No, it would be more along the lines of…..ehhhh, the why isn’t any big deal, far too difficult to pin down. The how, that’s what I want to know, and could possibly determine to a greater certainty than a why.
Man, that’s damn near impossible to even imagine, change without a pattern recognizable or conceivable from it? The duration of such change would have to be vanishingly small, and the repetition rate approaching zero.
I guess I’d have to say, because we think we do measure time then it must be the case change without pattern is a contradiction.
From the technical side though, i.e., the model 3 transcendentalist, if I say time is not what we actually measure, then change without pattern is irrelevant with respect to it on the one hand, and, pattern is not a necessary condition of change, on the other.
Truth be told, I never heard of it, me not being much for keeping up with applied astrophysics. I like Penrose as an author, happy for his Nobel, and I had to admire the daring attempts with OOR.
From a spot-reading, I’m not qualified to judge whether your critique of the theory is legitimate. Personally, the end of the universe is irrelevant. I mean, I wont be here for it, so……
What I think, then, is, we are the time tellers; without us, or similar relational intelligences, there is no such thing as time.
Would you consider that universal concepts are dependent on a multitude of minds? This means that they are a product of human communion, communicative activity. From this perspective, one aspect of the universal is separate from the mind, as the symbols of language are, and the other aspect is not proper to any one mind, but actually requires a multitude of minds (justification).
The issue is, that “products of the mind” is somewhat ambiguous. Obviously, one individual’s mind cannot be responsible for the creation of all the universals which exist within. So if we inquiry to those who hold a “products of the mind” theory, they generally claim that “the mind” itself is some sort of universal, referring to all minds. But this is problematic because it cannot be a universal “the mind” which itself creates universals. Therefore “the mind” in this usage is not a universal, but a collection of individuals.
That’s an important difference because it would be a category mistake to refer to a collection of individuals as a universal concept. But now we have a new type of property to consider. We have a type of property which is attributable to the whole of a group, but not attributable to any individual within the group. Each individual plays a role, but the property manifests as a defining feature of the whole. The existence of this type of property has been studied in nature, such as the murmuration of birds.
In the case of human concepts, we could use the Wittgensteinian approach. Each word that we use is a sign which indicates direction to the individual mind. The words used together create a grammar of rules for the individual mind to follow. By following the rules, each individual plays one’s own role in the activity of the collective, which produces universal concepts. It’s also interesting to note that birds are understood to have a very sophisticated communicative capacity.
Notice, in this perspective, the universal concept is not a “product of the mind”. Nor is it something which exists strictly independently of minds. It is the product of the activity of a community of human beings. So it is the product of minds, but it also exists independently of any individual mind, the activity of any individual not being an essential aspect of the universal.
It is a transcendental object, which just means it’s an a priori deduction of pure reason, representing the manifold of all resident representations as belonging to and contained in one consciousness. Metaphysically necessary, psychologically invasive, physically irrelevant.
This in dispute with the ancients declaring everything is transitory and nothing is persistent and abiding**. And maybe you brought this up regarding your exposè on time, and asking for that which doesn’t change.
(**CPR A364)
Thank you for the kind words! I find the ego typically gets in the way of finding the truth, though to give the Devil credit where it’s due, it’s probably from the ego my obsessive need for truth comes. But yeah, the happiness and relief I get from learning something new far outweighs any negative emotion I may feel from being proven wrong. I am lucky to have that. I think my more recent years of philosophizing has been a crucible. I’ve philosophized all my life, but I’ve only gone really hard into analytical philosophy and formal logic the past 5 years. The combination of being egoically attached to certain untenable positions and also being driven towards truth is a very burdensome inner conflict. I even became depressed during one period of this path due to the inner conflict of being so attached to a position that the force of truth was showing to me was impossible.
After finally letting go of that position (this was sometime in 2024), it kind of opened Pandora’s box. I saw what could happen if I put aside my ego as much as possible when searching for truth, and the amount of Eureka euphoria that a less obstructed stride towards truth generates just dwarfs the discomfort and pain of constantly changing my mind. It is a skill that requires practice however, and I seem to be developing it still. There have been periods of my philosophizing were I underwent staggering revolutions of thought every week, perhaps once every day. And often I would return to old ideas in new forms over and over. The fear of just uselessly going in cycles sometimes hits me, but I don’t give that fear much credence. I seem to be going somewhere, because the collection of beliefs that are seemingly useful and long-term is only growing larger and larger.
When I’m finally able to fully formalize my currently under-construction formal system, I will enter a new era, I believe. I suspect I’ll probably redefine it a few times, but it will be easier then, because it will be from the vantage point of having something more solid to stand on. Right now I am running around in philosophical quicksand, and the only solid ground I have is the soles of my own two feet. And I am not discontent with that, because it is a necessary phase.
Indeed, taking sets as fundamental is a bad move, I believe. That said, \mathsf{ZFC} is a great system. In many areas of math, equality is reduced to having the same structure. That makes sense for mathematics, because I believe it is the study of structure itself.
So, I believe \mathsf{ZFC} is largely correct on the structural level, but it seems to imply certain ontological positions that are problematic to me. Tokens are not prior to universals, because we cannot even pick out tokens without universals. It is when universals (predicates, that is) unify in salient ways that a token emerges from their co-inherence. Of course, this is not at all a sufficient account. I mean, take the conjunction of two predicates, and you just get another predicate. To go from the general to the particular requires either enough predicates, or the right predicate(s), to “weigh in”, such that their conjunction is no longer just a more specific universal, but now an actual particular. I don’t yet know exactly what that particularizing addition must be.
My system is more and more achieving a structural similarity to \mathsf{ZFC}, but it is doing so without taking sets as fundamental, but rather using predicates as somewhat equivalent to them. This isn’t ground-breaking at all, but I just thought I’d mention it, because I agree that we cannot conceive of tokens as logically prior to their universals.
I don’t believe in the real number line as corresponding to anything real. Not in the literal sense at least. I am not sure if I believe in absolute infinity, but if there is such a thing as absolute infinity, then it solves nothing anyways. Cantor showed that there are always bigger fish to fry. If you start dealing with transfinite numbers, then your need for true boundlessness just reappears higher (and higher yet) up on the infinite hierarchy. Any final, self-contained solution that uses absolute infinity will nonetheless wind up working primarily because it properly grapples with potential infinity.
So, if the real number line corresponds to anything real, it corresponds to what is always a discretized number line that can be iteratively given a higher and higher resolution. The density of the real number line, at best, corresponds to an activity on the true number line.
For any number x and y, there is a number between them… if we decide to look for it, to construct it. I am not sure if this is really how it is, but this is just the best case scenario for the real number line’s correspondence to anything real.
Either the measure of space and time is just statically discrete, or it is dynamically discrete, perhaps with an arbitrarily increase-able resolution, but never an infinite resolution. Density and continuity are always a work-in-progress, God fills in the blanks if and when he must.
But, as you rightly mention, quantum physics seems to stop that work-in-progress right in its tracks. The jury is still out on the correct interpretation of this IMO, but it definitely could mean that time and space are simply statically discrete, or perhaps dynamically discrete but with a limit to its resolution nonetheless.
I view mathematical absolute infinities and the real number lines as static idealizations of what must instead be eternally dynamic. And I think Cantor would ultimately agree, because the paradoxicality of the class of the entire hierarchy of infinites, often denoted as ת, is the logical proof that any and all infinite measure is an unfinishable work-in-progress. The destination is the journey, the finality is to be a process, because if we correctly classify processes as processes, then they are complete as such. There’s a beauty to that. And this is part of the reason why I don’t think time is an extralogical matter, and why I am very against trying to model truth and reason with these ideally static systems. I mean, all logicians know for a fact the systems aren’t, on a practical level, actually static. But, they say they are static in an ideal sense. I believe it is a Platonic move, and I think it is wrong.
