The Conflict Between Science and Philosophy With Regards to Time
Quite a few philosophers have seen Time as being intimately related with Being in some ways. I'm thinking principally Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Bergson. Their intuition seems to be that time represents some kind of "last frontier" for thought.
There is a profound difference between the phenomenological conception of time (or temporality) adopted by the philosophers and the 'materialist' conception of time adopted by scientists. These two different starting points seem to lead to incommensurable conclusions.
In science, one typically thinks of time as a measurable quantity. In other words, time is merely the comparison of the rate of change of one phenomenon (which is taken to be a standard of measurement, we'll call this a clock) and any other phenomenon. For example, very basically, the sun is taken as a clock, and we measure the time it takes to complete - say - a festival, by counting the number of times the sun rises until the festival is complete. Let's say it's 5 days.
An essential feature of the clock (whether it is the sun moving, an atomic clock, or a light clock) is that it requires something - a phenomenon - that is taken as a reference point. Namely, one day corresponds to one appearance and disappearance of the sun, and it does so all the time. If it doesn't, then time cannot be measured anymore.
This means that physical time is always relative, and in a certain sense immanent. We measure physical time by effectively comparing the rate of change of one phenomenon that we take as stable and unchanging (and that we call a clock) with any other phenomenon that is obviously less stable than the former. Under this worldview, time is nothing more than a comparison between the rate of change of one stable phenomenon with the rate of change of other phenomena.
Theoretical problems can be brought against this scientific conception of time. Namely, what happens if everything, as it were, speeds up in equal proportions, including the phenomenon that we take to be the stable unit of time? It would seem that if that is the case, then scientific time cannot tell us. For our festival that we took 5 days to complete, will still take 5 days now, only that the former 5 days aren't the same as the latter. Clearly, physical time will never be able to capture this occurrence. But is this phenomenon a chimera of our imaginations?
How does philosophy derive this phenomenon of experienced temporality? It is by looking at our experience of the flow of time. And we clearly do have some sense of time, and we imagine that if everything were to speed up at twice the speed things run at now, we would realize it, we would experience this change, even though we cannot measure it with clocks.
However, if everything were to so speed up, our brain processes, our perceptions, and everything about us would speed up as well. Would this not effectively result in us having our perception of time altered as well? Meaning we would effectively NOT perceive that anything has changed? A materialist would probably answer yes, rendering the conception of the philosopher moot.
In effect, the philosopher thinks of time as transcendent. Time is something above and beyond this world, something objective, by means of which events in this world can be measured. Unless one believes in God - an unchanging standard that can sustain such a time - this doesn't make much sense.
The 'materialist' view of time does render out of time an entirely relative phenomenon. There exists no absolute time, time itself is immanent within the world. I am reminded of 180 Proof asking rhetorically "what is north of the North Pole?" when asked "what happened before time began during the Big Bang?".
What about the philosophical idea that time is heterogeneous? This idea seems to suggest that time does not always flow the same way. It seems to agree with the 'materialist' view that time is not absolute but rather relative but places the relativity of time within conscious experience rather than within what we call the objective world. Now time becomes relative to the experience of consciousness - sometimes time flows fast, and sometimes slow, which science cannot capture since everything at once flows either faster or slower. I suppose the philosopher takes this as proof that the thought experiment we went through before does indicate that time changes in the physical world - namely things suddenly speed up or slow down proportionately such that objectively we do not notice this on our clocks. We only notice it in our direct experience of time.
This obviously bifurcates now and it depends on what your ontology is. If matter is in some sense "basic" in your ontology, then you'll probably lean with the materialist. If consciousness is properly basic, you'll probably lean with the philosophers.
How can such questions be adjudicated? Or is it impossible to decide between them in any way that is conclusive and not a matter of faith? Which is 'real' time? The interesting thing is that both sides take the other side's refutation as proof of their own position.
There is a profound difference between the phenomenological conception of time (or temporality) adopted by the philosophers and the 'materialist' conception of time adopted by scientists. These two different starting points seem to lead to incommensurable conclusions.
In science, one typically thinks of time as a measurable quantity. In other words, time is merely the comparison of the rate of change of one phenomenon (which is taken to be a standard of measurement, we'll call this a clock) and any other phenomenon. For example, very basically, the sun is taken as a clock, and we measure the time it takes to complete - say - a festival, by counting the number of times the sun rises until the festival is complete. Let's say it's 5 days.
An essential feature of the clock (whether it is the sun moving, an atomic clock, or a light clock) is that it requires something - a phenomenon - that is taken as a reference point. Namely, one day corresponds to one appearance and disappearance of the sun, and it does so all the time. If it doesn't, then time cannot be measured anymore.
This means that physical time is always relative, and in a certain sense immanent. We measure physical time by effectively comparing the rate of change of one phenomenon that we take as stable and unchanging (and that we call a clock) with any other phenomenon that is obviously less stable than the former. Under this worldview, time is nothing more than a comparison between the rate of change of one stable phenomenon with the rate of change of other phenomena.
Theoretical problems can be brought against this scientific conception of time. Namely, what happens if everything, as it were, speeds up in equal proportions, including the phenomenon that we take to be the stable unit of time? It would seem that if that is the case, then scientific time cannot tell us. For our festival that we took 5 days to complete, will still take 5 days now, only that the former 5 days aren't the same as the latter. Clearly, physical time will never be able to capture this occurrence. But is this phenomenon a chimera of our imaginations?
How does philosophy derive this phenomenon of experienced temporality? It is by looking at our experience of the flow of time. And we clearly do have some sense of time, and we imagine that if everything were to speed up at twice the speed things run at now, we would realize it, we would experience this change, even though we cannot measure it with clocks.
However, if everything were to so speed up, our brain processes, our perceptions, and everything about us would speed up as well. Would this not effectively result in us having our perception of time altered as well? Meaning we would effectively NOT perceive that anything has changed? A materialist would probably answer yes, rendering the conception of the philosopher moot.
In effect, the philosopher thinks of time as transcendent. Time is something above and beyond this world, something objective, by means of which events in this world can be measured. Unless one believes in God - an unchanging standard that can sustain such a time - this doesn't make much sense.
The 'materialist' view of time does render out of time an entirely relative phenomenon. There exists no absolute time, time itself is immanent within the world. I am reminded of 180 Proof asking rhetorically "what is north of the North Pole?" when asked "what happened before time began during the Big Bang?".
What about the philosophical idea that time is heterogeneous? This idea seems to suggest that time does not always flow the same way. It seems to agree with the 'materialist' view that time is not absolute but rather relative but places the relativity of time within conscious experience rather than within what we call the objective world. Now time becomes relative to the experience of consciousness - sometimes time flows fast, and sometimes slow, which science cannot capture since everything at once flows either faster or slower. I suppose the philosopher takes this as proof that the thought experiment we went through before does indicate that time changes in the physical world - namely things suddenly speed up or slow down proportionately such that objectively we do not notice this on our clocks. We only notice it in our direct experience of time.
