What is time?

[Little Bang]

The one thing which gives us a clue to time is that the acceleration of a particle slows it's clock whether its force that accelerates it or gravity that does the acceleration. I think this explains gravity and inertia as stated in, http://hypography.com/forums/physics...with-time.html . Time has a bearing on a magnetic field in that how we see the field is relative to our motion with respect to that field. I suspect this has something to do with how we see the photon in that we see it as having both an electric and magnetic component.

[Michael Mooney]

Hey, y'all... don't "make me" start a thread on subjective idealism as the philosophical basis for time as reified by relativity!

Anybody here think there is no "sound" when a tree falls in the forest unless "someone" is there to hear it?
We have been here before.
Air is compressed to make "sound waves" (call them what you will) when the tree falls, whether any eardrums oscillate or brains register a "crashing sound."

Likewise, if there were no clocks or observers measuring event duration, would the universe simply freeze up and cease to have movement/change? (Rhetorical question!)
Can we "get real" about this subject, as mature and thinking "philosophers of science"?
Michael

[AnssiH]

Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve

Michael, I agree with you too. I was using a 'rainbow' as in, "Hey Michael, let's go slide down that rainbow over there!"

AnsiH used it too, although he immediately wished he hadn't - perhaps because a rainbow is sensed and references something external, whereas time and energy are pure abstractions and directly reference nothing external to ourselves.

That's not why actually

I was originally referring to a rainbow as an example of something that we refer to in our mind as "one persistent thing", when at the same time we know that ontologically there is no such "one persistent thing" there. Every person sees a rainbow in different location for one, and think about what would be the meaning of saying that the rainbow has got persistent identity to itself over time? It's different "stuff" all the time. It is much like a spot of "shadow", just a persistent pattern in our view, but we still call it "shadow" and label it as the "same persistent thing" over time.

Epistemologically speaking, what we call "the rainbow", is a huge avalanche of specific "patterns" (or "features" or "noumena" or whatever you'd want to call it) in some raw data. I.e. it is all just a matter of defining something to mean "the rainbow".

So when I say "rainbow does not exist ontologically", I do not mean that when we see a rainbow, it is somehow just an illusion out of "nothingness"... I mean, it is completely up to us whether we have defined such and such pattern TO MEAN ANYTHING. I.e. rainbows exist inside our epistemological constructs, because we have defined them. But if there is no one there to say "this means rainbow", there does not exist "rainbows" as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about". (Michael, this is what I mean by sounds not existing ontologically; that we do not know what they are ontologically, even when we have defined such and such patterns to mean "sounds")

And, the reason I regretted making that rainbow example was because people might jump to think it is just these special kinds of "observer dependent" objects that are "erroneously thought to have ontological identity". It is important that the reader understands, that absolutely ANY object you can have a perception of, or even think about, is a case of having defined some data pattern to MEAN THAT THING.

Think about how we could, in theory, define almost any sort of pattern to mean "an object X", just however our hearts desire. What is there to stop us? Take a little corner of that box and little piece of that wall and some portion of air, and call that "schlabuuga". Probably very useless definition predictionwise, but just as valid ontologically as any other definition for all we know; it's just bunch of patterns.

At the end of the day, whatever pattern you define to mean this or that is not important by itself for prediction ability. What really matters is that your set of definitions as a whole does not run into self-conflict. I.e. whatever your worldview is like, it must be self-coherent. And of course valid in that it actually makes correct predictions.

The ability to make correct predictions about reality does not tell you that your model of reality is exactly how ontological reality is. There always exists many ways to model the same data (via different definitions), and you can never tell which one of those models is correct (that information simply is not available to us). What matters more is that reality is modeled in some self-coherent way, and it is those definitions that give you your expectations in the terminology of your own world-view.

I first came to think about this in the context of AI, trying to figure out how could an AI come to build a world conception that would tell it "how things evolve" around it, i.e. that would allow it to make meaningful predictions. I certainly don't know what reality is like around me, but I know how the things I have defined will behave. But I cannot enforce my definitions on it, as it needs to be able to pick up on new definitions when it comes across new patterns. If you think about it, you can see that there always exists many ways to see any situation, that all yield meaningful predictions. And the ontological correctness of that interpretation never comes into play at all.