No static system could ever formalize a dynamic reality. Our systems are meant to be mirrors of reality, and so they must move in sync with reality. The system’s are not merely dynamic at the practical level, because the system’s do not exist beyond the practical level. A formal system is an activity, called formal only due to its rigid structure.
I wonder, what do you think of this? I went on this tangent to build on my interpretation of what you are talking about above, but I could have misinterpreted the point you were making. Or even if I didn’t, you may still disagree with some of the details of my account here.
This is incredible interesting! It connects to stuff I have been thinking about, especially recently, but it frames it in a slightly different way. I don’t think I have ever heard or thought about the present as an overlap of the future and the past. Right off the bat, I like the thinking, because it removes the present as an additional primitive, instead defining it in terms of the future and the past. Before I try to analyze your idea above here, I’d like to offer some of the context with which I receive it.
As explained above, I believe in the discreteness of space and time. However, that immediately raises the question: what are the quanta of space and time?
A discrete view of time usually treats time like a video. It is a video, a discrete sequence of pictures stitched together. But, there is a building intuition within me that this may perhaps be problematic. I can’t quite explain very well yet why I think so, and why I think the alternative might be better, but here it is:
What if time is a video made from stitching many tiny, indivisible videos together? In an earlier post, I warned against change across the span of a moment. And I still believe in that we should be wary of this; we should make it explicit whether we are ultimately professing such a thing or not.
But perhaps this is the only thing that makes sense. What if the moment IS the change? Each quantum of time (each moment) is really a quantum of change? With static moments, we create this duality between the static contents of moments and the mystical change between them, whatever that means. But perhaps we should just accept change as the fundamental content of moments? This may seem like I am returning to my former view that change is what kills and not time, but I would argue this is a separate matter, and so it isn’t a return. I will get back to that.
I am not well read on Hegel. I, like most people, do not understand him at all (if there even is something to understand). But in SL, he mentioned something that I found to be very interesting and profound. He says measure is the unity of the duality between quantity and quality.
That makes sense, because there is no way to get a measure from quantity unless there is a quantity of something. And that something, that gets quantified; that is the quality. The qualia of the matter. The qualia of the length that we’ve just decided is a meter. The qualia of the duration that is a second…
As you can see, I believe a temporal logic must be intervalist. I believe temporal intervals are more fundamental than temporal points, because the latter is really an unreal, idealized abstraction from the former.
Now, that stance perhaps does not directly force the idea that the quanta of time are themselves dynamic; like an atomic video. But, I think it at least helps motivate this move. If the quality of time was the static breadth of a moment… then there’s this extra layer of how the phenomenology of time somewhat mystically arises as being dynamic from the progression of static quanta. But… as a phenomenologist, this makes me uneasy. It just doesn’t feel like that. The static moment feels like a mere abstraction, utterly impossible to sense or even properly conceive, already gone before it had time to be. If time were truly a video stitched together by still pictures, then why doesn’t it feel like that?
Now, this does not imply I am returning to an idea that change is fundamental. Time is still divided up into quanta, and it is the force of time that brings forth the quantum in which I am dying. The only difference is that instead of time bringing me from a moment in which I am alive, into a moment in which I am dead, time is instead bringing me from a moment in which I am living, into a moment in which I am dying. Then after that, I am being dead. So, I see this as a separate matter, not as a return to change as logically prior to time.
The content of every moment is itself an indivisible action or activity. Every moment is a quantum of change. But this then immediately forces me to ask; what is in-between moments then? Well, I must conclude… nothing. Instead, moments overlap.
If a moment is an activity, then we can abstract from it its idealized start- and end-points. But these are not really points, but rather the sub-regions of overlap with the preceding and succeeding moments (respectively).
Moment 1 overlaps with Moment 2, and Moment 2 overlaps with Moment 3, but Moment 1 does not overlap with Moment 3. And it is this intransitivity that allows all moments to really be entirely overlapping with other moments, and yet moments are still distinguishable from each other. Moments always share their content with other moments, and find their distinction from other moments in that they have different relations to other moments.
And this growing intuition of mine thus clearly connect to what you are claiming here… It seems my philosophy is pushing me towards thinking about the overlaps between moments, and you’re talking about the present as an overlap between the future and the past.
And you then connect that to the breadth of the present. I’ve always known there had to be some kind of breadth to the present, but I didn’t know what it was. Now, it seems like that breadth is a quantum of change, a quantum of duration, or the qualia of duration… And this breadth consists of the overlap of the past and the future…
The more I think of it, the more obvious it seems. It gives a kind of qualitative and even logical continuity to a progression of time that is nonetheless structurally discrete.
What do you think? Am I interpreting your idea here correctly, and if I am not, then what do you think of this idea I am proposing?
Indeed, placing the future as kind of prior is wonderfully ironic, but really intuitive once it is grasped. The deepest truths often tend to be ironic, I have noticed.
Though, there is kind of* a force moving in the opposite direction, the conventional direction. It is the force of logic, where the presence of antecedents in the past force the universal presence of their consequents into the possibilities of the future, which means that regardless of which possibility gets picked, the consequent will be a part of it. We can model this as a force from the past acting on the future/present.
*But, that is a simplification. The logical force from the past to the future is at most a transferred force. Really, there is a kind of parallel force acting on time, acting on the present; the force of God’s selection of which potential gets actualized. God picks a certain antecedent, and God enforces logic, so God thus indirectly forces the universal presence of the consequent in all future possibilities.
We can model this as a transferred force from the past onto the future, because it is practical, but it may be very misleading. It may be misleading because the transference implies a kind of delay between God’s selection of the antecedent, and the emergence of the consequent’s presence in all possibilities.
…But perhaps there is a delay? I wonder if God is omniscient in the sense that his thought, his realization of the world, his computation… is the speed limit (equal to c, I would assume). I don’t know. I view reality as a work-in-progress, and I wonder if God is simply the one who works it all out before us, with even him too being constrained by some speed of computation, of discovery, of self-realization.
If so, there may be a kind of transference of force, because maybe when God picks an antecedent, he must compute its consequents, and once he does, the realm of future possibility is shaped accordingly. His choice of an antecedent forces aspects of his possible future choices, and in this way, there is a transferred force from the past to the future, mediated by God.
But this is just a possibility that I am exploring.
I take this as an agreement that the breadth of the present is not static, but rather dynamic; some quantum of change? And the section quoted above perhaps explains what you think the quantum of change really is. The quantum of change is the selection of one possibility over another, which is the same as the actualization of one possibility and equivalently the non-actualization of all the others.
Would this be a correct interpretation?
I agreed with this back when I wrote my last response, but I just didn’t want to jump into a discussion of what is doing the selection yet. I wanted first to understand the other aspects. When I said:
I did not mean that the potential was singular. I’m a big fan of the following riddle: What is that when you have one of it, you have none of it?
I meant that the potential was a plurality of mutually exclusive possibilities, and time was the force that forced one of them into actuality. But the force that picked which one was a force I wanted to remain quiet on, for that time being. I have long thought of God as the selecting force in reality. I plan on trying to prove God’s existence and nature in my formal system once it sufficiently matures. I think one of the most important proofs of God’s nature will be the proof of his supremacy, which will follow from a proof that reality is indeterministic, and yet the present moment is determined… so, there must be a mechanism that takes us from one to the other. Intuitively, that would be God.
