wdog

to recap luvluv,

you are apparently aware of the temporal paradoxes presented to you since you have brought up out of time as a way of explaining how the temporal paradox of omniscience and free will is resolved. But then you backed away from out of time, or hypertime, as something that you are not claiming is reality. Somehow then you claim that you have presented a way around around the paradoxes simultaneous with backing away from out of time as a reality. Interesting tactic, propose a mechanism for your assertion to hold. Back away from the mechanism as plausable, but at the same time insist that your conclusion is still logically true.

You can't divorce one from the other luvluv, you simply cannot claim that there is something out there that rescues you from the temporal paradoxes without defining exactly what that something is. Logically you haven't done anything.

in the words of craig above : 'For analogical predication without some univocal, conceptual content cannot be regarded as anything more than metaphor'

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: wdog ]</p>

picklepuss

Hello people;
Please excuse a newbie lurker for butting in, but I always thought that 'time' was just a theoretical, epistemolgical construct used for measuring the ontology of 'change', i.e., what is the 'reality' of conservation of identity versus alteration of identity.? Being&gt;Not-Being&gt;New Being. A question that harks back to Heraclitus and his nemesis, Parmenides, not to mention Parmenides' supporter, Zeno. As I understand it, you cannot resolve the paradoxes of 'time' without first resolving Zeno's (and other Eleatics, etc.), paradoxes of 'change', with it's being/not being problem. I hear that the quantum universe has gone a good way to resolving the Eleatic conundrum, and establishing the 'reality' of change. But I really don't know or understand how. But if that is so, then it should also resolve the paradoxes of time.

Just thought I'd ask for your feedback. Ignore me if you think I'm out in left field, somewhere.

wdog

hi picklepuss,

I would welcome you, but I don't want to risk offending you


I think that there have been other threads on time where this has been discussed a lot, you might want to review those. I also don't think zenos paradox is really a paradox, again I think it was discussed elsewhere.

I don't believe this discussion is about so much about the nature of time as it is the nature of 'out of time'. Just shooting from the hip though I think there is more to time than our imagination.

wdog

luvluv,

to save time, i am going to preemt your response to my post directly above pickle's. When you shifted your argument to god as a time traveler, you took away his omnipotence. An omnipresent being has no use for time travel, Take the spatial analogy, if god is everywhere, why would he need to move about? If god is at all times, why the need for time travel? You see that is nonsense for such a creature, and your analogy of a time travelling observer is way off track here. Another way to frame that in your terms of argument is that time travel is a concept restricted to temporal beings only, and god is not a tempoal being so time travel does not apply.

Let's get back to your original argument of an atemporal god present at all times at once. then we are back to the original point I brought up, do we exist at all times for this god to observe us there? Tron says that quite obviously yes we do, there are essentially an infinite number of us there to see. But both you and tron found it distasteful to think that a god is watching many luvluvs at once, so you shifted to god as a mere time traveller. Also again, this resolves no temporal paradoxes at all.

There are two clear choices here, to an atemporal being we are either localized in time or we are not. I submit that since our consciousness is localized in time to the present moment (if I exist next week, then why am I not aware of it?), and we are localized spatial creatures, then we are localized in time as well.

If we are localized in time, then there is no future to observe. If we are not localized in time, then there is essentially an infininte numnber of us and still none of the temporal paradoxes are resolved.

also you seem to imply that god doesn't need free will? really? god cannot do what he wants?

and from your quote about the super bowl

you say that god that god 'said' who the winner of the superbowl will be long before any of us were around. If god enabled, or 'said', or whatever, then so much for our free will. the winner of the next super bowl needs to be determined by freely determined human choices or we don't have any free will. Your god can have nothing to do with it, and that contradicts his role as just an observer.

