AdamWho

Has anyone pointed out yet that we measure time by measuring physical lengths.

sophie

wordfailure,

YOU : Isn't change itself what it is that we endure?
ME : yes of course.

YOU : Does time exist outside of mind other than as a conceptualization regarding change? (I don't think this is mere semantics.)
ME : Yes & No. The conceptualisation regarding change which we call time resides in the mind. Change exists regardless of mind, whatever it is, when it exists solely, when we experience it we call it time.


YOU : Does speed exist in itself, or is it just an attribute of or a way to describe something about motion?
ME : Speed is a partial understanding of motion. When we examine motion, we have discovered something real to which we can attribute a label, this is called speed. Slow motion or quick motion.

YOU : If time exists independantly of mind, then it's a whole other ballgame, but if time is but a conceptualization regarding characteristics or attributes of change then conceptualizations regarding time as something that exists ouside of mind are misdirected, aren't they?
ME: Yes this is tautlogically true.

ME : Either the mind is making up what it percieves which would make time a fiction, or the mind is basing its perceptions on something the mind attributes a reality.

ME : Pink elephants stomping in my room is something the mind does not base a reality on. Waiting for the end is something the mind sees as a reality important enough to use as a base for a concept.

sophie

AdamWho,

We do not measure physical lenghts, we measure the rate at which physical lengths are traversed, or the rate at which quantities accumulate or seperate.

The pure measure of physical length is called distance.

AdamWho

sophie

We don't measure the rate because the rate for any time measuring device is a constant. We first make the assumption that a phenomena is a constant then we either count or measure how much has changed. Can you show me a way to measure time that doesn't entail counting objects (such as number of decays in isotope) or measuring the length of change of a constant phenomena?

wordfailure

Sophie:

So what is the problem? I haven't implied that change is a fiction, only that separating out part of change and thinking of it as a discreet thing is mind-stuff. It works remarkably well for us in most cases, maybe all cases except when actually trying to understand change. Then it can be confusing, IMO

Yes, there is a real phenomenon that we are conceptualizing about when we speak of speed, but here you yourself are defining speed as "understanding" which is mind-stuff just as I am doing with time. Why the objection? BTW, I have not implied that something is wrong with conceptualizing, only that it may be confusing not to realize when we are doing it.


Tautologically? I don't think so. I'm saying that describing something that is itself in effect a description rather than a thing can be confusion. The word "conceptualization" here is more precise. I don't see anything wrong with how I stated it, unless one just has a preference for more variability in use of letters of the alphabet. But thanks for the free literary criticism. :-)

John Page

Yes. Two examples of change - one for space and one for time.
1. 2D Space Change. (Could also be called difference) Left hand-side of field of vision is white, right hand-side is black. There is a change detected at the join of the left and right hand-sides.
2. Time change. As above but move your head left and right, the join of black and white appears to move. Speed up your head movements and the movement of the join speeds up. Irrespective of why the join appears to move, the subject perceives that there are no changes to the object they are viewing and posits movement of a "constant" object and can hence develop the notion of movement measured as time.

In addition, I'd be interested in your thoughts on depth space change. IMO one has to develop 2D space perception and time perception in order to perceive objects in 3D. Our sense of 3D comes from moving objects toward or away from us. We perceive that the object is unchanged but its size alters, from this we can also intuit that objects have thickness (depth-in-themselves?).

The curious thing is that having learned to perceive things in 3D, we no longer need a time-based change to understand a 3D image - a non-moving snapshot of a building block creates the understanding in us of a 3D object. My hunch is that optical illusions such as the never-ending stairs are possible because perception happens this way - a 3D form (stairs) is rendered in 2D media but with inconsistencies, so when we try and understand it as a "real" 3D object we get confused.

Cheers, John

wordfailure

Hello, John Page.
I'm afraid I don't have much to offer. It's difficult for us to see how this all works, IMO, because we can't step outside our own manner of perception in order to examine it. I read somewhere that people never previously exposed to photographs or other two dimensional representations of three dimensions don't automatically recognize what they are seeing, but must learn to see it. Interestingly this skill is not learned consciously through instruction but rather directly by the brain seemingly struggling to make sense of what it is confronted with. This seems to be another observation related to what you are noting about learning to see in three dimensions. This in a way suggests for one thing that maybe we should be thinking of eyes as functionally part of the brain. It also suggests that our perceptions about relationships, for example between space and time, may be different than the actual relationships because it's difficult, at least for me, to conceptually separate the perception from the reality here and elsewhere, as well as in the cases of speed and time.

John Page

Cool. I guess it all starts from the nascent nervous system activity when a fetus, with the mind flowering like a bloom from its genetic roots.

Cheers, John

wordfailure

That's where it all has to go, IMO. Physiology.
Susanne Langer has talked about abstraction as a device for brains to simplify in order to keep track of important information. For example, if you are potential prey for tigers it is crucial that you be able to recognize them when you see them. But it's not feasible to remember every detail of every animal, so the brain discards everything except those things essential to tigerness, retaining only an abstract (ideal?) form. This is part of the seemingly automatic pattern recognition that brains are doing constantly. She says that the eye itself is also doing this kind of abstracting directly and mechanically (organically?), for example by emphasizing boundaries and eliminating redundancies. She says the process is automatically determined by the structure of the organ (not only the eye , but the whole optic tract, including the visual cortex), and the abstraction is performed unknown to the performer. She goes on to suggest that if such abstractions are occurring in the optical sections, it is reasonable to suspect that analogous abstractions are occurring elsewhere in the central nervous system unknown to the performer.

I suspect that this mechanical (or organic) brain function is related to much of the confusion over such abstract conceptualizations as speed and time-- an unrecognized obstacle. I think it may be necessary to better understand perception and the other workings of the brain before much more philosophical progress can be made regarding time.