I agree that determinism removes the very purpose of the present and thus, through parsimony, implies eternalism. Or worse, the implication of eternalism from determinism may in fact be fully a priori. Either way, I believe in neither.
Yes, but the consequent is a selection that is inseperable from the selection of the antecedent. God does not violate logic. If you want a more detailed view of my stance on this, I refer you to this discussion: God and the Paradox of the Stone
Logic determines the relations between God’s selections. But it does not fully determine God’s selections. Logic is just not strong enough to determine everything, so at the end of the day, there is a beautiful, indeterminate, divine, magical choice of one thing over another.
I don’t know if God plays dice, but he sure as hell doesn’t just play Sudoku…
I thank you back for your words, and the pleasure is mutual! Minds resonating together reach amplitudes utterly unreachable when alone
I am not well-versed on the different views on universals. I expect my next round of developing my formal system will involve the umpteenth re-visitation of what universals really are, and at this stage, I might be in a better position to start reading about the views of other philosophers on the matter.
Whether my position right now is best described as conceptualism or psychologism, I don’t quite know. My position may in fact currently be too vague to even receive a name. However, as a phenomenologist and idealist, I think I might agree with your characterization of my view.
One of my most central principles is that of Giambattista Vico:
“Truth is itself made.”
I am not sure if my version of this philosophy exactly matches that of Vico’s, and it is beyond the scope of my post here to explain what I mean by it, because it gets kind of complicated, and I’m also not finished figuring it out.
I believe we must start with epistemological subjective idealism, and then we make our way to ontological objective idealism, but also with an account of the intersubjective aspect of reality at some point. Also, I think the objectivity of our idealistic reality is supplied by the fact that we are all living inside of God’s mind.
So, how do universals come to be? Well, I can’t give an exact account, but in our phenomenology, we are inundated with the mental substance of which reality consists, and this substance has all of these divisions. Divisions of a very general kind, perhaps logico-spatiotemporal divisions is what we could call them. Just differences. And we really could pick any division of that and not-that to in which to ground a primitive universal. But some picks are more useful or relevant than others, and those are the ones that typically make their way into our languages for the long-term, which then reinforces their salience.
Are these divisions outside of our phenomenology? Well, only in the sense that they may exist also in the mind of God and the mind of others. Perhaps only a structurally identical set of divisions exist in a different mind? Is my blue the same as your blue? Not sure it matters for this debate, but it’s worth mentioning.
Anyways, since I am an idealist, to say that universals or predicates are just the recognition of divisions inhering in my phenomenology is not really classifying them as less real. They are about as real as they could be, to me. Perhaps you agree with all of this, and mostly disagreed with my phrasing, my use of “abstraction”.
Well, I am not sure how well I can defend my use of “abstraction” here, because my view of universals is still too vague to tie all of these intuitions together. But, I think that the divisions in our phenomenology use objects, tokens, as vessels. Then, through some intellectual action on that, we extract or really abstract, the universals/predicates from them. I don’t know… Anyways, if by all of the above, I am an adherent of conceptualism or psychologism, then that’s my current, tentative stance.
This sounds to me like you are aligned with Heidegger’s notion of universals as seeking states? Or maybe something similar. My cursory understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy has inspired a new line of thought within me ever since I caught a glimpse of it.
Perhaps the activity of grasping a universal is the activity of shaping one’s mind into a keyhole for which the universal is the key? To grasp a universal is to grasp its shape by feeling around the shape of its absence (when no instances are present), or by feeling the shape of an instance clicking into place like a key into a keyhole?
I intend to read Heidegger as a part of my next investigation into universals. I have long had a view of universals as static, a view of each individual thought corresponding to a mental state. This approach has been very difficult, and I find the idea of viewing the quanta of thought not as states, but as acts or processes, as very alluring. It seems to fix the issues of the static view of universals. And such a move by me would come at the perfect time, because as can be seen in my latest response to @Meta_U, I am moving towards a view of time composed not of still pictures, but rather indivisible quanta of change/activity…
That said, my budding view of universals as actions, as perhaps feeling around the keyhole, does not seem to run contrary to the view of universals as our own products, in the sense I vaguely explained above.
The divisions exist in our phenomenology, whether we want it or not, though they are also nonetheless dependent on at least one of us being sentient (counting God as one of us), since they only exist in our different phenomenologies after all. But although the divisions are there, we choose which ones to name, which ones to focus on, which ones to keep a longer-term grasp of. Now, the pressures that guide these selections are of course not made entirely by ourselves, especially not by any one individual. But, it is still a part of our participation in how we divide up reality, or rather, how we accentuate the divisions already present in our phenomenology from the start.
I am not a Christian, but I find that Christian theology has some incredible insights. I think the insight above can be found in the Bible.
19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper meet for him.
—Genesis 2:19-20, KJV
God made all the tokens, and all possible collections thereof; all possible predicates, even predicates utterly irrelevant and/or inconceivable to us. But we shape the forces of salience in our phenomenology, thus truly shaping our phenomenology directly, by naming some predicates, and not naming certain others. All the groupings were there, however seemingly arbitrary or useless. We chose to name and use some, and let others be almost invisible to us as mere noise.
Oh, numbers are a whole other can of worms to me. I haven’t fully developed my account of numbers, but my best bet is this: numbers are neither real as objects, nor even real as reifications of quantitative predicates. The predicate that a collection has when its quantity is a googol is not present in our phenomenology, and never will be.
So, I think of numbers as purely formal objects, defined structurally. Numbers don’t have referents, but they are symbols that have a formal-logical behavior, and that behavior is their only source of meaning. They behave according to the rules of the number system they live in, and that is all the meaning they have in themselves. This is why I think mathematics is the study of structure. And when a mathematical structure matches a real-life structure, then we can prove so through science. But at no point do the mathematical objects ever refer to real things, not even in the sense of intelligible universals.
That’s my best bet right now. Once I understand universals as acts better, I might change my perspective on mathematical objects.
Tying It into the Discussion (again)
Ever wary of letting our investigation of universals get off-topic, I will make its connection to the topic of change and adaptation explicit.
When we begin looking at universals as acts, then suddenly the very quanta of thought themselves are subject to time and change… perhaps even adaptation?
Hegel had a very dynamic view of concepts. I don’t claim to understand him very well, but I think Hegel would argue concepts change and adapt. In a way, they adapt to their own self-attack. A concept exists, its dual springs from it, they both defeat each other, and in their wake, their union rises, a sublation of both… or something like that. There are like a million ways to interpret Hegel’s Science of Logic, and I haven’t even found one way to do it well, hah! But I haven’t grappled with it for very long, nor have I done the necessary preliminary reading. I should have a good grasp of Kant and also have read Phenomenology of Spirit before trying to deal with Hegel’s SL.
Are concepts in a state of being, or becoming? Perhaps we should ask that first? Though, perhaps the self is not a concept at all.
And why can’t that be an object? The use of the preposition of to suggests a notion of knowing where to point. Even if we cannot grasp the phenomenon (if there is one) at the end of that pointing arrow, we can still grasp the phenomenon that is the arrow. And so, we can define the I as that to which the arrow points. In this sense, “I” is an object, though not a phenomenal one to ourselves. And perhaps not to others either. I do not grasp the subject that is you, I merely grasp your surface, be it the surface of your body, or your internet profile on a forum. But I would wager that the object that is the self is perhaps a phenomenal object to God, in the same way an apple is a phenomenal object to us.