Imagine another scenario enabled by an omniscient and omnipotent god. If your god wanted to he could mediate a discussion between you and yourself 20 minutes into the future (all he would have to do is watch the two of you, or time travel if you prefer, and pass messages between you). let y1 be you at the present and y2 be you 20 min into the future. assume that you at at home at the present and the conversation goes soemthing like this:

y1: 'hello luvluv'
y2: 'hello myself, I have something urgent to tell you. Please don't go outside like you want to in 5 minutes. I have just been shot and am bleeding to in the driveway'
y1: 'oh no!, thanks for the info'

end of conversation.

now if you in the present, y1, has free will then you can decide not to go outside in the next 20 min which is what you would probably do. But if you don't go outside, then you were not really talking to yourself in the future and god was not seeing your future. If you are forced to go outside against your will, then you don't have free will. take your pick, either free will exists or omniscience about the future, but they cannot exist simultaneous.

the fact that this logical contradiction is enabled by your omniscient god, then we must reject on logical grounds that it is impossible to know the future by any means or that we have no free will. That is important luvluv, no means you can think of will get around the above contradiction that is why i kept saying that it doesn't matter if a god is out of time or whatever, we are still restricted by the rules of our temporal existence.

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: wdog ]</p>

wdog

some interesting links and thoughts on time travel, ect.

<a href="http://www.wfu.edu/~brehme/time.htm" target="_blank">http://www.wfu.edu/~brehme/time.htm</a>

<a href="http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Is%20time%20travel%20possible" target="_blank">http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Is%20time%20travel%20possible</a>

I also highly recommend the carlo rovelli article that someone else on the other thread posted the link to. at

<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9903045" target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9903045</a>

I can't claim to have understood everything I read, but the statements about how time is an arbitrary parameter of the physics are most interesting. It seems best just to not even consider it in the theoretical descriptions, the true evolution of the universe is best looked at as just the evolution of the relations between the observables. This seems to be close to the interpretation of picklepuss and others in various threads.

To me though that is a little at odds with special relativity which explicity uses time and talks about a spacetime manifold? am I wrong? or is is just that general relativity is just as its name implies, a more general way of looking at everything including special relativity.

I also read a lot of various other stuff, some garbage and some not. It appears that a lot of folks are with tronvillian in that they think that we exist along our entire worldline, even though they admit it causes problems with freewill. There was a reference to some freewill advocates who claimed to have gotten around the paradox, but OF COURSE I could not locate what would be potentially the most interesting argument of all. If someone can find such arguments, please post them here (please not this usual theist stuff again).

I have a lot of problems with the existence along the entire worldline view. Namely the freewill problem, but also seems to be at odds with the nonlinearities of the world as well as uncertainty on the microscale. I also think that there is a unique point on the worldline, the present. That is where our consciousness is localized, or would that just be an illusion?

luvluv

Not much time:

wdog, in the thread this discussion was started in, dangin introduced this idea as a DISPROOF of free will.

You are the ones on whom the burden of proof lies. Your argument runs something like this:

1) An omniscient God knows my future acts.
2) If my future acts are known, they cannot be free.
3) Therefore, if God exists, I am not free.

2 is unsound, because it is not NECESSARILY true.

Even if I can only demonstrate that time travel is POSSIBLE then this disproof is unsound and the conversation is over.

I care for you and your soul, but understand I DO NOT CARE if you believe in out of time or not (Many Christians do not). I am not in the least bit interested in convincing wdog to adopt the position that out of tim is true. This is not what is happening here. I only entered into this debate to show that this supposed disproof of either the existence of God or free will was nothing of the kind. If any of the premises in the argument are not impervious to debate, then neither is the overall argument.

You can believe whatever you want, but what was posted was a disproof of the co-existence of an omnipotent God and free will. It's unsound all day long. (Plantinga does a number on it in a book called God, Freedom, and Evil. I considered re-typing it here, but I do have something resembling a life.)

Unless you can prove premise 2 to be a logical certainty (or perhaps restate the entire argument so that it is sound) then this disproof is not worth the electrons it is posted with.

I am not offering the out of time view, or the open theism view as something for you to believe or accept, I am offering it as a critique of the second premise. No, neither you nor I know whether out of time is real, but if it is even POSSIBLE then the above disproof is worthless.

You are obviously an intelligent person, and I don't know how I can make this any clearer.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

For the record, I DO believe the eternal view is correct, (but that has never constituted the whole of my belief about the subject).

