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On 15 Mar 2015, at 5:55 PM, Marla Vijaya kumar via Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > Here is the quote:To say there's no time is rather like saying there's > nomatter, on the basis that ultimately matter is made up of > vibratingsuperstrings or something, you might be tempted to say about matter, > well, it'snot really there at all. The truth is, matter manifests itself in > our everydayquasi-classical quasi-microscopic world, and space and time > manifest themselvesin that world too. I concede that space and time may not > be the ultimatereality. It could well be that space and time - and we really > have to link themtogether - are ultimately derived concepts or derived > properties of the world.It could be that ultimate reality is something more > abstract, some sort ofpre-space-time, component out of which space-time is > built. Just like matter,time may be a secondary or derived concept. But > nevertheless, at a sufficientlylarge level of size, there is the familiar > space-time we know. You can't wishit away, or define it away through > mathematics - it's something that you cantry to explain. Wood, for instance, > is not a primary substance, it's made up ofsomething else, which in turn is > made up of something else, and so on. But thatdoesn't mean that wood is > unreal. It's still there. The same goes for time. Weknow that time is real at > one level because it can be manipulated stretchedand shrunk by the > processes I have been discussing.Your question is very pertinent though, > because before thetheory of relativity, it was fashionable in some quarters, > and maybe it stillis, to try to make out that time is somehow merely a human > construct, derivingfrom our sense of the flux or flow of events, that it's > something to do withthe way we perceive the world as a temporal sequence. I'm > not denying that weperceive time as flux, but time is not solely a human > invention or a human category.For the physicist, time and space, along with > matter, form part of theequipment that the universe comes with. Or rather, > it's what the universe ismade of. To say that it doesn't exist at all is > nonsensical.Vijaya kumar Marla This is way ahead of itself. What does it even mean to speak of the “existence” of the fundamental dimensions of existence? Space-time isn’t a “thing” in any ordinary sense of the term; it’s a conceptual frame, projected onto experience as an axiomatic starting point for investigation. The question of its "existence” only arises as a byproduct of grammar: we can only name things using nouns, and grammatically nouns can always be copulated. Talking about the “existence of space-time” - affirmatively or negatively - is a bit like talking about the “height of magnitude", or the "length of duration”. It’s tautological, and not in a nice way. We don’t “experience” time. What we experience - that which serves as the basis for the concept of time that is familiar to us, and which thus shapes the ways in which we construct in imagination what we think of as our primordial experience of time, including for the purposes of physical investigations - is the constant coming-into-being and passing-away of things. Heraclitus got it, and conveyed this insight in his famous river aphorism. The ancient Greeks had precise words for the conjoined Janus-faces of this dual process: genesis and phthora: coming-into-being and passing-away. The big secret is that these are simply alternative names for the same thing. Even Dylan got it: “He not busy being born is busy dying”. But it’s easily overlooked, especially when we're dazzled by awesome toys like CERN and the prestige and allure of scientific journals and expert discourse. What physicist is prepared to stake their professional reputation on their ability to devise a rigorous scientific experiment that can demonstrate, scientifically, the content of the term “existence”? What does the name “existence” even name, other than an imaginary projected constancy, ostensibly subsisting beneath a surface of perpetual change - a projection that serves only to paper over the chasm in our ability to speak coherently about how passing occurs? The term has no “scientific” content; it’s imported wholesale - but without awareness or acknowledgement - from a prescientific metaphysics. Modern physics consists entirely of a set of institutionalised practices and discourses that - among other things - systematically mask this prescientific basis. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
