Does Time Pass? - Philosophy Tube
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- Is the passage of time a real or just an illusion? What would happen if time flowed backwards?
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Hi I just discovered your channel, it's fantastic!
You brought up Special Relativity and I agree, it does seem in support of B theory. However there's one thing I don't understand. Can B-theory work in a nondeterministic universe? After all, if the 'future' already exists, then isn't it already determined? I ask this because, what if Quantum Mechanics is correct and the world isn't deterministic? I asked a philosopher of physics about this once and he basically believed the only way out for B theory is if quantum mechanics is if fact deterministic (which may well be true, since Bohmian Mechanics is a deterministic model of Quantum Mechanics). Do you think there is another solution?
Also I was intrigued by the claim that causality cannot happen in the B universe. Theories of physics never actually have causality in them, that's just the extra layer physicists add on top. Still, when physicists talk about special relativity, causality is a big aspect (afterall, when you start messing with time you want to make sure you don't muck up causality). But if B-theory doesn't allow causality, are we just interpreting relativity completely wrong? Do you have a video on causality? Well, I'm about to go through all your videos anyway, so I'll find it. Great work, I'm really impressed!
This was an older comment 4 years back so you may have had your answer already. But let me give one just in case (I hold to A-Theory and Libertarian Free Will btw). In Philosophy one can distinguish between causal/explanatory or logical priority and temporal priority. For example suppose there is a chandelier being held up by a chain timelessly. Here there is no temporal priority (they are simultaneous, one can view cause and effect as Simultaneous or Coincident and good arguments I think have been given for this) nevertheless the chandelier stands in a relation of dependence to the chain (Kant used a similar example of a ball on a cushion. The ball is the assymetric, simultaneous cause of the depression in the cushion). The future also if B-Theory is true then is not *determined* nor is it *fixed*. It is by our choices that we determine the shape and structure of the block in our vicinity (however you want to explain this, maybe via explanatory priority). Consider this quote: “Thus in this theory an event dictated by free-will, could affect points in its "future" region, but not in any other, which agrees with experience and shows that the theory is not essentially "determinist." If "free-will" is really free, the future is not yet determined, and the fourspace must be in some way formed by the will as time progresses.” George Frederick Hemens, “THE NEW WORLD: A Universe In Which Geometry Takes The Place Of Physics, And Curvature That Of Force”, in Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Gravitation.
See also the B-Theorist Adolf Grunbaum in Philosophical Problems of Time and Space (1st Edition, pp. 321, 322).
As for changing the future, as a Philosopher of Time, a former President of the Philosophy of Time Society once said that it's an analytic truth that the future cannot be changed, for that's saying what will occur will not occur. However using a different sense of change it can be in that future contingents can fail to occur and we can act in such a way as to prevent their occurence. As my Philosopher friend Randy Everist once told me: "There are two different senses of "change the future;" one is obviously incoherent (i.e., "The event that will take place will not take place") and another is fairly innocuous (i.e., "I will act in such a way that future events will be different than they would have been had I refrained from so acting"). B-theorists may cling to this distinction to point out a logical relationship between the event of the choice and the agent's causing such an event. I myself am an A-theorist, though. Anyway, the point mirrors the dialectic between the argument for...fatalism and those who deny it (e.g., "How can I be free if it is already true at time t that at t+10 I will do x?").
The ontology of it seems not to be a substantially different argument, unless we take an ontological view of truth-makers." Which he says someone like us will want to avoid. For problems with Truth-Maker Theory see: Trenton Merricks, Truth and Ontology. (Arguments using fatalism tend to confuse sensu composito and diviso, moreover using a Source Incompatibilist, a.k.a Frankfurt-style Libertarianism these types of arguments including I think the Block Universe Theory for fatalism or determinism can be easily averted. See: David P. Hunt, “Moral Responsibility and Buffered Choices”). Moreover one can always abandon Einstein-Minkowski STR for neo-Lorentzian STR (see Simon J. Prokhovnik, the Logic of Special Relativity and John S. Bell, How to Teach Relativity) which is a 3+1 not 4D Ontology (see my friend Travis Norsen, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics for Bohm and STR, btw I hold to BM and Libertarianism and don't view them in conflict but that's another talk for another time). Hope my thoughts helped a tad if any.
I am pretty sure this question is sufficiently answered by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Time is not a direct experience because it is an extension and not an object with properties. Time is however a property like extension in space is a property of an object. To say that the same object is capable of having conflicting properties is nonsense if there is no extension in time and change is such an act.
Time however is only experienced as so far as we can abstract it from our primal experiences and thus only something we can abstract from the experience of change (in position and extension in space or of properties relation to an object otherwise). It is very much like having an idea of a colour. We cannot have such an idea without attributing it to an object. Even if we imagine it being an infinitely extended surface. However we are still imagining a certain shape.
Just like space is only observed and experienced from the extension of a given object in space.
Mikael Jensen probably the best argument for the existence of time
Thanks
+Mikael Jensen what if there is no one to experience .. do time stop.. no it dosent
Mikael Jensen time is just the happening of the universe
it is beside the question.
I was in a chat room where one chatter said he had bought a shirt in Next last week, thus revealing himself to be a Time Lord.
5:32 You mean like a timey-wimey detector?
Zennistrad1 Yeah, one that goes ding when there's stuff.
First, this channel is great! Thank you so much for posting all of this stuff!
The time-reverse doppelganger argument assumes that directions in time are symmetrical, which is something I strongly doubt. You mentioned entropy, which as far as I know is pretty much what physicists use to define the direction of time, and which is well known to be time-asymmetrical. There might be some point in the argument that we don't have a specific experience of the passage of time, but I would suggest (with Kant, I think), that time is a form of experience (as distinguished from content), and we become aware of it through metacognition, especially reflection on memory and anticipation.
I don't have a great argument for this, but I think that the past, present, and future are different, and speculate that there is a settling-down of possibilities from a relatively variable future to a relatively fixed past, and that the present is that condition of relative fixity in which it is possible for consciousness to exist. I suspect that the "passage of time" is this directional working-out and settling-down of possibilities, perhaps occurring with respect to a chaotic (lacking any spatiotemporal order) background in which the physical universe is embedded.
Perhaps we have used the term "time" to refer to now we catalogue the order in which things happen.
I like to think of time as a particular type of subjective experience. In this way, time would "pass", but not as an external objective property outside mind but time could be defined in line with the perception, or awareness of change, order and duration.
So in this sense, I strongly disagree that there is no such thing as the experience of passage of time. I think that the experience of time, including the experience of "passage" of time, is all that there is. It is a subjective experience which by virtue of being experienced, it exists. Doesn't need to exist as some abstract entity nor as some external property of a realist world. It simply needs to exist as an ability to perceive or experience phenomena in a particular way.
Using informational terms, one would start with the ability of a entity to perceive (or be aware of) a difference (on vs off, this vs that, and so on), which is the basic unit of information, the bit. Then this entity might at some point be able to add some attributes to this perceived difference. It may be able to add the label before / after to this perceived difference (that is, order). It may be able to subjectively start to experience something which we could label "duration" (depending on how a change is perceived in line with the way memory can construct the experience of before and after).
