Possibilities are equally arbitrary by that same reasoning. Replacing points with possibilities does not resolve the arbitrariness it just moves it. And more importantly, arbitrary measurement does not mean nothing is happening. The fact that we choose arbitrary points to measure between does not change that there is something to measure. The process is real regardless of where we place our markers on it.
That’s the point. It provides a more productive description.
That’s right, relativity theory does not assume that nothing is happening. However the primary premise of relativity is that the truth about what is happening is irrelevant to the way that we represent what is happening. This means that while working within that logical system of relativity, i.e. in the act of applying relativity theory, there is no such thing as the truth about what is happening. The presence of “truth” has been excluded by the primary premise, as irrelevant.
Where this becomes a problem is that human beings feel insecure working with premises like this, which deny the relevance of truth. It’s an existential angst, to the highest degree, because ontological grounding must remain completely absent. And this angst cannot be suppressed through training (“shut up and calculate”). However, it is very true that relativity theory remains extremely useful.
So the human beings desire not to abandon relativity for the sake of relief from that insecurity and angst, attributing highest value to the usefulness it supplies. The existential angst they feel, can be dealt with in other ways. Most commonly, these human beings will assume relativity theory is the truth, and quell the angst this way. Of course this is self-contradicting, and the existential angst is merely suppressed behind self-deception, only to reemerge as a result of the absurd ontologies which are produced from this premise.
That also assumes these points flow regularly and always in order. Relativity also shows that time actually slows for observers approaching fractions of light speed.
I think we’re close. Truth is like time, something is genuinely happening even if we can never fully measure it from the outside. Our access to truth is always relative and incomplete, but that doesn’t make truth itself merely subjective. It means we make the most meaningful observations we can from where we stand, knowing the map is never the territory.
This issue, as i see it, is one of attitude. If we are using a logical system which stipulates that activities can be represented in a multitude of possible ways, and that truth is irrelevant, then we need to respect that “truth is irrelevant” is the attitude under which that logical system is meant to be applied. If we maintain this attitude, as you suggest with “truth is always relative and incomplete”, so forget about obtaining it, then there is no problem. But if we attempt to suppress the attitude with “that doesn’t make truth itself merely subjective”, then we stumble into self-deception.
So, how do you propose that the two could be compatible? What is “truth” other than a judgement? And how could a judgement be anything other than the property of a subject?
A judgment is how we access truth, not what truth is. The judgment belongs to the subject, agreed. But what the judgment is about doesn’t. When two people argue about whether it rained yesterday, the rain either happened or it didn’t, that fact exists outside both of their judgments about it.
I know this is a philosophy forum and not a physics one, but there’s so much misinformation in this topic that I can’t just let sit there.
You mean like believe presentism and not-presentism simultaneously? Yea, sure, I do that all the time.
Meta interprets this as time zones, which is nothing more than assigning different numbers to the same time.
One can also interpret this as experience of 1940 simultaneous with it being 2026, which is what happens when you watch war movies. Same goes for imagination of the past or future.
If, on the other hand, you suggest that eternalism posits that all experiences are simultaneous, that’s just wrong, kind of like saying all points on this railroad track are at the same location.
By definition, different times (especially along a timeline), are not simultaneous. The latter word means ‘at the same time’. See the comment about the tracks just above.
You’re saying that it took relativity theory to explain time zones? Those existed long before the 20th century.
That did not come from relativity theory. Galileo pointed out the equivalence of various frames of reference, with none of them being preferred, which is why it is called ‘Galilean relativity’.
Now you go too far. Per the Andromeda ‘paradox’, relative to the event of a pair of passing observers on Andromeda, the year here on Earth is both 1950 and 2050, relative to their respective frames. If no reference frame can be declared as the true one, then both those moments of your life are simultaneous with that distant event. That’s relativity of simultaneity (RoS, something which really did come from Einstein), and RoS is incompatible with presentism which thus must assert that one frame is more correct than any of the others. I know you’re a presentist, so quoting Einstein when you don’t understand the implications is incompatible with what you assert.
