Time is an illusion
Time itself has no speed.
What we subjectively perceive as the "speed" of time is simply the speed of our cerebral metabolism verses the speed of everything else in the world. Our brains can process only so much during the span of a clock tick. We regularly have the experience of "time" speeding up or slowing down. But this is not time itself speeding up or slowing down, only our brains.
What if time itself were to somehow speed up, or to slow down? Then, everything in our universe would speed up or slow down with it. If time were to suddenly increase it's speed by a factor of a million, then everything, our brains and the world surrounding them, would be moving and developing a million times more quickly. From our personal perspective, from the whole universe's perspective, nothing would have changed, everything would be moving and developing at exactly the same relative rates. Such a radical change in the speed of time would be both irrelevant and undetectable.
Saying something is both irrelevant to and undetectable by our entire universe, is the same thing as saying it doesn't exist. Time has no speed.
If time has no speed, it cannot move.
If time has no speed, it cannot be a process in motion.
If time cannot move or be a process in motion, it must be static.
But, we perceive time as being dynamic, as being the essence of change itself.
Therefore, time, as we intuitively perceive and understand it, is an illusion.
What we subjectively perceive as the "speed" of time is simply the speed of our cerebral metabolism verses the speed of everything else in the world. Our brains can process only so much during the span of a clock tick. We regularly have the experience of "time" speeding up or slowing down. But this is not time itself speeding up or slowing down, only our brains.
What if time itself were to somehow speed up, or to slow down? Then, everything in our universe would speed up or slow down with it. If time were to suddenly increase it's speed by a factor of a million, then everything, our brains and the world surrounding them, would be moving and developing a million times more quickly. From our personal perspective, from the whole universe's perspective, nothing would have changed, everything would be moving and developing at exactly the same relative rates. Such a radical change in the speed of time would be both irrelevant and undetectable.
Saying something is both irrelevant to and undetectable by our entire universe, is the same thing as saying it doesn't exist. Time has no speed.
If time has no speed, it cannot move.
If time has no speed, it cannot be a process in motion.
If time cannot move or be a process in motion, it must be static.
But, we perceive time as being dynamic, as being the essence of change itself.
Therefore, time, as we intuitively perceive and understand it, is an illusion.
Comments (94)
Er ... no ... ever heard of relativity?
We perceive everything changing because a static universe is inconceivable, but we also see hints of one such as Mach's Conjecture because the only thing we can ultimately know is that we know nothing. Mother nature's sense of humor is every bit as wicked as she can be beautiful. This also explains things such as why its impossible to achieve a perfect vacuum, the speed of light, etc. as all merely the fact a context without any significant content and vice versa is simply a contradiction.
Its "speed" is simply a measurement of one change or motion against another change or motion.
The first man to make an appointment invented timekeeping. All the ancient civilisations had some kind of timekeeping. As those civilisations became more sophisticated in terms of needing meetings, arranging events, and travelling, timekeeping became more accurate. The monastic orders that arose from Christianity, in Europe particularly, increased the demand for yet more exact timekeeping leading to the first clocks.
Time keeping was needed by farmers to know when to plant crops. It was a matter of keeping track of the days with astrological charts, monuments on the ground, and things like that. The day was divided by morning, noon, and evening. Then the day was divided into hours with the sundial.
But I wonder if they thought that each new day is a new day or as the same day restarting all over, same chores, (milk the cow, pitch the hay, plant, hoe...) with nothing new....time as the cycle/rhythm of life, and the monuments marking the return of something already started rather than the forward progression of time? Maybe it became progressive once trading with others became normalized.
Over half the world doesn't perceive time as linear as westerners do. It is more organic and there are times when time behaves more like it has a life of its own. This is something tribal hippies experience frequently, but few other westerners. It is the greater context determining its own content or what can appear to be synergy normalizing itself. The future can be viewed as both static juxtapositions and flow dynamics or bandwidth capacity that increases and decreases in different ways including metamorphic effects.
Constructal Theory by Adrian Bejan is closer to the issue by western philosophical standards and has been proposed as an amendment to the second law of thermodynamics.
Seasons and other variations such as the position of stars and phases of the moon make that extremely unlikely, I would have thought.
Though possibly not far out enough!
Any chance we could get a moratorium on you invoking quantum mechanics (which you clearly don't understand) in ways that make no sense and do not advance your argument a jot?
Yes... and if one is foolishly brazen enough to issue grand pronouncements on the nature of time, he should at least mention relativity!