Note that the ability to make correct predictions in multitude of valid ways is evident every day in our ability of semantics. Semantics is a case of understanding the same exact data in terms of very different (internally self-coherent) concepts and entities, and yielding equally useful predictions. Same thing is evident in all the different QM interpretations etc...

And I find it particularly telling, that to this day some of the most respected people from the field of "philosophy of the mind" are convinced that a mechanical system can never become capable of understanding semantics. To me, that issue has become quite simple; it is a consequence of modeling unknown data in self-coherent way, as oppose to somehow "correctly". And DD's work is the description of exactly that mechanism.

Now I would invite the reader to continue from that note over to:
http://hypography.com/forums/philoso...tml#post276228

-Anssi

[Michael Mooney]

Soooo... AnssiH, correct me if I'm wrong but I hear you saying (regarding "what is time?') that it's all semantics and it's all in our heads.
You say:
[QUOTE]But if there is no one there to say "this means rainbow", there does not exist "rainbows" as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about". (Michael, this is what I mean by sounds not existing ontologically; that we do not know what they are ontologically, even when we have defined such and such patterns to mean "sounds")[/QUOTE

"Rainbow" is of course just an English noun. But the phenomenon of light refraction, as seen from a precise angle to the sun relative to various observers (not of course "in the same place" for each observer) is an observable phenomena in nature. In that sense the phenomenon described above, regardless of its label as a "rainbow" (in any language... or a "made-up" language) "exist" in a way that "time" does not.... as a phenomenon/medium which "dilates" etc.

Obviously speeding clocks slow down relative to other clocks at lower velocities. No argument about that. The jump from that fact (assuming we agree on the meaning of "clock","velocity", etc.) to "therefore time itself 'dilates'" is one of the major points of debate here at hand.
So if we are going to communicate intelligently about the "sound of the tree falling with no one around to hear it" (classical subjective idealism example) we must begin by agreeing that there is, when a tree falls, a compression of air into waves which we call "sound"(or whatever!) whether anyone experiences the sound or not. When a tree falls anywhere in earth atmosphere, it generates such an air compression-into -waves phenomenon. (period.)

If you will not grant that point, then we can forget about serious scientific discussion of the subject "what is time?" if it is all semantics and all in our heads.

So then you can say, with the subjective idealists, "There is no cosmos 'out there', cuz it is all in our heads." (What heads?? There are heads but no cosmos?? )This is the height of absurdity, and all scientific inquiry into the nature of "the world/cosmos" would be rendered entirely futile by such a philosophy.

Michael

[ldsoftwaresteve]

AnsiH

:"What really matters is that your set of definitions as a whole does not run into self-conflict. I.e. whatever your worldview is like, it must be self-coherent. And of course valid in that it actually makes correct predictions"

Ok. That seems to be the jist of what you are talking about.

But here we are talking about Time. The link between DoctorDicks mathematics and Time is that he uses it as a placeholder for what some would call 'Time Slices' (which is necessary because they think time has ontologoical reality and has to be sliced up).

But, DD's math was such that he has concluded that Time does not have ontological reality - and I agree with that. He arrived at that from a different direction than I. He used mathematics and I had the benefit of a different worldview (McCutcheon's). With respect to understanding Time, my way seems to be a lot simpler. Assuming our idea of Time is accurate, then the mathematics that identifies that is very special and anyone calling themselves a mathematician should dive in and either agree with it or disprove it.

You use the concept of 'self-coherent' in discussing this. But isn't that really the application of logic to identify contradicting identifications (patterns)? And you use 'on the whole', meaning, within the worldview one pattern definition cannot or should not contradict another. The implication in contradiction identification is that there is a common thread between two identifications (patterns). And that seems like it is going to be an abstraction or a pattern within two patterns and one does not quite agree with the other when it should.

To turn that into functions that could be understood or used in software or firmware you'll need to identify every logical fallacy type and make it part of the housekeeping processes - unless you have abstracted a pattern in all logical fallacies and can short circuit that.

And I get the idea of 'rainbow' being a pattern. In a sense, it's a good example because you have to be in the right place to see it. It doesn't have a back or side and you certainly cannot slide down it. So it pops out as something different. It doesn't fit into my idea of a toaster or a slice of bread and it's even different than a cloud.