I’m not saying Einstein is wrong. What he says just follows from his premises. The laws of physics are not the same from one frame to the next, and the speed of light is not c relative to any but that one ‘correct’ frame. And this is only special-non-relativity. Add gravity, and speeds once again become relative, not absolute. One is again kind of forced to use an anthropocentric choice of frames, especially to measure time. So even presentism betrays its own attempt at absolutism.
There is no such premise to relativity theory.
No it does not. Relativity says time appears to flow normally for all observers. Time ‘flows’ at one second per second, and it is other clocks that are dilated relative to the frame of said ‘moving’ observer.
Isn’t it the case that “truth” is a specific form of relation, like “correspondence”, when correspondence is the defining feature of truth. So there must be some criteria for whether or not the desired relation obtains, and also a judgement of that is required.
I think you are confusing issues here. The argument referred to in this example is an argument as to which judgement is correct, “it rained” or “it did not rain”. Notice that to actually resolve this would require other parameters, what is required as fulfilling the criteria of “it rained”, the place, exact time, etc..
There is no such thing as the fact which exists outside the judgement, only strategies for solving disagreements like the one in your example. A common strategy is to assume that there is such a “fact” which we can refer to in an effort to solve the dispute. That assumption is an aspect of naive realism. It isn’t ontologically sound.
Clocks are a frame of reference tied to perspective and the mechanism ,like any matter , can be altered in ‘flow’ based on variables such as velocity or gravity. My point is that points on a timeline persist and are not destroyed. They are timeless. Human minds are machines built to measure time as a unidirectional flow. This would also speak to my belief in panpsychism where consciousness is a field allowing quantum entanglement as in penroses’s growing quantum microtubule theory where the wave function breaks down to elucidate one position amongst many possibilities.
Relativity allows for different timelines, where different times on different timelines are simultaneous. That’s why the analogy of time zones is applicable. Different times (by number assignment) are simultaneous, but there is no such thing as “the same time”, because absolute time is ruled out. So it’s just like talking about different time zones, without the assumption of absolute time, which is what validates your claim that it is “the same time” with different numbers. In relativity, absolute time is ruled out, and the time is simply what corresponds with the numbers.
No, I’m saying that our understanding of different time zones was extended in relativity. The idea that there is an “absolute time”, independent of all the different time zones, which grounds all the time zones as referring to “the same time” with a different number, was removed, and replaced with the idea of the relativity of simultaneity. This substitution allowed the speed of light to be the absolute (constant), instead of time. But under this precept there is no such thing as “the same time” just equality relations in the numbers.
Don’t you find this contradictory? Galileo was the founder of relativity theory in modern physics, as “'Galilean relativity”. So to say, ‘that did not come from relativity theory, it came from Galilean relativity’, is just contradiction. Einstein expanded relativity theory with special relativity and then general relativity to fit the motion of light into the theory.
Correct, that is known as “the relativity of simultaneity”, mentioned above.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. I am not “presentist” as the term is commonly applied. But I don’t see the relevance. I was discussing the implications of relativity theory, and presentism was not a part of that discussion.
Have you studied Galilean relativity? If you do you will see that this is his fundamental premise, his starting point. And Einstein just expanded relativity to allow that the speed of light could be fit in, as a constant.
I’ve always found the concept of time to be intriguing.
Is Time Real or an Illusion? A Grounded Answer
Time is real. Unambiguously, unavoidably real.
Here’s why, from the ground up.
The Foundation
Reality, at every level we can observe or conceive, is not static. Things differ from state to state. A particle moves. A thought arises and passes. Energy transfers. Even at the quantum level, where our intuitions break down completely, there is still difference between states. That difference is change. And wherever there is change, time is present as its measure.