So yes, time does have a speed, when measured against other frames of reference. And of course, these relative speeds are incredibly minute, at least as far as the everyday world is concerned.
But I am arguing that time has no absolute speed. We can easily accept that motion can have only a relative speed, this accords more or less well with our intuitive understanding of motion. But with time, it is much more difficult. It clashes with the intuitive notion that time is plodding forward at a constant rate.
So the problem remains: there are at most minute measurable differences, in most cases, in the relative speeds of time. But there is no such thing as an absolute speed of time. And without a speed, how can time, as we understand it, operate at all?
What an odd idea.
You suggest that in reality time is static.
Then you claim that we can defy reality and conjure the illusion that time is dynamic.
Yet it seems to me that if it is not fundamentally possible in reality for time to be dynamic then how is it possible in abstraction for time to be dynamic?
You introduce a problem, how can a thing which is static be converted into an abstraction which is dynamic?
And what does it mean for there to exist an abstraction of time which is dynamic but a reality of time which is static?
Does this mean time is made of two distinct substances one abstract and one real?
Time does not have a "speed."
Time is treated as a dimension in modern physics.
Speed is a measure of how many spatial units are translated in a given period of temporal units.
Speed is figured by using both time and distance, that is to say that speed is how far something travels in a given amount of time.
Reality is not colorful, but it is colorful as we perceive it, or in the abstract, as you put it. According to you, this should be impossible. Or is there a difference between these two cases?
Yes, time is a dimension. But saying that is not enough, time also keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future. We seem to be moving through this dimension, at a constant speed.
Yes, we are. Time isn't. So, if you insist on using the term speed, it is we that have it, not time.
The reason life is colorful is because light has different wave lengths.
Time does not have a speed.
Speed is a measure of distance traveled in an amount of time.
It does not make any sense to say time has a speed.
You did not answer my questions.
You introduce a problem, how can a thing which is static be converted into an abstraction which is dynamic?
And what does it mean for there to exist an abstraction of time which is dynamic but a reality of time which is static?
Er .. no .. it's because we have the ability to detect electromagnetic waves of varying wavelengths in a particular band and discriminate between them (albeit somewhat inconsistently!) The colour is not inherent to the light or a property of its wavelength. Colour is simply the way that the varying wavelengths are registered by our brains. It has no independent existence.
Any dynamic process, a chemical reaction for example, has a speed. "Rate", if you prefer.
Time, as you point out, cannot have a speed/rate.
Therefore, time cannot be a dynamic process.
Perhaps the entirety of time exists all at once, no one moment is more privileged than the next. What we perceive as a dynamic 3-dimensional system is really a static 4-dimensional one. The extra dimension gives "room" to project a 4-d static reality as a dynamic 3-d abstraction, just as the different chemical properties of different wavelengths of light allow for their projection as colors.
Not having speed is not the logical equivalent to is not dynamic.
Quoting hypericin
In modern physics time is not a separate dimension.
All spatial and temporal dimensions are considered one continuum
In general relativity spacetime must be dynamic otherwise gravity would not cause it to curve.
For this reason I disagree with you that time is not dynamic.
What you describe sounds similar to .block universe theory of time also called eternalism.
This was also Einsteins view of time.
It is not clear whether etermalism or presentism is the case with regards to time.
I personally suspect that it is probably a bit of both that is the case.
At any rate time is not an illusion as it is defined by physics, it is a real measurable effect upon systems in experiments.
Explain then, or provide an example.
Are It's dimensions physical (chronological) and psychological ( past, present, future ) ?
Considering the topic " time is an illusion" - I would go even further and say Time is a clown and likes to play mind games on us. Relativity being the first game... :)
I did explain with an example.
I told you that gravity cause spacetime to curve.
That is not an example, that is the topic. I have no faith in your authority as a physicist. And you yourself said that Einstein was an eternalist.
I would say it is logically impossible for something to have no speed, and yet be dynamic.
What if it's jumping around in a totally inconsistent manner, one moment here, the next moment over there, then somewhere else, etc.. How could this thing have any speed?
Are there dynamic abstractions...really??
You can measure it's average position, the rate of jumping, it's average instantaneous speed between jumps... I'm talking about speed in the sense of rate of change.
Another reason time can have no speed: change in time over time makes no sense.
Processes (you don't need the word "dynamic"--processes are necessarily dynamic) have a speed relative to other processes. That includes time, because time is just process.
