That is odd that you asked this question, since it hit me about a month ago and I, too, kept on pondering it and concluded the following. First, I know that I am real since I am asking the question, and if real means anything then it surely means this. Second, I do not know where I begin and end; i.e. I do not know whether my essence is just localized in my body or extends beyond it. So, I asked myself whether or not I have a beginning and meditated on it. If I have a beginning and others have a beginning, then necessarily that beginning must be the same, and so I and you are not separated from each other as we would imagine.
life = irreversible progression of experiance
man = conscious land animal with communication/thinking skills
mans beginning = birth
mans end = death
all of these assumptions are grounded in science. they are fact.
what we have in common? we are all alive “now” what we share is our existance in “now”, our existance is a progress and we share our location in the progress(in a temporal sense aka time) what we differ in is our spatial location(where you live). your spatial extent is your body dimensions(size). you have an awareness(which is brought about by your senses) which extends beyond your body(sight, sound, smell) taste and touch have shorter ranges(physical contact is needed to invoke a response). space is the only thing that seperates people physically(space can be filled with anything u see on earth/outer space if your an astronaught) everything we can attain awareness of is real. ultraviolet rays may not be visable to the human eyes, but they can burn the eyes, so anything which can effect us is also necessarily real.
if your question is under 8 words long its either easily answerable or unanswerable.
You got it almost right! Mans begining is conception!
Nice to know some peoples facts are not factual at all!
As I recall in my physics education, science is not about establishing permanent facts that are irrefutable. There is no theory that I am aware of, at least in physics, that can be said to be fact, since we would have to perform all the possible experiments to try to prove the theory correct.
I seem to misunderstand by what you mean by the word life, since life for me is experience. Defining life as an irreversible progression of experience is thus fluff; i.e. it reveals no new knowledge about life. Now, your equation that man is a communicating and thinking land animal is false. Yes, if you are a man then necessarily you are a conscious land animal that can think and communicate. However, if your a thinking land animal that can communicate and think, then you are not necessarily a man.
Now, on the grounds that what we have in common is this moment, then how can you say we have a beginning and an end? This moment, at least to my small mind, cannot possibly have a beginning or an end.
do you think im lesser the man because i ground my ideas in fact? after we experiance something what happens? we experiance something else. the present moment is constantly progressing, the future is yet to come and the past has already hapened, therefore were are all in the present/current moment together(thats why i can be late for deadlines). time is a construct of civilized man as a planning tool. but the fact is , we only live for a certain ammount of time. thus , our mortality puts a premium on time. the lenght of time that passes during any experiance depends on that experiance(different reaction/actions last different lengths of time) saying you dont know how we can have a beginning and an end if were all alive during the current moment is a misconception you made. time begins to pass for something as soon as that something becomes existant, the measure of the lenght of its existance is the measurement of its age. when you were born(or your dad knocked up your mom) time began to pas for you. this is so elementry i feel as thogh im explaining myself to a child. when you find mystery in your words your not profound your missing something(facts)
as for your comment about my land animal comment ; did you ever think that were just the smartest land animal( i know that there are other conscious animals which can communicate)
Trevor_W,
“this is so elementry i feel as thogh im explaining myself to a child”, you must of slipped your words because questioning “elementary” concepts is exactly what philosophy is all about. If you feel like a child, then what that means is is that you think you already understand these concepts (hence “elementary”) and preemptively judge anyone who is interested in them. And, that is not healthy, but is the usual among self-proclaimed “know-it-alls”.
Now, I’ll stop this nonsense and get back to the philosophy. The reason I think that we, as in every individual, have no beginning or end is because, as you stated, we all have this moment in common. This moment does not progress to another moment, because the other moment is then this moment. There is no previous moment, except the moment you remember in your mind, and that is not a moment. There is only this moment, then. So, if there is only this moment then nothing changes, since change requires a flow from one moment into another moment. The reason why we perceive change is for the same reason why we think there are other moments except this moment. Therefore, it is impossible for anything to “begin” or “end”, since there is no change.
did you ever notice that time passes alot faster in your sleep?
I know it doesn’t really because its constantly changing; its a system of measurement invented by humans which is constantly counting(since we started keeping time) a day is 1 rotation of the earth on its axis, 1 year is 1 eliptical path arround the sun. a day is 24 hours(not exactly) a year is 365 days(not exactly). when i say that its a measurement what is it really a measurement of? its a measurement of the passage of existance. just like a yard and a foot and an inch it was devised by humans. we know that we are mortal from watching people die(cease to exist). time to a mortal is of a limited supply(70-80 years and depending on your history it varries). knowing that life is the progress toward an inevitable death is a motivating factor for people to do things.
