Interesting. Prove to me time exists please. I find no evidence of time anywhere outside the language constructs of the human animal.
mastriani, first you typed a letter, THEN you typed another one. you didnt just type the whole word at once. i hope youre illustrating that absence of proof isnt proof of absence, as that would be a good reply to oreso.
what stops you from having solid disbelief is that there is no reason to! you have to acknowledge that its totally possible that the god i describe exists and therefore you cant believe that he doesnt exist unles you make a leap of faith just like christians.
Actually, my point was quite simple, and effectively, you missed it. There is nothing outside the language constructs of the human animal that counts time. We notice changes in our environment and world, and use the word “time” to ascribe a descriptor property to what we have witnessed/observed. Ergo, “time” is constructed by the fragmentary value application system of human logic processes and is not necessarily an actuality.
example: we use the word “day”. What is a day? It is a single revolution of the planet Earth, on it’s perceived axis, in the field of view of a radiant hydrogen fusion/fission sphere we call a star. Is this a measure of time? Not to anything other than a human. This is a case of the watcher believing far too much that it’s value defines the universe at large.
Back on topic: Belief in god and why.
Belief: Yes, although I adamantly refuse to attempt to define it, as that is a limitor, and whatever created/operates myriad creation is a delimitor.
Why: If the human animal, it’s pathetically rudimentary capablilities, and it’s egregiously inherent flaws are the apex of the universe; a sad, twisted, pathetic existence this all is, and everything summarily amounts to nothing.
couldnt have said it better myself.
no matter how i define day, or how long it feels or how long my clock says it took for the earth to spin, the earth is still spinning. it USED TO be pointing america over there, NOW its pointing over there.
at one point in time, uranium is unstable. at some interval, it spews particles. and then later, it has no more particles to spew. in order for things to change, time must exist. if theres no time, everything is always in one state, and we know that things change state!
i think you are trying to say that our everyday experience with time is not as accurate as we think it is, and that the units we use to measure it are not universal and certainly not based on a universal constant clock. but time still moves, things change, things are caused.
Mastriani
It is bad enough that you believe that the ultimate reality may be beyond human logic but your blatant lack of concern for human self esteem is unpardonable. Where is your compassion? Don’t you care? Have you never listened to Oprah?
You will be visited by three spirits: the ghosts of self esteem past, present and future. They will be taking the form of various “experts” in these matters all with credentials protruding from various orifices of their anatomy and by the time they are through with you, the error of your ways will become obvious.
Don’t you know? Haven’t you read enough modern up to date scholarly literature to know that you are God? And yet you say such things about God. For shame.
Its not your fault. This is why I send you my compassion. People have been expressing such ignorance for years regardless of how they’ve been scorned by those in the know. It’s no wonder then that those like yourself read of such ideas and can become skeptical of your true glory.
There was even a strange woman with the name of Simone Weil who lived a short life in the early part of the twentieth century and never gave anyone any peace with similar such statements.
Obviously she didn’t know that she was God in spite of the fact that she was a highly educated woman so we must be compassionate towards her.
She is gone but you are still here and fortunately will be extended the full education and compassion of the three spirits of self esteem. Yes there is hope indeed.
First off, I don’t at all appreciate being misquoted. Please do not excerpt my words to suit your own desire, as that is duplicitous to others reading the posts.
Second, you have said it on a few occasions, but apparently aren’t aware of what it is that you are saying: You describe changes in your environment, then ascribe the definition of “time” to those changes, “time” being constructed by your perception. Therein, still no proof that time is a model for anything outside the human animal.
LOL. Well done Nick_A.
Not sure if you jest or not, but the effort is summarily appreciated. Although I completely disagree with your assertions, comedic or not, you should still be commended for positivity.
Hi Mastriani
I guess we live in such strange times that what was obviously a parody could be considered seriously. Yes it was intended as humor. 
One thing I’ve learned in my own research is the importance for a person to come to grips with their own nothingness when becoming involved with the deeper spiritual concepts. When adopted by our egotism they can easily lead to personal psychological harm.
