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does time exist?
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badfish



Joined: 06 Dec 2005

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:13 am    Post subject: does time exist? Reply with quote

No: time is a man-made concept believe it or not. can you remember going on a trip and it seeming like it was over as soon as it started b/c it was so fun. can you remember watching a clock tick because you were so bored and ready to do something else? its all relative. the rate your mind processes information can approach the rate of reality but it can never go faster - a variation of Einsteins Special Theory of Relativity. but in a dream, reality doesn't exist, so the mind has an artificial reality that it can create with different parameters such as: the amount of time in reality for these thoughts to be processed. so basically, your brain creates that thought that the dream's reality was 30 minutes to an hour long.

Yes: the effects of aging on living organisms (especially humans), the rising and setting of the sun at regular intervals, phases of the moon, seasons etc
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VanIslander



Joined: 18 Aug 2003
Location: Geoje, Hadong, Tongyeong,... now in a small coastal island town outside Gyeongsangnamdo!

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

yer no jajdude
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badfish



Joined: 06 Dec 2005

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

VanIslander wrote:
yer no jajdude


oh
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VanIslander



Joined: 18 Aug 2003
Location: Geoje, Hadong, Tongyeong,... now in a small coastal island town outside Gyeongsangnamdo!

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

But you do ask an important if philosophically bad question, according to Wittgenstein. As time is neither a thing nor a non-thing (like an idea). As Ryle would later say, it's a category mistake to think of time in term of things.

Read Heidegger's Time and Being or his "Being and Time" to see how far the nonsense goes.
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jajdude



Joined: 18 Jan 2003

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 9:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

VanIslander wrote:
yer no jajdude


Lucky you, but thanks for what I hope is a compliment.
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arjuna



Joined: 31 Mar 2007

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 10:03 am    Post subject: Re: does time exist? Reply with quote

badfish wrote:
but in a dream, reality doesn't exist, so the mind has an artificial reality that it can create with different parameters such as:

Yes: the effects of aging on living organisms (especially humans), the rising and setting of the sun at regular intervals, phases of the moon, seasons etc


Is any reality not real? Is any reality not artificial?

What does "reality doesn't exist" mean? What do you mean by "exist"?

Time is a nothing, but it cannot be dismissed because at all levels perception happens. The perception is of process. Process, or movement, and the consciousness of the process are the final reality beyond which no question can even apply. Process itself can be considered time, and the perception of process/time will differ for different levels of consciousness.

Aging is a programmed disintegration linked to material processes. It, also, is as real (or unreal) as time.
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jajdude



Joined: 18 Jan 2003

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 10:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Time is a friend and enemy. Give me the weekend and kill Monday morning.
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faster



Joined: 03 Sep 2006

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Julian Barbour says time does not exist -- "change" is primary, but time is a perception of change.

Also, in A New Refutation of Time Jorge Luis Borges writes:

The denial of time involves two negations: the negation of the succession of terms in a series, and the negation of the synchronism of terms in two series. In fact, if each term is absolute, its relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist. One state precedes another if it knows it is anterior; a state of G is contemporaneous to a state of H if it knows it is contemporaneous. Contrary to what Schopenhauer affirmed in his table of fundamental truths, each fraction of time does not simultaneously fill the whole of space: time is not ubiquitous. (Of course, at this point in the argument, space no longer exists.)

And yet, and yet... To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and of secret consolation. Our destiny (in contrast to Swedenborg's hell and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
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beachbumNC



Joined: 30 May 2007
Location: Gumi

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 4:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

did you know that if you fly towards the Sun at warp speed, the slingshot effect of the Sun's gravity can send you backwards or forwards in time? that way you can travel back to the 20th Century to save the whales.

ask Captain Kirk if you don't believe me.
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idonojacs



Joined: 07 Jun 2007

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 5:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do donuts exist?
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tfunk



Joined: 12 Aug 2006
Location: Dublin, Ireland

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 6:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think that time is something so fundamental to human qualitative experience that:

a. It cannot be turned into a 'noun' (objectified).
b. It is so fundamental to our experience that any attempt to define it as 'verbs' etc. is self referential. For example, in maths the numbers 0 and 1 are considered axiomatic concepts ('it is' and 'it isn't' in English grammar) so any attempt to define these concepts must rely on terms that are themselves derivatives of these concepts. It would be like if I tried to define a door as 'a door is a door that acts as a barrier between two rooms'.

Space co-arises with non-space (space can be defined as the distance between two points) and is viewed as having objective reality.
Time co-arises with movement (the distance between 'starting' and 'finishing' and is viewed as quantitative and defined as both qualitative/quantitative).

I think the whole 'problem' with time is that we are obsessed with defining something, we feel that to define something is to conquer/control it. If you look at the most fundamental aspects of the English language, the verb 'to be' for example, you'll see that they all introduce metaphysical 'problems'.

There are some aspects of reality that don't fit into our template of noun->verb->subject.

I gotta go, it's time for me to go to work.
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Jizzo T. Clown



Joined: 27 Mar 2006
Location: at my wit's end

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 7:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is only the eternal Now.
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tfunk



Joined: 12 Aug 2006
Location: Dublin, Ireland

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 7:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jizzo T. Clown wrote:
There is only the eternal Now.


Stillness speaks?
PON?
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ED209



Joined: 17 Oct 2006

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

idonojacs wrote:
Do donuts exist?


No, but the holes do.
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Jizzo T. Clown



Joined: 27 Mar 2006
Location: at my wit's end

PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The ancient Greeks said "It's behind me" to talk about the future because they could already see what happened in the past ("No need to worry, it's in front of us now").

Alan Watts has a lot to say on the topic

And From The Eternal Now by Paul Tillich:

Quote:
The mystery of the future and the mystery of the past are united in the mystery of the present. Our time, the time we have, is the time in which we have "presence." But how can we have "presence"? Is not the present moment gone when we think of it? Is not the present the ever-moving boundary line between past and future? But a moving boundary is not a place to stand upon. If nothing were given to us except the "no more" of the past and the "not yet" of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the time that is our time; we would not have "presence."

The mystery is that we have a present; and even more, that we have our future also because we anticipate it in �the present; and that we have our past also, because we remember it in the present. In the present our future and our past are ours. But there is no "present" if we think of the never-ending flux of time. The riddle of the present is the deepest of all the riddles of time. Again, there is no answer except from that which comprises all time and lies beyond it -- the eternal. Whenever we say "now" or "today," we stop the flux of time for us. We accept the present and do not care that it is gone in the moment that we accept it. We live in it and it is renewed for us in every new present." This is possible because every moment of time reaches into the eternal. It is the eternal that stops the flux of time for us. It is the eternal "now" which provides for us a temporal "now." We live so long as "it is still today" -- in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this "eternal now" in the temporal "now." But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.
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