The physicists have discovered – objectively and empirically – that our universe’s timeline goes back 11-20 billion years. It seems to me that they’ve backtracked through time in a way analogous to someone who would model speeds from zero to c without adding in relativity. In other words, the backwards journey through time is – in how we conceptualise it – “accurate” for several billion years IMO, and then rears away from our conceptualisation, and by t = 0 the cork has popped and the human mind can’t even begin to imagine it.
These comments about the timeline also apply to the spatial extent of the universe. Thus, the ideas of “the beginning of” and “the boundary of” the universe are innaccurate and misleading, in spite of the “agreement” with experiment and observation from science. Anyone who tries to wrestle with these things in his mind is flogging a dead horse.
The universe can evidently be represented in spacetime in a limited sense, but definitely not as a whole. Science needs to acknowledge and accept that at the extremes, philosophy takes over conceptually.
I’ve had this post on my mind for a while, and found it difficult to write. I’ve posted it coz I want to know how you lot deal with the extremes of space and time. Do any of you know anything substantial or have any theories about how we can think about them?
[I posted it here and not in Natural Science because I consider it to be beyond science]
What actually takes over is mysticism. Language cannot describe the Universe as a whole. The closest description we would have would be “nothingness”. There isn’t very much to say about nothingness. Mystics attempt to escape language. Try “ommmmmmmmmmmm”.
Might be of zero use to you but the French philosopher Bergson sees all our problems in this area from zeno’s tortise to special relativity as arising from the attempt to “spatialize†time in our heads and on paper.
He believes that time is a “virtual” rather then a discrete (eg one that can be divided into points even an infinite number of them) multiplicity.
A virtual multiplicity is (somehow!) smooth, continuous and non discrete.
He also believes in multiple “durations” and possibly a deep virtually multiple time under it all???
Bergson’s third image is an elastic band being stretched. Bergson tells us first to contract the band to a mathematical point, which represents “the now†of our experience. Then, draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. He warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which traces it. If we can focus on the action of tracing, then we can see that the movement — which is duration — is not only continuous and differentiating or heterogeneous, but also indivisible. We can always insert breaks into the spatial line that represents the motion, but the motion itself is indivisible. For Bergson, there is always a priority of movement over the things that move; the thing that moves is an abstraction from the movement. Now, the elastic band being stretched is a more exact image of duration. But, the image of the elastic is still, according to Bergson, incomplete. Why ? Because, for him, no image can represent duration. An image is immobile, while duration is “pure mobility†(The Creative Mind, p. 165). Later, in Creative Evolution, Bergson will criticize the new art of cinema for presenting immobile images of movement. As Deleuze will show in his cinema books, however, Bergson does not recognize the novelty of this artform. Cinema does provide moving images. In any case, in “Introduction to Metaphysics,†Bergson compares all three images: “the unrolling of our duration [the spool] in certain aspects resembles the unity of a movement which progresses [the elastic], in others, a multiplicity of states spreading out [the color-spectrum].†Now we can see that duration really consists in two characteristics: unity and multiplicity.
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Thanks - this looks worth knowing even if it won’t provide (near-)satisfaction to me. I’ll look into it when it’s cooler (heat attenuates my brainwaves…)
what is a man being? is his ambitions of happiness? his different emotions tears toward his condition or his dreams? his ability to feel being in multiple scenes? his variety field to say beauty he needs for peace? is he his values believes expression of love to superior abstract being? …or a man is just an animal who can speak?
this is how i see time. i don’t see it in a watch but in happenings that made me feel my soul, age process is not scheduled since your birth to life but your eyes watching a depth interact in happenings are
Wow that’s very poignant - got a certain poetry to it
plus it does sound a little bit like Bergson though he didn’t just see duration as psychological/phenomenological alone but “real” in some way.
Like I say he’s tough to put it mildly.
But thats a really lovely image of duration and the passing of time iman.