Personally, I see time as a very primordial tool (time defined in line with subjective experience). Without it, evolution would not exist. No such thing as novelty, free will or evolution without the experience of time. One can even tie this with John Wheeler's Participatory Universe. Observation at the present moment (which is all that can be experienced, actually) can "load up" a particular branch of the (unobserved) past. Past, in this sense, can remain completely undefined, until a particular observation takes place in the present...
Anyway, I am rambling...! Thanks for your videos, they are awesome! :-)
Very Nice, to observe again Dolores's hieroglyphs and funny rambling ... Sometimes, "I" was missing you...
Time is only a human/man-made concept to help us understand reality of our ever changing world. If there's no dynamic in the universe, then the dimension of time is not needed.
I was of the understanding that time is another dimension that we are aware of but cannot physically observe nor accurately describe due to our 3 dimensional frame of reference. Time itself IS the direction and not something that literally passes one way or another: a direction is just the idea of a tangent from any given point. We also couldn't say that the concept of up passes upwards or down passes downwards, we can only say that up is a metaphorical tangent that can be perceived as a direction in relation to the opposite or an alternative. It doesn't pass. We do, along it's tangential route. Granted, i have no formal training in philosophy or physics or any of that, so i could be totally missing the mark. love your stuff, mate! been totally engrossed in your content since i ran out of Harris's and Shaun's stuff to binge on.
About Prosser, can't we say the same thing about space? We have no unique memory of experiencing the passing of space (going through space). So in effect we live in a B-theory analogy of space? (Will I be breaking a philosophy-discussion rule if dabble into physics? Forgive me, I'm trained as an engineer.) A photon, because it travels at the speed of light, experiences all space and time "simultaneously," or at least it does not experience the passage of time or space. Does this support that we cannot truly experience space or time?
A photon cannot have secondary-temporal properties or secondary-spatial properties. If we say the light from my screen will be absorbed by my eye, 2 feet from the screen, we are talking about photons that haven't been produced yet. But the photon itself does not "experience" the "will be" and the "from the" in that sentence. This seems very B theory.
(But then maybe tangentially related, photons that were generated millions of years ago can still be affected by observers... queue in that confusing quantum (gasp!) double erase experiment and its implications where our "present" can affect a "photon's past.")
Being a physicist myself, I appreciate the slightly technical description. You are absolutely correct that photons don't experience time. This is a non trivial point that not many people seem to appreciate. But in that single fact alone lies a whole plethora of interesting insights, that this A-Theory vs B-Theory discussion seems far from being able to encompass.
Would you have any further reading?
Time is synonymous to change. If something changed either in position or properties, time has elapsed. I don't understand what's so confusing about that or why there's so much debate about it? The most accurate clocks don't measure time, they measure the change in position of a particle. Measuring change is the same as measuring time.
My question for Dr Prosser is what is your experience of depth? Time isn't an object, it's a container that we move through just like any other dimension. So our experience of time is that we see the second hand of a clock tick by like our experience of width is that we see trees pass by when we're on a train.
But I don't think eternalism is inconsistent with a universe in which time passes (without going too far into it I believe in a theory that loosely resembles the growing block theory).
Wow, what a throwback these videos are
Hi! I have a lovely monkey wrench to throw into this discussion:
Those who study trama now know that one common trait of the trauma response is that the traumatic event(s) can recur according to the neural system and imitate the physiological and emotional (sometimes even the thoughts of) the originating event. For those with complex trauma (trauma response which results from long-term abuse or unmet needs, which may not have been recognized as traumatic at the time), the original trauma is often their "normal" existence, so the trauma response continues to be "normal" for such people even long after the situations which built it no longer apply. So in this case, the person may have a cognitive awareness of time passing, but their body thinks that what happened in the past is currently happening; time for them is both passing and not passing.
This can get even more complicated when neurodivergence gets involved, as some neurodivergent profiles include "time blindness" or a binary time sense of now/not now, and others involve reduced neural pruning, which could keep experiences in a state to be relived emotionally/physiologically for much longer than for people whose neural pruning happens on a more predictable schedule.
I listened to Dr. Prosser's lecture and am not convinced by his argument. I think that we all agree that we can perceive the passage of space. i.e. I moved from one end to the room to another, before I saw a table, now I see a closet. Which one-to-one experience is that? Moreover, his argument of perception is very space-oriented. If we believe that time is a fourth dimension (which I don't believe he refuted) and even if we assume that the passage of time has to be something that we perceive, it's quite possible that it seems that we don't perceive it because he is using the 5 senses we know of to describe perception. If someone waves their hand in front of a blind person, does that mean it didn't happen? Perception does not define reality.
To have a passage of time all we need is a universal process of energy exchange relative to the atoms of the periodic table. The spontaneous absorption and emission of photon energy is such a process. A simple example of this is water with hydrogen bonds breaking and reforming releasing photon energy with the future unfolding photon by photon relative to the flowing water. Photosynthesis the scientific ability plant life has to use sunlight or photon energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen is another good example!
Analytic metaphysics has embraced only stronger and stronger degrees of skepticism. It's already gotten to an absurd point. In the view of analytic metaphysics, I can't know: the passage of time; whether time exist; whether causation exists; whether modal facts exist; whether other people exist; whether morals or values exist; and so on. So much for attempting to advance human knowledge; it would seem that all analytic metaphysics has advanced is skepticism. I believe that this stems from the fact that it is infinitely easier to problematize an idea that to put forward a creative synthesis that actually serves some purpose. Perhaps I really am only like a machine though: only capable of registering (like a thermometer) when certain "sense data" strike me. That's a bleak enough picture as it is, but if you want it to get even worse, read Sellars and Quine in conjunction as Richard Rorty prescribes: the two together are analytic metaphysics' finally consuming itself. Sellars argues (and quite well) that sensation cannot correspond to propositional knowledge because of its indefinite nature, i.e. that you cannot meaningfully move from seeing red (which is not a proposition but an experience) to "I see red," which is a statement that exists in what Sellars termed "logical space." You cannot stitch these two different realms together without non-rigorous voodoo. Quine on the other hand challenged "concepts" themselves, saying that "concepts" ("rabbit," "red," "Harry Potter," etc.) do not correspond to little dioramas in our minds, that we do not really possess "ideas" as such. This amounted to saying that the idea of a truly "analytic" proposition was ridiculous. Putting these two views together: if experience does not ultimately translate into definite "data," and if "concept" is just a word we throw around that doesn't correspond to anything real, then we have found ourselves in a position where we can neither perceive nor synthesize: You (what ever that is---as the "cogito ergo sum" has now completely broken down) are alone in a flurry of special effects which you are at a loss to describe. So we've basically killed Kant's project...... At least this is how things turn out if we pursue the reductio ad absurdum of the analytic tradition. Other philosophers and traditions have much more vital things to say about relationships, fear, virtue, death, and generally how to live. The Analytic project has failed us, and we should readily abandon it to pursue actual wisdom instead of sophistry.
Hey, just started making my way through your channel archives, and these discussions of time really caught my eye. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, without ever having heard of a and b theory. In George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, he talks about metaphor being a conceptual phenomenon more so than a linguistic phenomenon. “Time as motion” is one of these so called “primary metaphors”. Take the title of this video as an example. Does time pass? Is there any way to talk, or to even think about time without this metaphor? Does time pass and change things, or is the passing of time a construct of our minds as a tool to make sense of all the changes in our world?