This obviously bifurcates now and it depends on what your ontology is. If matter is in some sense "basic" in your ontology, then you'll probably lean with the materialist. If consciousness is properly basic, you'll probably lean with the philosophers.
How can such questions be adjudicated? Or is it impossible to decide between them in any way that is conclusive and not a matter of faith? Which is 'real' time? The interesting thing is that both sides take the other side's refutation as proof of their own position.
Comments (89)
Duration (real time) from a Bergsonion perspective, would be actual evolution as experienced. It is not transcendental, but rather the actual. It is continuous (indivisible) and heterogeneous (feels as though it is moving faster or slower).
Duration in the manner that we experience it, is quite different from what scientists call time. Time, for science, is a method for judging simultaneity of events based upon some standardized rhythm of a chosen standard. While time appears in relativity, it appears in two different forms. Special Relativity contains the standard time that we know of in school, and is used to explain why two observers may disagree on the simultaneity of two events as they experience it. Beyond this Relatively time is given some ontological significance which begins to produce paradoxes which are always red flags, especially since Special Relatively can only be applied to a non-accelerating environment, e.g. one that is not within a gravitational field. Time in General Relativity is defined differently than in Special Relativity because the measurement problems are different.
The differences between the two can be seen as a function of what is one trying to inquire into. It one is inquiring into the nature of life, then understanding philosophical time is crucial, including the time we experience when we are asleep or unconscious. If one is attempting to transpose one set of scientific observations taken in one frame of reference into another frame of reference, then the Lorenz transformations are used.
The error would be to elevate any version of time as it appears in scientific equations, including Relativity, to a ontological level. They are simply measurements. They do not grasp the full meaning or experience of life. To substitute equations for life just leads to mass confusion which generally reveals itself as paradoxes.
Quoting Agustino
Contingent on interpretations of “transcendent”, I can envision alternatives to this: e.g., that of time being a metaphysical corollary of freewill-endowed awareness in the plural, of multiple first-person points of view that will things … and here, too, time can well be hypothesized to be relative, i.e., not absolute, and immanent.
For instance, akin to all the BIV, etc., mindsets of abstract hypotheticals, hypothesize two freewill-endowed first-person points-of-view that are incorporeal and dwell within incorporeal realms. That they in any way interact entails that there will be, at minimum, an incorporeal body of information common to both; this, in itself, speaks more to non-physical space, or distance, between the two as gaged between a) what is private to both and b) what is common to both. Again, grant that both hold some causal sway over this common non-physical space of information (which, if one would like to be more abstract, can be fully non-phenomenal … this in as much as an intention is of itself non-phenomenal: has no taste, smell, sound, visual appearance, or tactile feel, etc., though one could phenomenally re-present it at will). When one causes this common space to change, it will causally influence the awareness of the other, and vice versa. There is then a cause-and-consequence to all willed actions on the part of either; furthermore, the cause (the willing of the activity) will always be before the resulting consequence. Hence, there will always here be a before-and-after relative not to phenomena but to one’s willed action as awareness. And, so, the ontic reality of this before and after will be, in this scenario, relative to the two points of awareness, as well as dependent on their so being.
OK, a simpleton attempt at providing an example of how the philosopher’s time can be relative and not absolute, also metaphysically entailed while not being transcendent. The intended point to this hypothetical primarily being that, metaphysically, were there to be a plurality of freewill-endowed first-person points of view as a foundation to all that otherwise stands, there will then, I now think via logical entailment, then also be present some form of time.
True, within the offered hypothetical, there would be no way of measuring “how much time” had passed (kind of like when one is in an extremely good state of mind in interacting with another). To slightly paraphrase what you’ve mentioned, the repetition of the same identity common to all would be required for time to become measurable (including from such a metaphysical interpretation as that previously mentioned): that the sun goes up and down in the same way over and over again allows for quantification of how many days have gone by. This in turn, requires a physical space –a common space between all first-person points of view – that remains relatively stable in its constituency. Even in an imaginary digital clock that never cycles there would yet be repetition of “the same identity” in abstract form: 1a, 2 (1a + 1b), 3 (1a + 1b +1c), etc.
But yes, there is also the notion of absolute time among philosophers. Nevertheless, (as with Rich) I don’t believe that the immanence of time is strictly limited to the materialist’s notions of time.
Yes, that's why in my second repetition I said:
Quoting Agustino
The prior conception you quoted wasn't of the Bergsonian notion. This one is, and since time is relative to our conscious experience it can't be transcendent to it. Hence why I said "agree with the 'materialist'"
Quoting Rich
That's a one-sided view. It's also a method for judging how fast an event happens compared to a fixed standard.
Quoting Rich
I don't buy this.
Quoting Rich
Why? And how come you say we "experience" time while asleep or unconscious? I don't experience anything while asleep or unconscious.
Quoting Rich
You have yet to show this.
This would be another way of saying the same thing. There is a standard which is used for measuring simultaneity with some event (with the standard) and then there is another event being used to measure simultaneity. The two events can then be judged against each other.
Crucial to understand is that measuring simultaneity had nothing to do with time as we actually experience it in life. Duration is life and evolves whether or not there are clocks.
http://www.stephenerobbins.com "Special Relativity and Perception: The Singular Time of Psychology and Physics"
It begins:
"Physicists mislead us when they say there is no simultaneity. When the camera pans to the heroine tied to the rails and then to the hero rushing to the rescue on his horse – these events are simultaneous."
To begin to fully penetrate the nature of time, one must begin by setting aside clocks and observe duration by closing ones eyes. That is philosophical time unfolding.
No it's not. Simultaneity is ultimately a fake concept because physical time itself is relative. Simultaneous in one reference frame isn't simultaneous in another. The very concept of simultaneity presupposes some objective time, some transcendent time, that can encompass both events and say that the clock striked 12 at the same time the spaceship passed by us. But if time is immanent, then simultaneity is relative.
Quoting Rich
Who is he and what are his credentials? By the looks of his website he is a retired amateur with a hobby interest in Bergson.
The question 'what is time' is purely one for philosophy. There is no conflict.
The standard response to that is 'what about Bergson vs Einstein?'. To which the response is that they were both philosophers, arguing AS philosophers. That Einstein was also a scientist no doubt informed his philosophical views. But they were still philosophical views, not scientific ones. Einstein was not arguing as a scientist.
This is one of the questions I have regarding cosmological arguments. In what sense are we to understand God "causing" the universe (and time) to exist, if there was no time before hand? Our concept of causality seems to me to be intrinsically tied to time. Things change because of certain causes, and this takes time to happen. So if time did not exist "before" (what does that even mean, though, "before time" - was there a time before time?), in what sense is God "causing" the world to exist?
I think your op misses the most important aspect of time. Time exists as the separation, or division, between past and future. The difference which exists between past and future is likely the most important aspect of our living experience.
