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Gödel and the unreality of time

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Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#91

Post by wazoox »

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.”…

Very similar to the way death is described in Lucretius' de natura rerum.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#92

Post by dang »

sime2009 wrote: post #52
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…

"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

That is Schopenhauer's argument against fear of death. Not that it was unique to him, but since Twain was writing during Schopenhauer's popularity, I wonder if he found it there.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#93

Post by taeric »

Koshkin wrote: post #80
taeric wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

First, I'll agree that my not existing after death would be similar to my not existing before death. In that, it helps make this a cute saying.

However, that still says nothing of the difference between dying and not being born. Just because things have a large similarity does not mean they are equal, after all.

Your odd argument that "wasted" sperm and such should somehow count towards "born/not born" just seems a non-sequitor. That is quite literally unrelated. The sperm/egg are merely mechanisms and say nothing of the person unless we plan on presupposing a conscious person exists before they exist.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#94

Post by taeric »

Koshkin wrote: post #81
trgv wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you think that. I think the safest assumption is that being dead will be exactly like not being born.

It's like saying that the future is exactly like the past. (Which is true when applied to the question of non-existence, because what did not exist will cease to exist or continue to be non-existent.)

But that is only true of things which do not come into existence, no? I can safely say I did not exist a thousand years ago, nor will I exist in a thousand years. Further, I can say that from my point of death on, I am non-existent. Similarly, before my birth, I was non-existent.

However, my state of non-existence ended at my birth. Just as my state of existence will end at my death.

In this regard, the future is not exactly like the past. In the past, there was never a time in which I came into existence. In the future, there was a time where I came into existence. Neither of those statements transfer between past and future.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#95

Post by Koshkin »

taeric wrote: post #94
Koshkin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like saying that the future is exactly like the past. (Which is true when applied to the question of non-existence, because what did not exist will cease to exist or continue to be non-existent.)

But that is only true of things which do not come into existence, no? I can safely say I did not exist a thousand years ago, nor will I exist in a thousand years. Further, I can say that from my point of death on, I am non-existent. Similarly, before my birth, I was non-existent. However, my state of non-existence ended at my birth. Just as my state of existence will end at my death. In this regard, the future is not…

> In the future, there was a time

This is "memory", or "trace". Their existence take away from your non-existence, making it incomplete (imperfect), which indeed makes one's future different from one's past.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#96

Post by Koshkin »

taeric wrote: post #93
Koshkin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

First, I'll agree that my not existing after death would be similar to my not existing before death. In that, it helps make this a cute saying. However, that still says nothing of the difference between dying and not being born. Just because things have a large similarity does not mean they are equal, after all. Your odd argument that "wasted" sperm and such should somehow count towards "born/not born" just seems a n…

Well, clearly, non-existence after death is different from both types of non-existence mentioned above. (Incidentally, there are many more types of non-existence than just these.)

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#97

Post by gowld »

mcguire wrote: post #57
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…

If I remember correctly, the full form of that joke is that time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening in Cambridge.

That may be a variant.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler

cites some old sources that are (probably) a few years older than the Cambridge version:

http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Personal/Autobiog1994.pdf

says:

> As Dharma Kumar paraphrased Joan Robinson, "time is a device to prevent everything happening at once, space is a device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge".

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#98

Post by gowld »

motohagiography wrote: post #86
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

So to clarify, we can choose to use time whether it's real or not. 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 formal…

> Not sure there is a wrong to be here.

"Not even wrong" isn't a mark in favor of a model...

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#99

Post by gowld »

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.”…

Just as it takes infinite local time to enter a Black Hole, we live for the entirety of our lives. We are immortal, for in our local frame of reference, we will never die, just as a mathematical point existing in the open interval (0,1) will never reach the end of the interval.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#100

Post by gowld »

Koshkin wrote: post #80
taeric wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

> Non-existence is complicated.

Doesn't look like anything to me.

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