Time does not exist

You will undoubtedly have outlived me by many many, years. When i draw social security, i want the biggest check i can get from them. After all, i am unlikely to live 18 years after i begin to draw.

Or poetry time.

If time did not exist, Back to the Future would be meaningless.

Time is simply a concept.

You should get a job as a prison officer, see how well that notion goes down with the inmates.

This is a topic I find interesting. The German philiosopher Schopenhauer thought that time did not objectively exist, that time is a "side effect" if you will of being a material object. He believed that if we could step out of our material bodies, there would be no time. We would see everything at once.

In accordance with this belief, he also believed, (before Darwin! -though others did too - it is an ancient idea - Darwin's big thing was the proposal of a mechanism to expain it - schoppys big thing was couching it in somewhat scientific language or more advanced philosophical language), that things evolved in time, but that the evolution of things (animals) was an illusion created by being in time; i.e. evolution was like causality: a progression of events in time that marks the change of one thing to another.

So, to digress a moment, yes, time is marked by distance, but it is also more than just that, it is more generally labeled as "change". Though strictly speaking that change could also be labeled as movement (atoms moving towards ? entropy?) but this may be a bit incomplete. Harder to define change might include "thinking" which is without apparent movement - that would also define time as progression or "movement of thoughts (though one might say that thinking involves neuronal processing which is movement of electro-chemicals through neurons. This is by no means clearly defined as constituting "thinking" in the sense of the sensation of thinking. It may in fact be impossible to exactly define by definition).

OK, so back to Arthur, was he correct? He is not the only philosopher to have this idea about time, when one delves into philosophy, it seems fairuly intuiitve. and so when I first read his ideas about it, it seemed intuitive enough to me. However, there was something that Schopenhauer did not consider that Bertrand Russell in his big book on Western Philosophy talks about which Shoppy didn't have access to: Quantun Mechanics as it relates to relativity and spefically time.

In essence, if time is subjective, then why does time slow down at speed - more generally perceivable at speeds approaching light? All experminents have shown that this is true (including atomic clocks put on airplanes cruising around the planet comapared with "stationary" clocks).

The implications of this is that time, as a thing, is not subjective (we aren't here talking about the "subjective-subjective" expereicnce of time say when having fun or not), but something that exists outside of us and of which we have nothing to say about changing as an objective phenomenon. If it were so, our experience of time would not objectively change relative to anything. If we were ever to approach the speed of light we would expereicne this in spades when we came back and our children were as old as our grandparents!

This is the antithesis of intuitive which is more generally how the consequences of the results of quantum mechanics turn out. Strange Days indeed!

63? What!, you wasted a whole year.. If time exists that is..

Schopenhauer is wrong:

"Objectively" contradicts the reality. The simple fact that we have night and day proves the obvious. That people go work from 9 to 5 is proof positive that most people live by time. That we have life and death proves we have the passage of time.

I don't think bahman still understands that he faces death. LOL
At most, it has to do with his time on this plant; or age as most of us understand it. Otherwise, it's about health. They are both defined by time.

Wasted a year? I retired early; the average in this country.
https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-retirement-age-in-every-state

To hell with average, you could have done it (SS that is) at 62.

You appear to be correct that time does exist objectively..however, this issue about time that Shoppy is dealing with is not about what you are talking about. He does agree that time exists subjectively speaking..menaing that to us we CAN mark time by the subjective perceptions of the rising and falling of the sun and movement generally.

However, he was speaking about time more ontologically (as it relates to "reality" whatever that means!). Meaning, does it exist outside of our own perceptions of the sun rising and falling etc. Again, Einsteins theory of relativity would seem to contradict Shoppys view..however, by definition, your view of the rising and falling of the sun does not..for reasons why if you haven't already, read his book, the World As Will and Idea (or Representation).

Anyway, very interesting philosopher. Also, see Hume. These guys were some of the heavy weights of philosophies of modern (or pre-modern?) science. Its interesting to compare their ideas in light of modern science. Hume seems to rule though..his ideas still haven't been over turned. He is the Heisenberg of "ideas" (as knowledge and its nature)..

You probably know the philosophers better than I, but have you ever correlated their conclusions with the progression of their mostly disastrous 'love lives'? Might explain much of their philosophies.

Kant might be an exception.

Time exists on our planet. That's what is important to us humans. Philosophy only confuses the obvious to many.

Here's a thesis on time by Stanford. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/

@leadfoot, yah, don't now a whole lot about these philosophers love lives. Wouldn't seem beyond the pale that philosphers are mostly prickly people though..relating to most has got to be hard for these deep thinkers..

@ci, Yes, I don't think anyone denies that time exists to us. I think when people deny time, they are speaking ontologically. When you say that time existing is what's important to us, that is true - as a heuristic/practical matter, but may or may not be true ontologically..