So you say that we experience a "flow" of time, but this might not really be correct. We experience a separation between past and future, and there is something about this separation which is always changing, the anticipated future comes to pass, so there is always becoming a new past. This we assume as the flow of time. But there is also something about the separation between past and future which seems to always stay the same, and this is what allows us to measure time.
Time as we experience only exists as an experience of the past moving into the present, continuously. No one experiences the future. What we do experience is some action that we imagine as a possible future. Possibilities, however are not future time. Imagined possibilities are not duration.
... to the observer. I assume that this phenomenon is actually a space-time interval that is calculated between two endpoints, and being so time becomes more of a dimension of sorts that explains this position. It is not time but distance that is the problem here, as time converts these coordinates into distances. Proper time measures this distance so to speak between two events as though a clock had passed through it and enables a causal connection. Coordinates are essentially used as labels in science that help us identify spatial events and time actually holds no real significance in the physical sense; take time dilation, for instance.
Quoting Agustino
The propagation of information cannot move faster than the speed of light and it is why we have the theory of special relativity.
Quoting Rich
No one experiences the present. It is only future and past.
Yes I agree, strictly speaking, with a proper definition of "experience", our experience is only of the past. However, as living beings we also anticipate the future, and this is just as much a part of being alive as our experience of the past is. So there is a part of being alive which transcends experience, and this is our anticipation of the future.
Maintaining this strict definition of "experience", it would not be correct to say that we experience time, or the passing of time. All we have experienced is a changing past, and this is why the empirical notion of "time" is restricted to an abstraction from change.
The point I am trying to make though, is that in the more primordial sense, time appears to us as this separation between things experienced and things anticipated. So if the empirical sciences utilize a definition of time, which is restricted to an abstraction from our experience of things past, then this definition is completely missing half of how time appears to us.
Obviously, the time in question would not be the time physics and the materialist deal with. Before the creation of the Universe there was no time for the physicist/materialist because there were no phenomena that could be used to measure time. Acts of creation are not acts in time. They are events. But events are not necessarily linked by any flow of time in particular. Think of it as the still frames in a movie. Each frame is an event as it were. Time is only that which links them, we could imagine the same frames changing faster or slower. So having events is not sufficient to have a notion of a moving time.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, and our notion of causality, as we scientifically understand it, is also immanent and with reference to the world. No world, no causality as understood by science.
Quoting darthbarracuda
First, the Prime Mover argument isn't even that. The Prime Mover argument is that every second God is causing the Universe to exist.
Special Relativity is a very simple theory, the only additional assumption compared to classical mechanics is that light travels at a fixed speed everywhere. Nobody with a good understanding of physics can disagree with special relativity.
The notion of past and future are tied to memory though. We know about the past, and by extension the future because we have memory. Without memory, there would be no notion of past and future, just the present.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think we experience such a separation, as much as we construct it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Meaning? What is this that stays the same?
I don't follow you here. What do you mean time holds no real significance? And what does this have to do with time dilation?
Quoting TimeLine
Hmm yeah, agreed.
Quoting TimeLine
:-O That's not at all obvious. I would say we only experience the present directly, and the future/past indirectly via our faculty of memory.
As I said, we experience the past moving into the present. Anyone experiencing the future is referred to b as a fortune teller.
Yes, we imagine possible actions, but this is done in memory, not in the future.[
quote="Metaphysician Undercover;108464"]All we have experienced is a changing past[/quote]
Yes, this is real time (duration) as it is experienced. From this we create the concept of simultaneity for which we need clocks. We experience duration (real time) whether or not we have a question about simultaneity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If one wishes to observe real time passing, one should meditate focusing on the breath. This is the most fundamental form of duration. From this, one can experience the flow if life. It is quiet and continuous as sweet feel ourselves flowing into the present.
Why do you say that no one with a good understanding of physics can disagree with special relativity? According to what you've said here, all one has to disagree with to disagree with SR, is the assumption that light travels at the same speed everywhere. Unless the speed of light has been measured in every possible type of circumstance, then there really is no reason to believe in SR. We can easily fail in our inductive generalizations when we conclude that X is the case in all types of situations, without testing X in all different types of situations.
Quoting Agustino
Without memory there would be no conscious mind, and it is the conscious mind which anticipates the future, but this does not mean that we know about the future by means of our memory. That would be the fallacy of association. If all creature which anticipate the future also have memories of the past, we cannot conclude that they anticipate the future by means of their memories of the past. So you haven't really provided an argument for your claim that we know about the future through our memory.
That sounds rather nonsensical to me, as memory and anticipation are distinct. Here's a test. Try sitting or standing, and concentrating very rigorously on some past memories. Something could come out of the blue and whack you on the head because you have neglected that faculty which anticipates the future. If you are really good at focusing your attention on past memories, you will find that while you are doing this, you are really not able to do anything else. So anticipating the future, which enables you to do things, and remembering the past are distinct faculties, and this is evident from the fact that if we are overly attentive of one, we do so at the expense of neglecting the other.
Quoting Agustino
Again, this is a rather meaningless statement. It may be argued that everything we experience is constructed. Then the questions would be "constructed by what?", and "out of what?". I don't think that you mean by "we construct it", that the difference between future and past is totally imaginary, so what do you mean?
Quoting Agustino
The division between future and past stays the same. Have you not found, that throughout your life, the division between future and past has always been right there with you, and has always remained the same, as the division between future and past? Despite the fact that things have changed, the division between future and past, itself, has not changed
Quoting Rich
No, the imagination is not the memory. And as much as our anticipation of the future is not "in the future", this does not mean it is in the past. Likewise, our memories are of the past, they are not in the past.
I do not know of how to conceive of a possible future without it being in memory. I'm trying it right now. It is in memory. And it changes as possibilities change. However, there is a creative force that is creating these images in memory from memory. What we feel as the present is continuously moving into the past. I do not know if any way to speak of memory except as the past, but we can inconveniently drop all part, present, future terminology and just speak of memory pressing on into unfolding duration. This would be representative of the experience of duration.
The problem is that SR is only applicable to inertial frames which doesn't exist (except as an approximation), so SR had no relevance to any discussion about light or scientific time (my distinction,). Only GR is relevant. Under GR, scientific time becomes relative.
I am not talking about conceiving of a possible future, I am talking about anticipation. We anticipate the actual future, not possibilities. Possibilities are created by knowing that the anticipated future is lacking in necessity. Every day I anticipate all sorts of new situations which I will be in, before I am in them. Clearly, since they are new situations, I am not remembering them.
This is fine. I understand the feeling of anticipation that one may have of a possible future. And I also understand the colloquial use of the term future to which I have no objection. However, when discussing time (duration) as we experience it, I believe what we are experiencing is a possibility that we create in memory as opposed to an experienced future. I believe this is an important concept to apprehend when discussing the nature of time, especially when contrasting it with some block view of time.
