On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Edgar L. Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Jesse, > > Re your question of "simultaneous past p-times" its a good question and I > did answer it but will give a more complete answer now. > > I said first that everything happens at the same p-time (the same present > moment of p-time as p-time continually happens). > That's a complete non-answer. I guess you are *defining* "everything" to mean "everything which actually exists in my presentist ontology, i.e. only things as they are right now". But my question was specifically about *past* events, and it doesn't depend at all on the assumption that past events "exist", only that there is an objective truth about them. Do you believe there is an objective truth about whether astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, or about whether all life was created in seven days or evolved over millions of years? If your answer is "yes", then what I'm asking is whether, among the objective truths about past events, there is an objective truth about WHETHER THEY HAPPENED AT THE SAME TIME AS ONE ANOTHER. Yes or no? Please give a clear answer to this question. And if the answer is "yes", please tell me clearly whether you think there is any way to determine empirically the truth about whether two past events happened at the same time, or if it is fundamentally unknowable to all beings within our universe (if the latter, that's what I mean by 'metaphysical'). > > But as I've explained, p-time is that IN WHICH all computations of > measurable quantities takes place, so it doesn't really have a metric in > the sense that clock time does, because it is the logical computational > locus of the origin of all metrics. > > I have no idea what you mean by "metric" here, which in mathematics refers to a function that defines some notion of "distance" along paths in a manifold (which can include proper time if the manifold in question is relativistic spacetime). Again, please just tell me yes or no if you think there's an objective truth about whether past events happened at the same time as one another, no technical ideas like "metrics" are necessary to answer this question. Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