I’m not saying that God should not be contemplated but rather contemplated with an open mind and not insisting on definitions by our limitations. Consider how Meister Eckhart puts it:
Ahhh, what an excellent quote. With but one glaring exception in the last line. Some minds clamor for the highest good of all, a minor percentage of the totality of humanity. The rest are like 0’s, not necessarily real, but make for adequate place holders.
If it is “the God”, then I most certainly concur, withdraw is the only option. It draws those who seek, and it repels those who “already have it all figured out”.
sorry, i do that for brevity sometimes. i thought it still captured your point, i just missed the “if” that signified that you didnt actually think this is sad and twisted. i figured as long as im agreeing it wasnt going to be seen as some kind of trick.
time is quantified by my perception, perhaps innacurately, surely subjectively. that doesnt mean that stuff doesnt change, it just means that the way i see it change isnt absolutely correct. but its still changing, and if it changes then that means that it WAS something before and is NOW something different.
sure there might not actually be time, all of the events in the universe could have happened in one metaphysical ‘instant’ and our brain splits up those events in a discontinuous slide show according to some metaphysical stimulus. i dont know why youd believe that. what did you have in mind?
i mean i define time as change. i dont know how else it could be defined, and change is certainly here being observed. the way you are making it sound, there is no reason to believe that any part of the universe isnt a construct of our mind. and sure, there isnt, but why single out time? i think therefore i am is the only thing that isnt possibly a construct. thats old news.
Future Man said:
-
You overly partialized the quote, which completely voided the context that it was given in, reference to human existence.
-
You define change by ascribing a definition based on segmentation of perceivablility.
-
Cogito Ergo Sum is the most brandedly delusional, narcissitic phrase of pseudo-philosophical tripe ever. Descartes should be disqualified as having anything to do with the proposed arts of epistemology or metaphysics.
enough with the quotes, i put them in my post so readers know which part of your post i am referring to. no matter what i quote, i did actually read the whole thing and am responding to it. (but cmon wasnt that last one really funny?)
based on segmentation of perceivability? i know what those words mean but im not seeing why you wrote them. something to do with why change isnt neccesarily really happening?
is there something about einsteins relativity you arent saying is contributing to your attitude?
i dont know about that. theres a LOT of tripe in those silly books.
but i think therefore i am is true, my thoughts exist as thoughts, for SURE. it is kind of silly of him to possibly deny the existence of everything else besides that, but… isnt that what you are doing? thats why i brought it up. not because he proves you wrong but because he takes the same point you are making with time and applies it to everything except for my thoughts, which he says are certainly real (and they are, pointless tripe or not).
Future Man said:
Apparently you aren’t gleening the fact I have no sense of humor about someone altering my words to their own end. The answer is no I didn’t find it amusing at all.
No, again, you can’t seem to grasp the simplicity of it: Change occurs, but your perception that “time” is a real property that allows for change is a logical construct of segmenting reality.
Cogito ergo sum, is not about the reality of thought. It is that the thought creates reality, which is tripe, to exclusion. Thoughts are real? No, they aren’t, unless they manifest an action, a thought is not any more real than pixies and fairies. Norpenephrine/epinephrine/dopamine/serotonin moving across synaptic gaps is a real activity, somehow this activity is involved in thought, after it occurs several million times. Where is the thought? It’s locked up in a flow of synaptic currents and certainly does not affect the nature of reality, it can only affect the nature of perception.
oh crap descartes is an idiot. are you sure thats what he meant? i think therefore i am, and everything else is not neccesarily true. wow youre right that would be the worst tripe. but of course thoughts are real, i have one now. im making it. it might not consist of matter and i might not be able to hold it, but thats irrelevant.
thats a shame. i didnt alter your words, i referenced them with a piece of them. i wasnt refuting your amputated sentence and calling it stupid, i was using it to refer to a section of your post. i didnt change your words at all, they were still all there.
for those readers too lazy to read what he said, the full quote is that he has no sense of humor about people altering his words for their own ends
Mastriani –
Let’s be very careful to be cordial to eachother. (My issue, not yours.)