Our experience of the "passage of time" is just our experience of our memories and expectations, which are things that exist in our brains in the present. At any given moment, among the things we're experiencing, besides input from our senses of the present world, are images in our minds of things we've experienced before, and things we anticipate experiencing later, and an idea that these things are ordered relative to each other. That experience is "the passage of time" that we experience, and we would have it in either an A universe or a B universe (because there are no real differences between such "universes", those are just different "frames of reference", figuratively speaking, in which to look at the same universe).
I feel like, even though this is late, I would like to propose my idea on how time "passes"
In my opinion and experience, time is not a physical or necessarily targettable "thing". We can look at a star and say "That weighs x" or look at something and say "That is x distance from me". But we cannot say "It will be a short passing of time", because time is subjective in SOME ways. We can, however, note sequences of events. Just like how 2 comes after 1, I can take a step forward, and then another. That second step comes after the first, and through evolution, we have developed brains capable of organizing these events into sequences so that we can function and analyze the data in a rational way that helps ensure our survival.
I like to think of it like a video game. In a video game - let's use a generic shooter - you perceive enemies that you are required to shoot to progress. You advance forward, gun them down, and progress forward. That is a sequence of events. But what is interesting, is that the entire game is made of nonsensical 1s and 0s that don't record time being a factor. In the video game, there exists no concept of "time passage", only sequences of events.
We humans work much like that video game. There is no concept of time, but for us to exist successfully, we are required to mentally list and recall things in a logical sequence of events. We didn't progress by smashing rocks on the ground, putting food over the spot, and then laying wood on the ground. We need sequences, and thus, we developed sequential memory that gives the illusion of time.
Interesting, and further reinforcing the theory, is the idea that time can feel subjective. If someone is having fun, time goes quicker. I like to imagine that time tends to slow down when people are bored, because to entertain ourselves, we look around and observe things or internally think. Now, before I progress here, I want to first acknowledge that brains only operate at a certain speed. We cannot think infinitely fast, and are limited in our biology. So now, imagine that you have a very old computer that can only count from 1 to 1000 in 30 seconds. Like that computer, we are only able to process so quickly before we SLOW down. Our brains are receiving an increase in sensual data, and process it slower than when we are recording less data, like when we are sleeping or having fun.
This further reinforces that time is merely an illusion cast by the process in our brain that reads things in sequential order. I would love to hear your response or thoughts on this idea.
+KillerOfU33 what if there is not a single living being.. in a non living universe doesn't the time pass..oviously time pass.. If it would have been the case then the universe would have been infinitely old till life on earth existed..
This is not a question for philosophers, it is a question for scientists, who have already determined that time is in fact a function of the universe and using very complex mathematical calculations determined how it flows.
If time did not exist then how would you get time dilation? Here is an experiment to measure the passage of time, get 2 super accurate atomic clocks, put one here on earth, put another in earths orbit, after a period of time read both clocks, they will give different readings which would indicate a separate passage of time for each clock, one clock is more influenced by gravity while the other is less. Gravity influences the passage of time which would be impossible if time did not pass. Yes it may be in fact that the object is moving through time and it isn't time itself that is moving but it seems to me to be merely semantics.
Until a "theory"(which in this case isn't being used with the scientific definition, sorry a pet peeve of mine but it should really be A Hypothesis and B Hypothesis) can make a prediction about the universe that we can observe it's not even worth considering, and since it seems we can not disprove either A theory or B theory perhaps they are "Not even wrong."
Dichotomy well if you’re saying that things can only be known through experimental observation, then we can’t know what happened before the Big Bang, or whether there are multiple universes
No they haven't. According to physics time is a measurement, (it is essentially what the clock reads), of entropy or duration. It all matters on your definition of time. Do you divorce it from entropy\change\duration? Or, do you include it as all being the same? Quantum mechanics bunches those concepts together. In a sense, the nature of 'time' and its 'meaning' can only be discussed by philosophers. You should watch Sean Carroll's video on time, he's a physicist that discusses these points from a scientific point of view.
Also, an interesting experiment last year has, so far, shown that quantum entanglement actually can reverse entropy (not just move it around). Showing what scientists have long suspected, the laws of thermodynamics are flawed, or at least not as absolute as we assume. The very existence of our universe suggests that one, or more, of these laws has to be wrong.
Then again, your comment is over four years old. 😕
I totally understand, it came together in my brain like the idea changing how you think! Time isn't here all that can be like time is day and night, but everything moves breathes because that's what were programmed to do. So in turn all time is used for is schedules. Time is a invited for idea.
I think Prosser used a rather restricted meaning of perception. If we consider only empirical perception, than his argument would stand. But if we broaden it, or otherwise we could admit that the passage of time is not an "object" to be perceived through the sense but rather through an a-posteriori quality such as intuition, reflection, we could try to push our explanation further. We notice time passes because we see changes in the things. We do not perceive the passage of time, but we perceive changes. The intuition that time passes is therefore a sort of "naive theory of time", deducted from experiences of change (but not directly and empirically perceived from them).
Now, arguing for A or B I think is a matter of aim: do I want to describe the way human beings more directly relate to time? Do I need a different concept of time for a particular application? We should be aware of what we want to theory to explain, and look for an accordance of that. Of course this would require a theory of reality levels, in which to fit the different theories.
What do you think?
If we look at two experiences, I woke up... Then I got out of bed. Could we say that time has passed between those two experiences. Do you not need a beginning and an end to have time?
This has got me thinking now...
If time does need a beginning and an end, what about the past? It has an end (now) but does it have a beginning? And the opersite can be said about the future.
But the interesting thing I find is the present, it is an instantaneous point in "time" so it can't have a beginning or an end, it's instantaneous. So can time really be flowing in the present (or at any other point)? Flowing implies it's traveling from A to B but in the present there is no point A and there is no point B, as I said, it's instantaneous.
From this I think I have decided the time can not be measured due to its own properties that make time what it is, it does not flow because that implies that there has to be a range of start and end points for it to flow to and from, but due to the nature of past, present and future these points do not exist. Therefore time does not flow.
I would like to hear your come backs to this, what do you think?
i was about to click off and heard the comments mention the Planck length. That's actually really close to the answer! The amount of time it takes a photon of light to travel the Planck length is actually that measurement of the "framerate" of the universe in terms of stochastic time steps, much like a tetrahedron of the Planck length on all sides is comparable to a "pixel"
Our experience of passage of time is a variety of qualia. Saying that "We don't actually experience passage of time" is in a way similar to saying that "We don't actually experience color red". So the question "Do we actually experience passage of time?" boils down to the question "Do we actually philosophical zombies?". The question "Does time actually pass?" is a way similar to question "Does sky actually blue?". We can experience color red in our sleep, without any actually red object being present around. Similarly, we can experience passage of time without any physical time being passing. To experience the passage of time we don't need to be able to agree among ourselves on time's direction as we don't need to be able to agree that we all experience color red the same way to experience color red.