I am not sure if I agree with the above, but it seems like an intuitive rendition of what you said.
In my head, the “I” is inferred from the limits of our phenomenology. I reject Decartes’ Cogito, ergo sum. Rather, I think, Cogitans, ergo cogitans.
The notion of my thinking and my phenomena is only possible to construct once I prove that there exists something beyond it. Before that, my remains an empty predicate.
But once this is done, it re-contextualizes my entire thinking and phenomenology as a reflection of, and on, myself. I am nothing more than a specific limitation of the whole.
That is why final awakening is said to be when you wake up as no-one, because it is an awakening as the whole. When you lose your separation from everything, you lose yourself, because you are nothing more than that separation.
Focus is separation, dividing the world into the foreground and the background. Focus is duality. Self-focus is thus dividing reality into self and non-self. So, in my system, I first believe I’ll derive the existence of the box (the self) through deriving the existence of that which is outside of it. Then I start talking about focus, and layered focus.
There can be foci within foci. We divide our full experience into a foreground and a background, but then we divide the foreground into a fore-foreground, and a back-foreground. We can iterate this a few times to give ourselves a very precise focus.
…But we can go the other way. And if we go all the way, we find that the background to all of our foci was merely the boundaries of the most prior foreground; the self. Beyond it is its immediate background, perhaps the boundaries of our higher self? Go far enough, and you’ll go past all the boundaries of higher selves, and wind up at the boundless, highest self; the self of no-one; the self of God.
That’s not to say God has no personality, in fact I’ve heard he’s the life of the party!
I’ve read about Atman before, but I am not very knowledgeable about Hinduism and Buddhism. How does the Atman connect to Brahma(n), and how do the teachings about the self to which you are partial relate to the view I proposed above?
And when applying this to the discussion at large here, is Atman the part/layer of the self that remains constant? Or does even it change? And even if it does, some part of it must remain constant, to allow for its continuity in being the Atman, no? It’s been a while since I delved into Eastern spirituality, but it is always a joy to do so. I eagerly await your responses
Well, where I came into the discussion was with ‘The problem posed by that dialectic (between Parmenides and Heraclitus) was addressed by the Aristotelian universal which could maintain its identity while also changing.’
To the extent that ideas (eidos) are acts rather than things, then they are dynamic by their very nature. They can retain their identity while still being able to change. That is what Aristotle introduced with the ‘substance’ (substantia) and accident distinction, isn’t it? I think the notion that the Ideas (or forms) are ‘changeless entities’ is mistaken, but that’s going to another large digression, so I’ll leave it there.
So it is said, but it’s probably much easier to describe it than to undergo it.
In Ramana’s teaching, realising the identity, the sameness, of Ātman and Brahman is the entire point of the teaching. That is what is understood in Advaita as 'mukti’ or liberation.
I like to change my subject of study frequently. This helps me from getting hooked on things. Instead of needing a resolution to a problem, I drop it, forget about it, and come back to it later. After the go-around, I come back with a changed perspective and this assists in making progress. Likewise, I’ve learned that if I’m overly certain about a solution, if I drop it and come back later I’ll find that the certainty wasn’t warranted.
Well, I wish you the best of luck in finding your solid ground. What I’ve found is that there’s no such thing. That’s` why I think that learning about the nature of time, change and adaptation is so important, its how I learned that “solid ground” is an illusion.
The problem I see with the real number line is that it attempts to combine two incompatible ideas, discrete units (numbers which might describe a section of line) with a continuous line. The numbers are like the nondimensional points I talked about. The line is dimensional. So, like they say, no matter how many nondimensional points you put together, you never get a dimensional line out of them. The numbers are supposed to mark points on the line, but since they are nondimensional (they do not occupy any section of line), no matter how many numbers you posit, you still have the same quantity of line existing, just more theoretical divisions. That’s why there’s an infinite regress, the numbers are really distinct from the proposed continuous line, so no matter how many numbers are proposed, they have no real effect on the line at all. That is the principle of continuity, the divisions are purely theoretical. A true continuity allows for division only in theory. If it were divided in practise it would not be continuous
I take it that what you are saying here is that it doesn’t makes sense to designate space or time as continuous. But I might disagree with this somewhat. I think it may help in understanding if we designate one as discrete and the other as continuous, like the numbers and the line.
Since time has been shown to be logically prior to spatial change, we can say that it’s continuous, and space is discrete. Now spatial existence is like the numbers on the line, and the continuous time (the line itself) passes in between these spatial points. Then we have our discrete, still frame model, the spatial state at t1, time passes, the spatial state at t2, time passes, then t3, etc. and this can form the conceptual foundation.
Now I need to add the complicating factor, “the spatial state at t1”, or t2, or whatever, is not a state at all, but is itself active. But it is active in a completely different way, and this is known by the expansion of space. So t1, t2, t3, etc., appear to us as a succession of still frames each one changed from the last, but each is actually acive in a completely different way. What we commonly observe as activity and change, is the succession of still frames, t1, t2, t3, etc, but each of these is active in a perpendicular way (the breadth of the present). And this activity is probably so rapid that it completely escapes our observation, only to show up in the long range as spatial expansion.
This secondary type of activity is derived from the reality of choice. Choice means that the world must be recreated at each moment of passing time, recreated from possibilities. This implies that there is not a necessary continuity between t1 and t2. That means that what we observe is not a succession of still frames, but each still frame must actually be created at the moment, to allow for the reality of choice. This act of creation (manifesting as spatial expansion) cannot be instantaneous, but must take some time, calling for the second dimension of time. So it is the overlapping of these two dimensions which allows us, free willing human beings, to make changes which appear to defy determinist causation.
I’ll see if I can explain to you how I conceive the overlapping, in physical terms. The psychological/phenomenological is obvious. The mind anticipates, even predicts the immediate future as time passes, so the mind is in the future in that sense. At the same time, we are recording the immediate past into memory, so the mind is also in the past. This implies an overlapping in the mind.
In the physical sense I see it like this. The world is recreated at each moment, and this allows the free willing being to interfere in what we observe as determinist processes. The succession of moments are discrete recreations and this is what we observe as the continuity of time. But each recreation itself is a sort of activity so it requires time as well. This is the second dimension of time, the breadth of the present. And since there is an order within the recreation process (most massive to least massive), the moments of recreation can overlap the time we observe as duration. This allows the interference of a later moment with an earlier moment which we know as intentional acts. Since we notice the continuity of time principally as the inertia of mass, mass must top the order, as first thing in the order of recreation, therefore most difficult to interfere with.
Making the present an additional primitive creates all sorts of problems. This is because it effectively puts the present outside time, making the observer, at the present, outside time. That produces the eternal ideas of platonism, and an interaction problem.
In my description above, each of the tiny videos plays in a direction perpendicular to what we see as the passing of time. Each of these tiny videos is a recreation of the entire world, there’s a tiny big bang at each point is space. As observers, we look across these tiny videos, seeing only a tiny section out of the middle of each video, lined up at the same place relative to each other, so they present as a series of still frames. Only when we look across a huge number of these tiny videos (a long time duration) do we notice a slight discrepancy in the way that the observed sections line up, and this discrepancy we conceive as spatial expansion.