[Little Bang]

Amen Micheal, but I would disagree on one point. I think clocks are dilated not because of their motion with respect to the observer but due to their acceleration with respect to the observer.

[Michael Mooney]

Originally Posted by Little Bang

Amen Micheal, but I would disagree on one point. I think clocks are dilated not because of their motion with respect to the observer but due to their acceleration with respect to the observer.

This brings us back to the question "what 'dilates'?"
My position all along (through the tedious "spacetime" thread) has been that time is not an entity that can speed up or slow down, but rather that clocks do that as they are accelerated to different velocities.... that the different forces of accelleration (change of inertia) effect their rates of "timekeeping", not that there are different "local time environments" (my quotes) for each locus or trajectory of each moving clock... which the clocks simply monitor.

I got tired of arguing this point with Modest, so I simply speak of different clock velocities... with the implicit understanding that they have different velocities because they were/are subjected to different forces of acceleration**... even if that difference is simply because of differences in altitude ( velocity relative to earth's center.)

** Google "momentary co-moving reference frame (MCRF) " The"trick" to saying that velocity alone, not acceleration, accounts for differences in timekeeping is indeed the "slices of time" concept in which, at a given *instant*, the force of acceleration is negligible so it can be ignored in the calculu0us-like math applied to the MCRF context.

Michael

[AnssiH]

Originally Posted by Michael Mooney

Soooo... AnssiH, correct me if I'm wrong but I hear you saying (regarding "what is time?') that it's all semantics and it's all in our heads.

No that is not quite what I am saying; there's quite a bit more to this. I'll get to that in a min, but there's something that first needs to be understood properly and I think went completely by you (and this will turn out to be important for the topic of time):

"Rainbow" is of course just an English noun. But the phenomenon of light refraction, as seen from a precise angle to the sun relative to various observers (not of course "in the same place" for each observer) is an observable phenomena in nature. In that sense the phenomenon described above, regardless of its label as a "rainbow" (in any language... or a "made-up" language) "exist" in a way that "time" does not.... as a phenomenon/medium which "dilates" etc.

Like I said;

Originally Posted by AnssiH

...I mean, it is completely up to us whether we have defined such and such pattern TO MEAN ANYTHING. I.e. light refraction exist inside our epistemological constructs, because we have defined it. But if there is no one there to say "this means light refraction", there does not exist light refraction as such, there only exists some unknown nature in some unknown form that one just can't even "think about".

I quoted myself, but I just replaced "rainbow" with "light refraction", and I expect you to understand why I could do that for any given argument one could have against this.

It is important that you understand this from the perspective of building a world model out of unknown information. Anything you refer to as "real" or "what exists" is exactly like that english noun "rainbow"; a shorthand reference to a familiar pattern. It is "observable" for the simple reason that a definition exists for that pattern. Still, you do not know explicitly, what gives rise to that phenomenon you have a name for, i.e. you do not know its ontological nature.

Your response is painfully typical though, people often like to inform me what something "really is" (rainbow is REALLY a light refraction, or sounds are REALLY compressing air), without taking into account that they are just referring to another pattern whose nature is just as unknown.

If you can follow the epistemological analysis, you will explicitly understand that the same patterns can be referred to via very many different sorts of "sets of definitions" (alternative worldviews), and the defense of one is simply a matter of having faith on specific undefendable assumptions.

And just to be sure;

So if we are going to communicate intelligently about the "sound of the tree falling with no one around to hear it" (classical subjective idealism example) we must begin by agreeing that there is, when a tree falls, a compression of air into waves which we call "sound"(or whatever!) whether anyone experiences the sound or not. When a tree falls anywhere in earth atmosphere, it generates such an air compression-into -waves phenomenon. (period.)

I am not talking about that at all; I am not saying that reality is somehow different whether we are there to observe it or not. I am saying, that our mental model of reality is different from how ontological reality is. This will turn out to be an important point to grasp, because it can be shown why our model of reality obeys relativistic time relationships, even while ontological reality holds no suchs features. (Understanding this fact properly has to do with understanding the consequences of defining unknown patterns into persistent objects, when no explicit information of "real objects" exists in the patterns)

Obviously speeding clocks slow down relative to other clocks at lower velocities. No argument about that. The jump from that fact (assuming we agree on the meaning of "clock","velocity", etc.) to "therefore time itself 'dilates'" is one of the major points of debate here at hand.