Change in the rate of change is observed empirically, it is known as acceleration. You may be right, it may not make sense logically, and that's why physicists have found that it is a difficult subject. It is similar to the concept of "becoming", which doesn't make sense logically. It requires something in between two describable states, and this forces an exception to the law of excluded middle. But when things appear to disobey our laws of logic, this does not mean that they are unreal, it just means that they are not well understood.
Are you familiar with Aristotle's distinction of two types of change? There is change of place, locomotion, and change to an object. The latter is a change which is not a change of place. There is nothing to necessitate that change to an object must be consistent in the way that you describe. It is only when that object is related to another object, as the cause of that change, or as a standard of measurement for a "rate of change", that a change of place is established, and the consistency which you refer to is developed.
What you are dealing with is that change or flux can only be measured with absoluteness if we can establish some absolute backdrop of stasis or a complete lack of change. And in the end, we can't find such an absence of dynamism. We can only find a relative absence to construct our desired backdrop for measurement.
So our notions of time are an attempt to arrive at an image of "least change". That is is why you find yourself talking about a Newtonian model of time as a spatialised dimension - a line with points. And then why you worry about why motion along this temporal line should be itself constant and not variable in its speed.
But you give your own answer already on that. If everything was "sped up" or "slowed down" by time changing its speed, it would make no difference. It would be the same as if the speed of time was constant anyway. And so, the whole question of "what speed is time moving at" can be seen as irrelevant. Treating time as a Newtonian dimension is already as simple as it gets. To have a global dimension that is eternally there in always the same fashion is already the least amount of change that can be conceived.
This should be apparent from Newton's own classical laws of motion. Constant linear motion or constant angular momentum are inertial - a form of change that is not really a change in dynamics. A rolling ball can roll forever at the same speed. This is a consequence of time being a "statically existing" global symmetry. A realm of objects in eternal inertial motion is already as rock-bottom unchanging as you are going to get.
But Newtonian dynamics has been found to be too static even with its already irreducible degree of "constant change". Relativity required a more dynamical picture on the large and cold scale, quantum mechanics required it on the small and hot scale.
So time is just the way we talk about measuring change. And that in itself involves establishing some general backdrop of relative "no-change" against which we can then measure the other thing of some particular or local change.
This is why the very notion of time appears to be based on the "necessary self-contradiction" of being a static or unchanging backdrop thing. It is the fixed container of everything that changes.
But even with Newtonian time, critical aspects of the dynamics of things are made part of the global picture. Inertia - the kind of motion that is constant - is a universal property of masses. So Newtonian physics simplified our notion of time in putting the cause of constant motion "elsewhere" in its physics. But as we moved towards the kind of physics that could unify our notions of spacetime as a container, and matter as its contents, inertial motion came back to haunt everyone. Time had to be reimagined in the more dynamical fashion that could underpin relativity and quantum mechanics.
I don't understand the apparent distinction you're making. There are only actual processes. "Process itself" is actual processes. "Process itself" makes sense in that you're just talking about the fact that something is changing or is in motion, and you're not talking about specifically what is changing or is in motion, but "process itself" only obtains via actual processes. The idea of processes that aren't actual (that is, the idea of them existing or obtaining somehow) makes zero sense in my opinion.
Thanks for the stimulating reply. I am still stuck though.
We can imagine space as a 3D euclidean space, divided into a mesh of invisible little points or cubes. Motion then has an absolute meaning, as moving with respect to this mesh.
But, this is a fiction. Motion is meaningful only relative to other frames of reference. That is fine, as objects are distributed throughout space, with their own separate velocities. But, if we were to claim that the *entire* universe is moving at some velocity, then, without this lattice of cubes to move against, this is exactly equivalent to saying that the universe is completely stationary.
But what if we treat time as a 1D line, analogous with space? Then, unlike with space, every object is at the same point, and moving through time at the same rate. Which, unless you imagine absolute points along this 1D line, analogous to the lattice of cubes in space, is also like saying that every object is motionless in time. Or, if you invoke relativity, then objects are only moving in time to the degree that relativistic effects are observed.
If we aren't moving through time, then how did I seem to start this at time t, and arrive at t + 20 seconds when I finished? Do we need the imaginary points, or some other unobservable, "unchanging backdrop thing"?
Or can we dispense with time altogether? Everything is just process, at rates relative to each other and nothing else, in an eternal present? I am ignorant as to whether physics actually requires an ontologically existent time, as opposed to a formal notion which makes the equations work.
When you said "time is just process.", I took that to mean that you regard time as somehow the abstract essence of processes. If not that, then what?
Then how can a range over all processes have a speed relative to specific processes?
