Time as now and nothing else

Prolly is.

Though we could crank up skepticism to maximum, and say that while now it seems that there were previous nows, maybe actually the only moment in existence is the current one. And it has memories of previous nows that didn’t happen, there’s no change. :slight_smile:

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But there’s only change, surely? It’s why I am always sceptical about looking to the past to solve the problems of the future. The past is the past, what once was, but we are in the now, and that is what will be.

The Romans didn’t have internet or AI, neither did the Nazis. Everything is different, and always will be…

Well of course I too find it useful to think in terms of change, but that doesn’t mean that change actually exists.

All I see is change, it’s constant and unerring. Perhaps the cycles we have enforced (which are by no means natural) lead to predictable outcomes, but we are not beholden to those cycles, we can leave them at any time. I choose to leave, and survive locally as opposed to globally.

Well of course, have you tried being a human that doesn’t experience life in the direction of the arrow of time? You would probably instantly die.

Time has an arrow? Where does it point?

It seems to point from a more homogeneous state like the Big bang to our present state, and then onward in the same direction.

I don’t deny the existence of the greater cycles, just the validity of the lesser ones we have imposed on ourselves.

Our perception of time is messed up; destiny, determination, I believe in none of those things. Who is to say that the cycle will not deviate? Are the cycles perfect in their recursion? Nature says no, multi-dimensional recursion and causation means that even the greater cycles can be altered by lesser ones.

I wasn’t talking about cycles; cycles automatically mean that change is fundamentally real.

Well then, where is your disagreement?

I simply said that it’s useful, normal, an evolved ability to think in terms of change. But that doesn’t mean that change actually exists at the most fundamental level. Not sure where I disagreed with something.

Well why doesn’t change exist at the fundamental level? What is the fundamental level? I say there is no fundamental level, outwith God, but that’s just what I believe.

Say you have a block universe that’s closed in space and time. So there are no cycles and yet our past and our future meet. This is a logically perfect picture and it has no change fundamentally.

The universe is a block? How can infinity be contained? That would be my first question regarding that.

Whether or not the universe is infinite in scale (we simply don’t know), the process that defines reality can be nothing less than infinite.

It’s closed so it isn’t ā€œcontainedā€. It has no end, no edge.

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I agree with everything apart from the closed part. Not sure what ā€œclosedā€ implies.

I think of it this way: a 1-dimensional circle is closed, we just can’t imagine a 1-dimensional circle. Anywhere you go on the circle, you won’t find an end (plus you can’t go anywhere on the circle because that needs a temporal dimension). My default assumption is that our universe is like that, just in 4 dimensions 3 space + 1 time.

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I don’t accept time as a dimension. What we consider ā€œtimeā€ is zero-dimensional. There is only the now, endlessly unfolding. What we consider to be time is just measurement of cycles, but ā€œtimeā€ is indivisible, it is relative to nothing, but everything is relative to it. What you call time, I call the endless recursion that Potential, Release and Expression can realise. Cycles are merely a coherent by-product of that process.

I think that our perception of time is a relic of our own ultimate cycle; birth, life then death. Because we are defined by such a cycle, we assume everything is relative to that cycle. If we were reduced to sub-atomic scale, then perhaps the contraction of the field of potential (to a particle) that surrounds the nucleus might take eons to form. We only know our spatial relation to time, but that is just one of an infinite scale of relations.

It’s not all about us.

But unfolding/cycles/recursion belong to a 4th dimension, I don’t see how these can exist if they don’t exist. It can also be seen as the 4th spatial dimension and that time is a route in it.