Re: The Time Deniers and the idea of time as a "dimension"

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 11:26:45 -0400

Dear Chris,

    Thank you for this post! Interleaving...

----- Original Message -----
From: "chris peck" <chris_peck303.domain.name.hidden>
To: <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 7:34 AM
Subject: Re: The Time Deniers and the idea of time as a "dimension"


> Hi Stephen;
>
> I have a couple of quesitions.
>
> [SPK]
> "Emulations involve some notion of a process and such are temporal. The
> idea that a process, of any kind, can "occur" requires some measure of
> both transitivity and duration.
> The mere *existence* of a process only speaks to its potential for
> occurrence."
>
> Im not quite sure what you mean by this. Possibly you mean that to
> coherently describe time it isnt enough to have laid out in succession a
> series of moments, or events, described by real numbers or however. There
> must also be something running through the series in order for the concept
> of time to make any sense. If you like, there must be a 'now' - a temporal
> position of sorts - in which raw sensory experience - audio and vision
> perhaps - comes together synaesthetically into a coherent perspective and
> is then consigned to memory. Put another way, there are many strips of
> film one could thread through a projector but until one does so the well
> ordered sequence of frames remains static, time is not realised in any
> coherent way in a film until it is shown. I think that if this is what you
> mean (or close) i'ld like to add my support to you're objection.

[SPK]

    What you seem to be considering is the distiction between 1st and 3rd
person aspects! The "...laid out in succession a series of moments, or
events, described by real numbers or however" is the 3rd person: The "view
from the outside" of time. The 1st person aspect is: "running through the
series in order for the concept of time to make any sense". This is the view
from the inside in the sense that at any given "present moment" - 'now'- an
observer (that has the capasity of making a report) will find itself within
an experience.
    What ever the means are considered to generate that "experience", what
does not change here is that the any observer will have a 1st person
experience of something and within that experience there will be some means
of distinguishing the overall content of that experience and some sense of
somehow being seperate from it.
    It is this "seperateness" that, I believe, connect the 1st and 3rd
person aspects and this is where the "inside" and "outside" framing obtains.
One way of thinking of this is to consider a video game that is set up so
that on can switch between seeing the computer generated scene, as one
"moves around", from the point of view of "where the eyes are" to the point
of view of a camera "floating overhead". What remained the same in the
switching?

> [CP]
> However, you might mean that there must be some sense of duration and
> transitivity within each individual moment. If you like, a series of
> events (frames, real numbers) which individually have no duration (or
> sense of transition) can not therefore collectively be considered to
> obtain such properties. I disagree with that. duration and transitivity
> can obtain accross a span of events, and to be strict I dont undestand the
> requirement for change at all.

[SPK]

    No, if we are taking the notion of a moment to an infinitesimal "slice".
It seems that in our eagerness to mathematize everything in sight, we
neglect the consequences that obtain. Numbers by themselves do not naturally
code for the operations on those numbers. We can arbitrarily assign some
number to "+", "-", etc. as we find in Goodel numbering, but this is not
natural, it must be assigned "by hand"! Thus we find ourselves in the
predicament of having to account for where the notions of duration and
transitivity come from.
    As to the requirement of change, I am claiming that we must have some
prior notion of change, at least the potential to change, in order to have a
coherent notion of transitioning from one "frame", number, Observer Moment,
Time capsule, or whatever. Even is we are going to use numbers, the simplest
of the ideas here, we have to have some "change" between the numbers
themselves as some quantity to relations between the numbers. The mere
existence of quantities is not sufficient to include both the numbers
themselves and the relationships between them (the latter including the
operations on the numbers). Figuratively, somewhere somehow, there must be
included some form of change.

> [SPK]
> 'Time, from what I have studied so far, involves two distinct notions: a
> "measure of change" and an "order of succession".'
> [CP]
> I can see that time involves an 'order of succession'. I dont see that
> time is a 'measure of change', if by that you mean that time depends on
> change to exist. I can concieve an infinate universe consisting of a
> solitary glove over time, a universe in which there are moments but no
> change. Awareness of time might not be possible in the absense of change,
> but that is not the same thing as time not existing. Moreover, it seems
> odd to insist - if you are insisting - that events (frames, real numbers)
> change rather than the just the substances which characterise the event
> itself.

[SPK]

    What is a "clock" if not an means to measure change? Time is not the
change itself, it is the valuation of that change. Change is what is taken
to be a priori in the notion of time; in requers some process of
differentiation.
    "Distance" is a measure of extention, requiring some prior co-existence
of differenciable entities. The how and the why of this differenciation is
what we need to look at carefully. We can assume that the differentiated
entities exist a priori, like numbers, but if we errace all vestiges of a
means to "know a difference" such as an observer, what coherence remains?
    Numbers, in-themselves (dasein), are meaningless.

> [CP]
> In boiling water, the water (substance) changes temperature, the event at
> which all the water has passed temperature 'd' requires no inherent
> 'becoming' to make sense temporally, it just needs to 'identify' the state
> of the water at that time, doesnt it?

[SPK]

    Your claim here depends on looking only at an abstract slice 'd' that
has some quantitative value within some assumed coordinate system;
temperature vs. time. This is going back to the cellular automata results
where I pointed out that the range of values over the checker board of
results can only be taken after the act of rendering the result, not prior
to it.
    Does a "history"" include values that can be associated with either of
McTaggart's A or B series? No! It has boundaried at some initial point and
spans to some "present moment". Again, we are considering an order of events
after the fact of their ordering. The "measure of change" aspect goes from
the 1st person aspect of "being there as the history was happening" to the
3rd person aspect of comparing the events at one date of a history to
another.

>
snip

Kindest regards,

Stephen
Received on Fri Jul 08 2005 - 11:30:23 PDT