Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gödel and the unreality of time

edwardfeser.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 132 posts

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#71

Post by ClintEhrlich »

simonh wrote: post #64
announcerman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you decide that your new view is valid and is not based on your need to lessen the fear of death. I have problems with this with every new thing I try to use to make death more palatable, be it religion, philosophy or anything else. I just cannot believe in anything because I feel its just a convenient way to make the fear smaller. How can any view be valid if its based on self interest?

What's wrong with self interest? That's a serious question. I don't mean that in a nihilistic, nothing is true, everything is permissible way. Nor do I mean it's ok to arbitrarily pick fantasies to believe, especially if that leads us to imposing the consequences of those beliefs on other people. There are few beneficial delusions. The question is, what do you care about in life and what are your goals. How you choos…

I find this to be an eminently reasonable perspective, which did not deserve to be downvoted.

Existential anxiety can be extremely debilitating. If one plausible interpretation of time brings you comfort, there's no harm in focusing on it.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#72

Post by gerbilly »

Schiphol wrote: post #13

Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…

You should fear the absence of death, if people never died, the earth would be a pretty crowded place. (The dead greatly outnumber the living, with estimates ranging from 50-108 billion).

To go further, if nothing living ever died, the whole biosphere couldn't work at all.

Life exists because of death. Saying we like life, but not death, is like saying: "I love breathing in, but I hate breathing out."

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#74

Post by Koshkin »

taeric wrote: post #54
sime2009 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain

Cute, but I think there is a substantial difference between not born and dead.

In this Philosophia Non Existentiae you also have to make a distinction between "not born (yet)" and "not born (ever)".

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#75

Post by Koshkin »

navaati wrote: post #22
Schiphol wrote: post #13

Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…

> all of the moments that make me and everything I care about are still there, occupying their own spacetime regions, eternal, in a way. Yes but not evolving anymore. What sucks isn't really not existing anymore, what do sucks is having no future. If a supervillain's evil plan was eternally freezing the universe right now, I would be as sad as if it was making it disappear.

> what do sucks is having no future

Nature has a clever way of dealing with this: at a certain point in life you begin wishing you had no future.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#76

Post by motohagiography »

solipsism wrote: post #66
motohagiography wrote: post #53

I once saw a fridge magnet that said "time is natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once," and it's stuck with me. The concept of time not being "real," can be useful as an exercise for modelling problems where to fully explore the problem space, you need to decouple your solutions from needing them to occur in an order or sequence. From an engineering perspective, "removing" time means you can…

What does the idea of time not being real have to do with thinking about a system across different points in times in its evolution?

The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider, and b) whether viewing a problem in the scope of a time domain always necessarily adds more information than it removes from scope.

It's just interesting to consider whether assuming time as a necessary variable can create an artificial constraint on reasoning.

The specific example I was thinking of is in an ontology, where you have all these types of information, related in different ways, that are all factors in each others behavior, but you can't model the whole thing as a function or transaction. That is, adding time (a transaction order) reduces the scope of what you can include in your model.

From a writerly laymans perspective, asking whether time is a real and universal property of all systems or an artifact of how we interpret them, is analogous to imagining we were studying physics with a heuristically useful, but generally limiting presupposition. One which would be like presuming all algorithms were in P, all graphs had hamiltonian cycles, all consistent theorems were true, etc. Then considering the consequences of the alternative.

It's all very meta and fun to think about, but I suppose that's what this topic is about.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#77

Post by taeric »

Koshkin wrote: post #74
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cute, but I think there is a substantial difference between not born and dead.

In this Philosophia Non Existentiae you also have to make a distinction between "not born (yet)" and "not born (ever)".

Isn't that implicit, though? By virtue of being able to state that at some point you were not born, you were necessarily at some point born.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#78

Post by danenania »

dsubburam wrote: post #70
sime2009 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain

Here's a different take, another thought experiment Re: death, from Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”…

I think this is an important consideration. A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. So we are left with something like Zeno’s paradox. We can get closer and closer and closer to death, but we will never reach the end. Could this lead to a form of eternal life? Your final living moment, subdivided endlessly, could play out as entire additional lifetimes in your experience.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#79

Post by hammock »

dschuetz wrote: post #4
leni536 wrote: post #2

OK, so tldr: If you can't define a partial ordering between events (ie. "earlier than" as in A can cause B, "later than" as in A can be caused by B, "same time" as in there can be no causal relationship between A and B), then time as defined in B-theory can't exist. So what? What are the consequences?

Nothing! It's fun thinking about it. I think, he's trying to say that "time" is really not a thing , but rather our perception and understanding of time makes it a thing. What we should see as time is actually some flow of causality. You cannot map "earlier/later than" or "same time" to causal reality, those qualities only refer to time as a scale, not as a natural occurrence of causality order. Or so I think.

In other words, time emerges from causality (and our observation of it), not the other way around. Is that right?

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#80

Post by Koshkin »

taeric wrote: post #77
Koshkin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this Philosophia Non Existentiae you also have to make a distinction between "not born (yet)" and "not born (ever)".

Isn't that implicit, though? By virtue of being able to state that at some point you were not born, you were necessarily at some point born.

Non-existence is complicated. In an obvious (and trivial) sense future itself does not exist, so one cannot tell whether someone in particular (e.g. another Einstein) is not born "yet" or "ever".

On the other hand, one might argue that (for example) wasted sperm and eggs should count as "not born". But even that can be seen as too limiting, because - perhaps, somewhat paradoxically - to be completely objective one should be considering statistical parameters rather than a physical measure.

Post reply on HN