset, imagining that the past fades from reality like the horizon behind a speeding car, while I presently plunge forward into an unwritten future… a void of choice. I have an existentialist’s perspective on most things, so since I have yet to make any choices in the future, I tend to think of the future as unreal, or not yet real… until I make a choice, and so far, I have only been able to make choices in the present. (I’ll have to explore that claim some more… let me know if you think you can challenge the proposition that choices can only be made in the present).
Since my past choices seem to be carved in stone… the stone of my present memories at least, it would seem that in some way, the past is still real to me. This starts to sound like the “growing block” theory: the past and present are real, but the future is not… yet. Maybe the past isn’t still real, but it seems real to me because I have present memories of what once was real.
As I try to answer your question, it becomes obvious that I cannot escape my perspective. It is my perspective that the horizon fades-until-disappearing in the rear-view mirror of my car, BUT I certainly don’t believe that the objects on—and beyond—the horizon cease to exist. I wonder why I tend to think that my past experiences and choices fade in this way and become less real (or cease to be real) once they pass from the present to the past? Hmmm…
Another thing to consider is this: Philosophers such as Augustine have argued that the present has no length, no duration, because if it did, then it would have a beginning, middle, and end, which corresponds to a past, present, and future. This makes sense to me. So then, the present must have no size at all; Augustine suggested it is like an edge of a knife, dividing the past and the future. Here’s the funny thing… let’s say I live in the present, but my present experience of touching my computer keyboard actually takes time to travel from my fingers, through my nervous system, to my brain where it registers as an experience. SOOOO… that means my experiences, my perceptions of the present don’t reach my mind until the actual experience has passed… the sensation of the experience is present, but the actual experience has or is past. Much like a camera flash that blinds you for a minute… the flash may have taken place ten seconds ago in the past, but the white blur that lingers inside your eyelids is still present with you. This idea haunts me… that my awareness, my sensations that form my experiences, actually arrives late to my consciousness, after the actual experience has dissolved into the past. If this is so, then I’m never actually present, or presently aware of the present. Sort of like my body/being is thrust into the future, and my brain is always a few nano-seconds behind. Weird…
Although some of my reading suggests that most philosophers are now converts of eternalism, I don’t find that theory very appealing. That’s not to say it isn’t true, of course. I just want to note that I don’t like the idea that the future is just as real as the present, and past… because it seems that eternalism leads to fatalism (the view that all of history is already written), and that of course pops the bubble of choice that I hold so dear in the present.
Some Christian theologians suggest that we have perspectives limited to the present, and God has an unlimited, eternal perspective of all of history, beginning to end, simultaneously present to Him like when a student looks at a timeline in her history book.
I struggle to accept that view. If that view were real, then I could pray to God, and ask God to change the past which is (still) present to Him, and as far as I know, no one has successfully used prayers to travel back and change the past. For example, let’s say I commit a murder on a Saturday, and on Sunday (while in jail), I pray and ask God (who is presently watching me commit the murder) to stop me from committing that murder. According to the Christian theologies that I am aware of, if my will is united with God’s will (that I shouldn’t murder), then such a prayer is ‘answered.’ But that loophole doesn’t seem to exist in practice, so I tend not to believe that God does not exist ‘outside’ of time.
There are just so many theories on time, and I don’t know how to choose one over the other. I hesitate base my choice in theories on logic, because I feel that most philosophers’ logic is actually a logic of language more than it is a logic of reality. And I also hesitate to base my choice of a theory solely on my experiences, because my experiences seem to be mysteriously tied to the every transient present, where as the person that I am seems to be the sum total of all of my experiences. I am real, so it would seem that the past that created me is just as real, at least it is real in the sense that my past lives on through me. And then the future… if the future is not real, then why do we spend so much time planning for it? Ahhhhh……!
So… I’m rambling. Let me close with a paraphrase of one of my favorite lines from the Matrix Trilogy: The Oracle says to Neo something like, “You can’t see beyond choices that you don’t understand.”
I agree aith Alex all things are still in time. Whether the watch shows time or not it still lives in time. There is only one being who does not live in time and that is God he is the only one who does not lkive in time becasue he created it.
Does anyone have any ideas on the question "how is God out of time?"
i am really curious to hear ppls veiws!
Well, when it comes to God there are alot of different views on it. I'm not saying that there is no God but what proof do we have, we have never actually seen him. but anyways my view on, " what is time" is that time was created by the greeks because they were insecure, they needed to be able to say, "O look the days half way over" so i see time as an illusion, nothing more. If we never came up with time we would have found another way to live and function.
alex,
It would seem that people lived and functioned for quite a long time before the Greeks...
Is it possible that time was there before anyone recognized it as such?
To say that time is purely illusion is to say that most everyone is hallucinating in the same way... if so many people seem to share the same experience of time... that would suggest that there is really some common 'thing called time' that is the spark of their experience. When a person claims to have a seen a UFO, we usually think, "Freak!" But if a million people claim to have seen a UFO, we thing, "Hmmm... there must be something to their claim... they must have really seen some THING." Perhaps the same goes for time...
Hours... minutes... seconds... these are certainly HUMAN inventions, but it seems that behind these inventions there is a REAL THING called time, that is real regardless of what words we use to describe it. So, what is this thing called time?
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