Its a gpod question and it points to a real sloppiness in my lamguage.
Clearly cause cannot follow effect if there is no time. There are however relaionship between the two states which can be charecterised by an increase in overall entropy.
In your first rejoinder you mentioned intervals. The same point applies there are no intervals there are however relationships charecterised by an increase in entropy.
Unfortunately I am not a physicist. There are however lots of books about the arrow of time and whether time is foundational. If you are interested you will find their explanations more reliable than mine.
Infinity is a poorly understood concept. Even where it’s must useful - mathematics - it’s done so only when absolutely necessary. Reminds me of the line - darkness upon darkness - which someone claims appears in the Hindu Vedas.
Finitude defines our world, demonstrably so. To think theism offers eternal life is a misinterpretation and one probable source of this error is misunderstanding the word “soul”. Soul didn’t mean some immaterial self that outlasts the body, it simply referred to the person (body included) and corpses were dead souls.
Metaphysical speculation may be entertaining but there’s a good reason why Hume looked askance at metaphysics - it is nothing but sophistry and daydreaming.
That said, perpetual beginning isn’t really an issue. There are people who haven’t budged an inch from where they started centuries ago and they appear to be finite (at least to me) and quite happy to stay put where they are God bless them.
Some cosmological models are self-contained, consistent with the data and with an eternal past. What do you think this means?
That is what I used to think about time too previously. But now I feel time is a language or measuring system for the intervals between the past, present and future. We definitely talk about what happened in the past and have records of them in journals, diaries, photographs, videos and memories. Without the time system, we wouldn’t be able to come to agreements when something X happened in the past.
We also talk about the future. There will be the next World Cup event in 4 years of time from this year what not.
Of course they are not the physical time with shapes, smells or particles. But they are definitely events and objects in the past and future seen from present.
So time could be attributes on the events and objects or beings existing in the world, as well as descriptive language and measuring / counting system in human civilisation.
Also it could be psychological perception of the intervals of start and ending on the observed processes.
I’m not an atheist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that “eternity” is a Platonic extension of early Christianity, necessary to explain the delay of the parousia (which was expected around the first century).
As for this very eternity, from the perspective of the average person (which I am), life, and in the broad sense, Being, is only possible in becoming. I can’t imagine becoming where there is neither beginning nor end, so this form of being is unknown to me.
My point was that cause is always posterior to effects in the sense that, we perceive and understand cause after the effect.
Because in Hume, cause and effect are just perception. We infer cause from the constant conjunction from X events to Y events.
For inferring X events, we need to perceive Y events first. Hence effect always came prior to cause. Without perceiving effects, we cannot infer causes.
If time is perception, then eternity can last 3 seconds, and 1 minute of pleasant experience can be felt as a half of life time length.
Waking up after death and perpetual beginning sound only plausible, if we view human life in general as a unity keep surviving the nature generation after generation.
I think the second could be true, but hte first could not due to “eternity” being defined in a way askance from perception of it (because that can’t be done, properly speaking .. just conception, i think).
The idea of “a long enough time that we cannot conceptualize it’s end point” could last three seconds, as an extension in perception, i suppose. But then these are confusing terms. “3 seconds” is, apparently, also a perception. So it would be extremely odd if we could perceive something presently which violated another present perception (the long period vs 3 seconds). It may be that we’re just talking about two different perceptions. In which case, there’s no weirdness there I don’t think.
OK, valid point. For me, I couldn’t imagine or understand the concept of eternity, not having been through it via own experience or perception of the concept in matching reality.
What I have experienced with the concept of eternity has been always the word “eternity”. I see it, read it, and try to think about it, but cannot think of anything matching reality. Hence it abruptly ends at the point, and the concept and reality of my eternity always lasted for 3 to 5 seconds at max.
This is precisely why I have a suspicion that in nature there is nothing eternal or infinite; these are just our abstract concepts that have no analogues in reality.
God bless them.