I agree that duration is a construct of memory, it is an empirical concept, but the point of my first post was that this is not the way that time appears to us in the most primordial sense. In the primordial sense time appears to us as a past and a future, the two being fundamentally different. It is when we assign order to what has occurred, that we conceive of duration. But duration is not time itself, because time goes to that deeper level.
We all experience life, and I'm all about describing experience as precisely as we can by direct observation.
I can say on my behalf, that the duration that I experience is all in my memory. This is my experienced time.
With this said, if you experience time differently, then I cannot deny your experience. It is yours and you are the only one that can directly observe it. But, as a point of reference, there was a whole movement of modernist authors who attempted to describe their feeling of duration (Proust, Woolfe, etc.) and their works can stand as evidence of how others perceived their existence through duration. It's interesting to compare notes.
I agree with this, assuming that we maintain a strict meaning of "experience", as I described earlier. But this allows that we have many feelings which are not experiences. This would be for example, intentions, we have them but we do not experience them. Anticipations fall into this category, we have anticipations but we do not experience the things which are anticipated. We experience what really happens to us relative to the anticipation, and this might be somewhat different from what was anticipated.
Quoting Rich
So I would not say that time falls into the category of things which are experienced. Do you recognize that concepts are not experienced? They are understood, not experienced. So duration is a concept, it is not experienced. Experience is always of the particular, while the concept is general. So for example, we do not experience the colour red, this is a concept, we understand it. But we do experience particular instances of seeing the colour red. Likewise, we do not experience duration, we understand it, but we do experience particular instances of duration. So if I referred you to a particular instance of duration, "the time when X was occurring", you would probably describe your experience of that instance of duration as X occurring.
So to avoid longer and longer posts, I'm going to focus on this particular statement because I think it is the focal point of the discussion.
For me, as I sit and meditate on the actual sense of being/existence, I only sense duration as a product of evolving memory. That is it in total. So for me, I experience the feeling of duration as an evolution of memory. It is right there and is complete. I can't find anything more.
Since my ontology is entirely based upon direct observation of experience, this is how I perceive the essence of my existence. This along with the creative force that presses into future possibilities that it identifies possible choices of action.
What counts as scientific time?
And would you agree that if I take a man and fly him close to the speed of light he will age slower than one that remains on Earth? And if so, then some of the effects of GR/SR are ontological no? They're not just measurement effects. I mean we can't presume both start as babies, and one reaches old age, while the other is still in his teens and then claim that it's just a measurement effect and not ontological right?
These time dilation effects have been experienced with muons and with atomic clocks already.
Scientific time is measurement of simultaneous events. It is not the duration of experience which is heterogeneous and continuous. It is there essence of Zeno's paradoxes. Duration is indivisible.
The only way to observe the duration of life is by closing one's eyes and directly experience it. One can also mediate, practice Tai Chi or yoga to get an even deeper understanding.
Agustino, I would have said that scientific time is the time in scientific equations, like velocity * time = distance. Such time is frame dependent since none of the terms above (velocity, time, or distance) is meaningful without a frame.
This is opposed to proper time which is a frame independent duration on a world-line between two events on that world-line. Experienced-time is proper time of the experiencer, or his real age.
Quoting AgustinoIn scientific time, each man ages faster than his counterpart since for each man, it is the other that has all the velocity. Sans acceleration, they cannot ever meet but once and have a meaningful comparison of age.
In proper time, they age at the same pace, but their world lines are different lengths so if they meet, they are not the same age.
It is the what the relativity equations are all about, keeping in mind only General Relativity. Special has c no application since inertial frames don't exist anywhere.
Okay, I'm not going to dispute that, at least not now, but I've asked you something different apart from that.
Quoting Agustino
There should be no difference since each can be considered accelerating relative to reach other as GR is considered. However, as we all know, acceleration can be felt, and therefore may be biological effects as a result of the actual real duration of acceleration. In other words, there may be real effects but independent of Relativity which assumes no privileged frame of reference.
Will the one who travels close to the speed of light be younger than the other one upon his return? I don't care what theory you consider when answering this question, but please answer with yes or no.
Quoting Rich
An accelerating frame of reference is privileged. Only inertial frames of reference aren't.
Who knows? As I said, as far as GR is concerned each can be considered accelerating relative to each other. The equations should be reciprocal. I don't know how you pick which one is accelerating. But I've called say that one feels like they are accelerating, which is an altogether different animal not taken into account by any scientific equation.
Quoting Agustino
The equations do not identify which twin is to be considered accelerating. Either one can be chosen since from either twin's frame of reference, it can be accelerating from the other. I looked at the equations, and it doesn't state a preference.
That's false. According to GR, the accelerating reference frame is privileged. In an accelerating reference frame it can be distinguished who is at rest and who is accelerating. In an inertial reference frame it cannot be distinguished who is at rest or who is moving.
Quoting Rich
As I said, that's not true. Remember what the first assumption of SR is - laws of physics are the same for all observers in inertial reference frames. Accelerating reference frames are NOT inertial.
Quoting Rich
Well, I think this is by this point beyond doubt. We've seen atomic clocks slow down, that's more than enough evidence that the predictions of SR/GR with regards to time dilation hold true.
Quoting Rich
No, you cannot use the equations in a way which disagrees with the assumptions from which the equations are derived in the first place. One assumption of GR, which is used to derive the equations is that accelerating reference frames can be distinguished from those that are at rest.
What is at rest?
Anyway:
https://phys.org/news/2009-06-twin-paradox-older.html
It is possible that the actual force of acceleration is affecting the bodies but this is not taken into account by the equations. The equations include some really strange definition of time that had nothing to do with clock time as we know it. It's called curved space-time and shouldn't be confused with clock time. It's its own beast.
Not in an accelerated frame of reference.
Quoting Rich
Yes, spacetime does have to do with clock time. It explains that clocks move slower in certain regions of space and even allows us to calculate how much slower.
For example, atomic clocks are shown to slow down when flown around the Earth compared to those that remain on Earth. And the accuracy is amazing - it's something like one-billionth of a second.
That physical things are affected by acceleration (applied force) and gravitation is observable and can felt. But this is a far cry from giving equations ontological status as an explanation for lived time. As I peruse the different literature on Relativity, which each person giving their own take, quite often contradicting each other and very rarely agreeing on what anything actually means in GR, I just perceive a mess. I don't even know why SR is even taught?
There is some strange variables in the equation which are suppose to be some kind of warped time, but whatever it is, it is not comprehensible as clock time and certainly not duration as we experience it.
So whatever measurement problems science is attempting to iron out as far as the limits of observation (light) and how light is affected by gravity, it doesn't affect the duration that we feel as an evolving creative force. To philosophers who is interested in penetrating the nature of life, it is this duration that they should be focusing on. Observe the creative energy as it presses forward and all that it is capable of doing.