When I say it's not any specific processes, I'm saying that it's not just some subset of specific processes, while not being other processes. For example, someone might think it's the process of a clock ticking, say, but not a bird in flight. I'm saying it's both. It's every process, or the process part of every process--which just means that it's not the "feather" part of a bird in flight, for example, but the changing relations that amount to being in flight.
Hence "Processes have a speed relative to other processes. That includes time, because time is just process." In other words, each one of those processes is what time is. Every single process. They have speeds relative to other processes because we simply compare one to the other. "The bird flaps its wings x times per click of this clock" for example. That's what the speed of processes is--that comparative relation.
But you have then added the extra thing of a change in location to your static grid. So now there is something extra in the this grid world that is not fixed to a location. And its position can change in regard to location in a way that you would feel moved to describe as where it was "previously", where it is "now", and where it could be in the "future".
So you started with a spatial grid and smuggled in notions of matter and time to create a model of a world of objects in motion (or not, if their positions are seen to be unchanged during the time that other objects do change their position).
Quoting hypericin
But that is just to treat time as a further spatial dimension. If time actually was just like that, we should be able to travel backward in time with the same ease we move forward. And we should be able to remain at rest in time.
So while a spatialised representation of time is useful, it doesn't seem true in a deep way.
What physics is working towards is a thermal model of time which accounts better for its apparent character. So time now becomes the rate at which the contents of the Universe in general are cooling as - spatially - the Universe expands. There is an entropic curve that the entire Universe is running down at a general rate.
So now we can look at the most general material feature of the Universe - the cooling and spreading bath of cosmic background radiation. Everywhere, the temperature of the CMB is falling at the same rate. It is changing at the same speed. And this now gives a concrete backdrop of steady change against which we can measure different local rates of change.
It defines simultaneity in terms of a standard temperature. Right "now" the cosmic time is 2.725 degrees above absolute zero. And there is a thermal arrow that points from when the Universe was hotter to when it will be even cooler still.
So time is how we can measure change in terms of whatever it is that we can find as not changing. And time also has some intuitive features - like a locked-in forward direction, and a universality in terms of there being some common "now" where everything in some sense stands in the one spot - that a spatialised Newtonian model is not good at representing.
Therefore we need better ways of modelling time that produced these other features in a more intuitive fashion. Talking in terms of temperature rather than location is a way to do that. Even if we are standing still, we can see that a process of entropification means we are getting older and colder at the same general rate as the entire Universe.
Quoting hypericin
Don't forget that the rate of change we care about most is that of massive objects. Light travels at only its one speed (and so, for lack of comparison, radiation is pretty "timeless"). Massive objects are free to move at any speed between rest and c. So massive objects have the kind of variety relative to a pair of absolute bounds on motion that lets us talk about them moving at different rates in comparison to this backdrop difference.
So when you are talking about the speed of mass x, you are saying it is y times faster that being at rest, and z times slower than being at c. That is why masses appear to move "inside" time. There is both an upper and lower absolute bound that between them define a range of meaningful speeds.
Mass always thus exists somewhere on a spectrum of speeds. There is always a faster and a slower from wherever they are now.
Or at least this is the case for the Universe as it is thermally right "now" - a Universe that is largely in its classical regime being neither so hot and small that it is a Big Bang bunch of thermal fluctuation, nor so cold and large that it is just a "red-shifted to buggery" Heat Death sea of thermal fluctuations once again.
I don't understand the conflation of the measurement of time and time itself. CBR might be a universal clock. But does it make sense, in response to the question "What is Time?", to point to a clock? Is there any justification in believing that time itself would stop if the universe were to stop expanding?
Well if you believe a clock can actually measure time, then surely that answers your own question?Whatever a clock is, it represents the way you already conceive of time.
That's a damn cold universe! If this is the current temperature, and the passing of time is the universe cooling, and the temperature limit is absolute zero, then there must be a relatively small amount of time left for the universe.
I was thinking that in these physical models time need not be short, if it's long then the matter can get on with its stuff regardless. If time just allowed matter some space(in time) matter would just get on with it anyway. Perhaps time is something which we as observers can't do without, but matter can.
I would say that the clock actually IS time, just as all processes (all change/motion) are.
So if the first tick was a second, the second tick is 10 seconds long, the third 100 seconds long, and so on, if you get my drift. Thus the last tick will last for bloody ever.
Remember the geometry that underlies this view. We are talking about an expanding sphere of gas. So the temperature or energy density drops fast if the sphere is an inch wide and grows by another whole inch. But once the sphere is a mile wide, growing an inch makes very little difference.
