Non-Duality: You are experiencing the inside of your own mind

[PeterJ]

Not sure I understand all that you're saying here, Tar, but it seems to make sense. I feel that we are usually trapped in our own perspective, but that this is our own fault. We tend to assume that there is a clear distinction between our inside and outside worlds, and between subjects and objects, but first-person reports overwhelmingly contradict this idea.

[Fred Champion]

Nonduality is the claim that there is no 'other side'. The two worlds are one says Rumi. But there would be two worlds in the same sense that there is for physics, the classical world and the world of QM. Nagarjuna speaks of (Rumi's) two worlds as the 'conventional' and the 'ultimate'. But the distinction would be reducible.

 

Nonduality is so mind-bending that it is difficult to talk about it. For instance, for this view the aphorism of Lao-tsu, 'True words seem paradoxical', would be true. So expect a lot of what seem at first glance to be contradictions to appear in the discussion. Lao-tsu is also clear that is possible to understand and know our origin, and that he knows it. Indeed, he say 'Knowing the ancient beginnings is the essence of Tao'. It is the essence of mysticism. Btw, Schrodinger was 'nondualist'. This is why he proposes 'I am God', even though his religious view was not theism. .

Help me out here, PeterJ. I think I may have discovered nonduality by accident. I have come to believe that what we call "this side", the material universe, and the "other side", usually thought of as the environment of God and souls or heaven, are actually the same space only occupied by objects and entities with different physical characteristics. I take "other side" objects and entities to be able to occupy the same space (at the same time) with each other and with "this side" objects and entities.

 

I have posted that I expect there is a finite smallest unit of something that can be anything and that everything is composed of those units and that they are undetectable and thus would appear to us as undifferentiated. I say undectable because their only property is that each one occupies one "unit" of place; space being the aggregate of all those units of place. So then, does space composed as I posit qualify as the "nothing" from which all "somethings" are made?

 

I am still considering whether there might be a smallest unit which "is" and yet does not occupy a unit of place. It seems my experience does not provide a way to conceive of or describe how a structure could be formed from such units. I can only speculate that perhaps "non-place" units could somehow form or change phase into "place" units. Would "non-place" units qualify as being yet not being?

 

In wanting to describe the Universe, and being able only to describe it in mechanical terms, we seem to be restricted to "kicking the can further down the road" of being. The idea of a "non-place" environment still has the notion of environment in it.

[PeterJ]

I'm not sure how to respond, Fred. For nonduality it would be necessary to go beyond the idea of place and time. Your ideas may have something to them but they are nonreductive. You begin with objects in space, and it seems as if you share Russell's neutral monism for which everything would reduce to a myriad of individual neutral (between mind-matter) particles (or maybe Leibnitz's monads). But this doesn't go all the way down. If two entities occupy different spaces they are not undifferentiated, and space and time would still need an explanation in any case, not forgetting also the laws of physics. .

 

It wouldn't be a 'non-place' environment because it would not be an environment. An environment with something in it is two things.

 

The basic idea at the heart of all this is that Reality outruns the categories of thought, such that all division or separateness is emergent and (in a particular sense) illusory. The moment we say, 'the universe is x', we have endorsed a metaphysical dualism and reified the categories. For nondualism we must say the universe is x and not-x, since these will be the two contradictory and complementary aspects of the category 'x-ness'.

 

Nonduality requires a dual-aspect theory like QM, where we have two contradictory theories that complement each other, neither of which is adequate on its own. Hence the use of (what appears to be) paradox and contradiction in the language of mysticism.

 

Even if there were a smallest unit of matter or space this would be a detail. Also, quantising space in this way does not work if we think that time and space are a true continuum (as opposed to a mathematical construct). I suspect what we are always talking about is a smallest measureable unit. This would make sense.

[Fred Champion]

Thanks. It should be obvious the idea of nonduality is new to me. I had not seen the term until I came to this thread. It seemed to me that my ideas fit in with it.

 

I do not accept that "mind" is a thing or a phenomenon. I can see some meaning in it at best as a vague generalization. I prefer not to use the term.

 

I do not accept "time" as a thing or a phenomenon either. I am convinced that it is an artifact of intelligence completely dependent upon memory.

 

I did not mean to begin with "objects in space". What I tried to communicate is that I see space as the set of place "holders" I described as the smallest units. The idea is not that there is space, a void or something, with these units in it, but that these units are space, each one a unit of place.

