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Post 60

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - 4:57amSanction this postReply
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“What if Time Really Exists?” – Sean M. Carroll (2008)



Post 61

Thursday, April 30, 2009 - 9:47pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Stephen. Downloaded Carroll's essay. Will read soon.

Jordan

Post 62

Monday, May 4, 2009 - 3:28pmSanction this postReply
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The Carroll essay was not very good. It failed to respond to McTaggart and further failed to justify the proposition, "time exists." It was, instead, mostly concerned with time's arrow, and his points to that end were not terribly insightful.

Jordan


Post 63

Saturday, January 30, 2010 - 4:33amSanction this postReply
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Add to #33 (Earman/Maudlin) and #43 (Tooley) and #60 (Carroll):

The View from Nowhen: The McTaggart-Dummett Argument for the Unreality of Time
Kevin Falvey
Philosophia (2010)


Can Physics Coherently Deny the Reality of Time?
Richard Healey (In Time, Reality & Experience, edited by Craig Callender, Cambridge 2002.)

Introduction
"The conceptual and technical difficulties involved in creating a quantum theory of gravity have led some physicists to question, and even in some cases to deny, the reality of time. More surprisingly, this denial has found a sympathetic audience among certain philosophers of physics. What should we make of these wild ideas? Does it even make sense to deny the reality of time? In fact physical science has been chipping away at common sense aspects of time ever since its inception. Section 1 offers a brief survey of the demolition process. Section 2 distinguishes a tempered from an extremely radical form that a denial of time might take, and argues that extreme radicalism is empirically self-refuting. Section 3 begins an investigation of the prospects for tempered radicalism in a timeless theory of quantum gravity."

1. How Physics Bears on the Reality of Time

2. The Perils of Parmenides

3. The Timelessness of Canonical Quantum Gravity


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PS (Re: #64 below)

No, Jordon, for now we need to go to a library or buy that book.
(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 1/30, 10:58am)


Post 64

Saturday, January 30, 2010 - 9:39amSanction this postReply
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Any place to find the second essay in full, online, for free?

Jordan

Post 65

Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 11:02amSanction this postReply
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Stephen,

Sorry for the belated response.

I have my RoR preferences page set up to catch and retrieve only the last 99 forum posts, and I must've been away from RoR for long enough where your question was rotated off of the latest 99 posts. In other words, I never saw it.

Under the principle that late is better than never -- and that the future comes into existence (from 100% potentiality: a version of non-existence):


**************
Do you think that all relations are abstract? Do you think that all relations require consciousness in order for the relations to hold?
**************

No. The relations are there and are the facts or the aspects of reality regardless of our conscious awareness. This is what makes our definitions "factual" (rather than mere, heuristic tools used only in order to compartmentalize knowledge).

Think of a unicorn. A unicorn doesn't "really" exist (except in your mind), yet we can have true definitions of unicorns. We can even evaluate something for its "unicorn-status." A horse without a horn, is ne'er a unicorn -- one might say. And those with a horn in the right spot, are.

Our ability to think and to talk about unicorns does not make them "real" -- even though we can be 100% accurate about them. We understand the necessary relation of a unicorn with its horn, even though the unicorn is only a mental existent -- not a real entity.


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I have held for a long time that the membership relation of concepts and sets is only an abstract relation, not a concrete relation. But I hold that there are also relations that are concrete. There are concrete relations that are perceived and concrete relations that are discerned by abstract thought. Perceived relations would include some relations of proximity, containment, and similarity. Some other similarities, such as that between a water circuit and an electrical circuit, are accessible only by abstraction.
****************

I take a different view. Even if the relation of something to something else can only be known on an abstract level of thought -- as long as it refers to things real -- I take that relation to really exist (in a real, metaphysical sense of "existence"). The relation holds because it has reality and is more than merely abstract -- even though the only way that humans can epistemologically discover this metaphysical relation -- is through abstract means.


****************
The fact that the temporal relation that is the future must be known through abstraction (except for the sense of the future-front of experience), does not mean that the relation itself is not a concrete one existing independently of consciousness.
****************

This is sort of like what I just said. I agree with its structural logic. Relations which can be known only abstractly don't have to be only abstract (they can be concrete relations independent of consciousness). But, for another reason, I disagree with the conclusion that the future is real.

I "see" the future as having 0% actuality (0% ontological status) -- even if it is always tied to the past. Think of the lottery. If you buy a ticket, and win, then your future winnings were inescapably related to your past purchase of the ticket. Your winning never existed though, until it finally existed. It wasn't real until it happened. On this note I end with the playful quip:

Show me the money.

:-)

Ed


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Post 66

Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 11:08amSanction this postReply
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Jordan,

**************
But their relations to each other don't change: A future is always "ahead of" a present is always "ahead of" a past. That's why he calls this, his A-series, non-relational.
**************

But a relation is, precisely, an unchanging changing (a changing or an effect that doesn't, itself, change). Think of the gravitational relation of objects to the earth. What makes it a real and knowable relation is that the relation itself (9.8m/s^2) doesn't change.

And if it always randomly changed, then we'd say that there isn't any relation at all.

Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 1/31, 3:29pm)


Post 67

Sunday, January 31, 2010 - 12:47pmSanction this postReply
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Hi Ed,

It'd help if you'd read my post again, and more if you'd actually read McTaggart's essay.

Jordan


Post 68

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - 12:26pmSanction this postReply
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I'm sorry for the late response, Jordan.

Ed


Post 69

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - 2:17pmSanction this postReply
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No worries. I'll likely have more to add to this thread after I finish with the Falvey essay that Stephen linked.

Jordan

(Edited by Jordan on 2/03, 2:33pm)


Post 70

Monday, February 8, 2010 - 9:58amSanction this postReply
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I read Falvey. Falvey defends Dummett who (boiling it down) interprets McTaggart as endorsing tenseless logic. I disagree with Falvey that McTaggart did. I would argue that McTaggart's view allows for tensed logic, which I believe doesn't require time as McTaggart construes it.

Falvey further defends McTaggart against the claim, by Lowe, that McTaggart is guilty of an indexical fallacy. E.g., it's just as weird to say "future in the past" as it is to say "in front of me behind me." I agree with Falvey here. The indexicalities might be awkward, but they still suffer the same infinite regress that McTaggart pointed out.

Jordan

Post 71

Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 5:02amSanction this postReply
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The following paper is supplementary to #16. It has just been published in Philosophy of Science 78(5):1082–95.

How Accurate is the Second?
Eran Tal

In future work on Rand’s theory of concepts, I will want to consider certain elements treated in this paper possibly pertinent to measurement-analysis of objective concepts and their rational reformations.


Post 72

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 - 2:52amSanction this postReply
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Experience and the Passage of Time
Bradford Skow

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Post 73

Tuesday, October 27 - 5:47amSanction this postReply
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Legend has it that the last words of Goethe were “More light!”

 

At the university named after him, in Frankfurt am Main, physicists have used light (X-rays, really) to measure an episode of time down at the bits of time in the zone of 10-to-the-minus-21 seconds.

 

In particular 247 zeptoseconds.



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