The experience of time passing is not the experience of discreet events. As Husserl explains in his 'Phenomenology of Time Consciousness,' we experience the fading of the past, the perception of events currently transpiring, and the expectation of what is to come always all at once necessarily. Such experience is to be distinguished from reflection about these three states because they are only divorced from one another in the form of reflection, although even when reflecting all three states actually exist as one current state of being. In other words, yes, when you extract the idea of time from the experience of it, time appears impossible, but even as you do this you cannot deny that time has passed during the operation. This IS time. This is what we mean when we talk about time passing. Time isn't directional in an objective sense. Time is a necessary condition of experience, not an abstract value.
Check out Gaston Bachelard's "Intuition of the Instant". A critique of Bergson essentially in the guise of, "the instant is the metaphysical reality of time suspended between two nothings viz. that past and present". There's a distinction between physical time and the phenomenological experience of time.
BOTH TOPICS sound awesome!
I can see the logic of time being an illusion but what about Einstein? The fourth dimension? The time space continuum? Is time not a tangible thing that actually changes when not in the presence of a large distortion in the time space continuum, like the earth? Satellites must account for this. Speed also plays a role. From what I understand time is a quite tangible thing.
Is there not some way of combining both A and B theory?
In human terms, Person X moves through Time whilst Time is also moving past Person X.
With regards to Prosser's argument:
Isn't the argument a little bit verificationistic? We cannot experience causality but does that mean we do not know what we mean when we talk about causality? Moreover, we do not experience the extension of time (as suggested by the B theory) either. So a parallel argument can be proposed against the B theory.
... We do experience the passage of time differently. When we're afraid, when we're bored. But that seems like an easy answer to me. I'd rather go in the other direction. You don't experience "an orange". You experience smelling an orange. Does the fact that you also smell other things mean you don't smell? The sensory experiences discussed don't define the senses, they depend on them. The fact that none of us have ever had one of those experiences without it involving a transition from one thing into another means they also depend on the passage of time.
Two questions:
1) If we assume B-theory is right and time is pretty much just like space then why is it so easy to travel in every spacial direction we want but so hard or even impossible to travel in back in time. Where dous the difference come from?
2) It seems to me like my conciousness only exists in the present and not in the future or the past which kind of sends me in the direction of presentism. Is it possible to make a valid argument out of this or not?
Time is a perception. Is like a sense. The human brain needs to remember things in order, otherwise nothing would make sense. It is why we learn things best if we are taught them in "steps". Our brain works only with organized thoughts and one way to organize events and create memories is through the illusion of time.
on the article of 2012 experience can be understood not as specific sense but the memory formed from the collection of the senses, also there is no reason why even specific sense wouldn't allow sensation of time because we see movement of things or hear echo, feel something getting colder and so on, which imply some previous state.
or in dialogue we can talk because we understand voice vocalized after another voice.
I only recently found your channel, and I'm going through the back catalog.
I think experiencing time is being framed in a way that ignores what we have been discovering in the physical sciences. An interesting thing that relativity also kicks out is that literally all things in the universe are traveling at the speed of light... Just that matter tends to be moving at said speed mostly in the direction of time. Whether that 4th dimension is real is a very open question.
But if you can experience traveling from point a to point b, you can experience the passage of time, because it's very much the same thing. Now, does the past continue to exist once it is no longer a part of the present? That's where philosophy and worldviews become far more amorphous. Einstein believed in "block time", whereas various physical uncertainties suggest this may mot be accurate. I know of late you've been focusing on social issues that need focus, but if and when things settle a little, I'd love to see you come back to this.
The uniqueness constraint seems rather strange... here's my initial knee-jerk counter to it: In all of my experiences, I always have some experience of... a "sense of being". Surely then any experience is a good candidate to suggest my sense of being and none of them will satisfy the uniqueness constraint more than any other by the same argument.
I like the idea of not ever really experiencing the passage of time though. After a bit of thinking, it seems to me that we only have an idea of "time passing" by noting that our "present" experience differs from our "past" experience. But this perception of difference really occurs in the "present". I'm not sure we could distinguish between (1) a universe in which there was no time at all, but rather an ever present and "instantaneous" experience of "time passage" and (2) the experience of time in either an A or B type universe.
Hey, great channel man!
Imagine you are in a special room with no gravity, no light, without any sound from outside, would you experience time passage? Well you could detect your heart beating and breathing... but imagine you are very very calm you dont aware of it. What will happen then? Will you be able to tell that time is passing? I heard somewhere they made an experiment similar to this and people "left their bodies" (or they thought they did). The thing is, when you are left with no sensorial information your mind cant tell where your body ends, where is it's physical borders\limits are and sort of "dissolves" in space and "time". Interesting, but i dont know if this is truth. Maybe they did experiment like this on ISS.
I'll copypaste my comment on reddit:
I personally think that what we call time is actually a flow of energy-matter. (not because energy can flow because of time, but "time" is created because of flow of energy) It doesnot exist as a separate thing, doesnt exist by itself. its like saying that wind is a thing that makes weather change. No its not, the flow of energy and matter (temperature difference) creates changes in weather, which is accompanied by wind. Same with time. Time is a "side-effect", by giving it a name we mentally separate it, giving it another meaning. Its like "WATER", we call it: ice, water, steam, but it is the SAME bloody thing. Our language is creating boundaries where they do not exist. Also there is a big bang theory which says that there was no time before the big bang. This also explains that time was created with energy and matter flow and its just a property of this process. All the arguing about time happens because everyone has its own understanding of the word "time" and people do not tell each other what they understand under "time" before arguing about it. I think i roughly explained my point of view. Also im 100% sure that there is no future or past, but only now, the rest is made up by brain. Sorry for my mistakes, im not englishspeaker!
***** great explanation, I completely agree with you and with "Eternal Now" concept...
My own view of time and it’s passing is that we don’t need to be able to experience it for it to be real. Just as a blind person can walk forward without seeing witch direction they are going, so can we move through time without understanding how we are doing so.
The idea that we cannot detect the passage of time is, like all other metaphysical propositions, a redefinition masquerading as a fact. In this case, the redefinition is the idea that "experience of the passage of time" is a strange sort of thing that could possibly be detected like other things. But in everyday discourse we have no problem detecting the passage of time. Clocks detect time passing like rulers can detect something increasing in length. The passage of time is encoded by memories. I perceive something happening now and immediately before that I perceived something else happening and so forth. This ever increasing string of memories is what "time passing" means. This is perfectly in keeping with the B theory.
We use the word "time" in two ways. There is "physical time" in which all points of time exist and past present and future are meaningless terms. There is also what we could call "psychological time" in which we can point to our string of memories as the past. Since we couldn't point to anything called the present or the future, those terms would be meaningless.
If you lived in a universe in which time flowed backwards, how would you know it? At t_2 you'd remember events from the future t_3, falsely remembering it to be the past, and you would have no memory of t_1, even though it had only just passed. Then, at 1_3 you'd forget that t_2 had happened and remember the future events of t_4 and so on.
Q-Theory Time: There exists only a single "now", as in A-Theory. However, now is fuzzy in a quantum way. I.E. Different observers view each object with not just random positions (which they may not agree upon), but random and possibly different momentums. When different observers disagree on the momentum of a single object, "now" breaks from a point into a range of points, the collection of observations from each observer. The A-Theory melts into a creeping, crawling now moment that changes and moves directionally with a healthy dose of randomness.
In this theory, time is directional because quantum objects have a directional momentum. The future is the set of probabilities for where you may next observe each quantum object in the universe. The past fails to exist; it was where the quantum objects used to be, but are no longer as the creeping now moved on.
