81–90 of 132 posts
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Cute, but I think there is a substantial difference between not born and dead.
I don't know why you think that. I think the safest assumption is that being dead will be exactly like not being born.
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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 ontol…
Not really. Time could be real, and still not necessary to consider in all situations.
I think this argument applies to your b) as well, but I'm less sure of that...
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?
[0] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976PhDT........61T [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder
You can just as easily have a Newtonian space with time travel (roll up the time coordinate in a circle by identifying T=0 with T=1). I think the same trivial construction would work in GR, so you don't need mass, rotation, etc. That doesn't seem to prove anything about the nature of time. Does anyone have a copy of Gödel's article so we can see if the argument goes deeper?
Of course it's must deeper than that. http://kurtgoedel.de/cms-83FO/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Goe... It's a solution allowed by GTR, not a new trick definition. It belongs to the family of 'dust solutions'. You arrange particles (can be as big as galaxies) that move in certain way and you get time travel. Only other assumption is nonzero cosmological constant. You can't get time travel in Newtonian universe just by…
For those interested in the topic, I can't help but reccomend the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
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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 ontol…
> The idea of time being real or not raises the question of whether it's, a) always necessary to consider... Not really. Time could be real, and still not necessary to consider in all situations. I think this argument applies to your b) as well, but I'm less sure of that...
The question is, given it isn't always applicable, and it may not always be necessary where it is partially so, are there situations where it causes paradoxes where it is a source of noise instead of information, and how can we know when applying it whether it causes one or the other?
Godel as a logician would have approached it as just another formalism.
If reconciling models of physical phenomena with models of time produces inconsistency and paradoxes, he'd ask whether we were first sure that was time intrinsic to those physical phenomena, or does our model of time impose an arbitrary constraint on our ability to reason more abstractly about them.
My point is that it's a reasonable question with related applications. Not sure there is a wrong to be here.
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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.
As a former boxer who has been "knocked out", I have always speculated that feeling is akin to what death would "feel like" (that is, nothing at all). When you are knocked out (as aside from asleep) you have no experience. You don't dream, you don't feel has though time has passed - you don't feel anything. One second you are awake and aware and the next second you wake up lying on the ground (or don't wake up at all, if you are dead). It feels like an instant, no matter how long you actually been knocked out for. This makes it different than sleeping and simply not remembering your dreams upon waking.
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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…
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"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.
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?
If there is no way to define an unambiguous time ordering, then you cannot use a "flow" of time picture to describe time. In other words, despite the everyday perception of time as something that marches ever onward, in reality we live in a "block" universe where nothing moves. Or so was supposedly Gödel's argument.