 

I do not accept the idea of space as a continuum; I do not accept infinite divisibility, rather a smallest unit which is not measurable. I don't know exactly how to fit this in, but the size of an atom is not measurable using a yardstick. Unless we define size as something measurable, the idea that we can't measure something doesn't mean it has no actual size.

 

I posit that the smallest measurable unit would be a composite of many interactions among disturbances in space, a disturbance in space being the displacement of units of place. I imagine the interactions among disturbances such as waves, currents and voritces to be the "building blocks" of things which would interact with ever larger things to form what we could recognize as particles.

 

I'm trying.

[PeterJ]

If you haven't come across nondualism before you're in for a treat.

 

The nub of the matter here seems to be your non-acceptance of the continuum. If you have time you might find this interesting. I prefer Weyl's view as expressed here.

 

http://theworldknot.wordpress.com/the-continuum-east-and-west2/

Edited June 27, 2014 by PeterJ

[Fred Champion]

If you haven't come across nondualism before you're in for a treat.

 

The nub of the matter here seems to be your non-acceptance of the continuum. If you have time you might find this interesting. I prefer Weyl's view as expressed here.

 

http://theworldknot.wordpress.com/the-continuum-east-and-west2/

I read the referenced material. Interesting but it does not dislodge me from my opinion. I will need a more convincing argument.

 

Part of the problem Weyl and others have seems to me to be that they accept time as a phenomenon or some sort of real thing. I don't. I think time is just an artifact of memory. Objects without intellect do not seem to experience anything we could call time. That, by itself, is sufficient to convince me time is not experienced and thus is only a product of intellect.

 

Another problem Weyl and others seem to have is that they accept infinite divisibility. They seem to be into the notions of mathematics as describing something real. Math is an invention of intellect.

 

For example: there is no such thing as a circle in nature and there should not be, except as an approximation, in geometry and physics. Examine the elements of a circular object to high magnification and you will see that the "circle" is actually best represented as a polygon, the line segments connecting the physical elements (atoms, molecules) of the circular object (assumed homogeneous) in order around the "circumference".

 

So then why is so much made of "pi"? This ratio is not a ratio of real things. Better to consider the ratio of the sum of all the line segments of the polygon to their distance from the center. Now if you consider that a real polygon object is constructed such that the distance from the center to each element is a whole number of those elements (necessary if we are to compare distances in common units) you will find that we can construct regular closed polygons only of certain determined radii and number of elements. Not every radius will produce a closed polygon. This is true for any polygon constructed in/on a plane.

 

Why insist on whole units? I expect the quantuum folks can answer better than I can. My answer is that there is no such thing as "half" or any other fraction of any real thing; "half" of an apple is an approximation, and each half is one whole thing. Even with numbers, which are not real things to start with, a fraction of a number does not describe a real thing and is better described as a whole thing which when taken in some multiple will sum to that number.

 

Weyl and others seem to believe we experience in a continuum sort of way, in infinitely small bits. Physics shows us this is not the case. Action and reaction at the smallest scales are not smoothly transitional. We do not observe the firing of brain cells to be a process involving a flow. Electrons jump, they don't climb. The continuum of experience as it is often described doesn't appear to be continuous.

[tar]

Fred Champion,

 

I liked your Pi thought but I think I can not go all the way with you here, because there are many examples where things in reality seem to be more analog than digital. Like sine waves AND the flow of time and frequencies of sound and light and such.

 

"That, by itself, is sufficient to convince me time is not experienced and thus is only a product of intellect."

 

The thread topic tries to indicate that reality is only in ones mind.

The world tries to tell us the exact opposite.

 

I am not thinking that it is sensible to have to go fully one way or the other.

 

The "middle way" might indeed be the best choice, so that one does not get too self important, nor feel too unimportant in the flow of things.

 

It struck me one day about 10 years ago, that everybody I was around was experiencing the same now.

 

I thought that very important to consider at the time, and it indicates to me, that time is indeed "something" that is occurring and structured in its happening, quite securely independent of a particular "intellect".

 

Proof being, that great minds have come and gone, experienced a great number of moments, written and spoken about them, and have died, leaving those experiencial moments in your past, and mine, and the past of inanimate book upon whose pages the intellect's thoughts are written.

 

Time proceeds on as one thing, to everybody and everything on the planet, regardless of what you think about it, or how much of it, you remember. We are all in the same moment, give or take the time it takes light or a radio signal to travel round the Earth. At 196,000 miles a second, considering a human moment is but 2 seconds or so, we all, pretty much, are experiencing the "same" moment.