“you don’t have week day to get that homework done”
everyone is conscious of time to some extent. other things we are conscious of are our perceptions/conceptions(experiances). we are aware that we are conscious physical communicating animals. consciousness is inate in humans. we all feel pleasure and pain and we all have senses. our senses are what allow us to experiance(form perceptions of) our environment. our bodies interaction with its environment is the source of our pleasure and pain, this re-affirms our physicality.
knowing that dreams are quite different than the reality i experiance while awake(dreams have no physical consequences) only further re-affirms that, what i experiance while conscious, is in fact real and there are consequences.
now that weve established that we(humans) are a conscious/mortal/being.
we can realize that the only thing that changes in life is your age and the experiances we have during life. so that effectively means that the only thing that changes in life is life itself. as the only things that makes up our lives are our experiances.
If all we have is our experiances/possesions and our thoughts/memories of these experiances/use of these possesions we better have as many good ones as possible. communication is another type of experiance we can have while conscious. this is where we share our memories and thoughts through are diverse languages. beginning of life= birth(1st experiance) life = progress toward death(many diverse experiances) end of life = death(last experiance)
while conscious can you control your bodies movement throught your environment? certainly(speed / terrain limited by your physical potential)
can you tell the difference between your different experiances? certainly( your body/mind allows you to recognize perceptions and associate them with past experiances(memories)) what do i mean by associate? differentiate. you can also communicate your thoughts about these experiances(limited by memory).
the communication of different ideas is what stimulates the mind to form different or similar ideas. we have our assumption, and some of them are right and some are wrong. the ability to reason from past experiance is a trait we all have. when we decide to do anything its for a specific reason.
why do i eat? to live, to feed me.
Why do i drink? to live , to hydrate me.
why do i breathe? to live, to get air for me.
why do i do anything else? for fun and money.
my will is my only motivation; we all have a co-incedental will, as we all exist in this moment (its just that humans have a limited capacity for perception/conception/action) aka we can’t all see everyone/everything at the same time(closer to the opposite).
that said, we are all free to make what we each may of our lives, but that said every action has its consequences. the reason why we need laws is exactly the freedom i just layed out. its exaclty why anarchie would never work. if there were no judicial reprecusions for anything think of your next car accident. insurance companies would not exist. Government would not exist(more lost jobs). People could riot in the streets with no worries other than survival(sounds civilized)
we need time because we are civilized (we have deadlines and commitments) we need laws because were civilized(we have people who realize how free they are and take advantage of the niave. consciousness and memory and insight come together to form deception and honesty. truth and fiction and preference. insight is what we attempt at when we try to choose the future. it can result in success or failure or plesasure or pain. these all come after we experiance a reaction to environmental stimuli.
experiance provokes perception/thought and thought provokes belief and motivation and (if a decision is made) experiance.
better have fun while it lasts
Interesting. I have a different conception of time, so I’ll try to explain myself as best as I can.
Granted, we are able to measure something called “time”. Let’s call this chronological time, so we will not get confused, for now. Are we able to measure the time that we perceive as tommorrow and yesterday? I don’t know of any measuring instrument that can do this. Suppose there was a person without any memory, does time exist for him? Surely it does, since we are able to measure time. However, there is a different kind of time. This time is your personal time; the kind of time we create in our minds that allows us to say “yesterday” and “tommorrow”. This is not chronological time, and is the time that I was talking about.
Do you understand the difference between these two conceptions of time?
the past is an experiance we’ve had, the present is the experiance we’re having, the future is the experiance we could have. time is a man made measurement, time is what we say we measure in hours and min. and sec.
just like we measure length in inches, feet, meters, centimeters ect.
like i said before time is a neccesity for a civilized society(because we have deadlines).