Yet another time about time …
Part I: An Essay on the Phenomenology of Physical Time
Plamen L. Simeonov
Quite a complicated an interesting read from which I extract:
"In his book “Time Reborn” Smolin argues that physicists have inappropriately banned the
reality of time because they confuse their timeless mathematical models with reality,
(Smolin, 2013). His claim was that time is both real (which means external to him) and
fundamental, hypothesizing that the very laws of physics are not fixed, but evolve over time46.
This stance is not really a new one (cf. Wheeler, 1983; Page & Wootters, 1983). "
Quoting Rich
All this is utterly wrong. The stay-home person is not accelerating in the frame of the rocket twin. It takes force to accelerate, and no force is being applied.
Velocity is not a frame independent property of an object, but acceleration very much is.
Quoting RichOne twin getting older than the other is not a function of acceleration. Suppose both get on a rocket, and one accelerates at so many G straight out and back, and the other furriously orbits with similar acceleration. They both experience the same acceleration but the orbiting one is much older (more proper time in his worldline) when they meet. So it is not biological effects of being under acceleration. It's not the velocity since in the frame of each, it is the other one that has all the velocity.
But one has a greater moment of acceleration, and that is the difference.
Quoting AgustinoPrivileged means it is the one correct frame. There is no correct accelerated or inertial frame, so none is privileged. Or are you just yanking Rich's chain?
I don't see how either twin knows this or how the clocks know this. Do they feel it? To the twin on Earth, it appears that he is accelerating away from the rocket. Where in the the equations does it identify which twin to choose? It seems rather arbitrary unless one of the twins knows our feels something, but there measurements should be neutral. Just measurements. They are looking at the same thing. But it is possible that the additional forces that are being applied and felt are having some biological effect.
It is very speculative to begin making all kinds of ontological speculations about the nature of biological and conscious evolution based upon some equations that were designed to address some measurement issues. My guess is that the physical body will actually perish under such prolonged pressure. Who knows what happens to consciousness.
From an interview of Smolin:
"Feynman once told me, "Whatever you do—you're going to have to do crazy things to think about quantum gravity—but whatever you do, think about nature."
One really needs to keep focused on the problem and not get carried away with equations, substituting symbols for conscious experience. I share this point of view.
"Let's consider a system that's been studied many times. We have measured before the statistical distribution of outcomes through some collection of past instances where we've measured the system before. And if we do it now and measure the system again we're going to get one of those past outcomes that we saw before. If we do it many times now we're going to get a statistical distribution, which is going to be the same distribution that we saw before. We're confident if we do it next year or in a million years or in a billion years we're going to get the same distribution as we got before. Why are we confident of that? We're confident of that because we have a kind of metaphysical belief that there are laws of nature that are outside time and those laws of nature are causing the outcome of the experiment to be what it is. And laws of nature don't change in time. They're outside of time. They act on the system now, they acted on the system in the same way in the past, they will act the same way in a year or a million or a billion years, and so they'll give the same outcome. So nature will repeat itself and experiments will be repeatable because there are timeless laws of nature.
But that's a really weird idea if you think about it because it involves the kind of mystical and metaphysical notion of something that is not physical, something that is not part of the state of the world, something that is not changeable, acting from outside the system to cause things to happen. And, when I think about it, that is kind of a remnant of religion. It is a remnant of the idea that God is outside the system acting on it."
Now he goes in the describe an alternate hypothesis about the nature of time:
"So let's try a different kind of hypothesis. What if, when you prepare the system, you transform it, and then you measure it-nature has a way of looking back and asking the question: have similar things been done in the past? And if they have, let's take one of those instances randomly and just repeat it. That is, nature forms habits. Nature looks to see is there a similar thing that happened in the past. And if there was, what if it takes that? If there are many, it picks randomly among them and presents you with that outcome.
Okay, well that will give the same statistical distribution as you saw in the past, by definition, because you're sampling from the past. So there doesn't have to be a law outside of time. The only law needs to be what I call the principle of precedence—that when you do an experiment, nature looks back and gives you what it did before."
In these two paragraphs if one substitutes mind for nature, Smolin described Bergson's mind, though he probably doesn't realize it. This process is Bergson's duration.
No force means no acceleration. That's a Newton equation, and relativity didn't even need to modify that one.
The twin paradox can be illustrated with nothing but SR rules using a tag team and no acceleration and no significant masses screwing with gravity. I put one together that I think has no flaws. I can post it if you like. As I said, both subjects can be accelerating equally and yet one will age more than the other. Acceleration is not required.
That's Newton, which at the end may be closer to nature than Relativity.
Yes, I said it was Newton. I also said that equation went unaltered by relativity. Zero force still means zero acceleration, in any frame.
"Time Reborn" is a good book, well worth the time to read it. Smolin explains how the applicability of the laws of physics is limited by the confines of the size of the experimenting theatre. So the laws are not applicable at the extreme micro scale, nor are they applicable at the extreme macro scale, they are applicable at the human scale, because this is the environment which they have been developed to be applicable in. He applies this principle to time, and suggests that over a very short period of time, or over a very long period of time, the laws of physics would differ, and speculates that the laws of physics should actually be represented as evolving over time.
I think we can stop at this point. The OP is about philosophical vs scientific time. There are thousands upon thousands of ideas about the ontological implications it lack thereof of GR (let's forget about SR) and no reason to throw yet more into this very mixed up bundle. It doesn't even jive with QM so why even consider it until it is straightened out.
Why? You have not sketched out yet why this primacy of philosophical time over scientific time.
Quoting Rich
The point is that it can't be felt. The clock as such does not feel as if it's slowing down but when compared to the other one it does. So if one person travels close to the speed of light while the other stands still, the one that travels will return younger than the one that stands still. However, the one that travels will not feel like he ages any faster. But when he returns, he will be younger than the other.
So in what sense is this not ontological time if it affects how one ages relative to others?
Regarding the paper, what Smolin is concerned about is the arrow of time, and its irreversibility. According to GR (I think), there's nothing that stops time from going backwards so to speak. It's only the second law of thermodynamics that accounts for why events are irreversible, and why we can't travel backwards in time.
Quoting Rich
What does time being external to him mean? This seems to be precisely what duration isn't, since duration is internal.
And in addition, the hypothesis that the laws of physics are not fixed but evolve with time is very interesting, I too think something like that may be the case, but so far we have no evidence at all for it. It's just a possibility.
Quoting Rich
This is only if the deceleration is very fast when the rocket turns around. Otherwise, there would be no issue. Furthermore, since everything slows down - including for that matter the synapses in your brain, etc. - you will not perceive that anything has slowed down. To perceive that something slows down would be to presuppose that your internal workings don't slow down while your external environment does - but this isn't what happens. Both of them slow down. Thus in your experience you would not perceive a change.
Quoting noAxioms
Okay, I did not mean to use privileged in that sense. I meant to use privileged in the sense that the accelerating frame is distinguishable from the one that is at rest in a way that the frame moving at constant speed isn't distinguishable from the one that is at rest.
There's no reason to disagree with special relativity for the simple reason that we have never observed light traveling at a different speed anywhere in all our observations so far. It could be possible, but we've just never seen it happen. So there is no reason to doubt SR. A rational person just cannot doubt it.