Indeed no argument about that, and I know for a fact that if you took the time to walk through DD's work, you would find it to be an exact explanation to the conundrum that you have in your mind, and yes it does point out explicitly that relativistic spacetime is an ontological concept that is just a matter of defining the data in such and such ways. (And defending its ontological reality is exactly like defending the ontological reality of any pattern we have an english noun for, albeit it is often defined via its associated concepts. Of course; it is part of a self-coherent set of definitions; the other definitions do "support it" if one takes them on faith)

Now, I know from your past posts that you agree on the validity of relativistic time relationships; I take it that is what your comment means that I just quoted. But you do not agree on the ontological interpretation that people make; the interpretation that says "time must be a real dimension of real minkowski spacetime" (or something akin to that).

Isn't it interesting though, that the relativistic time relationships are valid? If you are really interested of looking into how those relationships arise from self-coherence between defined persistent entities (and that consequently explains exactly why those clocks show a different reading without taking time as a real dimension at all), you should take a look at that "analytical-metaphysical" thread. You can take the assertions in the beginning on faith for time being, if you don't want to trace their validity yet. (Just remember, none of that is suggesting an ontology, all that is expressed are logical relationships, and they could be expressed via many arbitrarily chosen concepts that would look completely different)

You should realize though, that newtonian space is just as much a matter of defining data patterns in specific ways; you need to define some patterns to mean an object with persistent identity through an "evolution of data patterns", and that is when the meaning of "motion" arises, and that is when the meaning of "space" arises.

Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve

But here we are talking about Time. The link between DoctorDicks mathematics and Time is that he uses it as a placeholder for what some would call 'Time Slices' (which is necessary because they think time has ontologoical reality and has to be sliced up).

What he calls "time" in his treatment is an evolution parameter that is required for representing "change in one's knowledge". That's the initial premise in all its simplicity. I.e. this is not an ontological concept.

But further down in the analysis (via the symmetry requirements) it yields a way to express, what some set of information looks like after we succesfully (self-coherently; without changing its meaning) transform it from one coordinate system to another.

When you also include a construction that modern physics would call "a clock" (2 massive mirrors and 1 massless oscillator, where the definition of "mass" is arrived at via epistemological means), it is explicitly shown that the count this construction yields, as it has been defined, will depend on which coordinate system the construction is plotted in. The difference in that count is exactly the relativistic relationship (interested yet?), and you can see how it is completely a consequence of the underlying definitions that got us to define those mirrors and that massless oscillator in the first place (remember, they are based on patterns whose meaning we just do not know; we do not know what is the ontological identity of "the photon" or "the mirrors")

But that reading on those clocks is what people usually take as "time", i.e. people take it that the best information we have about time is via measuring it with clocks. And that leads to the idea that "time dilates". Oops.

Just to be sure, that is not a consequence of "the geometry of spacetime", nor is it a mechanical effect (~a clock under mechanical stress), albeit perhaps both could serve as an (undefendable) valid explanation. It is an effect of ordering unknown data patterns that way (for some very good reasons).

But, DD's math was such that he has concluded that Time does not have ontological reality - and I agree with that. He arrived at that from a different direction than I. He used mathematics and I had the benefit of a different worldview (McCutcheon's). With respect to understanding Time, my way seems to be a lot simpler.

Yes but then there is very different purpose behind DD's work, as it does actually display why relativistic time relationships are valid, for one. (I would not call it a philosophy per se, it's a bit more)

Assuming our idea of Time is accurate, then the mathematics that identifies that is very special and anyone calling themselves a mathematician should dive in and either agree with it or disprove it.

Yup.

You use the concept of 'self-coherent' in discussing this. But isn't that really the application of logic to identify contradicting identifications (patterns)? And you use 'on the whole', meaning, within the worldview one pattern definition cannot or should not contradict another. The implication in contradiction identification is that there is a common thread between two identifications (patterns). And that seems like it is going to be an abstraction or a pattern within two patterns and one does not quite agree with the other when it should.