Our observational perspective (external sensation) has been adapted through evolution to be based in a very short slice of the perpendicular activity, to provide us with a view of the continuity of very stable massive objects, inertia. This very narrow slice creates the illusion that there is no breadth to the present, hiding the second dimension of time. But our internal experience of memories mixing with anticipations reveals that “the present” really consists of past and future. Notice “the present” is traditionally defined by that assumed nondimensional line of narrow sense perspective, which divides past from future cleanly. But once we allow that the observational line really has some breadth, then we have the principle required to extend the breadth of the present, logically, beyond the width of the observational line. At each passing moment is the recreation of the world, a big bang of spatial expansion,. We observe across a thin line, as the duration of time, but with logic we can expand the breadth of that line.
Look what happens here. Change is spatial. So when we realize that the quantum of time is actually a quantum of change, we are really talking about a quantum of space.
And look what happens now. Between each change is a passing of time. That is necessary to keep them from being on top of each other in violation of the law of noncontradiction. And we can see that something must happen during that passing of time, and this is the preparation of the next quantum of spatial change. Notice, that to allow for the reality choice, the individual quanta cannot be preprepared, they can only be prepared at that very time. This is why time is so difficult and complex.
This is that difficult aspect which forces a very complex model like the one described above. The progression of static quanta is a simple determinist representation, like the succession of still frames. This seems to be based roughly in Hume’s description of sense perception, as consisting of a series individual static perceived states, perceptions. From this he says, that we infer that change occurs between these perceptions.
But Hume does not properly describe sensation. Really, we are sensing activity, so the senses span numerous moments, and they do not separate distinct static moments. The distinct static moments are produced by the activity of the brain, which puts things into memory this way. But those static moments are constructed for the purposes of memory, so they are not a true representation of the independent.
So when producing a model of the true quanta, we must respect that sensation spans a number of them, and this creates a continuity. Further, we must respect that the free willing intentional activity of human beings can actually have an effect on the next quantum to be produced. This means that sensation is limited to a narrow portion of the true activity, unable to observe the part where the intentional act will interfere with the quantum to be observed. So time is very complex and difficult.
Notice how intentional acts may prevent you from dying. You eat, you maintain health and exercise, and you avoid unnecessary danger. So take a look back at you diagram, where the force of time is presenting you with the options of dead, and not dead. In reality, the options are living and dying. As much as possible, we opt for living. But sometimes we don’t know, or the force overcomes us with age or disease. However, the important point is that there is options.
Therefore, the force of time is not bringing forth quanta, which will necessarily push you this way or that way (fatalism), the force of time is bringing forth options for quanta. The quanta cannot be conceived of as preexistent because of the reality of possibility. This means that each quantum, when it comes into view at the present moment, must be created at that very moment. This makes the nature of time very complex, because creation is itself an activity, therefore each quantum must itself be active, in the sense of itself being created. This necessitates the two dimensions of time, to account for the two distinct forms of activity.
Right, each moment consists of activity. And the activity I describe as perpendicular to observable activity. We cannot say that this activity is indivisible though. What happens between moments is an interaction of the perpendicular (unobservable) activity of t1 and t2. This allows for intentional activity at t1 to affect the quantum of activity at t2. Since this occurs, we must allow that the perpendicular activity at a moment is in some way divisible.
The issue here is that sense observation has evolved to produce a very thin line, as the stability, and continuity of massive objects (inertia) was very beneficial to survival and thriving of living beings. The thinner the line is, the less interaction is allowed for. The traditional nondimensional separation between past and future allows for no interaction, therefore “the interaction problem”, where the properties of the mind, at the present are distinct from the temporal reality of past and future.
The wider we allow the present to be, the more space we have for interaction. We know that the present must be wider than what is provided for by sense perception, because the activities of the mind, and intentional actions fall outside the realm of observable. The problem is that we need to find real principles to base this in. Relativity provided the start, with the relativity of simultaneity. However, this just provides that the present is not a nondimensional line, but it gives no real way for lining up different aspects of reality to produce a line with breadth.
I think you’ve interpreted quite well. Maybe not all the complex aspects, but the basics, very well.
I think that this is a very good way to put it. We look at the past as prior to the future because that is the principle which has facilitated our logic. So it’s deeply ingrained, the first thing we learn, as it supports a whole lot of logic.
Now, we can portray logic as a force, like you do, but it is a completely different type of force than the force of time. The force of time is independent, but logic was created by us. So it is an artificial force, and I’d say it was created for the purpose of facilitating decisions. In a sense, it is a counterforce, to the force of time. Time forces us to make difficult decisions, and logic is a force employed within our own minds which makes the decisions easier. It forces decisions.
I don’t think i am ready to position God here yet. If God is within the force of time, within the future, making selections as the present unfolds, then the force of logic, and the decisions of human beings would be contrary to those of God. And that doesn’t seem right.
This puts logic as transcending human existence. I think of logic as something we created, a tool for understanding. We can apply logic to try and understand the selections which God makes, and even stipulate that God must make selections which are logical, but what would enforce that stipulation on God?
So I would like to think that the reasons why God makes the selections which God makes, are far beyond the capacity of the lowly human intellect to understand. But we have created logic to help us in making our own decisions, so when we think of God we think that God would employ logic in a similar way. But God has a completely different perspective. We employ logic from the perspective of the past being prior to the future, but God acts from the perspective of the future being prior to the past.
Motivation and desires propel us. We hardly think of existence in its pure meaning. We think of tomorrow while we take for granted that life will be there tomorrow.
To Heraclitus’ “No man can step in the same river twice. It is not the same river, nor is he the same man”, there’s the counterweight of Zeno’s paradoxes and divine simplicity. Cratylus, a student of Heraclitus, only wriggled his finger when people tried to discourse with him because he believed that the meanings of words changed so fast that no one could utter anything without being misunderstood.
Zeno’s paradoxes, of motion and more, were crafted to prove that change is an illusion. Parmenides, Zeno’s teacher, asked, “how can x become \neg x?”
Divine simplicity consists of a) non-composition (God can’t be decomposed into parts and God is identical to divine qualities like potency) and b) Non-becoming (God is a constant)
Pyrrhonism has the concept of astathemta (instability), roughly corresponding to Buddhist anicca (impermanence).
Evolution’s core is change & adapting to change, this being achieved only across generations and not in single individual’s lifespan. However humans do adapt to change in a single lifetime, but this plasticity is confined to social/cultural/economic/etc. domains.
Here we must mention technology. Human inventions can impact environments with such speeds that keeping up can be a challenge.
I originally planned on responding much sooner, as I had some time to spare and wanted to spend some of it on TPF.
I stepped into the quagmire that is the Newcomb Paradox however, and I found myself sinking deeper under the oppressive march of time. As time was passing, running out, the need to adapt grew stronger.
My period on TPF this time around happened to coincide with moving houses. I am not the best with change, because I build an edifice of routines on which I am very much dependent (I am diagnosed with ADHD, but I don’t wish to take medications).
This edifice of routines, it is a house of cards. Time brings with it the winds of change, and but a breeze can blow my house down.
This happened when I moved. I always have a week or two where I adjust to new changes of that magnitude, and this adjustment comes with a great loss of routine and discipline, before I finally reach a breaking point, and claw myself back to functionality.
I am a one-track kind of guy, which means all the other stuff in life, the practicalities, they need to be trimmed down and trivialized: turned into simple algorithms that I do mindlessly, effortlessly. My purpose (in addition to family and friends) is all I care about, and all the other stuff is just maintenance for the train.
I need the purpose that I have, and I need a lack of distractions to follow that purpose. At least, I think I do, but maybe I miss the bigger picture.
Anyways, when I get distracted by big changes and thus loss of routine, my mind grabs onto something easy and dopamine-fuelled, a distraction from both my real purpose and my other, practical needs. A kind of temporary obsession to still my mind.