To deny time’s reality you would have to deny that anything ever differs from anything else, which is not a serious consideration. It’s arguably the one claim reality makes most forcefully and constantly.
What This Handles
This definition elegantly dissolves most of the classic objections.
The “flow” problem disappears. Time doesn’t need to flow like a river, a deeply confused metaphor. It simply measures the magnitude and sequence of change. A clock doesn’t chase time; it is a change-tracking device.
The physics problem is neutralized. Even if the fundamental equations of quantum gravity contain no time variable, they still describe differences between states. Whatever those equations are doing, change is embedded in them, and so time, as its measure, survives.
The relativity problem becomes a feature, not a bug. Different observers measure different amounts of change depending on their velocity and gravitational position. Of course they do; they’re moving through reality differently. Time being relative doesn’t make it illusory; it makes it a precise and responsive measure of change rather than a crude universal one.
The “block universe” problem is reframed. Even if past, present, and future all exist as a fixed 4D structure, that structure is still one in which states differ from one another along the temporal axis. Change is still there, woven into the fabric. Time still measures it.
What Change Requires and What That Tells Us
We saw that change, at minimum, requires that something be one way and then another way, and that for this to be genuine change rather than mere replacement, some thread of continuity must persist. Whether that thread is matter, pattern, information, or something deeper doesn’t ultimately matter.
What matters is that thread of continuity, and the differences that occur along it, are precisely what time measures. Time is the axis along which the “same thing being different” becomes coherent and quantifiable. Without time, change has no structure. Without change, time has nothing to measure. They are two sides of the same coin.
The Final Answer
Time is real because change is real, and change is perhaps the most undeniable feature of existence. The illusion isn’t time itself. The illusion is our folk picture of time: the flowing river, the moving “now,” the sense that the past is gone and the future is approaching. Those are constructs of conscious experience.
Strip those away and what remains is something far more solid: a measure of how much reality has differed from one state to the next. That measure is real, it is structural, and it cannot be wished away without wishing away reality itself.
Time is not a river. It is not a dimension you travel through. It is the measure of change, and as long as anything anywhere changes, time is as real as reality itself.
Time and change are not two separate things, one proving the other, but two aspects of the same fundamental feature of reality, viz., that things are not static. To define one is inevitably to invoke the other, and that is the nature of a foundational definition rather than a logical failing. It is worth noting that fallacies are frequently misapplied, invoked in contexts where they were never meant to operate. The ad hominem fallacy, for instance, does not apply to every derogatory remark made about a person. It applies specifically to arguments where someone’s character is used to dismiss their reasoning. The fallacy lives in the argumentative context, not in the insult itself. The same principle applies here. Circularity is a fallacy only when it appears inside an argument, where it substitutes the conclusion for a premise and produces no real reasoning at all. Inside a definition, circularity is simply an honest reflection of how deeply intertwined two concepts are, and foundational definitions almost always have this character. Strip away our folk picture of time, the flowing river, the moving “now,” the sense that the past is gone and the future approaching, and what remains is something solid and inescapable: wherever anything differs from one state to the next, time is present as its measure. That is not an argument. It is simply what time is. Moreover, time is fundamental to all reality.
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The Closest We Can Get to Going Back in Time
Any event in history is defined by two coordinates, viz., when it happened and where it happened. Time moves in one direction, carrying events away from us permanently. But the spatial coordinate of a past event often persists, which opens up something remarkable.
Your boyhood home still occupies the same point on the earth’s surface. The battlefield where a historic event unfolded is still there. The room where a great piece of music was composed can still be entered. The place remains, even when the time is irretrievably gone.
There is something more than merely sentimental about this. If events are defined by coordinates, both spatial and temporal, then visiting the spatial coordinate of a past event is the closest a human being can come to re-entering it. You cannot recover the time coordinate. But you can stand inside the other half of the equation. The place holds, in a very real sense, the ghost of the event’s location in reality.