 

Your past is same as mine, your present the same as mine, and if the Moon would split in half (it being an inanimate object) we both would see it just about exactly when it occured, and the two moons would have begun to be two moons, at the same time as we experienced them becoming two moons.

 

 

So time may be created by the acts of sense/storage/comparison/and recall, as those things take "time" to happen as the signals circulate about, but the thing is, everybody you are liable to talk to about it, is operating in the same manner, with the same equipment, and every human being that ever was has the same a priori intuitions of space and time. Everybody. So there is no way to, and no need to, "trump" the situation, and figure you have any way to be immune from time.

 

Regards, TAR

[Fred Champion]

Fred Champion,

 

I liked your Pi thought but I think I can not go all the way with you here, because there are many examples where things in reality seem to be more analog than digital. Like sine waves AND the flow of time and frequencies of sound and light and such.

 

"That, by itself, is sufficient to convince me time is not experienced and thus is only a product of intellect."

 

The thread topic tries to indicate that reality is only in ones mind.

The world tries to tell us the exact opposite.

 

I am not thinking that it is sensible to have to go fully one way or the other.

 

The "middle way" might indeed be the best choice, so that one does not get too self important, nor feel too unimportant in the flow of things.

 

It struck me one day about 10 years ago, that everybody I was around was experiencing the same now.

 

I thought that very important to consider at the time, and it indicates to me, that time is indeed "something" that is occurring and structured in its happening, quite securely independent of a particular "intellect".

 

Proof being, that great minds have come and gone, experienced a great number of moments, written and spoken about them, and have died, leaving those experiencial moments in your past, and mine, and the past of inanimate book upon whose pages the intellect's thoughts are written.

 

Time proceeds on as one thing, to everybody and everything on the planet, regardless of what you think about it, or how much of it, you remember. We are all in the same moment, give or take the time it takes light or a radio signal to travel round the Earth. At 196,000 miles a second, considering a human moment is but 2 seconds or so, we all, pretty much, are experiencing the "same" moment.

 

Your past is same as mine, your present the same as mine, and if the Moon would split in half (it being an inanimate object) we both would see it just about exactly when it occured, and the two moons would have begun to be two moons, at the same time as we experienced them becoming two moons.

 

 

So time may be created by the acts of sense/storage/comparison/and recall, as those things take "time" to happen as the signals circulate about, but the thing is, everybody you are liable to talk to about it, is operating in the same manner, with the same equipment, and every human being that ever was has the same a priori intuitions of space and time. Everybody. So there is no way to, and no need to, "trump" the situation, and figure you have any way to be immune from time.

 

Regards, TAR

I brought up the pi thing mostly to emphasize that math and geometry are inventions, not discoveries, and attempting a correlation between math and our environment is not going to work. The development of math is prejudiced by our experience of the environment and of course we should expect math to follow the environment to the extent of our observations. Math is not an independent thing and extrapolations of it should not be used as proof of what it came from. Math and geometry are imaginary; the environment is not, at least to me.

 

One can make a good argument against quantization by simply recognizing that observation is limited by the receptor object. Receptors seem to have a threshold for responding to a stimulus. If a receptor doesn't "fire" until a threshold is reached we can't determine that an "analog" event occured; we observe response, not stimulus. Of course the other side of the argument is that stimuli are produced only from responses to other stimuli, and therefore are likely to be, as you say, "ditigal". Those who hold to the current philosophy of science that we can accept as true only what we can observe will feel compelled to accept quantization. I think this may be one of those things that we just can't know.

 

I can accept that one's perception of reality is in his "mind". I hold to the idea that there must be something producing a stimulus before one can respond to it. I see no logic in the idea that I can imagine something totally out of my experience. It seems to me that I must discover what is out of my experience and if I discover it, it was there prior to my experience of it. I accept that reality is universal and one's perception of it is local.

 

I do not accept that "... every human being that ever was has the same a priori intuitions of space and time." Intution of space, yes; recognition of self as separate from not-self. Time, no. The idea of time is learned. If you want to change my mind on time, show me evidence of a phenomenon, action and reaction, stimulus and response which is not already and better explained by physical interactions. It is just not there. Recognition, counting and recording cycles is useful but it does not indicate anything other than physical interactions.