So to achieve constant temperature drop, each tick of the entropic clock must be exponentially longer than the last.
Doesn't this seem extremely absurd to you, that time would all of a sudden start passing extremely fast, and then slowly slow down? What kind of reverse acceleration is that, something that all of a sudden starts extremely fast, then slows down? Even if you pack a huge amount of power into a small thing, then let it go, like a wind up toy, that thing has to accelerate to get up to top speed, before starting to slow down. How is time supposed to get up to top speed, before starting to slow down?
I don't see there being a requirement on a broadness scale. The only requirement seems to be that something is right. And this is right. Process--change/motion, is what time is.
What isn't process? Relations in general (though of course relations are often processual--but they're not always), the material changes/moves with respect to other material, structures that are not in process, although that may just be an abstraction.
Yep, the Big Bang exactly represents the situation of a wind up toy. Your argument is devastating.
You mean how is looking at 4:00 on your watch, say, sufficient to tell you that it's 4 o'clock? Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question though.
But you know that it being 4 o'clock is just a convention in your locale, right?
But a process is an unfolding causal pattern. So it involves changes, but also materiality and location.
What you may mean is that in talking about time at the cosmological level, we need to be able to see it as an immanent aspect of the Universe considered as a process (a disspative process for example) rather than something transcendent of existence itself (in the way Newtonian time is).
So in that light, we need to find what changes least about the process that is the "Universe coming to be", and thus can stand as our global static backdrop for local acts of measurement.
In modern physics, the Planck scale triad of constants gives us that kind of fundamental dimensional yardstick. So time or duration (as measured by any clock) is derivative of a relation between h, G and c - the basic units of quantum action, gravity's strength, and the speed of light.
For "time" to "pass", there must be an effective distance as scaled by the relation: h x G/c. Or more accurately, a unit of Planck time is t = square root of h x G/c^5.
That is, starting from the Big Bang, the Universe must have grown big enough, and flat enough, for the quantum spreading and cooling of its contents to have begun - the first tick of the thermal clock.
So from a Newtonian frame of reference, we talk about the Big Bang starting at 10^-44 seconds. But that is imagining time in a way that is detached from existence as a thermal quantum process. It is imagining the Big Bang as happening in time as opposed to the Big Bang being the first tick of time.
From the Big Bang point of view, time starts from an already physical size - the one where there is already also a maximum local energy density or heat, and a minimum possible spatial extent.
And I didn't say it "is" temperature.
A clock is a device that is meant to locate events in time. So - to the degree a clock seems to work - this is due to a presumption about what "events in time" means.
You keep asking about "time itself", as if that notion made sense. It doesn't. It's the philosophical equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.
But we can talk about local change being measured against a backdrop of no change. We can talk about differences of rates. So now all we need is a backdrop which has usefully minimal change in terms of the aspect of change we are interested in measuring.
With Newtonian mechanics - the laws of masses in motion - that resulted in the kind of time that you think "is time". But that notion of time turned out to be not very realistic once we started measuring the Universe at hotter/smaller scales, or larger/colder scales. It turned out that at a more general scale, time, space, momentum and energy are all entangled - as the Planck scale constants show.
Of course we can still measure time in Newtonian fashion with a clock. But we now have to remember to include corrections as we start to approach the extremes of scale. So if you accelerate a clock towards the speed of light, you know it is going to tick slower.
Yet it would be great to have a model of time, a way of measuring change, that doesn't have to involve a collection of corrections - especially once we get down to the level of a theory of quantum gravity.
Quoting hypericin
The single number is just your way of locating yourself as an event in a wider sense of passing time.
So if you have a model of the Universe as a bath of radiation spreading~cooling at a geometrically determinate rate, then you can hope to pin-point your location within that cosmic history by measuring the current CBR temperature (or equivalently, the current average energy density of outer space).
So you don't measure time in some direct sense - as time is not itself a thing. What you measure is a local surrogate of the globally unfolding process you believe to be taking place.
An actual clock with hands and a face is a surrogate for Newtonian time in that it presumes you can regulate the continuous uncoiling of a spring with a system of toothed cogs and an alternating escapement mechanism - the physics of that will work fine because the Universe is not so hot that the clock melts into radiation, or so cold that there is no available energy to wind it up.
So a clock as a measuring device presumes that time actually is a detached constant backdrop with no local entanglements with the device doing the measuring. But again, accelerate that clock towards c and you will find it always was in fact entangled with that "detached" backdrop. So as a model of time passing - a means of locating events in time - it isn't really getting at the fundamental level of what is going on.