This might also explain why pilgrimage is such a deep and universal human impulse, whether to a childhood home, a battlefield, a birthplace, or a holy site. People are not simply being sentimental when they make these journeys. They are doing something philosophically coherent: collapsing the distance between themselves and a past event by recovering the one coordinate still available to them.
The time is gone. But the where remains. And standing in the where is as close to then as any human being can get.
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Time is intuition. To perceive an object, the object must exist in space and time. But time itself cannot exist in space, and time cannot exist in time. So, time cannot be perceived.
Humans perceive the intervals of motions and movement, and infer time from them. The inference is time intuition. Time can be intuited even without perception of the motions, movements and intervals, but it wouldn’t be accurate.
The inference made from observation of the motions, movements and intervals would be more accurate.
Therefore time is not real or illusion. It is intuition and inference.
But what is it that connects moments in time - the tick of a clock, the passage of sand through the hour-glass - into a sequence? Each ‘tick’ is after all an event unto itself, and in itself it has no relation to the tick immediately preceeding or the one immediately following. The observer stitches all of these discrete events into a period that has a duration. This does not mean that time is illusory or unreal, but it does mean that it is ineluctably connected with the observing mind.
I have my own views of course. But perhaps I’d like to ask a question: what changes for you from a philosophical perspective if (somehow) time is shown to be an illusion or is proven to be “real”?
What consequences follow for us? I don’t discern a difference.
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Nice.
The question in the title is yet another example of grammar looking like ontology.
“Real” is a comparative term. The painting is not real; it’s a photograph. The coin is not real; it’s a forgery. The duck is not real; it’s a decoy.
If you would claim that time is not real, to what are you comparing it?
And if you can’t say, then what is the word “real” doing here?
And much the same goes for “illusion”. One only uses “illusion” in contrast to “real”; but if what we mean by “real” is unclear, then so is what we mean by “illusion”.
This argument should be familiar to those who have read Austin.
Time is not a metaphysical entity but an indispensable commonplace. We time events, plan meetings, use tenses, recall the past. It makes no sense to speak of such activity as illusory; time is built in to how the world is for us.
We learn to talk of now, and of then, and how to wait and when to act. It would be a mistake to think that because of this time is constructed by our minds. Rather, everything our minds do already supposes being embedded in past and future. Time is not dependent on our waiting and acting, but our waiting and acting is dependent on time.
Manuel is right to ask what difference it could make to think of time as an illusion. Nothing changes, because the notion of “illusion” does not apply here. One cannot show time is unreal without having to stop using past/present/future tenses, stop keeping appointments, stop aging – but you can’t, because the use of ‘time’ is woven into our very lives.
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If ‘Time’ exists then we can say goodbye to freewill. Alternatively ‘time’ we do know exists as a measure of the various rates of motion, that is rather than it being any real measure of a chronological progression. Clocks register the rate of rotation of the earth, calendars the orbits of the moon (moonths) and the orbit of the earth around the sun, years. If these parameters weren’t alterable then we could accurately say Time exists. But as it is, and leaving determinism aside, they are arbitrary.
Why?
On the contrary, as things stand, we can’t be certain if you will reply to this post or not. But time will tell. It seems that your choice is utterly dependent on time, and hence so is your free will.
One thing to consider is thermodynamics ─ the ‘arrow of time’ is an inherent part of the Laws of Thermodynamics, specifically the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is that overall entropy increases over time in a closed system.
If one considers time to be an illusion, one will have to somehow explain away this. Yes, it can be shown that at the microscopic level entropy does not steadily increase over time, but at the macroscopic level no real violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics have been substantiated.
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In a frozen universe nothing could be useful, because there would be no uses―since nothing at all happens. We can say that in a frozen universe time would not be, and that would represent one way of thinking about time in that imagined context.
The other way would be to say that since the frozen universe is something which persists, then time as mere duration would be. Are both ways of thinking right in terms of their own conceptions, or is one conception correct and the other not? How could we tell which?