This time around, it was debating people on the Newcomb Paradox. It started out innocently, but as I started neglecting my purpose, obligations and the dishes in the sink, it became clearer and clearer that I was engaging in an addictive distraction.
So, I had to adapt. I whipped myself into action, ended my participation in the debate for now, finished my chores and got to work. Now, I am well on my way into routine again, fortunately. And so, before I go off-site for a while, I wanted to return to this conversation, one of the actually productive ones that I have had on TPF thus far.
And I thought it was fitting, since this is about change and adaptation, after all. What greater or harder change do we face than that which is within us? It is not the rain that causes the tears.
Agreed.
Well, to allude back to my earlier metaphor, if there ultimately is “no solid ground”, then I’ll simply change my definition of it, and I’ll say that “the soles of my feet are the solid ground.” At the end of the day, the only thing we can depend on are ourselves. Even if we one day may die, this is still true, because if/when we die, we won’t need to depend on anything anyways.
Agreed, mathematicians just blow past this philosophical paradox because their mathematical system isn’t able to derive an in-system, formal contradiction expressing this absurd construction. So to them, the weirdness of the construction is “just philosophical weirdness with no practical value.”
I think Hegel’s sublation of quantity and quality has some good intuition to it. We start with quality, and then we embed it with an imposed, cognitive structure of quantities, thus creating measure.
So whether I agree with this depends on what you mean by time being continuous. You see, the breadth of the present, to the degree it can be called a duration, could be a continuous duration. In fact, to think of the breadth of the present as continuous may be necessary. But what continuity even means in that context is hard to say.
There’s mathematical continuity, and then there’s more like a substantive continuity due to atomicity, or lack of internal divisions. But, does the breadth of the present really fit that? I don’t know.
But then there’s the horizontal dimension of time, the one that goes perpendicular to the breadth of the present. And well, if you see this dimension of time as discrete, all you are saying is that there is a discrete succession of “breadth-y” presents, who themselves may be continuous instead.
To go back to the picture vs video analogy. As I said in my last post, I now think that time is not a video made of stringing together pictures. It is a video made by stringing together tiny, indivisible videos. Those quantum videos may be continuous, but their continuous duration progresses perpendicularly to the progression of the composite video it quantizes.
However, I think the composite video is discrete. I think you can find one “moment” t_1, and another “moment” t_2, such that no moment t exists such that t_1 \prec t \prec t_2. This is what I mean by discreteness, and I only ascribe it to the horizontal dimension of time, but I don’t necessarily ascribe it to the breadth of the present (the other dimension of time).
I have yet to really start formalizing the breadth of the present itself, so I don’t even know if the questions of discreteness vs density vs continuity even makes sense for it.
I didn’t quite get this. What is the order within the breadth of the present? And why does this order follow mass? And why can’t the recreation be divisionless/atomic? In my head, the breadth of the present could be not a progression of multiple moments, but rather a single, “fat” moment, a moment with quality or qualia, the quantum of duration.
At the end of the day, there has to be a building block of time that supplies the duration-ness of it all, just like there has to be a building block of length that supplies the distance-ness of it all. That’s how I see it at least, because the alternative seems to be building something from nothing, ie. duration from instants.
This is kind of how I think of it, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it. I have this intuition that massless particles are really travelling big bangs, but that’s just a fringe intution I have.
I can agree with this (provided some more thought) so long as the tiny section in the middle of the video is not itself an instant. I think the concept of “the instant” is an idealized thing that creates more problems than it solves.
I am not saying you are arguing for instants, I just want to be sure whether you are or aren’t.
This is very interesting. I cannot say I get the intuition behind it though. What is it about this discrepancy that drives expansion? And why does this discrepancy only grow in one direction (seemingly)?
And since you say conceive, do you think that the expansion of space is not an objective fact?
As an objective idealist, I believe we live inside the mind of God. The expansion of space to me always made sense as the expansion of God’s mind, of God using his boundless intellect and creativity to always create more, almost uncontrollably due to the automaticity of his grasping. He thinks and so it is.
Ahh, now I think I may see why discrepancy leads to the expansion of space. If each breadth-y present is actually the entire evolution of the universe, and if as we move through the other axis of time, we sample a section of the breadth of the present that is slightly displaced to, say, the right.
Since this is sampling the universe within the breadth at a slightly later time on that axis, it is slightly more expanded.
But, this seems to me like you’re saying time is like this:
I have displaced the perpendicular, “breadth-of-the-present” arrows to signify the discrepancy of which tiny section we sample, we the people progressing along the horizontal temporal axis.
Also, I made the horizontal axis of time thick, so that it has the thickness to even have a breadth-y intersection with the vertical time-lines, thus giving us a breadth to the present.
Here again, we see that horizontal time is thick, so that it can contain the breadth of the present. But here, the breadth of the present does not go beyond, it is entirely within our phenomenology.
Also, here I am showing the overlapping between “moments” (I use quotation marks, because I want to be clear I am not talking about instants).
The third line marks the point where Moment 1 ends and Moment 3 begins. There is no overlap here.
Now, when you overlap moments who are mutually exclusive, then you need an extra dimension of time to resolve those would-be contradictions, to keep them apart.
I see the breadth of the present as a natural consequence of moments overlapping.
A being’s “trajectory” through this two-dimensional time can be thought of as a zig-zag of diagonals, going up and down.
I made the present moments circles, because with them you can see overlap more easily than with squares. But really, they should be squares, as that would facilitate the following explanation:
The being starts in the lower left corner of moment 1. Here they live in the actuality of moment 1’s qualia.
Then they move up-and-right. This is simultaneously a calcification of moment 1’s content, but also a selection and semi-actualization of moment 2’s potential content.
As the selection reaches maximal specificity, moment 2 has its exact content selected. This is simultaneously the actualization of it. If you have only one option, you have no options. Whittling potential down to a singular one is the same as actualizing it.
At this point, the being has entered moment 2, but the being is still inside moment 1 as well. But moment 1’s content contradicts moment 2’s content. But the breadth of each of these present moments separates these contradictions. As such, the being is still in moment 1, but that is because moment 1 is the immediate past, which is a part of the present. The being is also in moment 2, which is the immediate future (a singular potential, as such both actual and yet to be made thepast)
As the being continues moving, the potentialities of moment 3 start being whittled down. They race towards a singular potential.
Eventually, the being passes out of moment 1, turning it into the non-immediate past, and the being enters moment 3, a singular potential, thus actual but not yet past. This move is also what turns moment 2 into the immediate past: actual, still in the present, but now on the way out, as opposed to being on the way in. That is moment 3’s role now.
And so it goes. Exactly what the breakdown of the change within these breadth-y presents are, I don’t know. Is each moment entirely indivisible, or are each moment divided into twoindivisiblehalves perhaps: the first half where it is the immediate, actual future, and the second half, where it is the immediate, actual past?
I am leaning towards the latter. But either way, the line has to be drawn somewhere, terminating at the indivisible qualia of duration, the qualia of the dynamic moment.
Interesting… Not quite sure how to map this onto my ideas, but I am glimpsing something, I think.
Agreed.
Agreed again. Time just demands one has all kinds of concepts and understandings in place before one attempts to account for it. It’s a real puzzle.
You bring in will and intention here. This is a topic that I have been increasingly bringing into my system creation. It seems to be invaluable.
I agree that intention/will is a necessary component of time. God’s intention/will most definitely, but ours as well. We participate in God’s creation after all. We get to participate in selecting potentialities.
