Time to me is a conceptual instrument which uses symbolic representations between events that we hold subjectively to have meaning for ourselves or ourselves in the world. Nothing more.
Example:
The death of Julius Caesar is a symbolic representation of ourselves through the world of time which we have constructed to have some sort of meaning.
Being that the cosmos is indifferent or uncaring what does the cosmos “care” about Julius Caesar?
What does the death of Julius Caesar mean to the cosmos? Nothing at all.
Time was invented when the sun-dial was constructed. Before the sun dial there was no time.
Objective universal time doesn’t exist.
Example:
What was the date of existence before the creation of recording devices?
The answer. We can’t know. We will never know.
Time only exists through the constructed simulative realities that we have invented for ourselves through our individual or collective expiriences and that is about it.
Time is a product not a constant. Time was not discovered, it was invented.
Time differentials are man made. Without man there is no modeling or calculating of time where instead you would just have one eternal motion of static that is called existence.
In order to have time you need models and calculations. Without people there is no models or calculations.
Here’s how to think of time as an actual thing, as a dimension:
Take a basketball, a volleyball, and a bucket roughly the diameter of both.
Put the basketball in the bucket.
Take it out.
Put the volleyball in the bucket.
They both occupied the exact same spatial dimensions, but there had to be another dimension through which to travel so that they could occupy that same space: time. They can never occupy all the same dimensions, but they can occupy both occupy three of the four. That is, they can occupy the same three spatial dimensions at different times, or any two of the spatial and the one time, but never all of them together.
“Time” not existing doesn’t mean that everything happens at the same time. In this case it means that the only moment that exists right now is now and that time is not like a video-tape as you seem to suggest. (napoleon, etc. still existing somehow in the past) First its one way, then the other. Potentials play themselves out.
Thinking of time as the fourth dimension is a good way of abstracting it but can be misleading.
I didn’t say time was like a video tape. Even if we invented a time machine that’s not how it would be at all (watch the atheism episodes of South Park, specifically Cartman with his ‘time phone’).
If time doesn’t exist in the same way the three dimensions do, then how can we change our progression through it (time dilation)?
We could just as easily say the three dimensions don’t exist, and that there’s only reality. Objects don’t contain matter in the up down, left right, and back forth; they’re just blobs existing in a blob. But we can break that reality down into chunks: three spatial directions, and one time dimension. Change in the blob is simplified as time.
Varied rates of change caused by relativistic effects. As I said, change occurs at different rates depending on circumstances.
No, we couldn’t. In the three spatial dimensions we can go back and forth and occupy any space of it we will. There’s pretty good evidence for the reality of the three spatial dimensions. But has anyone ever occupied any other place in time except the present moment? There simply is no proof for the reality of past or future. As a mental construct it is exceedingly helpful, yet it is entirely unnecessary to assume that such a thing really exists.
Change then, acccording to you, is very real. So then, so is time. You just changed the word ‘time’ to ‘change’. If change is velocity and velocity is real so then are the components of velocity. Why would stuff slow down because you’re speeding up? This can only be explained by a shift in time, not a shift in velocity; it just wouldn’t make sense.
I’m just arguing that time does not exist as a dimension, that dinosaurs are not real. That the world is not 4D but rather 3D and that it only changes.
I haven’t really considered presentism in relation to relativity before and I must say, after reading a couple of articles I find my position considerably less certain.
I’ll have to think about it more. Thank you for your thoughts.
But something I have wondered about is this: Why would one moment in the (supposed) time-dimension have the special ontological status of being now?
I’d agree with that, that dinosaurs are not currently real. I would say that we’re still 4D, but that our direction in one dimension is always forced, no matter how quickly or slowly it is.
No idea. Time is a curious thing…I don’t pretend to understand it much beyond being pretty sure that it’s real. I could also be wrong about that, but I have my reasons for thinking that way. I’ll have to think about this one.
Time is simply the distance between events. I dont see that time should be said not to exist as much as distance or volume exists. Dates, seconds, etc are obviously human creations, but so are meters, litres etc. I dont think that time can be considered to not exist just because we have created the ways in which to measure it