So, when Hume says that we have no objective idea that anything exists outside of our own subjective ideas of it existing, he is speaking ontologically and NOT practially/heuristically. In fact he makes great hay of this very thing in his essays.

btw, thanks for sending the link. Interesting thoughts, though the only mention of relativity theory is in relation to simultaneity, not in relation to travel at speed. and its relation to time. I figured that would be an easy one. It supports your apparent contention that time actually DOES exist..

The two other thing the paper fails to mention (or if it did it went over my head) is that time is not really a "when". Time being a "When" is a verbal construct (which the essay does mention - but not in relation to what time appears to "really" be). Time is a WHERE. It is the notion that a point in the past refers to a where we were at that "time". In fact, not just where WE were, but where exerything that exists in our time-space-dimension "was" at that location. In this view, time travel is possible only by bringing everything back to exactly that place and in exactly the same condition (configuration of atoms) at that time. In this sense, time travel doesn't carry the burden of the old "if I kill my father how is that posssible, I wouldn't be born" paradox since in this view, it is a "re-setting" of all things, which includes a wiping of what "was" the future.

Of course, this appears impossible, this isn't via the "simple" construction of a time machine, but something only the gods could do!

One thing I found of particular interest in the paper is the semantic issue. Our discussion of time is forever tainted by our ideas of eternity which is defined only by negation. There appears to be something horribly wrong with any discussion of time via some kind of logical exposition since we cannot reconcile time with how anything "began". It calls into question any conclusion we have about time, in fact any conclusion about what we call reality. In fact it underscores your call for a heuristic valuation of time and presumably all knowledge. I happen to share your thoughts. I think much of philosophy is tied up and twisted due to mistakes about language. Something Bertrand Russell spent much of his career exposing and clarifying. What I like about philsophy is more of its historical value regarding the progression of human thoughts..Hume though..everyone has to read him if you want to speak about epistimology coherently. Not doing so is like speaking of the scope of physics and leaving out heisenberg. Even Bertrand has copped to Hume..(see "problems of philosophy" !

My major was Business, and my minor was Philosophy. I remember the first question asked by our Philosophy Professor about reality existing in the dark.
I just don't care to rehash that part of Philosophy in today's world.

Concepts are thoughts, though, and by your categorization thoughts are subjective and subjective things exist.

exactly and this notion that thoughts are subjective and exist is a difficult conceot for time travel.

So, time, being a WHERE and not a WHEN depends on all things being in back in a certain place at x time ago. So, each part of the universe last week was in certain spots and had a certain atomic configuration. This includes all objects, living and non living and yes, thoughts too. So, if we go back a weeek, for it to be truly time travel, the whole universe - all its "pieces" must be in the same quandrant if you will as it was a week ago and the same thoughts must be thought at exactly the same time etc. If you could reconfigure the universe like that, you might wipe out the current moment, recreating whatever objects, events thoughts etc that occured at that time and effectively, if you put yourself in that place, could wipe out the current moment from ever occuring. i.e. you would wipe out the future of now the vantage point of "last week". Presumably if you didn't insert yourself or anything new, then the same future would ensue a week later.

Of course, I think these are logical games. I believe the only way time travel could be true is if when the universe exploded and expanded (assuming this is true) then every point in time was created at once and exists as a slice of that expansion as an infinity of slices. In every "moment" we occupy a new slice of that "echo" and contine to "move forward". In this view, time travel is possible if we can someone change our vibration to move "backward" (or sideways or up or down or whatever makes sense?) to a different slice of that echo.

But really I don't think that's true. I can't even talk about it properly without using words that really don't have a proper referent, so the discussion, while sophisticated from our human point of view, is crude in respect to discussing any kind of proper reality. Here at this level of knowledge, we can;t even get our terms if the discussion correct for Christs sake!

But it is fun. Then there's the multiverse!

Hey CI, yeah, its rough (thinking too much about this stuff without a foundation and tools for handling it can be psychologically hazardous!)

Its bizarre and though some of it may be true (by our own definition), a lot of it speaks more to how are brains are wired and processes logic than any "real" thing..still, a lot of it is compelling. I don't however look for philosophy for "truth". I never did. I read a whole bunch, thought a whole bunch and then one day, the question about why I read came up and I realized Iwasn't looking for answers, I simply enjoyed the historical aspect of it and the fun of reading brilliant people exersise their consideral logical powers in the various forms those thoughts took according to the knowledge of the age they lived in.

I was more interested in how far our knowledge could go and for me it ended with Hume. He set the limits and ended any hope of getting Truth. After that, the only thing left was for Russel and Witgenstein to play cleanup, clarifying what was left that was valuable and throwing the remaining philosphical chaff into the fire.

What is left is boring to some though if they intend to find Truth with it.For others like me, its just fun to speculate and to find solace that there are somethings that neither science nor philosphy nor religion can fully articulate - and that has to do with the fullness of what we are. Yet somehow we are plugged into that reality and if we tap into it, honestly, though we will never fully explicate it, it will keep us busy and learning for the rest of our lives. It will always be incomplete though and that is something that many cannot accept..

Cheers!