They say if you could reverse the direction of time, you could put together an egg that was smashed on the floor - - this is possible but unlikely given the large number of quantum particles involved. If you reversed time, there's no reason to think a quantum particle would be observed in the same place it came from because of the randomness of observation. You'd get something "pretty close" to the original unbroken egg but not the same. If you repeated this process over and over (unbroken egg forward to broken egg --> backward to unbroken --> forward to broken --> repeat ad infinitum) the inherent quantum randomness would degrade the particle trajectories and you'd get a big mess you could never put back into a whole egg just by reversing time.
Yes, and the entropy finds its roots in the natural randomness of quantum particles.
Nice vid. I need to interject on the topic of the brain perceiving time. We don't understand how the brain experiences anything; determining the color of an object, or it's distance in space, are similar neural calculations as determining the passage of time, as far as we know. I think the brain is able to measure time on evolutionarily relevant timescales, and the mind experiences it's passage.
Experience by the mind, precedes all other determinations of reality; to experience is to assert reality, even when only to a marginal extent...
If time has a direction, it must inherently have passage. What we can experience are changes in the environment, and any form of change takes time, as no information can travel faster than light. Therefore, time passes (concluded through physical knowledge rather than metaphysical reasoning), but it cannot be experienced; it can only be inferred.
The entire example about the Time-Tracking-Machine reminds me of a Dungeons & Dragons-game I am DMing and writing.
In the background of this Adventure, future scientists have developed a machine with the purpose of tracking and allowing travel through time, specifically for the sake of making space-travel easier
(Making it instantaneous)
However when said scientists finally turned on the machine for the grand opening, it immediately broke down, or so it seemed.
It turned out that time functioned in a way the scientists had not realised and the machine therefore didn't work at its initial job, the machine was however for unclear reasons still able to track and "interact" with time the way they had planned to, it just didn't have any reference for what would happen at any given moment in time.
For this reason the scientists employed new people as Time-Explorers who were to travel back to unknown moments in the machines databank and help Map-Out time itself to make time-travel safe.
The purpose of this was to allow my Players to have futuristic characters in the normal D&D, Medieval-Setting, which made for very interesting moments.
There's a problem with both A-Theory and B-Theory - both operate with a static frame of reference, which is technically invalid in this universe because nothing holds a static frame of reference (or at least within the parts of the universe we occupy nothing does).
Relativity makes both significantly more complicated for starters - because the velocity of the observer modulates the rate of A-flow/the set of B-relationships. That effect is relatively well known and most people would be able to raise that as an objection to either - it is difficult to process that the rate of A-flow is reduced by increasing the amount of distance covered in a particular set of time because you have to measure A-flow from two separate locations for that observation to even be noted, and for there to be more B-points for one person than there are for another is also... counter-intuitive because it's disruptive to the set of all B-points as an objective measure... neither is necessarily a theory-killer, just weird. Both theories describe time in the context of the things people do, but both can apparently be modulated *by what you do.*
But there's an additional significant issue - having velocity creates causality event horizons; that is to say, the faster you go, the less of the universe (at least in some directions) can reach you and thus you cease to be causally connected to things beyond a certain distance from you. This is true at any velocity, but it's more obvious at higher velocities. And that can mean that things that have objectively occurred in other people's presents have objectively not occurred in yours creating incompatible present frames. This is not simply that the light of those events haven't reached you - the part of the universe you occupy is actually ordered differently to other parts of the universe that you can interact with because you occupy a different plane of simultaneity. Two people passing each other at high velocities can potentially note *a different timeline preceding the moment that they pass each other* where events in one of their futures may have already happened in the other's past and vice versa. This problem is the Rietdijk-Putnam argument (or the Andromeda Paradox).
For A-Theory, this fundamentally disrupts the notion of any objective or universal flow of time - it becomes fundamentally impossible to describe that flow outside of a single observer's frame because it bunches up or expands in different physical directions differently for different people doing different things. It's not even consistent in a single observer's frame because velocity can effectively cause time to have different flow rates in different physical directions at the same time.
B-Theory is potentially more robust under this strained set of relationships but it still breaks down because any notion about a point of time is geographically tied (x event at x place) but even when occupying the same shared space the set of temporal relations in either direction for different participants in that space/time event space *are different* meaning that events themselves aren't what hold those temporal relations, and temporal relations are not universal.
Time's a mess basically.
I would love an introduction to philosophy of government and secularism, actually a video about philosophy of religion itself could also be very interesting.
Love your videos, keep up the good work =)
When do we decide that at one point we did not know about the bear in the conservatory (future) at another point we are scared of the bear as we are both in the conservatory (present) and then at a final point we say "thank goodness that is over". Our brains seem to order time passing. This is compounded by the fact that people have the same experiences (e.g. if someone was with us we would be able to agree that we were in a conservatory with a bear a week ago). I am more able to comprehend the idea of time being more of a shared illusion by creatures to comprehend the world: for example past memories feel like " just yesterday" as we lose
our grip on temporal distances. Our experiences once experienced are directed to the past at least as far as our minds are concerned, even with a time reversed doppelganger time still moves linearly? Essential we just experiencing the present and once it is not the present it becomes the antipresent and we have a vague idea of the distance that represents from our current present. The future is unknown. our brains experience time as the present and a vaguely ordered antipresent (past), that loses its accuracy. idk if you want me to clarify please say because I know it sounds confusing.
If we don't experience time, and we cannot experience time, why do I think I do? Why is it so obvious to me? What am I actually experiencing?
Could it not be said that our active contemplation of the passage of time is that experience which corresponds to its passage? Is there anything that stipulates we must actively be aware of our experiences in order for us to experience them? After all, if an orange is just sitting there on the table, but I'm not actively aware of it, does it cease to exist? I can experience it or not experience it, but either way there is (probably) an external object in the world which we'd call "orange" and there is therefore something for my internal experience of it being there to correspond to, if I should happen to experience it. So it'd be the same with time then, right? I don't necessarily need to be aware of time to still have something external for the experience of that awareness to correspond to.
For school I wrote an essay trying to define time and very recently adapted it into a speech. I did not touch on A/B theory though. Very interesting video.
A time reversed doppelganger is impossible.
The arrow of time is an artifact of the physical properties that evolve in one direction. Most use entropy for this but I think it makes more sense to talk about quantum mechanics and decoherence of the wavefunction, but either way, you can't have time flowing the opposite direction of these processes because these processes ARE the direction of time.
I don't understand William's argument, namely the connection between being able to sense the passage of time and the direction of it. It doesn't seem like the existence of one necessarily entails the existence of the other, and the absence of one entails the absence of the other either.
To illustrate, let's swap out passage for motion here. I can imagine a universe where there is an a method of determining absolute motion but not direction for an object. Perhaps there is an instrument like a momentometer that measures motion on a vehicle but nothing similar that exists to determine the direction one is moving in. Is such a universe possible? I certainly think so, so I imagine the same applies to the passage of time. The inability to sense direction does not undermine the ability to sense passage.
Isn't the argument with the machine that detects time just a somewhat convoluted way of saying it's not an empirical question?
Also, could you define "the passing of time". It seems rather obvious, but thinking somewhat deeper about it i can't seem to figure out what exactly you mean with it.
