Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Atlanticmike wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:49 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:05 pm
After you brought it up, I tried to imagine time not passing. I couldn’t do it either. If, as physics guy said, time is change, then I couldn’t move or breathe. I’m not sure I could notice it happening, as the neurons in my brain would be frozen in place.

It’s tough to imagine what a God that is not bound by the laws of physics would look like, or what it would be like to be such an entity.
You do realize "time" doesn't actually exist, correct? Look at it this way. As we live our mortal lives we are free to physically go wherever we want. Up, down, right, left forward, backwards and so on. But we can never actually go back in "time" because it doesn't exist. Time is just an illusion for us HUMANS because we are operating on a very limited knowledge of our eternal existence while living here on Earth.
If time is an illusion, so is up, down, left, right, forward and backward. I'm assuming that when one of your employees shows up late to a job, you say "no problem, time is an illusion." In fact, God would also be an illusion.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Chap wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 10:16 pm
I find it bizarre that you should ask your self whether 'an old book still deserves to be taken seriously today'. The City of God and the Confessions were foundational texts of Christian thought in late antiquity, and as such helped to shape western literate culture for centuries thereafter. Whether or not these texts are your favourite reading today is not the point. The people of the past did not live their lives to provide you with entertainment: it is our privilege as human beings to glimpse and try to comprehend their lives and struggles through the sometimes fragmentary remains that they have left us.

A basic rule in reading a text that comes from a different time, place, and culture is that you need to realise that the author was not writing for you, and your idea of what he ought to be trying to do, and whether he has succeeded in his aims, is likely to be irrelevant.

Augustine was addressing an audience who were trained in a very different culture from the one you know, and that audience respected him greatly. He was a professor of rhetoric before he was a bishop, and knew how to grab and hold the attention of people raised with expectations of spoken persuasion expressed in grammatically elaborate Latin, a style of prose that was in principle meant to be heard spoken aloud rather than read - rhetoric was the art of being a public speaker who persuaded an audience by art as much as by content. If when reading an English translation of Augustine's writing you can't see now what his contemporaries saw, the appropriate reaction is to realise that you have a mountain of understanding to climb. Some of us enjoy doing that; others may not.
The fact that Augustine was writing in a different culture may be why he needed an editor. It doesn't mean that he didn't.

I think the reason I'm happy to say he needed an editor is that I do take him seriously, after all these centuries. He's worth treating like the speaker who just came to give a seminar. Nobody is likely to treat me like that after 1600 years. A sixteen-hundred-year-old writer only needs 95% of his text stripped away to be worth reading today? That's one amazing ancient writer.

On the one hand it would be idiotic to complain that Augustine wrote bad English, or didn't know his way around New York City. If I'm not prepared to translate thoughts from unfamiliar cultures, whether ancient or modern, then I'm just cutting myself off from most of what other humans have done, an intellectual hermit. On the other hand, though, verbose writing is possible in any culture. Many great thinkers in every age have been bad writers. Being an ancient Roman doesn't make anyone exempt from the charge.

At some point having respect for writers from other cultures can be too much like the kind of chivalrous respect for women that opens doors for the ladies and never hears what they say.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Thinking about this some more, perhaps the thread title should be "The Passage of Time is Illusory" or something to that effect. We can all agree on what time it is in any given time zone, but the speed at which we all perceive the passage of time is different.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Some Schmo wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 5:29 pm
Thinking about this some more, perhaps the thread title should be "The Passage of Time is Illusory" or something to that effect. We can all agree on what time it is in any given time zone, but the speed at which we all perceive the passage of time is different.
I'm not sure that illusory is the right term. Two cars race. One hits the finish line first. If the passage of time is illusory, how do we explain that one car went faster than the other.

I think there's a difference between something being illusory and subjective impressions of the thing. We can define a certain range of light wavelengths as "red." But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have different subjective impressions of where the boundaries of "red" just by looking at colors. Would that make "color" an illusion? If so, I think we should probably discuss what distinguishes "illusion" from "not illusion."
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:23 am
I wonder if time passes for a photon. At the speed of light, distance contacts to zero on the direction it is traveling, so it’s like being everywhere along its path once.
Yes, exactly. Presumably. Imagining what it's like to be a photon must be harder than imagining what it's like to be a bat. But I think you understand this as well as anyone does.
Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
I have some ideas for a science fiction trilogy that would take time travel more seriously than it is usually taken. I'm still not sure how I'm going to address this issue. I just really want to write the line, "Yes, I'm from the future. I'm from Thursday."
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 5:08 pm
The fact that Augustine was writing in a different culture may be why he needed an editor.
Perhaps you will allow me to agree with that, but with the addition of the phrase "in order to be acceptable reading in translation to people whose roots lie in a completely different intellectual and literary culture from his."
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 6:44 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:23 am
I wonder if time passes for a photon. At the speed of light, distance contacts to zero on the direction it is traveling, so it’s like being everywhere along its path once.
Yes, exactly. Presumably. Imagining what it's like to be a photon must be harder than imagining what it's like to be a bat. But I think you understand this as well as anyone does.
Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
I have some ideas for a science fiction trilogy that would take time travel more seriously than it is usually taken. I'm still not sure how I'm going to address this issue. I just really want to write the line, "Yes, I'm from the future. I'm from Thursday."
WRITE THE BOOKS. I’M HERE FOR THIS.

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Re: Time is Illusory

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Physics Guy wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 6:44 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:23 am
I wonder if time passes for a photon. At the speed of light, distance contacts to zero on the direction it is traveling, so it’s like being everywhere along its path once.
Yes, exactly. Presumably. Imagining what it's like to be a photon must be harder than imagining what it's like to be a bat. But I think you understand this as well as anyone does.
Since a mysterious stranger didn’t kill your own grandparents before your parents were born, doesn’t that mean that you never go back and do it? ;)
I have some ideas for a science fiction trilogy that would take time travel more seriously than it is usually taken. I'm still not sure how I'm going to address this issue. I just really want to write the line, "Yes, I'm from the future. I'm from Thursday."
If you do, put me down for a copy. My current favorite time travel book is Time and Again by Jack Finney. I love the metaphor as time being a river and we float downstream in a boat. But, under the right conditions, we can get out of the canoe and walk upstream. It's not a serious treatment as far as physics goes, but the concept is neat.

I also liked Recursion by Blake Crouch, although I don't recall the technicalities of the time travel as being a big part of the story.
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Re: Time is Illusory

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 6:17 pm
I'm not sure that illusory is the right term. Two cars race. One hits the finish line first. If the passage of time is illusory, how do we explain that one car went faster than the other.
Because one was actually going faster.

I'm not saying that time on Earth passes at different speeds, just that our perception of that passage feels different to anyone who perceives it from moment to moment, depending on a number of factors, including the person's age and what they are doing.
Res Ipsa wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 6:17 pm
I think there's a difference between something being illusory and subjective impressions of the thing. We can define a certain range of light wavelengths as "red." But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have different subjective impressions of where the boundaries of "red" just by looking at colors. Would that make "color" an illusion? If so, I think we should probably discuss what distinguishes "illusion" from "not illusion."
I did a quick google search on the definition. These were the three that came up:

- a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses
- a deceptive appearance or impression
- a false idea or belief

We can scrap the last one for the sake of this discussion.

Let's start here: would you consider the feeling of an hour when you're sleeping to be either "a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses" or "a deceptive appearance or impression?"
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Re: Time is Illusory

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Isn’t time just gravity, which creates relativity?

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