 

You made the point, there is only "now". I accept that. I posit that the "now" is static and only objects change, not the "now". Show me how "now" changes and you will be on your way to demonstrating time.

[tar]

Fred Champion,

 

Well I think we are pretty much on the same page here, except for the time thing.

 

Best I can do to express my notion of it is to tell a story.

When I was 13 I heard that the light of a match (given oxygen) on a new moon could be seen from Earth.

 

I struck a match on a clear dark starry night and held it to the universe, announcing my presence.

 

I figure the light from that match is currently in a thin half sphere of a shell 47 lys from where the Solar system was that night. Cause it takes time for light to get from one place to another. In this, the light, although inanimate is subject to time and place as surely as a living creature is.

 

If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that means that every hydrogen atom in it has beaten its cycles for 13.8 billion years. Every hydrogen atom on the same beat...but space separating one from another causes the light to take some time to get from there to here.

 

What seems to me is consistent and palpable about time, is the way the universe fits together, and each action has its reaction...every sequence with a consequence, and the universe has already done what it has done, except for the thing its going to do next. If it was already done, it creates the present with the consequences and it therefore cannot be undone. Time is in this manner, one way, fitting and certain and is a thing which ideas have little power over to manipulate in anyway.

 

Regards, TAR

[Deepak Kapur]

@ Fred Champion

 

You say that everything is action and reaction i.e. cause and effect.

 

A simple scenario.....

 

A rock is lying on the moon. It moves.

 

Why?...a fragment of a meteorite strikes it.

 

Why does the meteor come to moon?.....because some rocks from the aestroid belt strayed into the moon's gravity.

 

Why did the rocks stray?....because everything is moving and such things happen.

 

Why is everything moving?...it's because all this motion has ultimate origin in the big bang. Every action reaction has it's origin there only.

 

Why did the ultimate cause i.e. big bang happen?

 

Fred, do we need 'time' now?

[Ten oz]

 

Non-Duality

You are experiencing the inside of your own mind!

For example an EXTREMELY simple computer program might be something like...[/size][/font][/color][/background]11011011010100010101011010111110110100100101010000101101001000101010101001101010100101010101000101010110101010101010101001000000101010110101101011011111010101010101111010001010110101110101010101010001000010101110001011010101011011110101101010101001001010101010100101011101011010100101010101110101[/size]...which the computer translates as the sentence "Hello guys! How's everyone doing?". An image is also composed of a giant stream of "ones" and "zeros". A movie is a stream of images combined together to form the illusion of motion.

When we are able to externally decode thought the answers to many of the questions raised in this thread may be found.

[tar]

Ten oz,

 

Perhaps we have already figured a way, as we have language.

 

This is turn indicates that it cannot be only the inside of our own minds that we experience, since we are experiencing as well, what is inside somebody elses mind...through language.

 

In the computer code example, there is a code, one thing standing for another. Only by agreement, and convention can the meaning of the code be known. There must be an analogy drawn, where one thing is standing for another, where a symbol stands for a something. If this is understood, this transform, by two parties, there can be common understanding, the meaning of the code can be known...but this requires two or more minds...that is language requires two or more minds, not to be concieved of, but for the meaning to be communicated OUTSIDE ones mind.

 

Thusly for one to communicate meaning to the outside of ones mind, or to understand what somebody else means, there must be an outside party involved. If there is an outside party, then it all is NOT happening inside one's own mind, for the other party is, as well.

 

Regards, TAR

Edited July 6, 2014 by tar

[Ten oz]

Ten oz,

 

Perhaps we have already figured a way, as we have language.

 

This is turn indicates that it cannot be only the inside of our own minds that we experience, since we are experiencing as well, what is inside somebody elses mind...through language.

 

In the computer code example, there is a code, one thing standing for another. Only by agreement, and convention can the meaning of the code be known. There must be an analogy drawn, where one thing is standing for another, where a symbol stands for a something. If this is understood, this transform, by two parties, there can be common understanding, the meaning of the code can be known...but this requires two or more minds...that is language requires two or more minds, not to be concieved of, but for the meaning to be communicated OUTSIDE ones mind.

 

Thusly for one to communicate meaning to the outside of ones mind, or to understand what somebody else means, there must be an outside party involved. If there is an outside party, then it all is NOT happening inside one's own mind, for the other party is, as well.

