Fun Stuff > CHATTER
How "normal" do you think you are?
calenlass:
--- Quote from: fatty on 04 Jul 2008, 00:23 ---OFF-TOPIC
--- Quote from: Papersatan on 03 Jul 2008, 08:45 ---
--- Quote from: Slick on 03 Jul 2008, 05:18 ---
--- Quote from: Papersatan on 02 Jul 2008, 23:16 ---I don't believe in time. No, seriously.
--- End quote ---
Pardon me, but what the hell do you mean?
--- End quote ---
Certainly the earth continues to turn with out us having a way to mark it. The sun rises every day and I am getting older. It's not that I refuse to admit that, it's just our system of dividing it is arbitrary and I feel like the people around me don't understand that.
The thing is, all of this would be ok, if people still treated it like a useful tool, but people run their lives around it. Now we all have precise clocks and we all use them to gauge our lives.
I liken it to someone believing that there is a God, because that can be a useful way to try and make sense of the big abstract concepts in the world. But then compare that with someone who lets their religion rule their life (which some would argue is what a religion should do). It seems silly to someone on the outside that people don't eat meat and milk in the same meal, or won't eat pork, or wouldn't get married on a certain day because it is not an auspicious day according to the charts or would torture and kill people for not following the same arbitrary rules.
--- End quote ---
I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. Likening the existence of Time to God is not really suitable. Time exists and it is considered a 'fundamental quantity'. God is a belief, an act of faith in believing in something that can not be proven.
What you are referring to is not time itself, but the metric quanitifcation of time being arbitary and 'meaningless'. In which case, the comparison to belief in God is slightly more appropriate. But when one person says they do not believe in God, it is assumed they do not believe in a higher 'spiritual' being. By admitting that you actually do think the measurement of time exists, you can not say you don't believe in it.
--- End quote ---
Well spoken. Or written. Whatever.
--- Quote ---Furthermore, Slick's assertion is completely accurate, every form of measurement and communication is arbitary. Just because you don't like the effect of exact measurement of time, doesn't mean you can say it ceases to exist in your reality.
--- End quote ---
Actually, his statement is not completely accurate. He likened it to language, but as a linguist and an etymologist I can tell you that it is not the same thing at all. Language may begin this way, but as soon as the specific vocabulary or grammar rules begin to be assumed by other people it becomes a whole other animal. Languages as we know them now are not arbitrary communication but the cumulative statement of particular peoples' cultures filtered through thousands of years. A language is a a window into the cultural unconscious of the people who speak it. It evolves into an amoebic thing, always changing and adapting to new shapes and ideas. Yes, you are right in that it can be arbitrary; you can make all sorts of sounds and noises that you have made up yourself and hope your point gets across. However, you will probably not have much success unless you use sounds and noises that other people are already making and understand.
I would like to say that unless I am really missing something here, I don't see how you can really compare time or its measurement or people's problem with it to language. Time and/or its measurement does not itself communicate anything, nor is it a tool of communication. The only relation I can conceive is that the measurement of time is the product of language and the need to communicate thoughts and concepts about the passage of time, and this is completely irrelevant to any of this discussion at all.
I would also like to say that I have to agree with whoever-it-was's statements about how people center their lives around hours and minutes and seconds and milliseconds. It is useful for things like making flights or meeting for class or whatever, but does it really have to dictate everything we do every day down to the smallest task? I find this obsession with minutiae draining and annoying and I have been working for years to work out some sort of happy medium for myself (so far to no avail).
tl;dr: I also have a lot of problems with the way people deal with, react to, and think about time.
fatty:
Katie: Point taken. My bad!
--- Quote from: MadassAlex on 04 Jul 2008, 03:39 ---
--- Quote from: fatty on 04 Jul 2008, 00:23 ---TIME DOES NOT HEAL DARK ANGEL FUCK YEAH
--- End quote ---
I think the idea here is that time is an abstract concept, in that it has no physical existence. We just named and put a system to the measurement of a sequence of events. So time, really literally, doesn't exist even though it does. I think it's kind of a pointless thing to argue because things will happen regardless of our conclusions about time.
--- End quote ---
This is equivalent to saying 'mass is an abstract concept'. Basically time is one of the few fundamental quantities, like mass, which is used to define other quantities.
McTaggart:
--- Quote from: KvP on 04 Jul 2008, 14:12 ---
--- Quote from: McTaggart on 04 Jul 2008, 06:00 ---
--- End quote ---
I would agree with this, but while we're all made up of the same stuff and are similar up to a point, it seems like the most miniscule differences in conditions can produce profoundly different results such that our apparent similarities are largely irrelevant in any case. I don't know if that makes any sense. It causes me to wonder, if you could control conditions absolutely, could you "recreate" a person exactly?
--- End quote ---
In general I think it's too vastly complicated and chaotic for it to have any kind of general predictive power. Mostly the model is there just because I like to have models for things and I like the process of making models. Models are things that I can put my faith in, I just function much better with them to fall back on. It's also neat to explain the things that are easy to fit in to it. I think that if you could control conditions absolutely you would be able to recreate a person. However, as Jimmy said even if you could develop an experiment to test this there is no ethics committee in the world that would let you do it.
(Incidently, my bedtime reading right now is on dynamical systems and the chaotic properties thereof, maybe this shows.)
MadassAlex:
--- Quote from: fatty on 04 Jul 2008, 21:03 ---This is equivalent to saying 'mass is an abstract concept'. Basically time is one of the few fundamental quantities, like mass, which is used to define other quantities.
--- End quote ---
Consider the possibility of there being no living entities in the universe. If there is no living thing to define the past, present and future then only the current instant of time exists. The previous instant influenced the current one, but without a memory to recall the previous instant the concept of time is lost and there is only now.
The past and future don't exist, in any case. Whether objects, beings or conditions continue from instant to instant is irrelevant because they just flavour the present with memories of the past.
P.S. I am kind of playing devil's advocate here. I don't really care whether I'm right or wrong, but if you can explain to me why I'm right/wrong then that would be super.
est:
That argument is fallacious. Objects within the universe would still show the effects of time, whether there was anyone there to see them or not.
And anyway, that universe doesn't exist. While it's great "fun" to come up with bullshit what-ifs we live in a universe where life exists, therefore there are witnesses to time passing.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version