Much cloudy concepts in the content. What existence are you talking about? Existence of what? Unbounded capacity for distinction? Who makes such distinction? Who was to switch it off? How do you switch on or off distinction? And why?
In Kant, time and space is the precondition for perception. You cannot perceive or experience anything without the precondition. All objects you perceive must conform to the category of time and space.
The reason that you can perceive motions and movements is that you have the intuitions a priori i.e. time and space in your mind. Hence you can perceive the psychological time passage even if you are locked up in the space with nothing changing.
But for telling the universal or objective time people use, you need perception of the external world changes which conform to your internal sense of time.
Resolution is more precise. Asymmetry moving toward resolution — no intervener required.
You said distinction only exists when perceived. But you exist. Are you not yourself a distinction — from everything you are not?
Unbounded capacity for distinction is not made by anyone. It has no outside from which to be switched on or off. That is what unbounded means. The question of who makes it assumes something external to the system. There is no external.
Kant stops at intuition. It is simply there, underived. I am asking what intuition is made of. That is where our frameworks genuinely diverge.
The question that remains: What is the condition for the first distinction?
Resolution is for solving problems by agreement or intentional effort. It still doesn’t sound right.
I am not a distinction. I am just an individual human. I don’t need distinction of any sort. I just exist with no need for distinction. The whole universe is residing in my mind. Why would I need a distinction?
So where did it come from? I have no idea what “unbounded capacity” means. Whose capacity is unbounded?
Technically, with respect to human experience, he begins at intuition, for which he must give account. And while it is true he doesn’t say much about intuition itself, it is in fact derived, or proposed as manifesting, through the predicates of the transcendental aesthetic.
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Please explain what the first distinction mean. Whose first distinction on what? Where did you hear the word “the first distinction” from? In what context?
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(Let me know if this is too much of a hijack)
There seems to be a trend recently, on atheist and philosophy channels, of espousing the view that the cosmos is eternal and uncaused. So, even if this pocket of space time is “only” 13.8 billion years old, it’s part of a wider cosmos, or perhaps is a bounce from a previous collapsed universe.
I think it’s misguided.
Not that I have any issue with an eternal universe – it may well be the case, but ISTM the reason for being a proponent of this position is motivated by a desire to get rid of a first cause, and thereby “solve” something.
But IMO I don’t care much if the universe had a discrete start or is eternal, because I think the philosophical questions of how/why anything exists and why this reality is the one that exists is valid to ask in either case.
You cannot escape out from your own time of life. No one can. Because no one experienced time before his birth, and no one will experience time after his death.
All the talks on billion years old, and 100 years from now are just imagination and hypes from the fictional minds attracting attention of the gullible public.
All you have is “Now”, and this moment you live in.
The concept of a “timeless architect” is contradictory, and I don’t think the contradiction can be escaped by the usual moves.
An architect, creator, or designer is a person in the broadest sense, something with intentions, will, and acts. Personhood analytically involves change, viz., to deliberate, to will, to act, to create all imply transitions between states. A being that never transitions from intending-to-act to acting, never responds, never does anything that constitutes a difference from a prior condition, isn’t recognizably a person or an agent. And change just is what time measures. Wherever anything differs from one state to the next, time is present. So “timeless architect” asserts an agent who acts without any of the features that make agency agency.
The standard escape is to say the change happens only in the created thing, not in the creator, the creator “timelessly wills” that the universe exists. But this either preserves the change-involving features under a different label (willing, grounding, sustaining all still implicate the creator in what’s happening) or strips them out entirely, in which case we’re no longer describing a creator. We’re describing some impersonal ground of being and calling it a creator by courtesy. Either the personal language is doing real work and smuggling in temporality, or it’s been emptied of content and we’re talking about something we can’t actually define.
So the dilemma is, if the creator is person-like enough to count as an architect, change is analytic to the concept and timelessness is ruled out. If the creator has been abstracted past the point where person-like features apply, “architect” is the wrong word and the imagery in the original post doesn’t refer to anything coherent. Either way, the opening premise doesn’t survive.
You take things like emergence, fractals, and the idea of infinity, mix in this intuition that everything is made of smaller things and part of bigger things, throw in a bit of quantum entanglement, plus how genetics links everything living and how consciousness seems to arise out of it, and you get overwhelmed by how everything ‘is’ connected. Add a bit of existential curiosity, and it can feel like you’re glimpsing some deep underlying unity - ‘solution’.
But then you hit the brakes when you look at what science actually says.
We might experience more, but let’s live without relying on that.
Talking about non-experienced ideas are either fiction or imagination. You cannot step out of your own time capsule limited by your birth and death.
Surely, I will keep you posted.
Time is also semantics. You said you will keep me posted. It is the time in your mental frame manifested in the word.
The time started when you started thinking and speaking or writing.
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I also cannot experience the time before I was born. So by that logic, when I read about, say, world war 2, I should call it “imagination and hypes from the fictional minds”
I am still having a great deal of difficulty imaging the meaning or significance of “time” in an empty or unchanging “motionless” universe. It is events we experience. It is events that are the fundamental units of which reality is composed. We mark time only through events, the seasons, the rotation of the earth, the moon, the planets, the oscillations of a spring, swinging of a pendulum. There is no meaning to time separate from the events we use to measure and mark it. Time is a derived concept not a primary independent feature of existence, hence its absence in physics.
Yes, you should. Quite correctly so! Although you wouldn’t call it hypes from the fictional minds, if you have an educated sense.
You are reading someone else’s writings on the subject, which is not your own direct experience.
Maybe the event had happened in reality, and maybe some are true, and some might not. No one knows it for sure. You cannot verify that from you own experience.
The important point here is that you must accept the fact that it is not your own direct experience.
No-one claimed it was. The point is only that we can gain confidence that events have happened, or will happen, on the basis of evidence and verified models.
I think you’re taking us off track though. I began my initial post with checking that I was not hijacking, but discussing the concept of an eternal universe is much more on-topic than questioning everything outside of personal experience.
I think you are missing the point. My point was, realistically your time starts when you start thinking and speaking and writing about time, and that is all you have access to time.
The concept of eternal universe is just a fiction, which is really off-topic. You could try to prove it in any possible way though. I shall prove it is a fiction.