I only dropped it because I felt it was a stumbling block for you and it wasn't necessary to my argument.

Really, though, you have not responded to the open theism argument (the future is unknowable, therefore a God who fails to know the future can still be omniscient) or my recent argument against the necessity of temporal extant. (The THEN/NOW comments.)

wdog

luv,

2 is all that is needed here for this discussion, and yes I did show how by example. see the conversation with yourself example which you never addressed. all that is needed is to show logical contradiction of your omniscient god and freewill in one example, and that has been done. If it contradicts once, the entire notion is discarded.

your closest attempt was the then/now stuff

that is one of the most vacuous arguments I have ever seen. You think by simply changing the tense around on a few words (then and now) that you have actually made an argument. You have actually said nothing by these statements, they are just a bunch of self-referrential jibberish.

As i showed to you also, the notion of god as a time traveler is wrongheaded to support your argument. To an atemporal being, time travel means nothing and your analogy is incorrect. I have tried to point that out as well as the correct physical meaning of out of time, but it has gone completely over your head. Before you declare yourself the winner of any argument, you need to first understand the opponents arguments.

more empty argument. does nothing to address the paradoxes presented, they are simply statements of your own own vague and imprecise notions of what you are trying to convey, but again they resolve nothing and you are making god a time travelling observer again. I have showed this to be inconsistent with an atemporal being.

What you believe or don't believe has no bearing whatsoever on truth. The fact is you have not established anything here.


as i told you previously, i only ACCEPT provisionally that which can be justified to me. I gave you 3 examples of contradiction which you were unable to resolve (you only think you did with your then/now stuff). If you knew plantinga's arguments, I can't understand why you wouldn't come right out with them in the first place. If they are that good, then why hold back?


You are behaving in theist style by glossing over the finer inconvient points of this discussion. You readily abandoned out of time as 'not reality' and then simply resort to vacuous arguments and self declarations of victory in this 'debate'.

Well thanks I guess, as one human to another i care about your welfare as best a stranger can.
The debate was about the logical contradictions presented by free will and omniscience with future knowing ability. The logical contradictions remain unresolved, so the logical contradiction between free will and future foreknowledge remains. The point of the discussion was for you to try and resolve the contradictions, not for me to show that they are there. Several examples have established that fact, which shifts the burden to you to resolve them. You have not presented any satisfactory resolution of the contradictions, nor any satisfactory picture of how an omniscient being is related to temporal beings like us. As bill craig pointed out, you simply cannot resolve the contradictions until you do that. You didn't understand that point, therefore you really didn't understand the entire debate.

[ October 24, 2002: Message edited by: wdog ]</p>

wdog

On time travel....

using one of the precise definitions about time travel in one of the links I gave, I think an argument against time travel into the past at least can be made.

To take oneself into the past, you would need to transport yourself, complete your memory and all, to a very specific state of the universe that was at some moment in the past. Now by state i am referring to the exact physical state (all fields, atoms, ect. in their exact relation with respect to each other). Now you might ask right away if that is quantum mechanically even possible, but assume that is not a problem. If the universe could be in that past state, then suddenly you appeared in it obviously there is an immediate problem. Your sudden presence alters the physical state of the universe, there is simply no way to exist in a past universe without altering it. If you were there it would have to considered as a different universe that would necessarily start to follow a different worldline and therefore could not possibly be your own past.

This is just a rehash of a well known paradox, but cast in physical terms. You, a god, or anyone cannot change your past and still have it be your past.

I would consider time travel into the past impossible based on that argument alone.

wdog

luv,

just to address your open theism view, I didn't think about it since that wasn't really in the debate. that represents a total abandonment of the future knowing postion, therefore in this context it removes all points of contention. there is nothing really to debate there but I find it really curious as to how you can so easily slide around in your views. The reality is unique, so how can you be comfortable with simply accepting two seperate arguments? I think it would be really be easier for you theists to stop even trying apologetics and just say "I want to still believe anyway". It was also telling when you said that 'it didn't matter if your argument was reality'. Of course it matters luvluv, the alternative to reality is fantasy.