Well, if we imagine that we really know "seconds since the big bang," and that doesn't differ relativistically, the way we know it is simply that we're measuring a particular process--in this case, universal expansion, where we have (mathematico-physical) conventions for figuring how the expansion has changed as it's gone on, relative to the process that we count as seconds (which we could just define as the ticking of a second-hand of a clock, or more precisely in SI terms, 9,192,631,770 (9.192631770 x 10 9 ) cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom).
Re the CMB, we're simply measuring temperature at present.
Yeah, processes are of material, and they have locations. That's not an objection to my view (in my opinion (re your "but")).
Quoting apokrisis
I don't buy that anything is "transcendent of existence itself." That idea is incoherent on my view.
Quoting apokrisis
That wouldn't be about what time is versus what it isn't, but what process we prefer to use as a standard for measurement.
Quoting apokrisis
For time to pass, there simply must be any motion/change/process. If we want to say that "Planck time" is the minimum possible motion/change/process, that would work.
So you accept my "but" in the sense of dropping the claim that "time just IS process"? At most, time is just one of a combination of abstracted limits we use to describe the Cosmos as a dynamically-evolving process - the others being principally space, matter and energy?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes. But it is useful also to mention that to explain the Cosmos, we have to imagine standing outside it. Or at least standing at its absolute limits.
So the trick for modern physics is now to establish an immanent model of cosmic existence in which "time" is an emergent limit, not a Newtonian-style transcendent limit.
Understanding the deep epistemic issue is how we can hope to untangle the ontological presumptions the OP makes.
So time in the modern sense is about two things.
It is about the possibility of history. Things change in some global (entropic) direction.
And it is also about the possibility of change at different local rates. In a radiative state, everything is happening at c and so it is a pretty much timeless state. There is only a single speed. But when the electro-weak symmetry breaks, the Higgs mechanism is turned on, you then get the new possibility of masses moving with any speed between c and absolute rest.
So now there is a world of very time-ful histories. Every massive object can tell its own personal Newtonian story. Talking about "time" starts to have real meaning - in the way we more normally think about it.
But then at the Heat Death, once massive black holes have fizzled away the last any matter, returning it to timeless radiation, talking about local rates of change will lack material meaning. There will be nothing around that is moving slower than c to measure. And even radiation itself will no longer continue to get cooler via metric expansion and red-shifting. Even that last measurable index of change will have dissolved away.
So time starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. And for a while in-between, it has a bit of extra material richness in terms of not everything unfolding in vanilla process fashion. There is some added thermal complexity to the description of things.
What?? No. That processes are "of material" and have locations doesn't amount to time not being process(es).
Quoting apokrisis
It's certainly not (just) a description. Of course, insofar as descriptions are processes, it's fine to note that it's that process.
Quoting apokrisis
I wish I could somehow ban all "explanation" talk. ;-) I don't know if I agree with your comment there, but "explanation" is vague.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't at all agree with tying time up with entropy. If entropy didn't obtain, or if it were different than it obtains, that wouldn't affect time in any way.
So you choose incoherence? You are not even wanting to say time is a property of a process. or some such. You are simply conflating terms in way that makes no sense of a relation about acts of measurement and what is claimed to be measured.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Explanation is causal talk. We construct models of causal relations that are meant to describe the esssence of the structure, process or system in question. And from those models, we know what to measure so as to particularise those models. We know how to plug numbers to make the equations do something useful.
So proper explanation is the least vague of human activities.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes. If things were different, then they would be different. Brilliant deduction!
Now show me why one would believe entropy doesn't obtain - the second law of thermodynamics being the most fundamental known constraint on material existence.
Perhaps you have a perpetual motion machine, or a time travel machine, that might make me start to suspect the second law?
Hello irony.
Certainly I don't think it's incoherent.
That's right, because it IS process(es). It's identical to that, identical to process/change/motion.
I'm trying to avoid responding with "I don't know what you're saying there," because frequently I don't really know what you're saying, but I'm not sure how to respond to a comment about "making sense of a relation about acts of measurement and what is claimed to be measured." That's not clear to me.
Quoting apokrisis
"Describe" has just the same problems, on my view. There are also problems with "essence" and of course "proper." Re "we know what to measure so as to particularize" . . . I just don't know what you're saying again, but if it's just "we can make the equations do something useful" I have no problem with that. Various models etc. are instrumentally useful, sure.