 

Regards, TAR

I agree with that but by externally decode thought I meant process the thoughts of others. I can listen to what other people say but I don't ever truly know what they are thinking. Language is edited. Not only that but people often don't fully understand their own thoughts and motivations.

Not only that but their is a difference between thought and compulsion or an idea vs programing. How does a spider know how to build a web? How do birds know how to make nests? Somethings are programmed and drive what otherwise seems to us like concious thought. If we could decode thought we could identify the difference. Perhaps even create our own programs?

[Fred Champion]

Fred Champion,

 

Well I think we are pretty much on the same page here, except for the time thing.

 

Best I can do to express my notion of it is to tell a story.

When I was 13 I heard that the light of a match (given oxygen) on a new moon could be seen from Earth.

 

I struck a match on a clear dark starry night and held it to the universe, announcing my presence.

 

I figure the light from that match is currently in a thin half sphere of a shell 47 lys from where the Solar system was that night. Cause it takes time for light to get from one place to another. In this, the light, although inanimate is subject to time and place as surely as a living creature is.

 

If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that means that every hydrogen atom in it has beaten its cycles for 13.8 billion years. Every hydrogen atom on the same beat...but space separating one from another causes the light to take some time to get from there to here.

 

What seems to me is consistent and palpable about time, is the way the universe fits together, and each action has its reaction...every sequence with a consequence, and the universe has already done what it has done, except for the thing its going to do next. If it was already done, it creates the present with the consequences and it therefore cannot be undone. Time is in this manner, one way, fitting and certain and is a thing which ideas have little power over to manipulate in anyway.

 

Regards, TAR

Each domino in a sequence falls, not because it is "time" for it to fall, but because another domino falls upon it. The conditions for the actions to happen are determined by the physical properties of the dominos, their spacing and the environment. Set up the same dominos the same way on a table top in Chicago, on the ISS and in a tub of water in Paris and the results will not be the same.

 

Why? Not time. Action and reaction. A threshold is reached and exceeded, or not. If it is, we observe change and may impute time. If it is not, we do not observe change and there is nothing to impute as time.

Ten oz,

 

Perhaps we have already figured a way, as we have language.

 

This is turn indicates that it cannot be only the inside of our own minds that we experience, since we are experiencing as well, what is inside somebody elses mind...through language.

 

In the computer code example, there is a code, one thing standing for another. Only by agreement, and convention can the meaning of the code be known. There must be an analogy drawn, where one thing is standing for another, where a symbol stands for a something. If this is understood, this transform, by two parties, there can be common understanding, the meaning of the code can be known...but this requires two or more minds...that is language requires two or more minds, not to be concieved of, but for the meaning to be communicated OUTSIDE ones mind.

 

Thusly for one to communicate meaning to the outside of ones mind, or to understand what somebody else means, there must be an outside party involved. If there is an outside party, then it all is NOT happening inside one's own mind, for the other party is, as well.

 

Regards, TAR

Yes, a shadow requires more than a source of light.

[tar]

Fred Champion,

 

"A threshold is reached and exceeded, or not. If it is, we observe change and may impute time. If it is not, we do not observe change and there is nothing to impute as time."

 

I don't think that is true. Time marches on, regardless of whether the rock is moving perceptably or not. It, the rock still weathers in the Sun and is eroded by wind and rain. The rock is still securely attached to an Earth that spins on its axis once every day, and travels around a Sun once a year that is in turn on a course around the center of Milky Way that it completes every however many million years. And the Milky Way is engaged in its dance around Andromeda and the both around the great attractor.

 

The "time" that is evident in the universe needs no imputing. Its already marching along, quite independently of human thought.

 

Regards, TAR

[Fred Champion]

Fred Champion,

 

"A threshold is reached and exceeded, or not. If it is, we observe change and may impute time. If it is not, we do not observe change and there is nothing to impute as time."

 

I don't think that is true. Time marches on, regardless of whether the rock is moving perceptably or not. It, the rock still weathers in the Sun and is eroded by wind and rain. The rock is still securely attached to an Earth that spins on its axis once every day, and travels around a Sun once a year that is in turn on a course around the center of Milky Way that it completes every however many million years. And the Milky Way is engaged in its dance around Andromeda and the both around the great attractor.

 

The "time" that is evident in the universe needs no imputing. Its already marching along, quite independently of human thought.

 

Regards, TAR

 

Why does the rock weather? No, forget that. How does the rock weather? Same way everything changes, interaction with its surroundings (sun, atmosphere, etc). A thing changes because other things act upon it. Things acting and reacting, not time.

