Is Leo's view of time correct?

[Anderz]

I have learned a lot about reality from Leo's videos. But when it comes to time I think Leo has a mistaken view. Leo said from about 1 hour and 36 minutes in his first part video about what is God that the present moment has existed forever. According to how I see it, that is wrong. Because there is only the now. There isn't any past stretching back an infinite numbers of years into the past. Time has a beginning, now, and no end. So the correct way to say it is that the now will exist forever, not that it has existed forever. In mathematics it's called a ray:

Quote

"In geometry, a ray is usually taken as a half-infinite line (also known as a half-line) with one of the two points and taken to be at infinity." - Wolfram MathWorld

 

[Roy]

Don't really have any philosophy to contribute, just want to share this awesome song in the spirit of the thread

 

[Member]

There are two theories of time called presentism (only now or it exists) and eternalism (everything exists). Personally I think that eternalism is more spot on because time is more like a measure of gradations of consciousness and infinite consciousness is not always the same. This evolution or change looks like time but imo it's just variations in consciousness. Let's say that pure consciousness is the foundation (0) - in order to build the roof, you need the walls, doors, windows and so on. Without all the construction materials (past) it is not possible to build (mind, present) the house (future or higher Self), so everything is interconnected (ONE).

Edited July 1, 2020 by Member

[Anderz]

@Member I have never heard of those terms before. Interesting stuff. I found on the Wikipedia pages you linked to something called growing block universe:

Quote

"According to the growing block universe theory of time (or the growing block view), the past and present exist while the future does not. The present is an objective property, to be compared with a moving spotlight. By the passage of time more of the world comes into being; therefore, the block universe is said to be growing. The growth of the block is supposed to happen in the present, a very thin slice of spacetime, where more of spacetime is continually coming into being.

The growing block view is an alternative to both eternalism (according to which past, present, and future all exist) and presentism (according to which only the present exists). It is held to be closer to common-sense intuitions than the alternatives." - Wikipedia

The growing block universe is similar to how I see it! With the additional constraint that all the past is information in the now and only information in the now. So the past is real but there is no past stretching back from the now.

[LastThursday]

I think the problem with talking about time at all is that it's built into the English language. It's nearly impossible to talk about anything without referring to time in some way. Unless you speak some other sort of language you're stuck in the paradigm.

So you can make a bald statement: "Time doesn't exist". But then ridiculously follow up with: "The present moment has existed forever". You just can't escape those pesky temporal words and tenses!

The way out of this is to seriously recognise we're all stuck in a paradigm, and it's one where time is axiomatic. You could of course invent jargon that doesn't emphasise time, so instead of "present moment" you could say "blurfblarg". Or instead just embrace what's being pointed to and not get hung up on words.

Edited July 1, 2020 by LastThursday

[Anderz]

@LastThursday The only view of time I have found that makes sense to me is that there is only the now. And all the past blasts into existence instantly in the now as information. A simple analogy I use is to list all natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... infinitely fast. When will that process end if it starts now? The answer is: the process will never end! Because there isn't any last natural number.

[LastThursday]

I'm totally onboard with instant existence (hence my love of Last Thursdayism: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism) .

But I have a problem with a lack of symmetry with what you suggest. If everything just came into existence, then what right does it have to keep carrying on? Instead of a number line stretching infinitely to the right, it's more like an infinitesimally small dot - it has no exent in either direction.

You also have to be really careful with mathematical thinking. When you combine two infinities, it isn't always an infinite result. You are talking about one infinity (all the natural numbers) pitted against another infinity (infinitely fast), which one wins depends on how you define the infinites.

For example, is 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + .... infinite or not? Yes it's infinite.

Is 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ... infinite or not? No, it is in fact equal to 1.

 

[Member]

6 minutes ago, Anderz said:

@Member I have never heard of those terms before. Interesting stuff. I found on the Wikipedia pages you linked to something called growing block universe:

The growing block universe is similar to how I see it! With the additional constraint that all the past is information in the now and only information in the now. So the past is real but there is no past stretching back from the now.

I think that the future already exists, the only difference is that is not this moment or now because it is different. This doesn't mean that the future is already set in stone because there is choice from which infinite realities emerge from moment to moment. Honestly, it's beyond our understanding but from my pov, we should be able to access any information available across any spacetime reality and even be able to communicate with anyone, just like we do now via wireless connection. That means that the aliens or any weird beings that don't exist in the 'now' reality and exist in the 'future' realities can interfere anytime with 'this' reality. There are infinite forms or universes through which the future could manifest.

[Anderz]

@LastThursday The lack of symmetry is the ray I mentioned. Time has a beginning, but no end. Consider the opposite scenario where there is the problem of time stretching an infinite number of years into the past. Or the problem of time starting from no time. The ray approach solves that problem by saying that time has a beginning now and is forever expanding into the future.

And instead of last Thursday, think of all the past, including the whole history of our universe, as information compressed into the now.

[Anderz]

@Member I have a similar view, that the future already exists. The unmanifested reality is infinite and contains all past and future, while the manifested reality is an unfoldment of the unmanifested.

