The eternal moment
This has come up in the discussion on the Kalam Cosmological Argument and I would like to pursue it further without derailing the thread.
My view is that we live in an eternal moment and that the past and present are there also in a limited sense. But that they are a consequence of the constitution of our incarnate bodies and the world they are evolved to dwell in, rather than some more fundamental part of our being. I am interested in what philosophy has to say about this.
Can anyone help?
My view is that we live in an eternal moment and that the past and present are there also in a limited sense. But that they are a consequence of the constitution of our incarnate bodies and the world they are evolved to dwell in, rather than some more fundamental part of our being. I am interested in what philosophy has to say about this.
Can anyone help?
Comments (44)
Do you mean the past and future are there also?
I'm suspicious that this is a circular argument dependent on your initial definition of 'eternal' which of course will be the definition that most suits your argument. If this isn't to be just a sneaky bit of sophistry then I suggest you lay out exactly what you mean by both 'eternal' and 'temporal' and indicate what you think their ontological status as, if either or both are considered merely illusory, then it all becomes a bit moot!
I don't know what philosophy has to say about this, and as a would-be consolation prize I can only offer what little I might be able to say, and maybe throw in a couple of fragments of Blake.
So, I would say that if we were lucky we might live in an eternal moment. But it is not as though the whole of our lives consists in an eternal moment, phenomenologically speaking anyway, but rather that they consist in a series of moments, each of which is at most a day, and some of which may be eternal moments.
[i]"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"[/i]
But this is probably not to be for many, or even most, of us:
[i]"Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night"[/i]
In the end I didn't say much at all, but let Blake do the speaking instead.
How Kierkegaardian. I share this thought of time too. I think it's breifly in The Concept of Anxiety?
[quote=Soren Kierkegaard]...When time is correctly defined as infinite succession, it seems plausible to define it also as the present, the past and the future. However this distinction is incorrect, if one means by it that this is implied in time itself; for it first emerges with the relation of time to eternity and the reflection of eternity in it. If in the infinite succession of time one could in fact find a foothold, i.e. a present, which would serve as a dividing point, then this division would be quite correct. But precisely because every moment, like the sum of the moments, is a process (a going-by) no moment is a present, and in the same sense there is neither past, present, nor future. If one thinks it possible to maintain this division, it is because we spatialize a moment, but thereby the infinite succession is brought to a standstill, and that is because one introduces a visual representation, visualizing time instead of thinking it. But even so it is not correctly thought, for even in this visual representation the infinite succession of time is a present infinitely void of content. (This is the parody of the eternal.) The Hindus speak of a line of kings which has reigned for 70,000 years. About the kings nothing is known, not even their names (as I assume). Taking this as an illustration of time, these 70,000 years are for thought an infinite vanishing; for visual representation they widen out spatially into an illusive view of a nothing infinitely void. On the other hand, so soon as we let one moment succeed the other we posit the present.
The present, however, is not the concept of time, unless precisely as something infinitely void, which again is precisely the infinite vanishing. If one does not give heed to this, then, however swiftly one may let it pass, one has nevertheless posited the present, and having posited that, one lets it appear again in the definition of the past and the future. On the contrary, the eternal is the present. For thought, the eternal is the present as an annulled [aufgehoben] succession (time was succession, going by). For visual representation, eternity is a going-forth, yet it never budges from the spot, because for visual representation it is a present infinitely rich in content. Likewise in the eternal there is not to be found any division of the past and the future, because the present is posited as the annulled succession...
[/quote]
If I understand it correctly, it's a type of presentism where the present is really a moment, an instant. A constantly changing eternal nowness.
I don't know, as I see it the travelling through time is part of the world we find ourselves in, an aspect of the spacetime. So in a sense time, the temporal, may be a quality of a domain or realm found in eternity, or manifest in some way. But when we are not present in a realm, time might just be a now, with no travelling. Perhaps some kind of transcendent state.
Not necessarily. If you understand eternity quantitatively then it certainly does. If, however, you understand it qualitatively as Plato and Neo-Platonist Christianity do then it is literally timeless
I don't see this. A symphony: that can be present to us as a whole. A drama. A novel. The ways of remembering and anticipating presented to us in novels, from Flaubert to Toni Morrison. I suppose I disagree with the distinction you make in the op:
Biology is history, it seems rich enough to me to be the foundation of 'fundamental parts of our being', although I don't mean we can explain culture from biology. From biological beginnings we can imagine time as Proust or Hawking or Shostakovich imagines time: once we do this imagining, it's available to us at any given, ahm, moment, isn't it?