This makes sense, and I think that’s what I am getting at with my zig-zag diagonal movement through the breadthy-presents. As one moves vertically, one participates in selecting potentialities, thus participating in whittling down the realm of potentialities down into a single potentiality, which is more like an actuality at that point: the actual, co-present, immediate future, sharing the breadth of the present with the actual, immediate past.
I agree, there must be a perpendicular activity, that of selection from potentialities which culminates in the creation of an actuality. This entire activity is all within the breadth of the present, and is part of giving it its quality or qualia.
This is why we can build the measure of time using the quantity of time (supplied by \mathsf{PA} I believe, because I think horizontal time is discrete), and the quality of time, supplied by the breadth of the present.
Mhm I am inclined to agree, I think to take the present moment as completely indivisible would be unwise. But that it perhaps consists only of a few internal divisions, I think is correct, akin to what I said earlier in this post about the line having to be drawn somewhere.
This is very interesting, I have never thought to apply this stuff to inertia. And although I don’t quite get it yet at a fully logical level, I do see some very strong intuition behind how the breadth of the present is logically necessary to even allow interaction between anything.
Very thought-proviking… inertia obviously gets involved with the above thinking, since it is the resistance to change.
Yes, I will have to spend a lot of time ironing out the complex aspects once I dive into formalizing time.
This is an interesting idea, but I hold logic in higher ontic regard. I don’t see logic as merely our invention, but rather as our discovery of the fundamental structure of the universe.
I think the universe is a language, and human conventional logic is our dialect of it. Our current logic is not a perfect dialect, but it is getting there.
God’s language is the Final Logic, this is the structure of God’s thoughts, it is an expression of God’s self-consistency, of God’s self-love. God doesn’t contradict himself.
God cannot contradict himself. And that is not an external imposition onto him. It is instead a feature of his own nature. God is not the kind of being who would contradict himself, and therefore he is not going to contradict that non-self-contradictory nature either. In a way, he cannot, which is like saying that God cannot not be God.
This relates to my equivocation between the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of Identity. The difference between them is a complete artefact of our language and limited thinking. But they are in fact the same.
And it sounds a lot less controversial to say that God cannot violate the Law of Identity. But that formulation itself is misleading. It is not that God is beholden to this law, it is that this law is an expression of God’s self-identical nature.
“I am that I am” is perhaps the deepest quote of the Bible. That is my view as someone who isn’t a Christian, at least.
And this relates to your linking between logic and decision-making. Logic is an expression of God’s coherent decision-making. It does force decisions in a sense, but that is one of the forces of God.
We mirror this force by using logic in our own decision-making.
But of course, I am a bit of a logic extremist. I really think it is more than just an invention. And I say more, because some things can both be discovery and invention at the same time.
In a sense, God enforces this stipulation. But not really. God does not enforce his logical nature onto himself.
In the same way, I do not force myself to see. I just see, as a person who isn’t blind. Even if I close my eyes, I am still seeing. This is just my nature.
Not entirely, I think. Whenever God makes paralogical decisions, then I think we won’t understand it. But logic is available to everyone, so when he makes a decision on a logical basis, we can understand it as such.
I think God made us to partake. Some of that participation happens in the mind, in the realm of reason and logic, in the marketplace of ideas.
We were meant to grasp truth, therein logic. God made it accessible, but he also didn’t give it to us as the start. For what would we be, if we weren’t grasping?
I do not see the endeavor of logic as human intellect imposing structure on reality… I see it as reality imposing structure on human intellect.
This one of our unities with God. When we reason correctly, we run the same cognitive program as he does. The same software. We unify our mind with God in one aspect of our mental activity. And good things usually come from increasing our unity with God.
Congratulations on breaking that addiction. Some (many) discussions on TPF turn that way, an endless waste of time which for some reason you cannot break out of. It’s almost as if it becomes an excuse to avoid other more important things in life.
I see your point, but … changing definitions for the purpose of hanging on to the principle, instead of changing the principle, produces a very ambiguous situation.
The breadth of the present is a temporal dimension. So if the present having breadth, is what supports the reality of continuity, then it is as I said, time is what is continuous. Nevertheless, “continuity” is a tricky concept on its own, as you indicate. It can be interpreted in different ways.
What I propose is that the horizontal dimension is continuous. The discrete points, which make up the moments, are spatial points. So we can assume a continuous horizontal “flow of time”, but we can mark real points along that continuity which represent a type of spatial activity which supports the need for the breadth of time. The real points are identifiable through spatial activity, but they do not mark a real division in time. For analogy imagine a vibrating atom used as a clock. Each vibration produces a real point, supported by spatial activity, in a continuous time. The difference though is that this choice of an atom is arbitrary, and what I’m talking about is a simultaneous activity which all space partakes of.
I think you need to better separate the spatial aspect from the temporal. Each of these supposed videos is spatial motion. The “stringing together” is temporal, and that’s why this horizontal dimension of time is continuous. Each instance of a tiny video occurring is an equal temporal unit from the last, but the string is not divided by these, as they are separate and just form the tool for measuring the string.
So according to what I said above, this composite video is discrete, but this is spatial, what we observe. The horizontal flow of time may be separate and continuous, such that we could mark t1, t2, according to discrete spatial points, in order to measure the continuous flow of time, without dividing that continuity. We would note t1, t2, according to observation of discrete spatial activities, but this notation is not an actual dividing of the continuity.
That’s not surprising because it’s very complex and difficult to describe. Please bear in mind that the complexity is produced from the need to accommodate the reality of choice, possibility, and selection. If the universe was deterministic, we could simply assume a succession of still-frames, each still-frame premanufactured to follow the preceding. But if possibility and selection are real (and I assume this), then any supposed still-frames must be created on the spot, according to the selection made at that moment in time.
This is why the proposed still-frames cannot be still-frames, but are more like the tiny videos which you propose, because they cannot be manufactured instantaneously.. Now consider the nature of the being which chooses, selects, and you will see that we have a very complex situation. Massive objects, roll along the horizontal temporal continuity, as if they themselves have true continuity in the determinist way. That is known as inertia. They’ll only change if caused to change by something else with inertia. So the being with the capacity to select, has very little power to interfere with massive objects, but can to an extent, through a process which is a chain of efficient causes, illustrated by “the butterfly effect”.
So choice directly affects high-energy things (neurological activity) which are essential massless. Notice that being massless allows them to escape the supposed necessary continuity of inertia along the horizontal line. Without inertia, the massless energy escapes the determinist continuity. Therefore this is where selection is possible.
Let’s put this together with the succession of tiny videos now. Each tiny video must be created at the moment to allow for the reality of choice. At the base of each vertical line we can place the most massive objects, because they proceed down the horizontal line in the determinist manner. Then each tiny video is a coming into being (creation) of the world, at each moment of time. The most massive or dense object is first, and the others follow in order of denseness. Each tiny video itself requires some time (in the horizontal frame), so as we move up the order toward least massive, there is more potential for overlap, because the vertical motion requires time which passes on the horizontal line. Therefore there is opportunity for selection and change in the overlap.
The “building block of time” is the horizontal continuity. The continuity of it is demonstrated by the inertia of massive objects which forms the base for determinst thinking. But remember that I maintain a separation between the true continuity of time, and the spatial representation of this as the continuity of massive objects. The spatial continuity is not a true continuity, but an appearance created by the apparent stability of massive objects in the succession of mini videos. The butterfly effect, and nuclear chain reaction, show that the spatial continuity is appearance only. The true continuity, I assume to be time.