 

I will repeat one more time: show me any evidence of any thing changing without being acted upon by another thing and I will accept that time is the agent of that change. If you can't do that, and you can't, admit that time is imputed from memory of change; recognize that time is an artifact of intelligence and memory.

[tar]

Fred Champion.

 

There are certain things that can be understood, and then there are certain things that can only be understood over time.

 

There are only a certain amount of concepts or modes or feelings or "thoughts" that one can have at once. To have other concepts than these, you have to have them over time. Some sequence, this, then that. You can not add two numbers together, unless you start with this number separate from the other, and then concieve of them together...a sequence, a situation, then another.

 

I do not argue the fact that we have to sense, and store and remember and compare, to notice a change. But that does not mean the change did not occur independently of our noticing.

 

A C note wafting through the air, is a particular frequency of vibration, that will hit our eardrum as such. A "timing" is embedded in the note. It reflects the vibration of the string on the guitar that was plucked, and it vibrated at that timing, and shook the air and our eardrum in a matching way.

 

You cannot have a frequency unless something in happening over time. And you don't have to have the brain to pick the timing up. You could put a big horn with a needle at the end of it touching a rotating spiral groved peice of properly heated vinyl and the frequency will be recorded with no human brain involved.

 

Sure one thing causes another, but it happens in a sequence of cause and effect, and here and now is the current condition of any place and everyplace in the universe you wish to choose.

 

Take a star 3 lightyears from here. It is currently putting out photons that we will see in three years. We are currently seeing photons it put out 3 years ago. There are photons thusly "on the way" here. Tomorrow"s photons are just a light day away

 

Its going to take those photons time to get here. Regardless of your noticing.

 

Regards, TAR

[Fred Champion]

...

I do not argue the fact that we have to sense, and store and remember and compare, to notice a change. But that does not mean the change did not occur independently of our noticing.

...

Of course the change did occur independently of our noticing. No thing reacts to a stimulus which has not impacted the thing. Reaction follows action.

 

I does not matter how many steps you back up in a sequence or how much magnification you use to examine a given step, the conclusion will always be that the thing observed reacts to a stimulus by producing a stimulus for something else to react to. The relationship is always action and reaction, nothing else, no indication of anything we could call time.

 

History has only one course. Things (events) have happened in one and only one sequence. Nothing which we could call time has had any influence on that sequence. The only influence on something happening has been that a threshold for a response has been met and an object reacted.

 

Surely you understand that we "measure" time in terms of changes in things relative to changes of other things. For example, we remember the states of what we consider to be variable (motion of objects) in relation to the states of what we consider to be regularly cyclical (the swinging of a pendulum). One memory compared to another.

 

Consider two clocks. One runs correctly, the other doesn't. Determine if one runs slow or one runs fast. If time is a real thing, you should be able to determine which one is not running correctly.

[tar]

Fred,

 

Point being that if a clock runs correctly it must be keeping time. If it is keeping something, there must be something there for it to keep.

 

You indicate that change is important in noticing that time has passed. One thing having an effect on another. The cause and effect, one way sequence of events, is exactly what it is we are considering when we consider time.

 

That thing has been sitting there for a long time.

 

No change, just its atoms bouncing around, and it sitting there, for a long time. The Earth has turned, and traveled miles on its path around the Sun and Sun has continued its trek around the center of the Galaxy, and in comparison to its immediate surroundings, the thing has just sat there, for a long time.

 

Cause and effect? Perhaps the relative lack of it, counts as well, when we talk of time.

 

If you and I, and the lamp post, are experiencing the same moment, there must be something consistent which we are all experiencing. Regardless of how we are changing, what we just did, or what we are about to do or not do.

 

Regards, TAR

[Fred Champion]

Fred,

 

Point being that if a clock runs correctly it must be keeping time. If it is keeping something, there must be something there for it to keep.

 

...

"Must" be? Nope.

 

Define what you mean by "correctly".

 

The only correct answer will be in the form of you observing changes in the clock (ex, the position of the hands) matching changes in some other object or objects (ex, rotation of the Earth).

 

Thus you will see that the clock does not "keep" anything. There is nothing there for it to keep.

 

The clock will use some form of energy you put into it to accomplish its changes just as every other object in the universe uses the energy gained during its formation and interactions with other objects to accomplish its changes.

 

If the rotation of the Earth were to change, would you say it was due to time? Nope. You would look for some interaction with another object or objects.

