paul30

I completely agree with glycolysis.

Time is a fiction. It is a mental construct designed (by humans) to help comprehend the perception of change and recurrence.

In fact it does not exist, except as a concept in our head--a shorthand for referring to external events and their ordering.

Many in this forum have said it does exist because we have measuring devices for it. But that is like saying unicorns exist because I can draw a picture of one.

Jarlaxle

Several things affect the rate at which time passes; gravity and speed are two of them. The faster one travels, the slower one ages; likewise, the stronger the gravitational field one exists in, the slower one ages.

Einstein predicted that two atomic clocks could be synchronized with each other then one could be put in a plane to fly high above the surface of the earth (where gravity is slightly weaker) and the one that stayed on the surface would have calculated more time having gone by when the two clocks were later reunited. The experiment was done and Einstein was proven to have been correct. If then time is not “real” how would one explain the difference in the times shown on the clocks? If then time is not “measurable” how did Einstein calculate prior to the experiment how far off the clocks would be from each other?

Here is an analogy I read from a book written by Brian Greene (I think that’s who it was) called the Elegant Universe. Imagine a two-dimensional world where two race cars are going to race 100 miles in distance across a plain. For the sake of simplicity, pretend that the cars either go max speed or are stationary. The max speed of the cars is 100 mph. The two cars race from east to west and you observe them from the south. The two cars start at exactly the same time at 100 miles per hour. We would then expect them to reach their destination exactly one hour later and finish with a tie. The blue car, however, falls behind and even more oddly the length of the car shortens. What would explain this phenomena? The answer, of course, is that the blue car has headed off course and is no longer traveling due west like the red car.

Using vector addition we could measure the length of the car and determine the angle it has taken; furthermore, we could discern whether it has gone off course in a northern direction or a southern one simply by observing whether it is getting “thicker” or “thinner.” The one constant we have to go by is that the blue car is traveling with a speed of 100 mph.

Analogously, everything in the Universe is traveling at the speed of light. That “total speed” is simply divided into several vectors; time being one of those vectors or dimensions. Hence when one increases his or her speed in one vector, the speed of the other vectors must contribute to that speed such that the total speed equals the speed of light. A photon, for example, does not age at all because all of its “time vector” has been reduced to zero in order for it to attain the speed at which it is traveling.

thestickman

So then paul30 I suppose that to you nothing exists. Because if we follow your logic then nothing really exists because everything is a concept in a human's mind. We can explain observations of cause and effect and have called this time, further we found that time can change. Time is a concept, of course, it really has no meaning except that which we assign to it, but then, so does everything else. Therefore time really isn't fiction because we experience it, our lives are bound by it.

As well, it seems that it is not just a human concept. Animals don't remember the future. They seem to remember the past as well. Time for them is quite real as well. Time is word, but what it describes is very real.

-tsm

paul30

Dear Stickman,

Everything is a concept, but some concepts are closer to the reality they describe than others.

Phlogiston is a concept. But that doesn't mean there is really phlogiston.

Just because we perceive events happening in a pattern, that doesn't mean our perception is true or that the pattern is anything other than a mental construct.

Our lives our bound by events, not by time. Time is a description of events, but no more real in itself than, say, the idea of fate.

We don't know enough about animals to say whether they remember the future.

They might.

Jarlaxle

Isn't that like defining a word with the word itself? How can you say events exist but time does not? Doesn't the existence of an "event" beg the question that time exists?

Did you meant to say past instead of future? If so, I beg to differ. My cat remembers that if it craps on my floor he gets the piss knocked out of him too.

petrachor

How do you justify that we can tell that any concept is a more accurate description of reality than another, which does not describe the same phenomena? Clearly concepts that are internally inconsistent or that run foul of too many other consistent theories can have such a distinction, but how is time self-contradictory, or in contradiction wiht other 'facts'?

The issue with rejecting our perception of time is that without it we don't have much of a basis for anything. As before noted tiem and causality are intimately related, either as time being the medium in which the other exists, or time being equivalent to causal relations between differing configurations of the world. Throwing out time bankrupts empiricism, and seriously damages any purely a priori conception of the world, as it creates an unspanable divorce between individual moments. Can you carry out an argument if there was no 'before' in which you made the earlier points of the argument?

xorbie

I think one thing that should be noted about time and it just being a mental construct. You need to seperate time from the symbols we use to represent us. Sure, clocks are a human construct, but that does not mean time is.

This is just like numbers. Would you say that numbers are a mental construct only? Just because there isn't a big number 1 floating aroud through space, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Of course the symbol itself has no meaning, but the number itself does.

1+1=2 regardless of the existence of people, and same with time.

Of course, this is all true if and only if you agree that any objective reality exists.

scumble

Time is bound up with our perception of events. We only have time with something to latch on to. The Universe obviously has a property of progression, and the only way we can tell which way time goes is irreversible thermodynamic processes. Entropy, I suppose.

mimi

Assuming objective reality does exist...

I'm slightly stumped. To me, a mathematical system, or time, would indeed still exist if we were not here. But somehow mathematics as a concept is much easier for my fragile mind to grasp than time.

In a way, I guess you could say that mathematics are a mental contruct, used to measure/calculate/explain our world. It doesn't exist, per se. Like us disbelievers are saying, time is a mental constuct used to explain the sequence of events in our world.

The statement '1+1=2' seems no different to saying 'the bus was five minutes late'.

thestickman

It's a simple act of observation to see they don't remember the future. If they remembered the future not the past, then if you went to hit an animal you would always miss, because it would know it was about to be hit, it remembers being hit.

No, but that is why I ask you if you believe everything you see is unreal. Because applying your principle above you realise that nothing about you can really be proven to be real. Science therefore uses axioms, and look where it has got us. Maybe we should just all sit here saying that time is just a misguided perception, of course that wouldn't work. Because of this we must treat the world as if our [to you] incorrect perceptions were real, and, believe it or not, they work incredibly well. This is what science does. In fact, nothing in science is 100% proven, such is impossible. You must realise the flaw in your argument because you can't prove that our perceptions are wrong, just the possibility.

That said, I can't prove our perceptions are real, but I don't wish to. I merely wish to explain these perceptions and create ways of understanding the effects.