To turn that into functions that could be understood or used in software or firmware you'll need to identify every logical fallacy type and make it part of the housekeeping processes - unless you have abstracted a pattern in all logical fallacies and can short circuit that.

Well you make it sound very complicated... At least the initial premise is very simple, it is just few symmetry arguments that are individually very easily expressed and understood mathematically, but it gets a bit complicated when all those constraints are to be expressed via single differential equation (his fundamental equation), and when you start to factor in the approximations that are normally made by modern physics so to arrive at specific expressions "about reality" (negligible feedback from the rest of the universe etc)

I hope this is helpful.

-Anssi

[HydrogenBond]

If time is a mental construct, then that implies the bending of space-time is only in the mind, since one is bending only a construct and not anything that is real. How can one bend something that is not even tangible? This is why I have argued, many times, that time has to be a thing or else we are only bending a construct (imagination).

Let me give an analogy. If we could catch a leprechaun we could get his pot of gold. The leprechaun is not a tangible thing, but only a construct of the imagination. If we bend the leprechaun and his gold, this is only occurring in the mind, since these are not tangible but only constructs of the mind. Only the mind is actually bending.

To make the leprechaun appear more tangible, let us plot (sketch) the leprechaun on paper and express the lines and contours with mathematics. We can use numerical methods and computers if straight math won't work. Now we have an image of the construct, we all can agree on, so we can bend him. But again, since he is not real but only a construct, we are only pretending to do something with reality.

Let us now build a real physical devices to bend the leprechaun. If we get any results that seem as predicted, does that mean we actually bent him, or have we simply bent the construct as it appear in math/paper?

Again ,I have tried to present time and space in terms of things so we when bend these things we are doing something real and not just on a construct. But I get into trouble for stressing the need for real.

To make time real, we need to look for something in nature that is expressing increments of the construct time. The frequency of energy quanta is one natural source. Time is not all of energy, just the frequency without wavelength. Now we have something to bend that is outside a mental construct. It is not the leprechaun any more.

[Michael Mooney]

I agree with HB, and you, AnssiH have once again avoided the question, "Is time only in our minds, only a semantic debate?"... or is there a difference between clocks keeping time differently under different conditions (forces of acceleration bringing them to different velocities) and "time itself" speeding up and slowing down?

You can do a full page of circumlocution around this question (and you have done several), but you have managed to completely dodge the challenge of "time reification" as a product of subjective idealism.

A rainbow is an observable phenomenon, regardless of what you call it. And science has a very good understanding of the spectral refraction which causes a rainbow. It is not an unknown but a very well understood phenomenon, regardless of the semantics.

"Time" is a very different ball-o-wax in that clocks obviously "keep time" differently under different and very well understood conditions, yet the jump to "time slowing down and speeding up" is a fallacy derived from the clocks keeping time differently.

You do not, in all your verbosity, address this issue, and as I see it, you don't even realize that you are not addressing this issue.

So, to "rewind" to a direct challenge you have completely avoided...
please respond to my baseline challenge above :

So if we are going to communicate intelligently about the "sound of the tree falling with no one around to hear it" (classical subjective idealism example) we must begin by agreeing that there is, when a tree falls, a compression of air into waves which we call "sound"(or whatever!) whether anyone experiences the sound or not. When a tree falls anywhere in earth atmosphere, it generates such an air compression-into -waves phenomenon. (period.)

If you will not grant that point, then we can forget about serious scientific discussion of the subject "what is time?" if it is all semantics and all in our heads.

So then you can say, with the subjective idealists, "There is no cosmos 'out there', cuz it is all in our heads." (What heads?? There are heads but no cosmos?? )This is the height of absurdity, and all scientific inquiry into the nature of "the world/cosmos" would be rendered entirely futile by such a philosophy.

If you see yourself as in dialogue on the subject of "what is time" then you must address such perspectives as I have repeatedly presented as above.

Is it all semantics and "in our minds" or are there observable "rainbows" (excuse the label... what would you call the phenomenon?). Is there there a difference between clocks (you know ... those timekeepers we have invented) slowing down and "time" slowing down.

How about a brief and to the point reply for a change. We have all been around the bush with you several times on all of this... while you insist that no one here besides DD understands the subtle implications of your persistent circumlocutions around the challenge to science's reification of time.
Michael