An event, such as World War I, has a location in the ‘static time series’, which we label as ‘1914-1918’. But how about the ‘dynamic time series’? Every event, it seems, in the ‘dynamic time series’ has every position in three tenses: past, present, and future. So it can be true that WWI is in the future, the present, and the past. But nothing can be past, present, and future because past and future are incompatible. How can something be both red and not red? p and not-p? Thus McTaggart concluded that being past, being present, and being future cannot exist. He also said that the ‘dynamic time series’ does not exist, too. He thought this shows that time itself is unreal.
My question is whether time is really unreal as McTaggart claims. It seems counter-intuitive that it is unreal, because we experience it everyday (methinks). What are your thoughts? Please help me clear this up.
I’ve always thought of time as just another dimension. Like, you know, length and width.
If I say: Meet me at the Circle downtown, while the location is defined it is very unlikely that we would actually meet (unless the temporal aspect of the conversation was assumed, which happens).
Hi, noth (may I call you noth?). Xunzian and north are are correct - time is not a thing, for things can be measured. Time is itself a measurement, an idea. I think your problem is that McTaggart presents a wholly unnecessary argument for the “unreality” of time. It is much ado about nothing. “Length” is not a thing - it is a measurement of things. This is not the BFD (big filosophical deal) that McTaggart makes it.
We do not experience time at all. We experience emotions, pain, euphoria - and we know from our experience that these will not endure forever. We may not know the end point, but we know there is one. Good or bad, it is this bit of inductive reasoning that makes us seem to experience time. Time does not slow down when we are at the dentist - our desire for change intensifies. In fact, time may seem to speed up as we get ready to go to the dentist. Time measures motion - but another way of saying this is that it measures change. Our desire for change is what we experience. The more change we want, the slower time “feels”. And vice-versa. What we are experiencing is our own desire - our own will. And we use time to measure that, too, or rather to measure the change in the circumstance against which our will is set.
time? as soon as something was, time passed. since then time kept passing in irreversable order. a memory is a conception of the past(conception of prior thought or action). perceptions come about when we become aware of our environment. knowledge is only had when we fully understand the tendancies or nature of how things react. how do i react to any situation? think then act. does time pass at the same rate in japan as canada? yah
time passes for everything equally, but things are always changing. thats why time is nothing more than a measurement of existance. existance is a conception used to sum up the progress of becoming. since time started and is irreversable, progress is inevitable. we are in a constant state of becoming.
things might not always be changing but always becoming older.
what makes humans the same as everything else in existance? an expiration date.
Hi, north. No, sir. The body experiences change. We measure it with time. But also with the other dimensions, which also change.
The reason that time presents a special problem to some is that we conceive of the first three dimensions - the first three measurements - as static. That is their use - to measure while ignoring change. But we know that everything is changing and moving always. Our senses are dull enough to enable us to utilize these first three measures. So, we say we are a certain height at any given moment. Or a certain width or depth. But there is no such thing as a moment. It’s just a figure of speech, with no measurable duration. It is a point in time, which is no more real than a point on a line. Just a conceptual convenience.
“Age” is defined by time. “My age is” does not imply that may age exists. I exist, by all evidence, but not my age. It’s just one of those quirky ways we use the english language. Since age does not exist, it cannot be experienced. That I get sleepy now when I smoke dope is something I attribute to my age, but it is more likely attributable to the condition of my body, which is not determined by age - I could quit smoking cigarettes and eat a vegetable once in a while - I am sure my endurance would improve.
first existence is beyond conception. objects were first.( objects are independent of conception. objects can stand alone,in and of themselves)
second. Humans can be the same as existence, since existence is infinite(something always is, since “nothing” can never be a something) therefore Humans can be infinite.
North, you wrote “first existence is beyond conception.”
Did you mean “First, existence is beyond conception”? Or “First existence is beyond conception”?
Either way, what on earth do you mean?
Do you mean “beyond conception” the way I mean it when I say “her beauty was beyond conception”? - which is merely a fugure of speech. Or that we cannot have an idea about, or define, first existence, or existence (in the first place)?
Your further comments are equally intelligible to me, but, well, I’d like you to illuminate first conceptions first. So to speak.
This is the same as saying distance is real. There is a distance between point X and point Y, some amount of space between them. This isn’t an abstraction or measurement, the distance is real. How we measure that (meter, feet, cubits, hands, whatever) is arbitary.