Aaand I just noticed theee has been three pages of discussion in three days so this has probably been said by now. Eh.
How can you be sure of this? Not as in what if someone else can experience future, but what if you don't experience single moments but a nanosecond of both past and future at any given moment? Given the reaction times of human beings and how (in)accurately we experience our perceptions, I don't think one could notice knowing something a fraction of a second before that event happens.
You seem to be mistaken about the physicist's stance on time. They also use matter to measure distances, but no physicist would claim that the distance between two objects divided by void have no distance between them. Similarly void is a possible concept in time.
Time did not exist before the universe, and neither did matter, but the correlation doesn't imply causality.
If one is interested in understanding measurements, then scientific time is primary. Einstein was interested in the issue of simultaneity. If one is interested in exploring the nature of life (ontology) then time as experienced becomes primary.
As for GR, as a matter of measuring, both twins can view themselves as accelerating away from the other as they take measurements. The twin on Earth can view himself as accelerating away from the rocket.
Here is an interview with Lee Smolin. In it, he discusses the many problems of time when approaching it from QM and GR. He then goes on to suggest that possibly science had it all wrong and time had primacy over matter (time in this case can be viewed as Bergsin's duration) and the implications on all of science in this were so, e.g. that laws evolve over time. I can't sort out the scientific mess. I can only proceed with direct observation of life and develop a metaphysical ontology based upon these observations.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lee_smolin-think-about-nature
Again, why? It could be that time as experienced is illusory, Einstein certainly thought so for example. This requires some argument.
Quoting Rich
Wouldn't this imply that an accelerating frame of reference is indistinguishable from one that is at rest? This is precisely what GR denies though - the claim is that they are distinguishable. Meaning each observer can determine who is really accelerating.
Quoting Rich
Okay thanks for that. Will be watching it.
In the meantime, why do you think the direct observation of life yields knowledge of ontology? What if the direct observation of life is illusory, and hence yields knowledge of an illusion, not really of the way things are?
This is why ignore GR and Einstein. Ontology becomes deeply derailed into an experienced of illusion. From this point, everything, including this thread becomes totally pointless. Anything and everything becomes an illusion.
Quoting Agustino
I take this approach for the same reason the Daoist did, it yields concrete, practical results that I can truly understand and believe in, because I actually experience it. I understand the healing intelligence of the mind/body because I experience it. I am a very practical person who is experimenting and exploring in every day life and gaining knowledge of life in the process.
Not necessarily, all that it would mean is that direct experience would not be sufficient to confirm what is illusory and what is not. For example, if I'm trying to build a satellite system that allows me to locate things around the globe, then I better take the effects of GR into account, even if they seem weird based on my everyday "direct" observations of life. For example, direct observation may indicate to me that the Earth is flat. So I need to do some measurements, make some predictions, etc. to gain access to the experience that the Earth isn't flat.
Quoting Rich
Well I too am a practical person, but it depends on what the truth is. Knowledge of the truth is what can truly help you take practical steps.
Once an individual allows illusions to become explanations then magic becomes real. Anything and everything can be explained as an illusion. There are no limits and we can't pick and choose. I seek the explanation.
Yes, but on what do you base the idea that direct experience cannot be illusory? Clearly, for example, the experience that the Earth is flat is illusory, right? So an experience isn't sufficient to justify and ground what we believe, correct?
I don't mean to suggest everything is illusory, just that some things can be illusory, and we need a way to distinguish between what is illusory and what isn't.
It is my experience, it is not illusory. If someone says that it is illusory, then we need to inspect the differences in our experiences. Differences in experience is real, it is not illusory.
So when I am in an open field and I look to the horizon and it seems that the Earth is flat according to my direct experience, should I really conclude it's flat? Or how do I reason about it that it's not flat?
The essential feature of experienced time is simply change. One thing gives way to another. There is a flow. Raise your hand and move it across your visual field. Right there, in that experience, is a mystery that science will never address.
The scientific view of time gives us a picture that doesn't give us any reason to expect an experience of change. The scientific view of time simply spatializes it. Imagine, for instance, a movie reel unrolled, the film stretched out flat on the floor. We tend to model time like this, events being spread across a spatial interval. But here, the events are simply adjacent. There is no real before or after. There is no causal dependency. There is no causality at all. Most importantly, there is no change. There is just a static set of events arranged in a sequence.
But isn't this spatialization of time just a convenient way for us to represent it in order for us to "picture" it? It allows us to draw graphs. But as usual, we should be careful that we aren't confusing the map for the territory. Real things have qualitative aspects that are not captured by simple quantity, that can't be carried by a variable in an equation. And we tend to forget that even a spatial interval as we experience it is more than a simple quantity. It isn't just a number. Like time, it has its own quality. And when we spatialize time, we are simply mapping the quantitative aspect of one qualitative feature of our experience onto another. It is essentially a lie. We are taking what is not simultaneous, what is temporally sequential, and what is not necessarily visible or visual at all, and rearranging it in our experience so that we can see it visually, and so that we can see it all at once (ignoring that we must take time to take it all in with a bunch of eye saccades). It is no wonder that our representations tend to lead us into confusions about time.
Consider how you can represent any quantity spatially, or with sound, or with color, or whatever else might come to mind. I can represent population, or luminance, or heat, or profit with a number. I can also represent any of these with a changing pitch of a musical tone. Or, to make it all available to my mind sort of simultaneously, I can draw a graph with a green line. But what is being represented is not fully captured by these representations. And heat certainly isn't green, even though profit might be!
Sound can be represented as a visible waveform. But in doing that, you've lost what most distinctively makes sound what it is. You can't experience music by scanning a waveform representation of it with your eyes. To take our spatial and mathematical models of time as directly conveying the true nature of time is a huge mistake. Our maps are useful for making predictions and for helping us to visualize and understand things in a certain way, but they are just maps.
With our scientific models, all we have are maps that show how certain things are related quantitatively. But I suspect that we discover the true nature of time in our subjective experience of it. We know it directly. We know exactly what it is when we talk about it by referring to the direct experience. And there is no way we are going to know its deep nature any better by any objective means. The objective study and modeling gives us a different kind of understanding, very much useful, but not adequate for fully capturing the thing in question.
We can see why the time of the scientists is what it is. Perhaps the time of the philosophers is what it is (it varies widely) simply because of the puzzles that subjective time poses, especially since there are such glaring differences between our subjective experience of time and the time found in our equations and graphs.
Whatever the case, even with all our modern theories, time remains incredibly mysterious. But space is no less mysterious. We only tend to fail to see it as mysterious perhaps because it is that aspect of our experience onto which quantities can be mapped by which we can most readily and immediately comprehend relationships. It is that in terms of which we seem to like to understand everything else. But do we understand it itself? Maybe, in our direct experience of it, we do. And maybe that's all there is to it. And maybe time and consciousness are like that too.