Are we able to measure the time that we perceive as tommorrow and yesterday? this question does not make any sense. what do tomorrow and yesterday have to do with time? well, yesterday passed(already happened) tomorrow is yet to come(we havent experianced tomorrow yet)
does time exist for someone without a memory?
time is a human conception, time in the sense of it being the measurement of the progress of existance, passes for everyone whether or not we are aware of it. whether or not you believe it time is going to pass equally for everyone. (when i arrive late for work its my fault for not
being aware of the time)
time is what it is; personal time is also refered to as our liesure time(aka time in which we have no obligations)
the kind of time we create in our minds that allows us to say “yesterday” and “tommorrow”. This is not chronological time, and is the time that I was talking about.
as a day passes i become aware that night is coming(as a result of the earths rotation) as night passes i become aware that another day is coming(as a result of the earth rotation)
id love for you to tell me what this other conception of time really is?
Can you clarify what you mean by time is a man made measurement? Are you refering to just chronological time? Surely time existed before any kind of measuring device, and would still exist even if we were unable to measure it with a kind of device. What I mean by this other conception of time is this: you can, right now, be thinking of what you did an hour ago, but it is not an hour ago chronologically. So, this thinking creates a conception of a time, other than chronological, that is similar to what you would maybe call personal, or leisure, time.
I have this timeline, in my head, of what happened and what might happen in the future. However, in this moment, the past or future does not exist, so this conception of time is an illusion. It only exists in our thoughts. That is what I mean by this other kind of time.
Your body will die, and with it your mind. Therefore, anything you experience is like a square witnessed from afar. The Square is but a circle, and thus your experiences must be judged accordingly, i.e. nothing is “real”.
The only things that are real are eternal, things that can not be proven, things that require faith. Thus, reality is only in your mind, and we both know where that will be in 100 years. 
What do you mean that reality is in the mind? Everyone, after perception, creates a different framework of the way they see things around them. Is this what you mean? In that case, the reality created by the mind is just an illusion, since it is not perfect and many other people see this illusion differently. If reality is anything, then everyone should perceive it equally. This is the kind of reality I was refering to; universal truth.
What is real?
That which is apparent.
(i.e. Pigs apparent can’t fly)
I agree, but how do you know what you see is the real thing; not just some kind of illusion created by the mind? Appearances are deceiving.
whats the difference between a dream and a conscious experiance? (consequences)
memory is not as time machine. you have a memory which allows you to call to mind “past” experiances. memory is not a different conception of time its a
way recalling an experiance which happened some time in the past. (quit the childish banter)
valdas , its seems to me that your being in a philosophy forum would imply an intrest in philosophy(then it just occured to me that your obviously here for nothing more than word games)
I agree, but how do you know what you see is the real thing; not just some kind of illusion created by the mind? Appearances are deceiving.
jump off a cliff and tell me if the trauma your body experiances is just an illusion/ drop the act if you looked at peoples points with an open mind you may learn something.
This is what I meant. We all perceive the world differently, but why? Why must there be different perceptions of the world? How do we know that our perception is not false?
For example, a women is looking at me in an interested look, but how do I know that she is interested? How do I know if she is thinking of me or something else? Is there a way to know? What happens is the mind then formulates all kinds of ideas about the situation; a kind of personal reality.
There must be a universal perception from which we can all see the world from.
we all percieve the world in the same way;through our senses. the only difference is the location of our body. what your talking about is our conception. thinking is distinct from sense perception. they are each a different faculty of the mind.
that said, our information that we use to form our ideas, thougths and beliefs are aquired through sense perception. If i see a woman from a distance i may or may not(depending on the distance between me and her) be able to see where she is looking. If i can see that she and i made eye contact there are other things (besides an intrest of hers in me) that could explain this.
She could have been looking at the T.V behind me, it may be coincedence that her eyes glanced past my eyes as i was observing her looking arround the room, or in fact she may have noticed me and was intentianally trying to make eye contact to show a sign of interest.
After saying that there is only one way to find out for certain; go talk to her. If after you approach her and attempt to make conversation she has a disinterested attitude she may not want to talk at all.
We may all have different thoughts about different instances or events or circumstances or consequences which result from specific happening in our environment but the fact is we all live in the same world and our senses give us the ability to differentiate objects and phenomona from each other. That said the root of all falsity is either misperception(a misinterpertation of sensory data as a result of stimuli being out of range) or misconception( a misunderstanding of the relationships different things have with each other as a result of a misapplication of reason)
if i see john from a distance and find out upon closer inspection that its not john but its charlie, i can attribute the falsity of my assumption to my sense perception.
if i think that i can fly, i can attribute the falsity of my assumption to my thinking.
oh yah, only through experiance/experiments can we prove our assumptions correct or false. that said we are all the same kind of animal and through communication we can learn from each others experiance.
sorry for the long winded post;