Just as time is real. As we travel through time, we experience change, but we are moving. It is a linear system with nice coordinates.
time most certainly does not pass equally for everything. Einstein’s theories of Relativity show that that ‘people traveling at different speeds will measure different times for events and different distances between objects, though these differences are minute unless one is traveling at a speed close to that of light’. An atomic clock travelling in orbit runs slightly slower than one on earth - without taking relativity into account the satellite network would not work.
first existence is beyond conception. objects were first.( objects are independent of conception. objects can stand alone,in and of themselves)
obiously my environment(the world i can interact with) exists independent of my mind. my body is dependent on my environment for survival. my mind is dependent on my body for experiance.
like faust i’d like to know what yyou meant by first existance(but because you start your second point with ‘second.’ ill assume you mean “existance is beyond conception” if so, i think existance is the progress which occurs when
the present becomes the past.in that sense were always moving toward “the future” at the same rate. the reason why i can imagine the future is because of past experiance. i wake up every morning,and assume it will happen every day until i die, if you can call 12:00 morning.
second. Humans can be the same as existence, since existence is infinite(something always is, since “nothing” can never be a something) therefore Humans can be infinite.
i agree that humans can have the characteristic of existance.(aka exist themselves) but i don’t think existance is infinate. mortality is a characteristic which all living things have. every animal on the planet dies.
1st they come into existance 2nd they exist for some time, 3rd they cease to exist. when animals cease to exist its either because of physical trauma
or old age. existance is not infinate.
Hi, Xunzian. In fact, I don’t think I did miss your point. I think your position is inconsistent. Time is not “real”. Hours are units of measurement, not the measurement itself. You would have to claim that inches are the measurement of length to be consistent here. But length is a measurement. You would then have a measurement as a measurement of a measurement.
Don’t get caught up in the imprecise way in which we normally speak. We do not measure time, even if we use that idiomatic expression. We measure motion, or change. We break this measurement up into units, in order to easily compare and to manipulate (perform math on) them. We do not count numbers - we use numbers to count things.
you can’t sense time but you can understand it. i have obligation/deadlines. to meet these obligations/deadlines i have to know what time is and how it progresses. if i have to be at school at 12:30 i’m not going to leave at 1:00 and expect to be there for the start of class.
just because the clock in my car doesn’t keep time perfectly doesn’t mean time doesn’t keep time perfectly. what makes one clock more efficent than another? the accuracy with which it keeps time.
I should think there is nothing controversial at all about what I am saying. The controversy arises when we make the mistake of believing that everything that has a name “exists”. That verb “to be” has caused all manner of misunderstanding, which allows for metaphysics. It simply has many senses, not all of which describe a state. Or rather, they do not all describe a state of reality. “There are unicrons in my back yard” reads as if it describes the state of my back yard, but we know that this is not so. It may describe a state of mind, but so does “psychosis”. I hope that not too many folks take psychotic states as conceptual guidelines.
More precisely, the verb “to be” does not describe the state of its subject or object in all cases. Sometimes it only describes the state of the human who utters it. This is a grammatical problem, and should not be a philosophical one. If all statements (sentences) in philosophy had as their subject “I”, things would be clearer. But metaphysicians would find a way, I am sure.
Saying that WWI being both in the past and the future is a contradiction ignores that these values are relative to the viewer. Making the same mistake, we could say this about location too- A car can be behind me and ahead of you, does that mean the car is both X and not-x and hence, direction doesn’t exist? I’m amatuer, so I can only assume it’s more complex than that.
faust-
Regarding the nature of time as a measurement. I think this is what Reid would say is a case of us using the same word for various different things. You are saying that time isn't a thing, it's a measurement- much like length. Well, length is a measurement of [i]something[/i]- call it distance, call it extension, but that something exists similarly to time, it's a sort of matrix that physical objects are located in. I think in the case of time, we have two words for the same thing. We call the measurement (seconds, minutes, hours) time, and we call the thing measured time as well.
You also speak of the perception of time changing based on our needs and desires. Well, I tell you that our perception of proportion and size changes in exactly the same way. A 3 foot long car seems tiny, and 3 foot long spider seems huge. When we use stopwatches and rules we can see that the actual units of passage have been the same, but our non-quantified expression of time and distance ("I was at the dentist forever" or "That sandwich was freakin' huge") remain flexible based on our moods and expectations.
Change isn’t a factor, by itself. Change needs to be done over something, in relation to something. And an inch is a unit of distance. That unit is arbitary, but it measures a real thing.