Quoting apokrisis
What I said is that time wouldn't be affected if entropy were different. Time doesn't imply anything about entropy. And I'm not deducing anything.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't say anything pro or con about whether entropy obtains. I was telling you why I don't agree with associating time with entropy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So I am wasting my time because any argument I offer is going to be "rebutted" by your un-argued assertions of personal belief?
Fine.
Well, you haven't answered the question, how does it get up to speed, so that it can start slowing down? A wind up toy accelerates rapidly until it reaches peak speed, then it starts its steady decline. What you have described is just the steady decline, the Big Bang being the fastest, so it's not like a wind up toy at all (even disregarding the fact that the toy requires someone to wind it up). Is the rapid acceleration supposed to be prior to the Big Bang?
Quoting apokrisis
Why does "time itself" not make sense for you? For this to make sense, all one needs to do it is to consider time as the necessary condition for change, rather than as TS says, change is the condition for time. There is no reason why the latter should be preferred, but there is reason to choose the former. We can conceive of time passing without any change occurring, yet we cannot conceive of change occurring without time passing. So "time itself" is not at all a nonsense notion.
Your wind up toy first has to overcome the inertia of being at rest. And even before that, someone has to wind it up, and set it down on a surface where it can start to react to the forces applied.
And then its speed declines as the countering force of friction comes into play. If your wind up toy was in a frictionless world, it could spin or roll forever (as long as it wasn't attached to its internal spring or whatever that becomes another brake).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's what God is for. :-}
Remember even in talking about the Big Bang in this cartoon fashion, it could be the Newtonian case that "nothingness" was coasting along inertially with no net applied force - no acceleration source - and all that had to happen was the sudden appearance of friction. Or entropification in other words.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But that is what I said. We conceive as time in the backdrop sense of what is no change. Or at least, the minimal imaginable change. And then events are the local changes that stand out against an unchanging backdrop in some sense.
That's my point. No I can't. An absolute lack of change makes no sense to me. What kind of thing is that?
But I can easily imagine a reciprocal deal where a backdrop relative lack of change allows there to be a foreground relative presence of change. So events and their contexts can be distinguished in the various ontically basic ways familiar from metaphysics.
If there is stasis, there can be flux. And vice versa. Each makes the other a possibility by the possibility of its own existence.
Surely you don't believe that you're presenting anything like formal arguments and not just forwarding personal beliefs?
Not that I'm implying that you should be presenting something like formal arguments, but apparently you think that's what we should be doing, and I can only guess that you're under some delusion that you're doing that contra the nature of my own comments.
Well, time is just duration, so every change requires a duration of time which is appropriate to that change. Now, imagine a period of time which is a lesser amount of time than that required for the fastest change. In other words, imagine a period of time which is so short that no change could possibly occur in that very short period of time. Then you have conceived of time without change.
But that is precisely the argument by which talk about durations less that the Planck time is considered to be physically meaningless. The Planck scale tells us what the smallest possible unit of change is. And its already "larger than zero".
This was unimaginable to Newton. It remains unimaginable for most people still as "quantum mechanics can't be understood". And yet it is now a fundamental fact of modern physics.
Here's a slightly different take on things: time does not only *not* flow (which I think you may have realised), but it is *not* an observable under quantum mechanics either. Rather, time exists in quantum mechanics as a non-physical parameter upon which observables and states depend. As such it is a relic of classical physics, and presumably will disappear under quantum gravity.
Progress along these lines was made in the 60s and more in the 80s. The remarkably beautiful solution that was discovered is that the universe as a whole is at rest. i.e. the quantum state of the universe is in an eigenstate of its Hamiltonian, which frees the wavefunction and observables from any time-dependence.
Because the universe is in an eigenstate of its Hamiltonian, it is not in the eigenstate of the position of hands on clocks, or any other observable that humans might use to tell the time. Rather, the universe is in a superposition of such eigenstates, whose eigenvalues are different hand positions! Thus time is a correlation phenomenon.
Amazingly, there has been recent experimental support for this solution to the nature of time:
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-experiment-shows-how-time-emerges-from-entanglement-d5d3dc850933
So the point now, is that physical change requires a Planck time duration, but we can still conceive of a time period shorter than this. In this time period no physical change is possible. Therefore we can conceive of time without physical change. Duration less than Planck time might be "physically meaningless", but it is not philosophically meaningless, and it should be considered as a logical possibility, in philosophical speculation.