I collect antiques, these antiques are present with me know in that moment, they also bear the marks of a checkered past, which they bring with them. It is by analogy like the way the light from a lighthouse swings around lighting the horizon in a great arc. This moment containing all the universe we experience is contained in that beam of light, of illumination. But surely our experience of this beam of light, of nowness, is a restricted experience, one dictated by the material universe that we find ourselves in. Like a two dimensional being not being able to experience the three dimensional reality of a piece of paper but confined to that two dimensional surface.
There might well be other beams of light (now) out there, indeed many, inhabiting the same [i]space[/I], external to our spacetime. They might be as pages in a book in another dimension in an eternity of time, moments.
Yes, I don't disagree (this is though an explorative exercise). What you describe here is what I suggested, a full or pregnant moment, nowness, generated by our bodies, our brain, our mind, a simulation. It implies a minutely brief moment of time passing with scientific precision on the atomic scale, on the nano scale.
Quoting PunshhhIf this were the case, how could we distinguish which part of the now is past, and which part is future? It all simply seems like now, but if part was really past, and part was really future, shouldn't we be able to distinguish which is which?
Quoting Punshhh
I wonder how this moment, the moment of the mind, could be conceived as being eternal.
I do think that for animals and uneducated tribal people the moment is eternal, they don't or only rarely intellectually divide or limit their moments, there is just now, which is very extensive.
I don't think we can view the moment as a series of brief moments as ticks on an atomic clock, which is in tune with all other atomic clocks, or the like. This is because as time (as we experience it) is actually a result of chemical reactions and atomic activity in the physical material of our world. This is an organic progression, in which there is some small variation in the progression of time, also that events happening closer, or farther distant from the observer are experienced with a delay, due to the effects having variations in delay.
Also our brain is rigged to create the perception of a greater breadth of moment for better interaction in our environment, which is why I used the phrase "holism". This holism my be artificially constructed by a divine process to mirror a breadth of moment in the experience of the soul or spirit in the eternal moment in another parallel realm, as I suggested at the top.
I can understand why you say that the series of nows is incorrect. The now is an assumed point which we use to mark the beginning and end of a period of time. One could say "now", then proceed to measure the passing of time, with a clock, until "now" is spoken again. Under this assumption, the now is an assumed point. We can also project that point, to yesterday at 6:00 AM for example, and tomorrow at 6:00 AM, then claim a period of time between these two assumed points. The problem is that no time passes at the now, it all passes between the nows, so it is impossible that time could consist of a series of nows.
Notice that these points, "nows", or "moments", are simply assumed. They are somewhat transcendent to time itself, because time passes at both sides of the moment, but not at the moment itself; and the moment is simply placed there, artificially, by the human being who says "now", or 6:00 AM, or some such thing. The moment can be moved around to any place in time this way. Any particular moment is created in that way, by taking the general moment, which is just a point, and placing it somewhere in the duration of time.
The duration is what you call "one continuous period". Without a beginning or an end, we could say that the continuous period is "eternal". And if we assume that the moment which produces beginnings and ends to periods of time is completely artificial, as described above, then there is no beginning or end, and the continuous period is eternal.
That is one sense of the word eternal, an unending time. But in another sense, the point, the moment, or "now", as something which transcends time, and is therefore outside of time, is eternal. I think that to understand the true nature of "eternal", we must approach this point, this moment, not the continuous passing of time. This moment is at once, the end of one period of time, and the beginning of the next. That is the moment of the present, it is the end of the future, and beginning of the past.
We can consider that this moment of the present, which is the end of the future, and beginning of the past, is itself active, not static, because as soon as we say "now", it is past. This activity makes the boundary between future and past, which is the moment of now, somewhat vague. And that is what special relativity theory assumes, that the relative position of this moment of now is dependent on one's perspective. The particular perspective which we have, is dictated by out physical bodies, as you say, so we don't see that there are other perspectives, we all have similar bodies. But if we consider other possible perspectives, this gives us the breadth of the moment.
I don't think it makes sense to speak about the passing of time between moments, and no passing of time within the moment, rather passing of time is a movement through or across instants, but yet the movement itself is made up of instants. There are no actual instants, they are abstracta, so in a sense there can be no actual movement of time, because it is also an abstraction; apart from its phenomenological dimension as pure duration or persistence.
Considered abstractly the moment is an infinitesimal point-instant, and just as a series of infinitesimal points constitute a line, so a series of infinitesimal point-instants constitute a duration. Abstractly considered passing from one moment to another can only consist in a traversal across further infinitesimal point-instants. So the moment-as-point-instant is not anything we could be in.
