What is time?

[Overdog]

I will say this, Doctordick, it appears to me that your approach embraces objectivism, but leads you to conclusions that sound like some form of constructivism...

To me, that seems rather remarkable.

[AnssiH]

Originally Posted by modest

When solving a problem of special relativity you see how the present instant is a construct or confluence of things. It's an extrapolation of ideas - not so much something that's real in and of itself. I would think you'd agree with this

If you're looking for a way to disprove or maybe question relativity, this is not a good way to go about it. The present instant is completely unobservable. There is nothing conceptually that prevents two people from having different present instants - even if they are not spatially separated. It is easily implied by relativity that it is necessary for them to have different present instants.

As it's conceptually possible and impossible to disprove with observation - it's not a good way to attack the theory.

I'm not looking to disprove or attack relativity as far as its predictionwise validity goes, I think I've mentioned this a few times.

The reason I've brought up relative simultaneity was to make people (some who were not familiar with that concept), to think about it from the ontological perspective, and realize that there are many ways to view relativity. To realize that one of the most common views - Minkowski's static spacetime - can't be objectively defended as valid ontological interpretation.

Seems like a good way to make people think of that issue is to make them imagine what does the world look like around them before they see it, according to relativity. That forces you to think because it is not a straightforward issue.

Unfortunately that often gets interpreted as if I'm trying to point out a logical flaw in relativity. If you look at post #408 where I brought up relativistic simultaneity, you can see how I just comment on how it caused people to interpret relativity in terms of static spacetime, and how it is not really necessary to interpret things that way.

i.e. when I refer to the possibility of understanding reality in terms of absolute simultaneity, I am not advancing any new theory. I am just talking about a different way to plot/understand the exact same information.

And the point of all that was to relax some assumptions people almost always make in their mind regarding the relationship between ontological reality and the way they understand reality. To make people look at their worldviews in terms of defined entities, whose ontological existence is unknown (including spacetime). So that it would be easier to comprehend that there always exists many different ways to model/communicate the same raw data. And to prepare them better to understand what DD's analysis is about. To understand it can be valid even when it doesn't operate with the components that people believe reality is made of.

(And like I said before, even though DD's analysis does not explicitly give you any answers as to what is reality really like, it does show that many aspects that are usually thought of part of how the universe "just is", are in fact consequences of defining any sort of raw data in a specific way, implying strongly that we are talking about completely imaginary constructs. How much these constructs correspond to actual reality is unknown)

But, no, I don't think the average expert in relativity would tell you the present instant or a world line or the lorentz factor, or many other things that represent the method of solving a transformation are necessarily ontologically real.

Nor should they, because it would essentially be an assumption. At the back of their mind they probably make some interpretation, but they don't communicate it if they recognize many interpretations can be made, and they all include some very unintuitive aspects.

Originally Posted by Overdog

The reason I posted that is because it seems to me the debate is being waged from points of view which are seperated by an epistimological paradigm shift. Perhaps some insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the two perspectives would be helpful.

Well, we have probably once all been what's called "naive realist", i.e. we tacitly assume world is the way we perceive it. Slowly we come to realize it's not so simple. I suppose that's the first step for a constructivist. I guess the last step is to realize that "to discover something about reality" is to interpret something in some specific way.

I've talked with realists who strongly oppose my view, but when pushed agree that it may be possible that many valid models can always explain the raw data. But they still believe that hidden underneath is reality that really does consist of "fundamental parts", i.e. that one's worldview could perfectly co-incide with the way reality ontologically exists. (As oppose to just being one of all the possible "perfectly aligned representations" of the reality)

Even so, the problem remains that there's no way to tell. To me, such a belief is much like believing there exists particles that do not interact with any things we can observe. I.e. that there are universes that could never be detected. Rather moot belief if you ask me.

Furthermore, what makes that belief rather unreasonable from my perspective (albeit not impossible) is that it seems quite clear, that in order to predict anything, we have to conceive some features of reality as "same object" through time; i.e. to classify some data in terms of "objects" seems to be part of the model construction process. When people discuss "ontologically fundamental entities", I just always wonder "well who defined those things as "entities" before we did?"

That applies to our views on time (and space).

I think understanding DD's analysis would be easier for a constructivist. For example, note the exchange between Modest & DD about "past" and "future". I would like to re-iterate that DD is referring to that "undefined data" all the time. I should clarify this for the benefit of Modest too;

Originally Posted by Doctordick

It appears that you are asserting that there exists things in the past which you do not know, but that idea presumes that you understand reality.

I.e. we have thus far learned some amount of "raw data", and our worldview "explains it". That explanation fills in certain blanks (we assume certain things have happened because of how we conceive the world). Different explanations are obviously allowed to fill those blanks differently.