 

We "see" patterns in clouds and relate them to other things. Same sort of thing for "time". We see and remember or record the changing states of things and notice that for many of those things the changes can be related to a fraction or a multiple of changes in other things.

 

If our science guys are right, nothing is ever in the same place more than once. This means that nothing is truly cyclical. It is only the positions of some objects relative to other objects that seems to be cyclical. We notice these patterns and impute "time".

[tar]

Fred,

 

You brought up the correctly running clock.

 

"Consider two clocks. One runs correctly, the other doesn't. Determine if one runs slow or one runs fast. If time is a real thing, you should be able to determine which one is not running correctly."

 

The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years.

 

Divide that into portions if you like. And those fractions would be segments of time. The whole time since the beginning is 13.8 billion years. That is a certain amount of the time it takes the Sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way. The Earth goes around the Sun a certain amount of times while the Sun goes around the center of the Galaxy once. There are a certain amount of days in a year, and hours in a day and minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute. And a Cesium atom has a certain "beat" and the beats of a certain transition within the atom occurs a particular amount of times in a second.

 

I don't know about something never being in the same place twice. We were at the big bang, and we are still where we were then.

 

And there is nothing in the universe, whose components were not here at the start. So here we are. Where we were 13.8 billion years ago. At least we are in the same neighborhood. Besides we are somewhat insulated from the motion of the Sun around the center of the Galaxy and the Earth around the Sun, and the rotation of the Earth. Enough to go to New York one day, return home, and go to New York again, some other day, and cross the same street, go to the same room in the same building as you did before...last time.

 

 

Regards, TAR

 

[Fred Champion]

"That is a certain amount of the time it takes the Sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way."

 

No.

 

That is a certain amout of interaction with other objects in the universe for the Sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way.

 

 

It's the science guys that tell us everything was/is in motion; before, during and after the Big Bang. Each object in the universe had/has a position relative to every other object in the universe. When one object moves, the relationship of every other object to that object changes. In other words, nothing is in the same place (relative to everything else) twice. Thus nothing is truly cyclical.

[tar]

Well Fred,

 

i will agree that the universe has not been in this arrangement before, but I think it is rather useless to consider that things which are cyclical are not cyclical. Perhaps we should call in the saying "for all intents and purposes" at this juncture.

 

As for the universe being a certain way now, that it was not before, I would like to point out that the differenciation between how it was before, and how it is now, requires the passage of time. And the distances between various elements of the universe, require time for light to transverse.

 

It is generally accepted, that the light from a star 3 light years distant from here, left that star's environment 3 years ago, and is entering our eye tonight. It took time for those photons to get from there to here. There are more on the way. The ones we see next second are a light second away.

 

The interaction that you talk about, between elements of the universe, takes time to occur. If it did not, everything would happen at once, and that would be the end of it.

 

Regards, TAR

[PeterJ]

Your argument works, Tar, as long as you reify the phenomena that are in time. If they are truly real, then so is time. Hence the argument about time has to start with the ontology of matter. Only if we say that phenomena have no inherent existence, that they are reducible, can time also be reduced. Then reductionism works. Time cannot be reduced otherwise, for the reasons that you give. .

Edited July 24, 2014 by PeterJ

[tar]

PeterJ,

 

I am with Kant in considering that time and space are the two a priori intuitions that are not reducable into subdivisions or any sub concepts or components. They cannot be explained in terms of other things, because they themselves are the concepts upon which all other concepts are built.

 

We all already know exactly what we mean by time, even though we cannot explain it, in terms of some other thing.

We all already know exactly what we mean by space, even though we cannot explain it, in terms of some other thing.

 

I am not taken at all with Fred Champion's attempt to describe the universe without the use of the concept of time.

He might as well also attempt to describe the universe without the use of the concept of space.

 

Even a physicist would agree that spacetime is what we are talking about, when we talk about everything or anything.

 

The ontology of matter is, in my estimation built on the concept of space and that of time. Position if you will in the two regards or ways that we all recognize the place and the changes that go on about it. Position in space and position in time.

 

The electron spinning about the nucleus, the molecules piling up into mountains and seas, the planets orbiting their sun, the suns orbiting their black hole that is sucking in "matter".

 

I don't think we can say much about anything without already agreeing upon space and time. But we can synthesize a lot of concepts and understandings starting from those two a priori considerations.

 

Regards, TAR