The whole “merely a construct” argument is profound, but my take is that there is nothing mere about a construct. The phenomena (experience) of time exists, and that is, in part, the origin of the construct. The nuomena standing behind the curtain – that “out there” that provides the clay for the phenomena we sculpt, is what’s in question. Namely, what is time a disguise for? In essence, what I’m saying is time certainly exists, but I’m also asserting, and agreeing, that time is a disguise. Since “disguises” are things that exist, and a species in this universe happens to be “time as disguise,” I don’t discriminate against it or say it doesn’t exist. The question is not “is there time?” Rather we ask “what is time?” Semantics as usual, which is why I’ve refrained from this game for months. But when we speak of timelines and causality (constructs) to prove our own points about states of affairs as we can best describe them (yet more constructs) it seems unproductive to dismiss concepts out of hand without a more subtle explanation. That is all I’m trying to offer here, perhaps more for myself, than for you and others in the thread, who may infer such things as a given.
On the assertion of constructs being used to define, I cannot refute.
On the assertion of constructs being used for perception, I cannot refute.
On the assertion of this discourse being semantics, I openly refute based on the need of personal inquiry into my own logic capabilities, known and unknown flaws included, to assess what it is I perceive and the manner of such.
I never state that anything is more than my own personal experience/opinion, as I can no more be you, than you I, hence taking a position beyond expression and opinion would certainly be semantics.
Simply put, I view time as a hapless construct of a feeble human mind attempting to reconcile it’s inabilities of perception through fallible definitions, In my opinion only.
Civility, I won’t touch.
Gamer, I was thinking earlier (imagine that) when reading Satyr’s most recent post in the natural sciences forum about “time.” He was talking about “entropy” in a manner that I don’t feel makes sense. And here, I see a similar conjecture in your words, perhaps not necessarily a duplicate of what Satyr was getting at, but nonetheless generally of the same subject.
Try this (you too, Satyr):
We imagine that entropy is a tendency of a system to increase in a state of disorder, such that what is organized becomes less and less organized as time continues.
Now check this out.
Since it is impossible to know that the universe at one time did not exist, it must therefore also be impossible to know that entropy exists. Why? Because in order for us to have the knowledge that something is falling into an ever increasing state of disorganization, we must also assume that there are definite points where one state can be called ‘organized’ and another ‘disorganized.’ In the case that we cannot experience a nonexistent universe, as well as lack the proof that at one time it didn’t exist, we can only assume an infinity, and in infinity there can be no real entropy because there are no real points.
Just a thought.
detrop arent right now and 15 billions years ago points in time whose disorder we can measure and compare to amounts of disorder in the future? what does the beginning have to do with it?
A “beginning” and an “end” have everything to do with it because without these definite points the sequence is only a line.
‘A--------------x---------y----------------B’
Here, the only thing that that allows you to identify “x” as an individual point is the fact that it is not “A.” The same with “y” in its distinction from “x.”
The dashes (“-”) are what can be considered change, so that not only is the “A” required for there to be an “x” and “y,” but also the “-” is needed so that they can be linked causally and exist as individual points.
‘----------------x---------y----------------’
In this one, unless something precedes “x” you cannot know where it began and you cannot know where it stops. You might say “sure I know where it stops…it stops when the “y” happens,” but this is to say that you are certain where the “x” began, from where the following “y” would result causally. This cannot happen. Its a chain that is infinite unless it stops in its linkage. You need the “A” and “B” in order to have identifiable points in the succession so that you can say that the reason why “y” occured is because of the entropy of the “x,” which can be considered the “change” or the “-”.
Now, if I have no “x” and no “y,” the example would look like this:
‘…[insert nothing]…’
Here the concept of “nothing” is interchangeable with “everything,” since you have no characters and no “-,” and you now have your infinity.
Its a bit of a mind fuck.
Anyway, I don’t think that “existential entropy” can be concieved of unless one can witness a beginning and anticipate an end, both or which are impossible to experience.