When you (modest) say there exists things in the past that you do not know, you are referring to things filled in by your worldview, but not things that exist in the raw data. Whatever you learn about past when you are sitting in a history lecture, is new raw data that is learned exactly there; while sitting in the history lesson. That you are capable of interpreting that data in the form of "account of something that happened in the past", is because you have that worldview which places the data as something referring to your past.

That is very important distinction when you want to analyze epistemological constructs objectively.

-Anssi

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by AnssiH

....I think understanding DD's analysis would be easier for a constructivist.

Yes, I agree, and also someone extremely mathematically-minded. Although it is beyond my abilities to follow his logic in it's mathematical form, I think I am beginning to sense that if constructivism didn't exist, understanding his analysis might well force people into the kind of thinking that might ultimately lead to something like it. I don't know.

In my opinion, constructivist ideas have not penetrated nearly as deep into the physical sciences as they have in the social sciences. Perhaps there is a good reason for this.

[Little Bang]

Doesn't ontology sort of imply that consciousness has something to do with reality? Metaphysics seems like a lukewarm way to give meaning to the observed universe.

[Overdog]

Ontology is the study of being or existence and its basic categories and relationships. It seeks to determine what entities can be said to "exist", and how these entities can be grouped according to similarities and differences. Ontology is distinguished from epistemology, the study of knowledge and what can be known.

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities that have being. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name beings but provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a collection of either objects or events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and god, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

Ontology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think you may be confusing Ontology with Constructivism...an epistemological point of view.

Constructivism
Constructivism is a philosophical position that views knowledge as the outcome of experience mediated by one's own prior knowledge and the experience of others. In contrast to objectivism (e.g. Ayn Rand, 1957) which embraces a static reality that is independent of human cognition, constructivism (e.g. Immanuel Kant, 1781/1787) holds that the only reality we can know is that which is represented by human thought. Each new conception of the world is mediated by prior-constructed realities that we take for granted. Human cognitive development is a continually adaptive process of assimilation, accommodation, and correction (Piaget, 1968). Social constructivists (e.g. Berger and Luckmann, 1966) suggest that it is through the social process that reality takes on meaning and that our lives are formed and reformed through the dialectical process of socialization. A similar dialectical relationship informs our understanding of science (e.g. Bloor, 1976), and it shapes the technical artifacts that we invent and continually adapt to our changing realities (e.g. Bijker, 1995). Humans are shaped by their interactions with machines just as machines evolve and change in response to their use by humans. (Lemke, 1993).

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/s...constructivism

Constructivism

[AnssiH]

Originally Posted by Little Bang

Doesn't ontology sort of imply that consciousness has something to do with reality?

I am a bit uncertain what you are asking about, but let it be said that certainly we attempt to build an explanation for "consciousness" or "subjective experience" as part of our worldview. And with that topic too, I do see people regularly constraining themselves by some undefendable assumptions that only exist in their particular worldviews.

For example, the "hard problem of consciousness" is partially caused by the assumption that reality is ontologically a set of tiny fundamental entities just like we conceive it; that leads one to wonder how can a huge collection of those tiny fundamental entities together have one subjective experience; why don't the smaller pieces have a subjective experience by themselves? Or what is it with a certain "colony of things" that causes it to have one collective subjective experience? Why doesn't an ant colony, or the New York traffic system have a subjective experience, or does it?

Here's an old post with some commentary about that particular conundrum;
Subjective experience

If I'm allowed to expand on that little bit, though now I'm forced to speak entirely through my personal worldview; If you wonder what could then be the requirements that a "process" must meet for it to be "subjective experience" (since obviously we define "processes" ourselves, like the NY Traffic System, and we can do that in a completely free and overlapping fashion), it is interesting to note that our subjective experience seems to be entirely composed of an interpretation of the sensory data; interpretation according to a self-built model of reality. A rock falling down a hill is hardly conceiving its situation through a model of reality; it has hardly defined a "rock" and "hill" from some data. (Nor has the NY Traffic System )

Not only that; the model always includes an identified "self"; data is always interpreted in terms of something happening to one's "self"... ...except maybe when we are infants, in which case we could never have any memories of what happened to ourself at that time, since the data was never interpreted as such... Which is just a specific explanation for infant amnesia.

Okay, hopefully some of that had something to do with what you were asking... ...because it most definitely had very little to do with the topic of this thread

-Anssi

[modest]

Overdog, how would you describe time?

~modest

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by modest

Overdog, how would you describe time?

~modest

A concept which may or may not have any objective reality.

[modest]

Originally Posted by Overdog

A concept which may or may not have any objective reality.

Can you define the concept?

~modest

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by modest

Can you define the concept?

~modest

It is a concept of duration, but...

...defining time in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars...

Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

These are the two main sides of the debate, as I see it...

Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[4][5] The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[6] and Immanuel Kant,[7][8] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable.

Edit:

I do not go as far as to claim that time does not have objective reality, merely that I don't know and don't know how I could know.