Prosser is using time (as a process) to prove that "The passage of time can't be experienced", his argument is completely tautological. It is not that there is a necessary "experience of time" which we must have to prove time exists, rather experience itself (or rather its occurrence) proves the passage of time. Since our perception changes, it means that some sort of "event" is occurring, and therefore that something is "happening". If we attempted to say that there is a necessary separate perception of the passage of time, than we would be at a loss because of course Prosser is right, this faculty is logically inconceivable. But, by this separation you have also created an incorrect duality between human perception of time and time itself. In fact there is a certain duality, but it is more complex than simply saying that "There is nothing that can prove time passes therefore it doesn't pass" because the thing that proves the passage of time is the person themselves. Say that an adult was instantiated strapped to a chair staring at the wall. There were absolutely no changes in this persons environment, in fact they did not perceive anything besides this wall. One could say that because of this, the man would not have a passage of time, that time itself only passed because they had a changing perception, but this is not true, since there was a time before perception itself that this man would intrinsically understand "happened", that there was a point at which they begun their existence that wasn't an infinite time ago. In this way we could say that changing perception is the proof for the passage of time, and that we can "experience" time.
If there was a universe where time flowed backwards, to the people living there time would still be flowing only in one direction (forwards, like in our universe) unless we viewed that universe, then it would seem that it flowed backwards. If time can only flow forwards, then there's no point in saying that time can flow backwards, i.e "if" time flowed backwards then time would be flowing forwards while flowing backwards. Time doesn't seem like a dynamic subject (you can't "experience" it) but more of a strict rule that everything has to follow even if they don't want to, like a conveyor belt, even if you constantly push an object on it backwards, that won't make the conveyor belt change its direction but instead it will continue moving forward while the object is being pushed backwards. "Change" is something we discovered through observation, time is just a synonym for "rule that changes always happen progressively".
Our perspective of time is always the present, the future will occur at some point in the present and the past has happened at some point in the present. I feel that the past and the future are just attributes of the present, it's a way our mind differentiates between what's already happened and what's going to happen, it's just convenient and nothing else.
It's similar to its spatial counterpart, if you're "here" then you can't be "there" (it's just for convenience, an attribute to describe somewhere "not here", just like the past and future) but if you're "there" then it's not "there" anymore, but "here".
my problem with prossers arguement is that it asks the question in such a way as it can't be answered successfully. he's handing us a rope and expecting us to tell him its an elephant. if i ask you what your experience of earth is, you might say, "its pretty good, kinda blue." i could say, "aha, you couldn't have experienced a sufficient portion of the earth to reliably attest to its blueness!" time, to me, seems the same way. we are talking about a big concept here, there are parts we can explain and parts we just don't have the breadth of experience or maybe even the breathe to talk about.
i have a similar problem with the argument that time can't work in a b universe because things are observed from different points to not appear simultaneous. in a b universe, time is like an ocean. in an ocean, no two things exist at the same coordinates, if you look at two things from one angle and somebody else see's them from another angle, they will look different.
i guess what it comes down to is that if you insist that perception can't answer the question then fine, but it doesn't make your arguement more valid. after all, the earth is blue... and brown and green and covered in people, but if you lived on a boat your whole life, how would you know?
Why is passage of time prerequisite for experience.
Let's take couple of examples of physical experiences:
Playing soccer as a kids, occasionally one might get hit with the ball in the head. Getting hit in such a way is an experience - let's name it A. Hitting the ball with head in attempt to score is also an experience - that will be B. The difference is that if you are trying to hit the ball with your head, you will swing your head towards it. If you are being hit - your head will remain neutral until the hit, and then it will recoil.
Let's look at these experiences form the perspective of the time-reversed doppelganger. If the doppelganger observes the following "the ball flies towards him he swings his head and hits the ball".
Has he just experienced B or has he "unexperienced" A?
What is to experience? We can differentiate between the states of an event, and the rest of the states.
Let's say we're experiencing X. We either have an experience of X or we don't. Comparing the two possible states:
a) I don't posses knowledge of X
b) I posses knowledge of X
So, to experience X, is to transition from (a) to (b)
This transition itself, aligns with the direction of the passage of time.
If you say that the doppelganger has "unexperienced" A - you are not talking about "experience", but some different process
If you say that the doppelganger has experienced B - that will be experience, but now you do have a passage of time. It's just like our passage of time - states with lack of knowledge, precede those with knowledge.
Even if you assume B theory of time, you will need something that moves through all existing times, just like "passage of time" in order to be able to talk about "experience".
If you are not convinced, please provide description of "experience without passage of time".
It seems that those who advocate for an A-type universe seem to consider humans to be a static reference frame. It seems to me that a B-type universe is perfectly consistent with what we see not because time passes, but because we move through time. I made a comment on the first video about this.
If we imagine a flipbook with a little cartoon character in it, we can flip through the book from one end to the other and watch him, say, eat an apple. We can see the whole flipbook; all of its pages are visible to us simultaneously. We can also flip it backwards and watch him do it in reverse, spitting the apple back out, we can flip to any random point in the book at our leisure, etc. We can do this because we live in three dimensions, and our cartoon lives in two. To him, what we might call the "third dimension" is the passage of time; his perspective of one event (page) occurring in a particular order, because he h as to. Three dimensional creatures like us are not so limited, and so while from our perspective, the book itself does not change, the act of flipping the book front-to-back gives the illusion that it does, giving rise to the cartoon's perception of passing time. For humans, just shift it up one dimension; we perceive time to flow only in one direction because we have no choice. We are restricted by three spacial dimensions, and the "fourth dimension" is imperceptible to us, except as the apparent occurrence of events in a specific order, i.e. time. In other words, just as the two-dimensional cartoon can only move in one direction in the third dimension, that being from the front of the book to the back, we can only move in one direction through time, from the past to the future. We and the cartoon perceive this direction limit as the passage of time.
If all moments of time are equally real, according to B-Theory, why am I only conscious of this particular moment? My conscious, after all, exists as equally in the future as it does in the past and as it does in the present. So why aren't I conscious of my future experiences, and why is my conscious (memory) of the past weaker than that of the present?
I think the answer to your last question comes from how consciousness is formed; it's basically something that happens to be bouncing around your brain at any given moment. The longer it circulates, the stronger the memory. Of course, not going back to it will cause it to become distorted. But to throw another wrench into the works, we take in more information than is necessary to "understand", or we can process. So we usually subconsciously and rather heavy-handedly truncate the information that isn't "necessary", which is of course a completely arbitrary concept. So we simplify reality and circulate the parts that seem relevant in our consciousness, which forms memories. The process is biased, and that's why memory is too. And it probably gets even worse, as when we start to forget details of a memory, and suddenly need to recall it, we just simply fill in the blanks, and the process is heavily influenced by our evaluation of that memory at that time, which is usually terribly biased. So it can get pretty circular.
The first question I have no answer to, but it is something that I have been wondering myself.
Wait isn't time a product of our observation of entropy?
If we see things go from one state to another. And if the state can not be reversed to it's previous state isn't that the same as saying that time has passed and we can not fully experience or recreate the past? Also that would mean that the future is all possible states that could be held.
Am I wrong or missing something?