Probably, what space actually is objectively isn't even captured by our experience of it. We have our subjectively experienced spatial field, in which our other experiences are situated, and it has a certain quality of, well, what else, spatiousness! And we imagine that beyond our minds, the universe is another big spatiousness just like it, only endless. But maybe not! Perhaps what exists objectively is only quantitative. Or maybe it's something else altogether, something unknown to us. Consider the numbers that represent spatial relations in a computer game. They have no spatial quality at all in themselves. It is only when we map them onto a monitor, which maps them onto our visual field and thus maps them onto our subjective space, that we experience anything resembling space. The same goes for color, sound, and so on. There is no qualitative difference between the bits in a sound file and the bits in an image file. They only gain their differences when we map them to different sensory modalities.
The world as our minds construct it might be qualitatively and substantially (assuming the world has any substance as we tend to conceive it) very, very different from the world itself, even if there is a mapping, a kind of correspondence, between the structural features of the two.
Consider that pain is part of our experience of the world. The world as experienced has features that have the quality of pain. And pain has a quantitative aspect too, an intensity, that can be mapped and represented in other ways while losing the painfulness. But it is hard to imagine that there is anything like pain out in the world itself, existing objectively. Why should any other feature of our subjective experience be any different? Why should there be color in the world? Maybe, there is nothing like time as we understand it subjectively in the objective world.
This doesn't make sense. First, your claim with respect to special relativity, was that light in all circumstances always travels at the same speed. Now you say that just because we've never seen light travel at a different speed, this claim is verified and there is no reason to doubt it. The problem with your position is that human beings live only in a very limited, and specific set of conditions, and therefore they have no capacity to measure the speed of light except under these very limited conditions. These conditions make up a very small proportion of possible conditions. So until human beings derive a way to measure the speed of light in all of these vastly differing possible conditions, there is very good reason to doubt the accuracy special relativity. It's like going to a pond and finding that all the fish in that pond are goldfish, then making the bold assertion that all fish in all bodies of water are goldfish.
Agreed. More specifically I would say change in memory. This becomes important as one constructs an ontology of perception. Quoting oysteroid
Emotions, intensity of a feeling.
Quoting oysteroid
If one stares at space, maybe as an artist, space appears to take on a new experience. Artists, such as the impressionists, or maybe Da Vinci saw in space what most cannot, because the skills have not been developed.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That's how we get refraction, and the bent stick effect, from the change in speed.
"No reason"?
Yes this is correct. I should have been more specific. Light always travels at a constant speed in a vacuum.
Although it does bring up an interesting point. In a medium, do signals - say force traveling from one end of a body to another - travel slower than in vacuum? Cause in a vacuum if force is applied to the end of a very long object, the front of the object only becomes aware of the force at a later time, not instantaneously.
It would also be interesting how the relativity equations change if one of the two observers is in a non-vacuum medium.
Okay, but we've also observed a large portion of the Universe through our telescopes and other such instruments. It's true that it is logically possible that the speed of light in a vacuum would be different in other places of the Universe, but what reason do we have to suppose this is the case? The mere fact that it's possible is a sufficient reason - it's also logically possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow, yet we don't really entertain that supposition all too seriously. Why not?
The problem with your view is that you base it off direct experience of duration, without understanding that there is a need for all experience to be coherent with each other. When someone like Einstein says that time is illusory, they mean that according to their experience, time only seems real from our limited perceptions of it, which don't show the true reality of the Universe that we can grasp through the process of trying to understand our perception and experience. They make this statement in the same way that we make the statement that the Earth is round even though it appears flat, or that the Earth travels around the Sun, even though it appears like the Sun travels around the Earth from our perspective. And yet, you want to deny their position. But to do so, it's not sufficient to appeal to your experience, for that is precisely what is under the question, you have to rather show why your experience is valid, and their process of reasoning is not or cannot be.
I would say "no reason", just like in my example with the gold fish, there is no reason to believe that all fish are gold fish, just because the one pond which was analyzed had only gold fish. Of course you could call this a faulty reason, but then how would you distinguish faulty reason from no reason?
Consider a situation where someone attempts to understand something, and believes oneself to understand, and claims to understand, but really misunderstands. We cannot say that the person understands, because as per the description, the person really misunderstands. Yet the person claims to understand, and has reason for the believe that the thing has been understood. We must somehow disqualify that "reason", as unreasonable, and therefore "no reason", in order to validate the description, which is that the person misunderstands.
Quoting Agustino
Do you know about the Doppler effect, red shift, and theories which describe the universe as expanding?
Yes. What about them suggests that the speed of light in a vacuum would be different in different parts of the Universe?
I am an artist of a somewhat traditional sort, doing mostly painting, drawing, and a little sculpture, and I have long been very interested in space. I like to look at arrangements in space that draw attention to the spaces between things, which make the space part of the composition. Unfortunately, painting can't really do this. I also love to hike, climb, and generally spend time in nature, especially up around and on top of big mountain peaks. And what often interests me most is just the sense of space and the arrangement of things in it. The big spaces around and between rocky peaks is impressive, but so is the space in a forest or crag or in and around a plant. Architecture often exhibits space nicely as well.
It is hard to explain just what it is that I find most interesting about space.
It seems that without any objects or landscape, if you were to inhabit a completely featureless, empty space, you wouldn't notice the space. You need intervals between things and to have depth perception and the ability to move around the scene to appreciate or to even have the experience of spatial depth.
I have no idea if I notice anything about space that others don't, but I usually get blank stares when I talk about how much I like to pay attention to the spaces between and around things, so perhaps you are right.
Even in two-dimensional arrangements, I find a great deal of interest and aesthetic feeling in even a single drawn line. The gestural quality, the relative intervals between prominent features, the dynamics of the curves, the texture, the varying intensity of the line, and so on, are all very worthy of contemplation and appreciation! I quite like looking at signatures!
I love time too, and am deeply fascinated by it. Arrangements in time are wonderful. Few things I have found give me bliss like playing a good hand drum, even though I am not terribly good at it! The better I get though, the more satisfying the experience becomes.
I find movement to be incredibly blissful. I live to engage with interesting, usually rocky, terrain and to bring my attention to what I am doing, to the spaces I am moving through, to the sense of change, and to make every action as deliberate, conscious, efficient, graceful, skillful, and quiet as possible. I tend to treat it like a Japanese tea ceremony. It isn't just the space and time that I appreciate in such activity, but also how energy behaves. I like to become conscious of gravity, momentum, friction, and so on, often visualizing changing force vectors, trying to fully appreciate how it is that I manage to find purchase on small footholds by utilizing oppositional pressure, by controlling the directions in which force vectors point by using momentum, and so on. The world and my body and perceptual apparatus become a thoroughly engaging toy!