[Member]

Just now, Anderz said:

@Member I have a similar view, that the future already exists. The unmanifested reality is infinite and contains all past and future, while the manifested reality is an unfoldment of the unmanifested.

Yeah, that's possible from a relative pov. But other futures/realities are also valid as you're interacting with them all the time

[LastThursday]

Compression is a good word. But my view is symmetrical, both the past and the future are compressed into the now.

A different way of viewing it, is that the "now" is being imagined into existence all the time. It's like the old now is forgotten and a new now is manifested out of nothing. In a way the "now" doesn't exist, because it keeps being re-generated.

[Anderz]

@LastThursday That's a crucial distinction. My view is that only the unmanifested is infinite. The manifested reality is always finite. And that's what produces time and the arrow of time when the manifested reality unfolds from zero information and expands forever into the unmanifested. Manifested reality will never reach infinite information so time goes on forever.

[LastThursday]

That is assuming the manifested reality is actually finite, couldn't it be infinite? 

The arrow of time is something else entirely. All it really says is that change is asymmetric (I love me some symmetry). In other words the world tends towards disorder - i.e. entropy increases. You don't need to have an infinite line of time to have an increase in disorder, because you can always measure the increase in disorder in the now.

The famous example is a cup being dropped and smashed. When you run the video backwards it puts itself together again. That never happens in real life, so real life has an asymmetry - an "arrow of time".

Edited July 1, 2020 by LastThursday

[Anderz]

3 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

That is assuming the manifested reality is actually finite, couldn't it be infinite? 

I don't see how time can progress in a continuous line. No matter how small time interval, there is always an infinite number of smaller divisions within that interval.

I got very existed when I learned about The Wolfram Physics Project. They use a simple graph that expands from an initial state as the foundation of their model. And unless they mess it up and turn it into some continuous model, the graph is always finite. And time in their model is the expansion of the graph.

[LastThursday]

6 minutes ago, Anderz said:

I don't see how time can progress in a continuous line. No matter how small time interval, there is always an infinite number of smaller divisions within that interval.

This is just infinity maths again. You have two infinities fighting each other to produce a finite thing. Yes, you have an infinite number of divisions, but each division takes an infinitely small amout of time. The two infinities balance each other out to produce a finity. Time progresses nicely.

The expansion of the Wolfram model is exactly what I'm talking about with asymmetry. This is I believe a cellular automaton that expands out using a very simple set of rules. The asymmetry arises because the rules can't be run in reverse. So time only runs in one direction.

It's good to note that with this model, if you are given the graph at step 1001, then it's impossible to work backwards to step 999. That means that time travel isn't possible - in other words all memory of the past has been obliterated. All you have is a "potential" past that could have created the "now". It's the same the other way round. You can't reach a future step 2001, without going through all the steps inbetween. The future is always just "potential".

 

 

[Anderz]

5 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

This is just infinity maths again. You have two infinities fighting each other to produce a finite thing.

I heard that some philosophers say that there are still problems with Zeno's paradoxes. And I agree that there is a problem. For example 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 1 is fine as an abstraction but as some experts have pointed out there is a problem when that kind of abstraction needs to be turned into a concrete situation. What they say is that one cannot just assume that a sum to infinity is actualizable.

[Inliytened1]

3 hours ago, Anderz said:

I have learned a lot about reality from Leo's videos. But when it comes to time I think Leo has a mistaken view. Leo said from about 1 hour and 36 minutes in his first part video about what is God that the present moment has existed forever. According to how I see it, that is wrong. Because there is only the now. There isn't any past stretching back an infinite numbers of years into the past. Time has a beginning, now, and no end. So the correct way to say it is that the now will exist forever, not that it has existed forever. In mathematics it's called a ray:

 

Semantics basically and the fact that we are trying to describe God or Infinity with language which is dualistic in nature and second order.

As we are talking about Infinity, the better word is eternal.  Time is imaginary.  No beginning and no end.  Only now.  But even the word now almost carries in a hidden implication of a beginning and an end - which is why you can't accurately describe Infinity with language.

[LastThursday]

15 minutes ago, Anderz said:

is fine as an abstraction but as some experts have pointed out there is a problem when that kind of abstraction needs to be turned into a concrete situation

That is exactly what we are doing with this thread. We are discussing abstractions and trying to match up with our direct experience and comparing notes.

Infinity is very slippery to get hold of. Overlaying the abstraction of infinity onto concrete reality I'm not sure is really possible in a definite way. All you can do is infer infinity - the universe is infinitely big, time is infinitely long, matter is infinitely divisible and so on. It's all guesswork. There's no way to prove or disprove  an infinity in reality.

Edited July 1, 2020 by LastThursday

[Anderz]

1 minute ago, LastThursday said:

There's no way to prove an infinity in reality.

Not a proof maybe, but I have an idea about why the future is infinite! It's based on the premise that manifested reality is an infinitely fast expansion of information in the now. That sounds like begging the question almost, but there is logic behind the idea. If the future had finite information, reality would come to a halt immediately.