Cf. Prosser's "uniqueness constraint": You can also fairly easily show that numbers (and in fact, most kinds of mathematical relationships) fail this constraint. For example, you can have four apples or oranges or tick marks on a prison wall. But do any of these encompass what is uniquely "four"? Of course not; they are merely instantiations of "four"-ness. In fact, it's impossible to point to something uniquely "four" because anything that satisfies being four also has to satisfy quantifiability (being four of something) as well as other descriptive properties. To counter the obvious counter, the Arabic numeral is nothing more than a logogram: If 4 were the "form" of four, then why are words like "four" or "quatre" or "si", or symbols like IV, also valid ways of describing it?
If you think about the puzzle Socrates gives Meno's slave, consider the relationship its solution has with the Pythagorean Theorem, and puzzle out the rationality of the resulting constant, you realize the "uniqueness constraint" starts to fall apart for more relational (and I am a fan of relational) descriptions of mathematics as well.
Yet at the same time mathematics unquestionably undergird our universe. I find myself suspecting that our perception of time is related to our perception of math. This leads to an interesting question: Can we construct a universe without mathematics? (I do not mean one without an apperception of mathematics; I mean one in which the salient relationships* are nonmathematical in nature.) I suspect not, because mathematics is not a statement of relationships, but rather a model of them. In other words, it is impossible to create nonmathematical relationships, because to have a relationship implies an ability to model it, and mathematics is the modeling of relationships. The links are starting to get increasingly tenuous, but I am seeing, in my mind, time being, interestingly enough, a mathematical artifact (consider calculus, the study of change; a time t is necessary to measure a "before" and "after", which is necessary to study change.) If it is -- this implies that the B universe includes a nonmathematical relationship, which as we just pointed out, is a contradiction in terms.
When you name your experience of an orange you specify the entire space taken up by that orange as your experience of an orange. You also specify an amount of time, be that an hour or a split second. So it makes sense to me that to suggest an experience of the passage of time you need the whole of time or at least a chunk of it. You can have an experience of an episode of your favourite show but to have that experience you are required to perceive the passage of time. I think ive just done a U turn there leading me to ask: How does this argument change arguments against A-Theory? Because I always thought that any argument about time that relied on our perceptions cannot be right because we could experience the passage of time in an Aish universe or a Bish one. It gives us not clue either way.
But what about the statement that we all live in the past? Because it takes about 0.04 milliseconds (or something similar) for the information to reach our brain. So by the time the information reaches our brain, whatever we saw or heard had already happened, by 0.04 milliseconds in the past.
Really though time can be a unique experience. For example, if I'm playing a video game or watching a movie I particularly enjoy then time seems to pass faster and very differently than if I was at work where I was bored of my plethora of monotonous tasks. This goes back to Einstein and special relativity, but we also know that speed slightly changes the passage of time. If I walk around my block while my sister stays at home I will be 14 femtoseconds "younger" relative to her. Time is something that is in flux and we do experience it, just like we experience the ground moving beneath our feet and the Earth spinning at 1,000 miles an hour (or about 380 meters per second for you metric folks) but we are so used to it happening, since it is happening from the time we are born, that we never notice it. Similarly we don't really notice time as an experience because we are so used to it. But because of relativity certain time intervals are unique and we experience them differently as a result which makes them unique.
If i ask the question(1) "why time created?" and (2)"what is time?"
the answer will be some thing like "some one wanted to measure the days"(1).
so in that case time isn't some thing real its just some kind a measure tool just like cm/inch (2).
so yes time pass, 2 moons ago its like say 48 hours ago.
I'm confused with williams' doppleganger argument. It essentially seems like he's saying our observation of the passage of time can't be used as an indicator of the direction of time because we can conceive of a scenario in which one observes the passage of time. This would be like saying are observations are wrong because someone else could've observed them differently, which is obviously ridiculous. Can someone please explain what he's actually saying because I feel like I'm completely misunderstanding
Of course we don't experience the passage of time in the same sense that we experience orange or love. Passage of time is prerequisite for the process of experiencing. To experience is to detect difference in the state - be it internal or external for the self. Time == Change & Change == Time.
Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 2 explains it pretty well imo
Nice video, nice subject.
Perhaps what we could say is that the passage of time is purely phenomenal and exists in the phenomenal world, but that doesn't necessarily men that the passage of time is noumenal. So we experience it, but that doesn't mean it happens.
Time is like air/space
it is formless but exists
as air we breath so time will be spent
direction will be ur thought
& u ll experience a memory for the time u would lose
Did I inspire you? It's exactly what we talked about yesterday at the TH-cam space.
I actually filmed this on Tuesday! So more likely we were inspired by this!
Philosophy Tube
Unless doyouknowellie was moving at relativistic speeds.
@Philosophy Tube For next time I'm curiosu to see "should we support the troops" cuz I'm a bit curious as to if what philosophy there is on the topic is vaguely based on civics a/o deontological and maybe.."militarism"?. How come you do put up "practical" (or engaged-->to the real world,as I like to think of them) questions more often Olly?.
The time reversed doppelgänger exists in the black lodge from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks....spooked
The experience of times passing is an illusion created by the earth rotating on on its axis. It's just the day that's passing Sunrise and sunset were once believed to be literal until discovered otherwise, We still use those terms but like them time is also illusory.
There's no intelligent or polite way to say this other than, sometimes you fuck my brain! Keep up the good work and find a valid argument to do with time that I can put forward to my boss regarding being 'late'...
Many thanks
Is Prosser's question really fair? To have an experience of an orange i technically have an experience of the start of experiencing an orange through till the end of experiencing an orange, whereas with time i am forced to be between the start and end of my experience and so my summary of my "single experience of time" will necessarily be vague. But we allow for terms to be vauge and still be considered to point out real things, its just that with time we cant really have experience of it's stopping and so of course it's not really clear exactly what my single experience that constitues time is.
Perhaps the ATheory vs BTheory is too light a discussion on time? It seems like a debate between choice of reference frames, but saying nothing fundamentally true about time. There is a certain directionality/dimensionality that is implicit in both these descriptions. The nature of our experience of time plays into this conception of time. We are still not close to a mature conversation on time with this binary debate. Is this where philosophy is currently on time?
So, is there a technical term in philosophy for the type of argument posed at 5:30, essentially that the difference proposed by a theory doesn't make a real difference? Like the machine that detects time passing, or the invisible gardener?
If time means "changes" in "stuff", then wouldn't the fact that things change into or from something else show a presence of progress? isn't that an experience synonyms with what we call time?
The passage of time IS real, we just don't feel it. I believe we just notice the changes in time, wether it is by watching the clock, or see that the sun is almost set and night is coming. The matter is that sometimes we sense that time runs faster or slower, as the relative theory. Maybe we sense it as we watched an episode of a favourite show and we say something like "Oh, it must be an hour later by now", but we don't feel it. Or when you work 6 hours non-stop and you don't realize, by the time you are leaving, 6 hours have passed.
PS: We could say present exists as every moment, and so we could say an instant ago was past, and an instant later will be future.
I believe that the A theory is more understandable, simply pertaining to the fact that time is experienced through things that move, change, or stay the same..such as the hands ticking on our clocks..but if those clocks was invented without hands, then clocks would be useless. We also experience time though motion. and motion coincides with change. and change is continuous meaning that it doesn't stop. Even the objects floating in outer space and the stars constantly exploding accounts for change. So if change is amongst the universe, and change is the time things take to move from one state to the other ..then that means that time and change go hand and hand. Which brings me to a conclusion that time is a such thing.
