Level1 Philosophicum: [Is time just a human construct?]

@anotherriddle and @BookrV I’m enjoying this thoroughly Thanks for setting it up and of course all the participants of the thread .

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I’m enjoying it too! Although, I can’t participate a lot at the moment. Never thought there would be so much interest, I hope the interest will continue. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Well every now and again i saw some physics drifting by in the lounge so there’s a apattite for these things.

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I don’t know enough about this.

There is at least one very easy to define part of time from a human perspective and that’s the measurement of time. That is a human construct but based on some form of reality like most things. Distance is real, but Kilometres is a human construct so we can measure and understand distance. Similarly time most here are arguing is real, the measurement of time is absolutely though a human construct so we can understand time.

Time is weird though, unlike distance which is with few exceptions is explicitly definable and constant. Time seems to have loads of oddities. Past, present, and future, of which you can argue, 1, 2, or all 3 are real. then time changes depending on perspective. And i imagine more.

Time is real I would say. I just wrote that in the past, not now, a period of something happened to make that happen, we can define it in seconds based on the environment around us and our perception of time from within the environment.

The question might be what is time? it seems to be something that not necessarily an absolute constant, or at least it can be observed differently depending on how you observe it, but I think that still makes it real.


This might be a useful resource, something i’ve not read through yet but looks promising.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/time/

Anyone have any more? Or links to research on time?

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You cannot write something in the past, you only write in the now, and introduce a change.

Same, I’ll get back to this when I’m off work next week.

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Would love if people read these and give their thoughts.

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It was written… semantics in language that is then. the text was still written in a past time, not now.

Experience of time is definitely subjective (how time seems to speed up as you get older [Probably because every unit of time experienced is a smaller proportion of the total time you’ve experienced?]).

Like the majority have said, time is objective and measurable. If you remove time, our physics models just don’t work, because energy can’t exist (at least, be observed) without some kind of change.

How long is now? How much time is the present? That would be subjective.

Change does not prove time.

What measurement would you want here, these questions assume time is real.

Time is human concept, but measurable as entropy in a system IIRC.

Throwing in a quote

Time is a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics.

It sounds a bit like your going for the all things only exists through a human lens so isnt actually real. Sounds like your going off a totally different set of base definitions from everyone else.

Maybe its worth setting out what those definition are, as you don’t seen to consider time to be the same as others, or have different definitions.

There’s not much to say if that’s the case :smile:

(None of this was written “now” as that would require it to have all existed in the exact same moment)

Pfff where to find time to read this long ass piece, its intresting though.

Perfect for on the bus to work, Thank for this brainfood.

If the definition of time is introducing change, which is what you are basically arguing, then yes time is real.

That’s the definition of time

The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future

The issue I have with the block universe criticism is that it doesn’t really make time “not real”. It helps highlight that our experience of time is an illusion, but the events we experience are still separated by time. Using the DVD example, although all parts of a movie exist simultaneously on the DVD, the events in the movie are separated from each other in the DVD and can be causally connected to each other with different distances (time).

On a tangential note: If illusions are not real then how do they exist? The subjective experience of blue exists to me, in a very real way. The photons of light that cause me to experience this are probably not blue but yet I cannot escape what is right in front of me; blue. In the same regard, our perception of time is undoubtedly flawed, but there are real things going on in our brain that create this experience.

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Imagine that we are incredibly far in the future, where the last atom has stopped vibrating. Is there still time?

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So would you argue that because time has no physical manifestation (that we know of), it can never be proven real?

They’re more rhetorical questions, than anything. I was trying to make the argument that past, present and future are definite constructs, in that they’re relative to our interpretation of time.

Now that’s an interesting thing to say.

Theoretically even after heat death of the Universe there’s still before and after states. Because the spacetime itself keeps on expanding. So while everything inside the universe reached energy equilibrium, the spacetime itself still “experiences” change. An in order for there to be change, there must be a way to separate before from after aka time.

I haven’t kept up, is the latest theory that the universe is forever expanding? What about oscillating universe theory?