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What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

arxiv.org

31–40 of 215 posts

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#31

Time exists. It's the observed difference between two states. Also, i am not a physicist.

Not just two states but causality. Something causes something else to happen. Although Sean Carroll says causality is an illusion, everything is "pre-defined". This just happen to flow one direction at a macro scale.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#34

Between modern physics suggesting time and space may be illusions, leading technologists agreeing that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality, and many ancient traditions being certain that this is all an illusion, I may have to have to go ahead and take this seriously....

The simulation argument comes from the fact that there a quite a lot of physics effects that are both surprising, and look an awful lot like dirty hacks that a programmer might put it. Quantum physics looks a lot like lazy evaluation (State doesn't exist until "observed"). The speed of light seems like a hack to prevent an n squared problem of everything in the universe effecting everything at the same time.

I haven't heard the 'dirty hack' argument before. Perhaps we only see those things as 'dirty hacks' because of the incompleteness and inelegance of our own theories.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very nearly a religion. I'd argue it is a religion. The word religion means to "bind back" or "yoke" [edited], i.e. to seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it. That's what physicists and cosmologists do. These disciplines also fulfill the needs of scientists for meaning and community and ritual, not unlike Christianity or Islam or whatever. Just because you might happen to believe something d…

> The word religion means to "bind back" or "yolk", No, it doesn't. Less importantly, you mean "yoke" and not "yolk", and more importantly you are confusing the definition of a the Latin word religare from which it is believed the Latin word religio may have been derived (from which, in turn, the Middle English "religion" meaning "life under monastic vows" may have been derived) with the definition of the Modern Engl…

> The Modern English word religion doesn't mean the same thing as Latin religare, or even Latin religio, or even the original Middle English sense of religion.

If you look at these lists of 'modern' definitions of religion, the plurality (if not the majority) of the ones from academia seem roughly aligned with the (disputed) etymology.

http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Definitions.htm

http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/defi...

E.g. the William James quote: "[Religion is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

That's basically another way of saying what I said, and I don't see any reason not to include scientists under that umbrella. I mean even the phrase from the paper "a quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space" sounds an awful lot like a conception of "the divine".

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#36

Between modern physics suggesting time and space may be illusions, leading technologists agreeing that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality, and many ancient traditions being certain that this is all an illusion, I may have to have to go ahead and take this seriously....

The simulation argument comes from the fact that there a quite a lot of physics effects that are both surprising, and look an awful lot like dirty hacks that a programmer might put it. Quantum physics looks a lot like lazy evaluation (State doesn't exist until "observed"). The speed of light seems like a hack to prevent an n squared problem of everything in the universe effecting everything at the same time.

Don't they only seem like hacks through our understanding, though? Once it's starts looking like a hack isn't it just as likely we're missing something that isn't necessarily a simulation issue?

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#37
post #7

Between modern physics suggesting time and space may be illusions, leading technologists agreeing that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality, and many ancient traditions being certain that this is all an illusion, I may have to have to go ahead and take this seriously....

What is ironic is the amount of blind faith required to accept some of these things that are so completely against everything we experience. It's very nearly a religion.

Well if you look at the question of why religion is such a prominent trait of the human species, we seem to have an innate bias in favor of the idea that the universe was created to allow for our existence. And it requires a certain amount of mental effort to resist that bias.

Re: What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

#39
post #22

Between modern physics suggesting time and space may be illusions, leading technologists agreeing that we're almost certainly in a simulated reality, and many ancient traditions being certain that this is all an illusion, I may have to have to go ahead and take this seriously....

There is no serious evidence for the simulation theory. It is more of a religious belief than a scientific theory since it poses more problems than it answers (who is running the simulation? How did they come to exist? What is their reality like? Etc.)

Do any of the theories that have evidence pose answers that spawn fewer questions?
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