When I first started thinking about the recreation of the world at each moment, as time passes, to allow for the reality of selection and choice, I thought in a way similar to what you express here. And since massless particles demonstrate the physical reality of choice, I wanted to place priority on them. Then I realized that I had to turn things around. Because massive objects are the most difficult to change, they must be the base of the apparent spatial continuity, and must be first to emerge at each big bang which marks the recreation of the world at each passing moment of time.
That’s right, and that actually becomes a very important point. A “section of a video” is not a timeless “instant”. This is the human (experienced) present. It cannot be a dimensionless horizontal line through the perpendicular videos, because that’s what creates the so-called interaction problem of dualism, which puts the mind in the eternal realm of timelessness. Having a section of each tiny video as our present, allows interaction, selection, and real change.
Imagine that in the tiny videos, the part which is the coming into being of very dense massive things is off to the bottom, below of our observed section. So they are understood as determinist massive inertia. And , the coming into being of light particles (photons) is off the top, so they are observed as waves of possibility. if for example, our line of observation was higher, we might be able to observe photons as continuous inertial particles. But if our bottom horizon rose up as well, we’d have less capacity to do work because our range of interaction would be higher above the massive. Instead, we observe light as energy, which is the capacity to do work.
I’ll try to explain this, why the observed phenomenon known as expansion of space fits neatly into this conception. I’ll try to avoid the unintuitive complexities of the concept of spatial expansion, and we’ll just assume that it’s something known to be occurring at the level of the universe as a whole, beginning as far back in time as we can see, and continuing now.
So we assume that at each moment in time, as t1, t2, above, there is a recreation of the universe, and this means that at each moment there is a big bang, and the mini video which follows is an extremely rapid expansion of space at each moment. Our observational point is a very short section of the mini video, such that we do not see the spatial expansion recurring at each moment in time. It’s hidden to us, and we get the impression that the moment is a nondimensional point, with the one dimensional horizontal lin. Then it seems like temporal duration is a matter of looking across a bunch of still-frames, when in reality each is a short clip out of a mini video of spatial expansion.
We construct “the universe” from this perpsective of looking across a succession of still-frames, but it’s really a short section, say the part between m and q, where a would be the initial point of expansion of the most dense thing. So m marks the continuity of a massive body like a proton, and q would mark the continuity of an electron. We work these two together in a relation to each other, by relativity theory, and we get the supposed horizontal line of temporal continuity. But then we get huge objects, like galaxies, and dense things like black holes, which are outside the range of m and q, maybe at a and d instead. These are not within our line of conceived horizontal line of temporal duration/ So they do not fit into our laws of physics which are applicable between m and q, therefore they expose the reality of spatial expansion to us. And if we make a line that starts at m and goes to q, and we extend it through extrapolation, it will be askew, and cause the appearance of spatial expansion occurring over the duration of the horizontal line.
On the other extreme we have high energy particles which are beyond q. These demonstrate the other end, where the separation of space goes beyond what is imaginable to us.
Here’s an example. Imagine two objects are judged to be not moving relative to each other. They are judged to be at a fixed distance from one moment to the next along the horizontal line of time. The line is based on the segment m-q of the mini videos. But if we could produce a line at h for example, the two objects would be closer together, due to spatial expansion.
That’s an oversimplified example, because in reality objects consist of parts. But look, the proton is massive, and the electron has very little mass. Protons appear to be very close together, and electrons further apart. But maybe it’s just the case that our method of observation sees the protons along the horizontal line of m, while the method of observation sees the electrons along the line of q, and this is what creates that spatial difference.
Yeah, that’s close, but the breadth is in the vertical axis, so the displacement is up or down. To use the above model, we could have a horizontal observational line at q, electrons, and a horizontal observational line at m, protons. Now suppose we extrapolate, and extend out through a vast amount of time. If our line starts out at q, and at some point passes over to the m line, the line won’t be perfectly perpendicular to the mini videos.
The real expansion occurs in the vertical process, happening at each moment of passing time, as the universe is recreated at each moment through a spatial expansion (big bang). The mini video is a video of spatial expansion, so up and down that line marks more or less expanded.
On this diagram then, each vertical arrow would have a starting point level with every other. This would be the line of the most massive, or it’s probably more accurate to say the most dense. The base would be “a” by the above description. Each vertical arrow signifies a big bang at each moment, with space expanding marked by the vertical direction of the arrows. The horizontal line, which is thick, would mark the observed section, m-q in my description.
Note, that relative to the horizontal line, which marks our experienced “present”, the vertical lines which are far to the left, in our past, would extend extremely high. The vertical lines at the right of the horizontal arrow, marking our “now” would extend to the m-q level. Then there would be some vertical lines even further to the right of the arrow, before our present, which extend to less than the m-q level.
I think that we need to allow the breadth to go beyond what is phenomenologically observable, to account for the reality of things we cannot observe, the activities of the soul, spirit, etc..
The overlapping, which you show with circles, is good, because the vertical lines in my description actually signify spatial expansion, and since they’re one dimensional lines, they don’t show the overlap. So the expansion of space, which causes overlap would actually be spherical, surrounding each point in space. The outer part of the sphere, where the less massive (electrons for example) are active, is a part which is still actively expanding, at the beginning of the next moment when the more massive is actively expanding This is the overlap that allows for interference through the selective activity of the soul. Enough electrons focused toward a point where mass is expanding, for example, would force a change to that mass. Change can only occur while the aspect is actively expanding, (protons expanding at m, electrons at q, in the model). By the overlap, electrons actively expanding from back at t1 might overlap protons expanding at t3, now, or something like that.
For all practical purposes we could assume that some moments do not overlap, but in theory they might all overlap. Suppose t1 is five million years ago, and t whatever is now. In the vertical time of expansion, q signifies the limits of our observational capacity. We could assume less and less massive things, even particles of negative mass, further and further out the line, t, u, v, etc.. If the expansion is asymptotic then there would be something even from the longest time ago, still overlapping today. But that would be highly negative mass, so very incapable of affecting the expansion of mass at the present moment.
This is the right idea, but I think we need a real activity to validate the being’s upward motion, rather than a strictly horizontal movement. This activity to validate the upward motion must be completely distinct from the observed horizontal motion of conventional passing time. That’s why I propose spatial expansion, which already is a valid concept. But spatial expansion is a very difficult concept to wrap your head around. It presuppose real points in space, everywhere, from which everything is moving away, though not by any type of motion we understand, through our horizontal line of temporal duration, or is even observable to our eyes.
That’s about it, but I explain the overlap between moments with spatial expansion. This allows that what is still active in moment 1,( i.e. potentials being actualized higher up the vertical line) in the less dense, can interact with what is active in moment 3, (potentials being actualized), in the more dense. This allows that selections in moment 1 can have an effect on the potentials being actualized at moment 3, through that overlap, as massless affecting the inertia of the massive.
The issue with inertia is that it is the foundation of determinism, and the basis of our understanding of a continuous time. By inertia, massive bodies must continue to be, just as they have been in the past, unless forced to change by another massive body. So this formed the baseline of the horizontal flow of time. However, we did learn that directed energy could alter the inertia of mass, and this was somewhat forced into the determinist understanding through relativity theory. But now quantum theory demonstrates that energy doesn’t actually behave in the determinist way of massive objects with inertia. This opens up the possibility that the deterministic inertial behaviour of mass, can be altered in a non-determinist way, through the appropriate actualizing of the possibilities inherent within the non-determinist activity of massless energy. The key point being that deterministic activity is an observed feature of mass (inertia). So when we allow massless activity, determinism no longer applies.
I will leave aside the discussion of God and logic, for now, because that’s another can of worms.
