Time?

[hyphite]

can the direction of time be our perception?

[hyphite]

i think of time as frames. for example if u had a line with a length of X in the first dimension, and then a square with sides X in the second dimension would have an area of X^2. in the third dimension, a cube with sides X would have an area of X^3. in the fourth dimension, time, would be an X amount of cubes, each with an area of X^3. the total area of all the cubes would be X^4. each cube would be a frame of time in which the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (x, y, z) dimensions of any object in the cube could change from one cube to the next.

[AGThePoet]

The way i see it "time" does not exist. It is simply a mental thought created by us humans to create a schedule. What is "time"? It is not an object, it is an idea. That is why it is not possible to truly travel "through" time; you cannot move through something that does not exist. It is a notion, nothing more. You cannot hold, see, pass through, or truly even prove it's existence except as a measurement of the sun spinning around the Earth. Time does not exist in the sense that a apple does; You can see an apple, feel it, taste it. Time is in our imaginations. You can say that we can travelt through time because we are constantly doing so, even as I write this. However, if our notion of "time" had evolved as to the point where we percieve it as not moving, then the entire notion would be worthless and we would never even think about it. Everything that is real changes. Time does not. It is always the same, becuase it is not real.

There may be a "river" of tie, but it is not so much a river as a very small pond emerging just us and moving with us. You cannot leave the pond, much as you cannot leave the so called "river of time" that has been so popular amongst the masses. You cannot change the future because if you go into the future to change something then at the time you are at your present, though it may be the future compared to the place you just left.

Comments please

agthepoet

[Roberto]

I slightly disagree when you say that time does not exist because you can only measure it and not taste or see it. That´s because "see" and "taste" are only different kinds of measure.

We humans have limited instruments (our organs) to make measurements of natural things. See is a limited way of measuring the shape, size, color and distance of objects that emit light in a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Taste is a limited way of measuring the chemical components of a substance. So, our senses do not determine what exists, because they´re limited.

On the other way, I think that simply saying that time does not exist is a way of giving up the challenge to understand it. I do not think that your argument that we cannot travel in time implies that it does not exists because I cannot see the connection. Could you explain the argument better?

[AGThePoet]

It really is an abstract subject, and rather difficult to explain. Time is not a spacial dimension. It doesn't exist as a dimension that you can see and move through. The notion that we call "time" is really just a relization that all things happen in sequence to eachother. We can imagine that "time" is a river that we can swim in, it is impossible. We can slow the passing of it by going extremely fast, and perhaps stop it if we go the speed of light, but we cannot go beyond the speed of light (doesn't einstein say that?) and standing perfectly still won't slow it down.

One thing I noticed to enforce my belief that time is a perception and not a dimension is when I can stare at a clock and mentally get the seconds hand to slow down and speed by by slowing down and speeding up my perception of time. When you are bored time seems to go slow because you have nothing to think about except the time, and as you become aware if it's presence in a more vived way it seems to slow down.

When you said "our senses do not determine what exists, because they are limited," one could say that though we don't sense everything that is real, but everything that we sense is real. The second statement is true in the sense that everything we sense is real in the way that we sensed it, but not neccasarily in the way that we infer it to be. When you see a mirage of water in the desert, the image of the mirage is real but the inferred reality of water is false. The same thing can happen with time. Our perception of it is real, however the inferred conslusion that we can travel through it at will is false. Time is all in our imaginations, and you cannot travel into new places and times through pure imagination.

Alex

[KiNPiN]

"It doesn't exist as a dimension that you can see and move through."
no, you can move through time. you're right that it is not a spatial dimension, but it is a dimension.

[AkiraBakaBaka]

I just posted in the other Time thread, but this discussion is interesting too. In my other post I explain why I believe time does not exist.

Another idea that ocurred to me is that accepting the existence of time seemed to create more questions than it resolved. If the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model is true (quantumly, everything that *can* happen *does* happen, in a different universe) then this would mean there are almost an infinite number of universes all coinciding in space and time. How such a complex system would ever function seems rediculous to even contemplate.

To me, this approach creates a much overly complicated situation that is completely resolved if you simply accept that time does not exist, as observation would suggest (and complying to Occam's razor?).

Without time, all of the strange time travel paradoxes simply disappear.. without time there IS no time travel. This doesn't break Relativity or anything, as like I mentioned in the other post, math itself is a conceptual hallucination. It's very useful for inferring things from our universe, and time can still be used traditionally in equations, but is itself not Reality, and it's value is completely subjective.

Time-dilation (the odd fact that "time" moves slower the faster you are moving) almost seems to justify that time is a complete non-factor. Everything is seperated by the distance information must travel to begin with, so two people could *never* have exactly syncronized clocks without occupying the same space, which is impossible.

[wholloway]

Excellent Post!!

[Roberto]

We could concentrate our discussions about time in one thread, they are almost the same... it's time consuming to have to write almost the same answers two times...

Well, I do not see how just saying that time does not exists will solve the time travel paradoxes if you continue to use time in equations. It's possible to formulate the time paradoxes in a completely mathematical way, without reference to expressionss like "exist" or "does not exist". If the concept of time existing does not make difference, I would agree to cut it with Occam's razor, but, as I already said, what is your definiton of "exist". If we want to say time does not exist, we need to have a difference with things that do. What defines the existence of something?

[wholloway]

I would define something exists if we can sense it. Would that place memory as our 6th sense? Memory thus proving the passage of time. For a more scientific proof, we need "time" in order to have two objects occupy the same space. The fact that I can move one object, and replace it with another, proves there must be a fourth dimension. Otherwise all our usefull space would get filled up real quick.