We have a very similar question with respect to space. Is empty space, space without substance, possible? Or, is space just a conception, the means by which we measure existing things? The argument above demonstrates that time without physical change is possible, but can we do the same thing with space? If not, then space and time are radically different. The problem which occurs with our conception of space, is that we assume a dimensionless point, as a means for measurement, and this inclines us to believe that the dimensionless point is spatial, when it is not. Then one might be inclined to allow that a physical object could occupy a dimensionless point, but in doing so, there is inherent contradiction.
I have an equally lofty opinion of your contributions. ;-)
But what your body feels when you wake up at 6am is different from what my body feels if I wake at the same hour, because for both of us time being relative it interacts differently with each of us. ( at least our perception of it )
Why do some people who are 5y old have the biological age of a 7y old or a 3y old ?
Considering some organisms evolve faster then others or at a faster pace, how would we choose to date someone who is 5years old (chronologically) but has the biological age of a 7y old ? What would be the correct way to say it's age?
Theory of relativity, backed by some proofs, says time is relative, not absolute. The concepts of space and time do not apply to energy. We see that the light that leaves the sun arrives here after 8 and half minutes, but the time itself does not spend any time in the journey; it arrives here at the same time it leaves the sun. This takes us to some interesting conclusions. Let us say that two events occur, one on the earth and the other at our nearest star, which is 5.4 light years away. The event on the star is 5.4 years in our future and the event on the earth is in the future of the star by 5.4 by light years.
General and Special Relativity are weird beasts. Special Relativity claims that there is reciprocity in all frames and references and General goes on to say just the opposite, the accelerated frame is privileged and time will allow down. Nothing like two cherished theories contradicting each other and from this produce all kinds of other paradoxes.
For this reason, I reject the idea that Relativity in any form has any ontological basis. All they do is resolve some measurement problems with the Lorentz Transformations.
Real time (duration) has nothing to do with clocks creating movent in space. Duration is what we experience individually as humans. Trying to determine simultaneity of experiences is a separate issue which science is involved with.
Why do you like quantum field theory then, as this is relativity based?
[I]Speed[/i] of time makes sense to me.
Firstly, we have the subjective perception of time you mentioned - when we're bored time passes slowly while time speeds up when we're having fun. If I were to offer an explanation it would be that our biological clock speeds up or slows down as the case may be, resulting in the feeling of time speeding up or slowing down. However, this is subjective in the sense that it has to do with perception rather than time actually changing speed.
Secondly, my rudimentary understanding of the theory of relativity informs me that travelling at high velocities makes time slow down. However, I don't know if we can increase the speed of time in an objective manner. What is slower than just sitting in one place?
Speed of time makes both intuitive and scientific sense.
Quoting hypericin
Indeed if speed of time changes universally and proportionately then it wouldn't be noticeable; therefore it's inconsequential. However, if the speed of time is local and disproportionate then it is relevant - think of the twins paradox (relativity).
I believe that there is quantum uncertainty, which was originally not well understood. I also believe that field theory was developed as a means of applying relativistic principles to quantum uncertainty. So if we are not satisfied with relativity theory, as you and I are, then we should reject field theory, as an inappropriate way of dealing with quantum uncertainty.
Whatever attempts there have been to add large particle prediction to quantum mathematical equations and the ontological consequences are inconsequential to the ontological claims of General and Special relativity which are dubious at best. As I pointed out, Special Relativity (from which all of these sci-fi time paradoxes emanate from) rests on the idea of reciprocity of frames of reference. This same concept is denied in General Relativity where one frame of reference is given preferred treatment because it is accelerating. The two theories contradict each other and General Relativity denies Special. Time, in General is some ambiguous notion in an equation which hardly had any relevance to time as we experience it. None of these ontologically ambiguities has any effect on Quantum experimental results. Once again, measurement symbols In Relatively are casually bring used to replace real life experiences.
Relativity wants to create an ontological model which is self-contradictory. Quantum interpretations does not inherit any of this in any form. In fact the Bohm interpretation wants nothing of it as it adopts non-locality.
Do you understand quantum field theory, and how non-locality relates to field theory? Look it up.
The philosophical questions are:
1) Does anything ever stop moving?: The answer is no.
2) Does quantum or relativity address the real life experience of time?: the answer is that Relativity doesn't and quantum might with certain holographic interpretations .
Relativity is solving a measurement problem and quantum is solving a different sort of measurement problem. Whatever ontological value quantum has lies in interpretations and experimental results. Science may do as they want to solve their mathematical measurement issues. It appears you prefer mathematical symbols to the real thing.