This reminds me of a Larry Niven story in which a device intended to reduce inertia locally speeds up time. The measure of the passage of time is, of course, physical and chemical reactions, i.e. events. If you could freeze the events, time would stop-in any sense that mattered. Time might still "exist" in some numinous sense, but so what?
The intriguing effect of recent experimentation is the invalidation (or at least the casting of extreme doubt) as to the lack of simultaneity in the universe. Quantum entanglement - and spooky-action-at-a-distance much more generally - as displayed in experiments with entangled photons, create conditions that are close as we can verifiably get to simultaneous. As frustrating as this is - I revere Einstein just as Newton was revered before him - when Maxwell's electromagnetic equations seemed to invalidate Newtonian physics and were casually dismissed by many contemporary intellectuals for that same reason, Einstein responded by determining where the overlap occurred (energy-mass equivalence) and demonstrating that the "heretical" differences held mathematical merit; I think, too, that we owe it to Einstein's work to update his own assertions in a similar manner to his treatment of Newton. He was in vigorous opposition to spooky action, which we have now verified with experimental data; this, combined with another experiment with photon beams that pokes some serious holes in the existence of intrinsic causality - or at least, our understanding of it - as well as the effect of the observer on Schrodinger waveforms (and in a different field, extreme cases of pediatric neuroplasticity) is starting to shift the perception of our predominant metatheory of science, Scientific Realism, from something infallible, and is make tentative implications that another more consistently successful metatheory approach needs to be found to be consistent with more recent discoveries... I've heard a couple of suggestions in circles of academic friends for the pursuit of a more developed form of Biocentrism, or a more grounded form of Postrealism, but both come with unique sets of issues of their own, besides currently being populated largely by fringe scientists, or Tesla, Fuller, and Bohr.
Interesting times, eh?
Would it not be irrelevant if we "experianced" time passing, because that would simply be a subjective exeriance, not determaning objective time passage, or the lack thereof.
Is there a theory that suggests/explores whether time is just a description of change and causation?
Everything we experience as "the past" are only recollection of memories. Even something that happened a moment ago is now only a memory in your head. We put our faith and/or trust in our memories (which can be flawed in recollection), so does the past actually exist? Or are we just putting our faith in our memories to prove its existence? If this is the case, then B theory may be believed, and the passing of time is only an illusion created by our brains.
I don't get the arguments against B theory that say stuff like "but then things couldn't change" how do we know anything changes? Everything could be happening exactly how it's supposed to, the universe could be completely deterministic. Physics has shown that we could not ever determine the future of the entire universe as there are things that are completely random to us, but that does not mean that they are truly random and that the universe is not deterministic.
Jozzarozzer Determinsim is consistent with change?
Philosophy Tube
I'm saying that change could be just an illusion, we feel as if we are changing things, but in reality that's exactly what was going to happen. Pretty much everything just happens in reaction to something else, and our minds are just a complex set of reactions. The only way the universe could be non-deterministic is if there is true randomness in something fundamental. You cannot disprove a deterministic viewpoint though, so it's non-scientific, but it's possible and interesting to think about.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the point you're trying to make in the video, but this is a diagram of the point I'm trying to make right now. i.imgur.com/ijyELqd.png
The key word there is "happen"
Even if everything is predetermined, there is still change in the sense of movement.
An apple falls out of a tree & even if that was always going to happen, the apple is still on the ground instead of in the tree.
see absolute idealism. If things were never to change then we could never describe them as they would be constant features of the universe.
Everything comes as a consequece of time passing so the mere experience of observation is the experience of time passing itself. You are relating something tangible with the observation but what you are really observing comes directly from the "event" of time passing.
Let me use blackholes as an example. As you may know the closer you get to a black hole the greater time dilation gets in that certain point of spacetime. You may experience as an external observer time passing (very slowly though) in spacetime close to a blackhole but as you approach to the event horizon you would notice things start to slow down (from your perspective) up to the point that you can't experience any changes (time passing). I think this proves time does pass; the mere fact you observe something means you are experiencing time passing.
+Sebastián López what if there is not a single living being.. in a non living universe doesn't the time pass..obviously time pass.. If it would have been the case then the universe would have been infinitely old till life on earth existed..Time flows in a steady manner its independent ..
Funny, you previously had the answer with the "pie cooling" example of your previous video (hint: time passage is all about entropy).
hi baes im a bit late to the trend but I'm a bit confused because abbie says that you can't point to one singular experience as the "passage of time" but isn’t that a category error? in a more recent video she describes a man who goes to oxford and asks to see the university. They show him all the buildings and rooms and he says "but where's the university?" We would say he’s making a category error because he views the university as a discrete, disjoint entity when it's actually the collection of the buildings.
applying the same concept, wouldn’t we say that we're making a category error when we say that we can't point to a specific experience to say it is THE passage of time because all our experiences are.
Am I way off with this?
I don´t think the arrow of time and entropy (nor expanding of this universe) can be separated. They both go one way in relation to the assumed Big Bang, right?
Thus, time is change, time is motion. Time can be experienced by perceiving how the manifest world changes all the time...
The future and past are in a different relation to the present. Which can be perceived when playing an audio- or a videotape backwards. From a subjective perspective future is probabilites and past has passed:)
i have actually been thinking in a B term recently, but only in application to celestially related time frames. Thank you for bringing it to Earth. :)
Isn't experiencing nostalgia a proof that we experience time? We remember fragments, so it isn't really equal to the present nor the future, what does B theory say about nostalgia?
Are you able to define how you feel time passing? That way you can tell me that i'm not experiencing the passing of time.
Also is it not possible to experience the experience of eating an orange, how much experience can one have in or during an experience?
I don't know much about arguments for time but seems a bit restricted if the choice is a or b. Lol
We can really only ever experience the "present". How can you experience something that you haven't experienced yet, or how can you experience something you've already experienced?
We experience the passage of time through our experiences. If you literally had no experiences, to you, there would be no passage of time at all, due to your lack of any kind of placeholder experiences, of which you would need at least 2.
Also, you if you could build a machine that could detect the order of cause and effect, you could detect an A or B universe. The problem though, would be that the machine would function under the constraints of the universe it's in, so it wouldn't operate the same in both universes, and I have no idea how you could possibly detect 1 universe from the other.
This is my view, feel free to add or comment on.
Isn't the changing of things a way of detecting time? If there was no passing of time everything would be frozen/ static.
A universe with no time would be like a paused youtube video. But your youtube video isn't paused, so in the watching of this video you detect the passage of time.
I guess.
It doesn't really matter does it? If the various descriptions all cover the exact same experiences then they are just using different words to describe the same thing. Assume that we have two books one above the other. We could argue about whether book A is above book B or if book B is below book A. "Aboveness" and "belowness" are clearly different so there should be some way to figure it out?
Of course not. Both descriptions describe exactly the same situation. There is no experiential/experimental difference involved. If there is no experimental way to test
A v. B " theories" of time then they aren't theories at all, just different descriptions of exactly the same thing.
Please do a video about the possibilities (or impossibility) of time travel