What is time?Follow

After having many discussions about this before, I would like to give this forum the opportunity to try its hand at convincing me. Everytime I have this discussion, the room divides into two halves. One half defines it as measurements, and that it wouldn't exist without humans. I disagree, because if humanity were to be obliterated, the planets would still revolve. That side devolves into a tree falling in the woods arguement. The other side of the room usually struggles endlessly with understanding physics and philosophy. Although I think the answer is with that half somewhere, it usually gets very painful in the brain before anything solid forms. So..

What is time? What is the definition of time?

The best scientific minds can't agree. What do you think?

In before Smash.




-NW

Which is why I never ask Pensive this type of question.

Kao - Thanks for the post. It sounds like you have a good definition for 'entropy' going. Mind taking a shot at time?

Time is what I wasted reading your post.

Can we talk about skin care instead?

Time is what you're dreadfully aware of while waiting outside of the only functional restroom at the only gas station within fifty miles with an imminent case of the whiskey *****, watching a blob of a woman straining and wheezing, sounding like she still has a drumstick stuck in her throat from the whole chicken she horked down for lunch, trying to unwedge her rusty powerchair from the restroom doorway while still seated in it.

You knew it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, time wouldn't exist without humans, but it's not because it's measurements (because it's not composed of measurements.) It's not really constituted of anything at all for that matter, because time is not a thing (though various ideas of time are things, time itself is not a thing.) It's debatably a theatre for the events of the universe, but I really don't think that such a description is adequate to describe it's function, and it also implies that time somehow exists for things other than sentient beings, which it doesn't.

Time is a means by which people cognize objects, and assert themselves against those objects. It's just a projection of the human mind onto the world so that it becomes ordered, allowing for us to make causal interpretations, and to make sense of how we can relate with other objects, including the ordering of our own thoughts. Time is what enables us to think of ourselves as contained, unified entities, instead of disjointed sensations.



No one who I have ever met, who believes that time is subjective, disputes the truth of this matter, nor do I. What is in question is the worth of the fact that objects will exist without human perception of them; just because an object is out there doing it's own thing without ever being perceived is not adequate proof for the objective existence of time (or space.) All it really does is assert that objects exist, in accordance with what it means to be merely an object, and not a subject (mere objects being things that don't percieve.)

Knowledge limitations. I have the right to talk about only human experience at best, and sometimes not even that. Trying to both imagine the experiences of a cat as well as maintain my human understanding of time may very well be theoretically impossible, and it's definitely practically impossible.

If plants and cats do have concepts of time, they're likely radically altered from our own, and it's really not being honest to even call it "time" at that point. It's "cat time" instead of "human time."

Really...?

I don't find it difficult at all to recognize that, while a bear might not look at a watch to find out how many hours he has left in the day, he still knows when to eat, when to sleep, when to hibernate, and when to hunt.

Every living thing, human or not, is ruled by time. The same time as everything else. The seasons, the sunlight.

Not that my different opinion doesn't give you the "right" to talk about something, of course.

Edited, Jul 21st 2009 10:15am by Belkira

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're confusing time as a measure and time as a concept. As humans, we think of time as intervals between one event and another, a measure. Bears, however, only know that then is not now, and now is what matters. They react to changes in season, however a bear in summer will not know that he has only a few months until he needs to prepare for winter.

A better analogy would be to use distance. A bear may walk a mile, but it doesn't know that it did. It's an old quantum parable, something doesn't have a value until it is measured.

I disagree, again.

First, the question is "what is time." I don't think that time is something withtout value until it is mesasured, espeically by, again, what we see in nature. Animals only take care of their young for a certain amount of time. Then they are off on their own. They know when they are to mate. They know when they shouldn't have offspring. They know when they are to hibernate, when they are to hunt. They are ruled by the passage of the sun. Just like we are. They may not have sectioned the day up into little bits, but it's the same thing. When the sun is here, we do this. When it's here, we do this.

If you don't think that a bear knows how far it walks, you're crazy. He may not have the concept of a mile in that word, but he knows how far he's gone and how far he has to go to get back to his den.

So, no. I don't think I have anything confused. I think I just see things differently than you do.

When I talk about the right to talk about something, I'm recognizing our limitations as human beings. We don't have the "right" to talk about plants as subjects in the same way that we don't have the "right" to phase through solid objects like Kitty Pryde. We probably have a little bit of right to talk about other conscious animals, but it's not very much; the experience of consciousness is just way too different. I'm not trying to be anthropocentricly arrogant or anything though: we're different from cats in the same way we're different from god, or telepathic aliens.

It's really hard for me to find the words to express what I'm trying to here... The seasons and sunlight and bears hibernating in the winter aren't really um, temporal. They're just things, that do stuff in the world. They'll keep doing stuff until the sun explodes, and then other things will do different stuff. None of that is really indicative of time though, and, as in the previous paragraph, we aren't really in the position of talking about that stuff as happening by itself, in a vacuum, with no human perception. Time's really just an order that we impose on the universe to force it into making sense, and in that regard, it's an essential part of the human consciousness, which constitutes our understanding of all of that stuff that's happening out there.

I guess i'd say it constitutes experience. In any case, the much cooler part of this mental ******* is deciding what to do with time once you've identified it; the practical effect is to give meaning to our lives. Of course, you probably don't care a whit about it, because you don't need that mental ******* to give meaning to your life, and that's cool too.




That's one way of looking at it, but it's not what I'm getting at, because the last time we discussed this that's what everyone thought I was trying to say, and it's not. It would be stupid of me to try to make an argument from physics anyway, because I don't study physics, and the idea that time is a thing, out there, to be measured and dissected by humans is directly at odds with what I think anyway. It's not that time simply doesn't mean something without being measured; it's that a human actually creates it, substantially, and not just linguistically or practically, through living and thinking.