Phemonenologically considered, there is no passing of time but rather a movement of focal awareness, seamless transformations within what is always the present moment. So experientially the present moment is indefinately extended to include past and future. Past and future are always phenomenologically here-now, they are only there-then or somewhere-when in abstractum.
Of course you will find something wrong with what I have written here; on analysis it is always possible to find inconsistencies or incoherencies in anything we may say about such things; they are inherent. The thinking of such things helps only to give us the feeling of having a better grasp on what is really ungraspable. An endless diversion for minds that are not productively occupied. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
;)
Therefore, the present contains all, but we cannot conceive it.
Yes I am aware of those perspectives, also the phenomenological interpretation provided by John. I suppose my perspective as I am presenting it here is a mystical conception in which all time, space and being is present in one point in space and time and what we experience as the present and the passage of time is a fraction of the whole, rather like a thread following an incarnate arc across the span of a certain combination of parts of the whole. The eternal present is immanent in that thread of now, whereas the past and future are also in that one point, but inaccessible to us due to us being experientially locked into that thread.
The above is a physical description, I would also give a mental description in which the one point is a transcendent God like being to which we are attached by a thread of spirit, embodying and sustaining a fraction of meaning and experience of the one being. In which we experience time similarly as in the physical description. But different in that the mental thread is straight and immanent, rather than an arc and the physical thread is curved tangential and causally distant.
Interestingly this conception describes a cross, the upright in the mind and the cross piece in the body, with the present in both meeting at the crossing point in the moment.
Actually I don't hold any beliefs, I regard them as a kind of halt, or full stop in the development and refinement of ideas.
If you don't believe that you hold any beliefs, then it would be accurate for us to say, "Punshhh doesn't believe that he does not hold any beliefs." People would expectedly take that to be saying that you believe you do hold some beliefs.
A simpler example: "Punshhh doesn't believe that 2+2=4." You should expect people to respond to that with, "Really? What does he believe 2+2 equals instead? 5?"
Let me see if I understand what you say here. Movement is made up of instants. The passing of time is a type of movement, occurring across instants. There are no actual instants, because these are abstractions. Does this mean that from your perspective, movement is not real either? Is movement simply an abstraction as well?
Quoting John
Isn't the boundary between one infinitesimal point instant and another simply artificial, completely conceptual? Otherwise, how could you say that the instant is an abstraction? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that there is simply duration, and the point-instants are just conceptual? If not, what evidence do you have, that such point-instants are real?
Quoting Punshhh
Could you explain what you mean when you say that all time, space, and being, are present in one point? is this an extremely large point, or what type of "point" are you talking about here, some type of black hole?
Change is experienced, and movement is one aspect of, and/or way of conceiving of, change. So it would not seem reasonable to say that movement is not real. The point is that we conceive of movement or change as a progression through different locations or states respectively. These locations and states can have no dimension, both because if they did then they would themselves have to be made up of further series of locations and states, and also because they are not phenomenologically inhabited, but rather, are merely abstractly conceived.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes exactly, the boundaries are "completely artificial", that is why I say they are "abstractly conceived". I think it is more accurate (to experience at least, if not to abstract thought) to say that "there is simply duration and the point instants are just conceptual"; in fact that is just what I have been saying. The point instants are real, abstractly speaking, however, insofar as they are really thought; but they are not phemonemologically real, insofar as they are not really experienced as such.
So it isn't really a belief in the way belief is used in reference to things which can't be tested, or determined,like God. A use much closer to the spirit of the word.
The other common use of belief, is I think entirely unnecessary and sloppy language. Namely I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Belief is not required here, rather I know the sun will rise tomorrow. I don't require belief in this to accept that the sun will rise tomorrow and hence to know that it will rise tomorrow, while I do not believe it will rise tomorrow.
It is something like the "one thing" of Parmenides*. Or spacetime reduced to one point rather than extended, rather like it might have been at the point of the Big Bang. The size of it does not have meaning in the absence of another thing to compare it to. Also in terms of mind, it is the equivalent Brahman, infinite while indivisible, transcendent yet present. Or one could describe it as the single point of origin in a monism.
This is why I mentioned it as a mystical view. I work with many concepts like this, which are tools in developing perspectives beyond our conditioned knowledge and understanding.
*In comparing my concept with that of Parmenides's one thing. I view it only as a local thing amongst other things in some transcendent, or eternal realm.
What you're calling a "technical" usage of belief is what belief is.
What you're describing in the second paragraph is a sophomoric misunderstanding of what belief is that seems to have primarily stemmed from a particular attitudinal approach to atheism that's popular on some message boards, chat rooms, etc.
If you don't have a problem with knowledge being justified true belief, then you shouldn't have a problem with saying that you believe the sun will rise tomorrow. You know that it will rise, and knowledge is justified true belief.
