On Jan 27, 2014, at 1:24 AM, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com
> wrote:
Dear Jason,
As many as are possible.
So if it is possible that they all exist, how is that different from
block time?
Jason
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 1:54 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com
> wrote:
Dear Jason,
I would not say " that only a single "present" moment of time
exists". I would say that we have a concept of a "present moment"
that we may believe that each person has. Maybe you are directing
this post to Edgar...
But you argue against block time, so how many points in time do you
believe to exist?
Jason
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 1:46 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Stephen,
If you say that only a single "present" moment of time exists, that
implies that the existence of that moment in time is entirely
sufficient to explain your current experience.
Now consider if the rate of flow of time slowed down, such that it
took a thousand years to go from one Plank time to the next. No one
would feel any different, as in each moment in time, still, only one
point in time exists, and it is still the same moments (it just
remains the present moment for a longer period of time than before).
Since they are still the same moments, everyone's state and
experiences remain the same.
Now let's say the flow of time suddenly stopped, so that it froze at
a single instant in time. As we already concluded, according to the
idea of a flowing time, the existence of a single point in time is
enough to explain your experience of now, since according to this
idea, the past and future do not exist (so what role could they play
in effecting what you feel?)
So if the objective flow of time makes no difference to our
perception of time, and even if the flow of time stopped completely,
it would make no difference to our brain states, perceptions, or
conclusions, then it seems to be that postulating the flow of time
to be ontologically or fundamentally necessary is completely
unnecessary and without base. We cannot say if time flows, how fast
it flows, or whether or not more than one present moment exists, so
for what reason should we believe that the current present moment
will disappear and be replaced with a new future moment?
The idea that time flows, when followed to its logical ends, seems
to undermine the very reasons for assuming it in the first place.
Jason
On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 2:53 PM, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com
> wrote:
Dear LizR,
Umm, I thought that I wrote up a semi-technical argument against
the block universe concept. Maybe you didn't see it. I will try
again to make the case using your remarks below.
On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 3:18 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 January 2014 08:54, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com
> wrote:
Either way the concept of a block universe is one of the most mind
blowingly moronic ideas anyone ever came up with. It reminds me of
the ideas me and my buddies used to come up with in Jr. High School
just for laughs but which no one was dumb enough to ever take
seriously.
But people actually do, very smart people too!
Even I do, so not just smart people.
Stephen, you have to provide some reason why the block universe
concept, which was used in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics,
is wrong.
We now know, given the weight of evidence in support of QM, that
Newtonian physics is "wrong", even thought it can be used for making
approximations when we can safely assume that the uncertainty
principle and relativistic effects are negligible. There are
metaphysical assumptions built into Newtonian physics, many of which
survive into GR.
One of these assumptions is that objects have properties innately,
completely independent of whether or not those properties are
measured. We know that this assumption is nonsense and should not be
used in our reasoning.
I hope that I don't need to duplicate what one can find in any
good article by, say Jeremy Butterfield, about the implications of
Bell's theorem. See, for example, http://philoscience.unibe.ch/documents/physics/Butterfield1992/Butterfield1992.pdf
for yourself.
Your attempt using QM misused the concept of simultaneity, and in
any case QM works fine it you make the block universe into a block
multiverse - all the quantum probabilities come out correctly, as
per Everett, from a deterministic evolution.
Not at all! A block universe is a static 4 dimensional object. Am I
mistaken in this belief? A "block multiverse" is a word salad, IMHO.
The fact that it's a block Hilbert space (or whatever) doesn't stop
time evolution being mapped along a dimension. That is all 'block
universe" means - that time is a dimension.
Ah! How exactly does this "mapping of time evolution" occur? If a
block universe is all that exists, what is doing the action of
mapping energy, spin, charge, etc. measures to a sequence of points
that can be faithfully represented as a "dimension"?
Trajectories of objects are curves in a space, not "dimensions",
at best they are partially ordered sets of "events" that have
properties associated with them. The association is done using
tangent spaces... I digress.
The idea that time is a dimension has been repeatedly been shown
to be problematic by people such as Chris Isham and David Albert, I
didn't just make up that it is a problem.
There is no problem with change in a block universe. Change occurred
in the past, which is a good example of a block universe. No one has
refuted that argument as yet, and in fact they can't - the past
clearly is a block universe, by all the definitions given, one that
extends from the big bang to just before the present. The logical
inference is that it continues through the present into the future,
and our feeling that time "flows" is an illusion (no one has ever
explained what that metaphor means, by the way, except with
reference to a second time stream - but that just moves the block
universe from 4D to 5D).
I disagree. We forget that when we think of a 4d object we are
involved with it, we are associating change with features of it.
They are not "in it". Our thinking using this idea only re-enforces
the mistake that we can observe things in a way that is 1) faithful
to what is "actually out there" and 2) that our observations are
passive. No work is required nor disturbance of the observed occurs.
This thinking is wrong.
The argument from incredulity has never worked very well in science.
Could you point to an example of an "argument from incredulity" so
that I might understand how you are claiming that my arguement is
such?
A lot of things that people couldn't get their heads around turned
out to be true. But for most physicists the BU isn't one of them, it
has long been understood and accepted. Anyone who draws a graph with
a time axis implicitly accepts it. Anyone who describes time as a
dimension implicitly accepts it. No sensible alternative has ever
been proposed. Saying that "it doesn't explain becoming" is
disproved with reference to the past - clearly things became other
things in the past.
I have proposed a sketch of an alternative, it may not be sensible
yet... I welcome questions...
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