Rock climbing is one of the most aesthetically pleasing things I have found in all my years. It brings together many of the things I most appreciate: space, time, movement, interesting physics, finesse, strength, the need for courage and mental fortitude, mindfulness, the symbolism of ascent, skill, puzzle-solving, effort, breathing, a Heideggerian sort of engagement with the environment and tools, interesting knots, sun and weather, all the many aesthetic qualities of natural stone, danger, pain, and so on. Yes, pain and strain! It's part of it! Pure bliss! By far the most beautiful sport there is, in my opinion! Underappreciated! And it's not merely a sport, but also an art and a form of spiritual practice! For some, it is religion!
The point of all this is that I am indeed a great lover of experienced space, time, and qualitative physics and I am also an artist and athlete. But, is this appreciation really rare? I am not so sure. I think that mechanics and mechanical engineers have a similar appreciation of how interacting machine parts relate in space and time, how forces operate, the qualitative aspects of the functioning of a well-functioning machine, the properties and interactions of the materials, and so on, all in space and time, even if they aren't conscious of it. Athletes of many sorts, I think, are sensitive to these things. Anyone who appreciates music, nature, or art probably has it. Dancers clearly do. Skilled drivers too. I suspect that it is a fairly universal feature of human experience. I have known a few though who seem to primarily have an intelligence and appreciation for all things related to language, and who seem to have deep deficits when it comes to space, time, and intuitive physics.
Even though science comes into play in much of this, science is blind to most of what I am gesturing at. Perhaps this is the space and time, not of scientists or philosophers, but of world-engaged aesthetes! And perhaps it is these who are most in touch with what space and time really are! It is like the difference between a scholar of love who doesn't love and one who loves deeply without a great deal of intellectual analysis. Who has the greater insight into the thing in question? I guess the different approaches to these things simply offer different kinds of insight.
I get so carried away!
Velocity is distance over time:
V=d/t
This means that as an interval of distance is covered, a certain amount of time passes. Let's say that the velocity is 10 miles per hour.
V= 10mi/1hr
Relating distance to time in this way works fine. But how quickly does time pass? If we try to express the rate of change of time this way, we seem to be trying to put time over time.
V=t/t
Time passes at 1 second per second or 1 hour per hour. This tells us nothing! And 10 hours over 10 hours equals 1 with no units, since the units cancel. No matter what time interval you plug in, you get this result. As you can see, time cannot be its own evolution parameter. It is as pointless as saying that there is one inch of distance in one inch of distance. But time does seem to pass at a finite rate! Notice that you don't experience your entire lifetime zipping by in a snap. You also don't experience it passing so slowly that it is almost stopped or actually stopped. You experience it passing at a certain rate. This rate might seem to vary a little as with time flying when you are having fun. That apparent variation isn't particularly interesting to me. What I am interested in is the strong experience that we have of time passing at a rate, even though this seems absurd when you think about it.
It might seem that the rate of time passage lies in something like the rate at which you are passing through a series of states. Instead of 1 second per second, you have 24 frames per second. But this solves nothing. Why does a second, which contains the experience of 24 frames, seem to pass at the particular rate it does? We are back to the problem we started with. This time that is passing outside the film strip that allows us to move with respect to it seems to pass at a certain rate.
Consider the following. With a film strip, we could have an animation of a moving dot and could mark our film frames with frame numbers standing for a kind of time unit. So the dot will change position from frame to frame at a certain rate with respect to the frame numbers. It might move at a rate of 1 millimeter per frame. But here, we still have no motion, real or apparent. It is just a static collection of frames. In order for you to move with respect to the film strip to see apparent motion in it, you need real time outside of the film strip. So now, as you move, you are passing through so many frames per second. You can keep doing this, removing yourself once, twice, three times, and so on, each time spatializing the time dimension. You could make another filmstrip depicting your dolly motion with respect to the first filmstrip, each frame containing an image of your dolly at a certain position along the strip. But in order to have change, you need to introduce another time dimension orthogonal to the previous one, this time real. And then you need to really move with respect to the strip. But how is this possible? Baffling and fascinating!
I cannot speak to how rare it is , but it is highly unusual. Observation and appreciation of real nature has for the most part been replaced by electronics, to the extent that rather than being at one with nature, people are at one with computers and are quite literally in love with them. They are trying to actually emulate robots. Technology has become without exaggeration the real reality.
But be that as it may, and we all can choose our own path of exploration, I like you explore the arts because I am really interested in understanding life.
It is good that you explore the arts! There is much value to be found there.
As for Bergson, I haven't read more than just a tiny bit here and there. He has long been on my to-do list, but I have always felt a bit intimidated, as I have difficulty understanding what he is talking about when I do sample his work. I started to read one of his books several years ago and didn't get very far before something else grabbed my interest. But I will have to put more effort into his work one of these days! I would like, in particular, to understand his view of time.
As for Stephen Robbins, I watched the first video a week or so ago, which I saw mentioned on these forums somewhere, maybe by you. It seems interesting, but I am not sure I quite understand what he is trying to convey yet. I mean to watch more to see where his line of thought leads. I also have read part of his book, Time and Memory, and mean to finish it one of these days. Right now though, I am trying to finally tackle Kant's first critique, starting with some secondary introductory material and the Prolegomena. That reading project might take me a little while at my slow pace!
OK, you're familiar with the concept of spatial expansion, that's good. So observational information is taken and interpreted according to the precepts of relativity based theories. The interpretations show that distant objects, stars and galaxies are all moving away from us. Of course we cannot conclude that all the objects in the universe are moving away from us, because that would make us the centre of the universe, just like geocentrism. Also, we wouldn't want to admit that relativity theory is defective, because applying it makes it appear like we are the centre of the universe. Instead, cosmologists have produced the theory of spatial expansion.
Now we have the motions of objects which are subject to relativity theory, plus motions which are subject to expansion theories. Since relativity theory is supposed to apply to all motions of material objects, then the latter motions, those explained by expansion theories cannot be called motions. So we have "motions" those which are consistent with relativity theory, and "non-motions", those motions which require expansion theories to explain. Instead of recognizing that relativity theory is inadequate for interpreting all the motions in the universe, cosmologists prefer to accept contradiction. They allow that there are motions which are not real motions, because they are inconsistent with relativity. Then they are forced to produce new theories, spatial expansion, to account for these contradictory motions.
You mean similar to how geocentrists first addressed errors that appeared in their model by introducing different fudge factors to account for the actual orbits of the planets?
Yeah, something like that. When "the rule" has difficulty dealing with the fringe factors, you need to make up more rules to deal with those exceptions to the rule. Cosmology is just the half of it. At the other extreme, in the microcosm of quantum mechanics, physicists use special relativity to produce fields. And here we have the same result, contradiction, particles which are not really particles. So in the one extreme, with the massive objects of the vast universe, there are motions which are not really motions, and at the other extreme, in the miniature world of quantum mechanics, there are objects which are not really objects. Both of these problems come about from the use of relativity theory which is really only applicable in the middle realm of the human environment, where the discrepancies that are amplified at the extremes, do not cause any problems.