We can have beliefs that we have no empirical or logical support for, and there are beliefs that there is empirical or logical support for. The presence of empirical and logical support doesn't change it to something other than a belief.
Justified true belief is an analytical device. I don't use it and I have no beliefs around the movement of the planets around the sun. I don't have a problem with you believing that I have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. But do you really believe that I do? I don't believe that you do.
The word belief is just a word to describe the attitude of a person in a situation. That attitude can be described using other words.
??? You didn't understand what I wrote based on this comment. What's a sophomoric misunderstanding is that "belief" doesn't refer to things for which one has empirical or logical support; or the idea that if one knows something, it's not a belief.
You have beliefs whether you call them that or not.
Anyway as I said, what I am doing, while it could argued that it is believing things, is an intellectual act which could also be described with other words like accept, or in my opinion. I use these words rather than belief and I know I don't hold any beliefs in things which can't be verified in principle, because I have actively rid myself of such notions and would have to actively opt into them anyway.
There are no beliefs here, don't you believe me?
So I take it that instants are irrelevant to the passing of time then, time passes regardless of whether human beings mark off instants. Then the following paragraph should be perhaps considered, as wrongly stated:
Quoting John
Duration is something other than a series of point-instants. A series of point-instants is a measured time, abstracted, or conceptual, but unmeasured, there is just duration without instants. A series of point instants might be how one represents a duration, but it is not duration itself.
Not exactly how I would frame it. Time passes only by virtue of its being marked off; and this would seem to involve the idea of instants or points of reference. Otherwise the marking off is in terms of events; but where there is merely a succession of events that can never be truly discrete, there would seem to be no passing of time, but rather a seamless movement or transition within time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. And duration seems to be a kind of space within which transitional change is ever occurrent, a space which we measure by demarcating more or less arbitrary points of reference within it. :)
This doesn't make sense to me, there can't be any time passing unless there is someone making off instants. How would someone act to mark off instants unless time were passing? Also, don't you think that there was time passing before human beings were making off instants?
The passing of time is an abstract conception, like the marking of instants. There is no marking of instants or passing of time independently of us; I would say. I doubt that animals conceive of time passing; and I think it makes no sense to say that they (or we, for that matter) actually experience the passing of time. We just experience constant change, for which we, in abstractum, think that a succession of instants and the passing of time, is logically entailed. And they are abstractly considered, logically entailed, but reality is not abstract; that is, it is not just as we abstractly consider it to be; because it is dynamic; and it simply cannot conceivably be a succession of absolutely discrete states.
But, yeah, as I said before of course you may be able to find grounds to disagree with this; just as you may be able to find grounds to disagree with anything that could be said on the subject. There is no final, unimpeachable statement about the nature of things, we can only approach a dialectical understanding of this by concentrically circling around and around the subject in ever tighter and tighter circles ...
So back to the other question then, is there change, or motion, without human beings? If change, or motion is real, and independent of human beings, how could this occur without time passing?
Quoting John
I don't agree with this, I think there are statements concerning this subject which cannot be disagreed with. Would you disagree with the fact that we recognize a distinct difference between future and past?
In the last analysis, whether or not there is anything without human beings is an exceedingly difficult and subtle question. I would say there must be concrete movement or change; whereas there is no concrete passing of time or succession of instants, so I would say the latter would be less qualified, due to their purely abstract nature, to be considered to be independent of human experience. but even to say this is not to be able to definitively pin down the situation vis a vis the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, between reality in itself and human experience; to definitively pin down this relationship is simply not possible, in my view, as I have already said.
To answer your last question, I would say that we certainly do recognize a logical, that is abstract, difference between past and future. That we can remember the past but not anticipate it, whereas we can only anticipate the future and cannot remember it; are these concrete differences between the past and future, or are they merely logical differences between the past and future; and concrete differences only between our modes of experience? Again, I would say these are very complex questions that admit of no simple definitive answer.
As I see it one would have to include animals in our passing time and present, indeed the entire biosphere. Although I am not saying that these entities are or are not aware of it, they are present here with us. Simply I feels it necessary to group the whole biosphere as one entity in this phenomenological realm, an entity which has developed into seperate organisms, which operate as seperate entities, but members of a common community.
Where you say there is duration, it is this moment of duration which I am referring to as the eternal moment. A phenomenon which does sweep forward through phenomena like a wave of present. But it is the experience we have of the moving wave of now which we can't easily conceive of as an fleeting glimpse of something broader and more permanent. If one considers our spacetime bubble as confining us in this wave of now. Then the moment I am referring to is transcendent to it, while present in it in part.