The Nature of Time
Due to recent discussions on fate/choice, causality, the ability for us to quantify and/or affect choice/fate in our own and others' existences, and general questions about memory, etc., I've been thinking (again! for those who know me) more than a bit about the nature of Time
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1. Good question. I don't know, but it is worth considering how we know about time, yes? We know time happens because we can observe change. If there were no change, what can be said about the existence of time? Time, or at least our experience of it (all efforts to measure it) is intimately intertwined with change. This leads then to an interesting question about whether time is linear or in some way circular (the shape part). My answer has to be both and neither. Clearly, our ordinary experience of time seems to be linear (but then our mortal perception is limited, and what we perceive as linear may, in fact, be something else entirely - like circular,spherical, zig-zag, etc). Is then circular? Well that would suggest that at some level change (our only means of acknowledging time's existence) repeats itself... to which, again there is little evidence (if any) for. Can time fold back on itself? Can change do that. Does time, as we are trying to talk about actually exist? How can we show its existence outside of marking some sequence of change?
2. Travel through time is clearly possible, naturally we are currently doing it. Just now, reading these words, you've traveled through time (assuming it exists to travel through). Can we affect our travels? If time really dosen't exist, (that what mistakenly call time is nothing more than a sequential method of accounting for change), then things like 'past' and 'future' don't necessarily exist. What is the hard evidence of the 'past' for instance? A lump calcified rock looking something like bone? A lump of carbon missing some neutrons? Perhaps your memory of what you yesterday morning? Or the first time that you've had sex? Memory though, as has been demonstrated, is a narrative that one creates in the moment. To quote a writer on writing, any story twice told is fiction. It is entirely possible that we've been inventing our pasts and past lives - in the same way that we go about inventing our future and future lives. If that were true, then all would exist together, simultaneously. Everything that steps away from the present in any direction, becomes, by its nature, more and more shadowy and less real - and yet the reality can be conjured in the moment, as one's attention shifts. So is possible to travel through time? sure.
3. Yes. History can be changed. History has been changed on a global scale. Your own history has been changed. You might, upon reflection of your memories of the past (this lifetime or others) have revised, more or less subtly, events as you 'learned' more, yes? Was the pre-revision memory truly wrong? Or is, in fact, the current version more correct to the current circumstance? We, who looked at any historiography, know for a fact that history is maleable - nothing is fixed (the great fiction of contemporary historiography, in my humble opinion).
4. Other than a relationship to change, I can't think of any other relationship to time. I will say, though, as a physicist, time is regarded as an 'imaginary' mathematical entity in its relationship to space. In terms of other dimensions, what do you mean by 'other dimensions'? Other spaces (like other universes)-to which, I'd imagine time probably is just as imaginary - or to mean in the sense of 11-dimensional pocket of existence as theorized in string theory (to which, we are really speaking about phenomena that can only be described using 11-properties, and nothing more, really).
5. I don't pretend to have an answer.
6. Indeed, is there a purpose to time, or is it a convenient thing that we've created in order to wrap our brains around the idea of change...
These are my thoughts... dashed out after a few days of deep thinking (with aid of some rum).
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1. Granted mostly, though in many regards, it could be said that our inability to negotiate matters of time are intimately linked with our inability to fathom matters of what we call time, whether that be manipulating it and/or even perceiving its structure or limitations (if either exists).
2. Well, yes. But more so controlled travel from point to point within time, regardless of direction. Do we travel in time? Yes, of course. But only so much as the child in the backseat of the car travels down the road at the directional whim of their parent driving. Can we become the parent? *chuckle* Likewise, while I understand what you're saying, I have to point out that you're linking the existence of time to memory. Ten different human perspectives on the same event will generally garner ten different memories of the matter. You add into the matter humans changing or adapting second or third hand versions of those ten memories and you see where "history" (i.e., that which is recorded in writing, etc.) becomes written by the assassins. BUT... that doesn't mean that an event doesn't occur somewhere within what we call time and space. In that regard, can we travel to such events regardless of where it may stand in comparison to the sequence of OUR specific time/space. Yes, my memory of the event might be different than everyone else's, but can I TRAVEL there, even if it occurs in time/space what we would call, for example, 1003 AD in Bulgaria?
3. This goes back to human perceptions/conceptualisations on particular events rather than the actuality of those events. Do we change what happened when we literally re-present history? No. What ACTUALLY occurred remains. We've just altered what we've written/conceived of it; how we perceive that actuality. My question revolves around causality and change -- i.e., History -- rather than human after-perception, i.e., history books.
4. Other mathematical dimensions, i.e., length, breadth, time, etc.
5. *Handing you some more rum in case you might be inspired to answer*
6. Do we really need perceptions of time to fathom change? We perceive other facets of change without linking them to time. Do we not just need perception itself to fathom change?
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We are, as you suggest, riding in safety-seats in our parents sedan relative to our journey through time. My purpose in my nihilism is to try and break up notions of the shape of time. We set limitations of our ability to understand time even when we pose the question 'linear' vs. 'non-linear' (in this example, I've just anchored time in some relationship to the concept of linearity).
What is it besides age that separates the child in the back seat from the parent in the front? Knowledge and perhaps some skill. There is a knowledge and awareness of what possible in negotiating space possessed by the parent that is different, if not completely missing, for the child. So, if our real quest is the get behind the wheel, then our knowledge and awareness of time must change from what it currently is - even as it is framed in discussions like this. Oftentimes these discussions make arguments for a 'curved' as if that somehow more enlightened and yet it still fails to provide for a truly experiential shift in one's awareness of time that could allow for a possibility of time travel to occur.
If we want to speak in terms of spirituality, I recall at one point in our many conversations, an idea that soul, at a certain way, exists in all time and all space and that from that perspective, all lifetimes experienced are but facets in the continuum of its existence. The span of each life is simultaneously experienced with all other lives (making possible that on a soul-level, one can shift awareness to any particular time). For various reasons (Gosling's Black Seal rum aside) I'm convinced this is the case. So then, how does one shift that awareness?
Now, back to item 2 and the question of 'what actually happened'... my point in raising what I did is to draw attention to how it is that you know something has happened. We are so severely limited in getting access to any event that happens (unless is happens directly to us), that a legitimate question is raised as to whether or not any given event actually did happen. Consider your example, Bulgaria, 1003 AD - what happened? Was there a Bulgaria (as we understand it) in 1003 AD? When was 1003 AD, precisely? Say we manage to go backwards (given our limited understanding of time) the 1005 years and to the geographical location of today's Bulgaria. Setting aside whether or not the people we encounter think that it is 1003 AD or consider themselves Bulgarians, we then observes what happens. Does what actually occurred there remain (as you assert)? I don't think does, nor can it. If you reject the linearity of time, then you cannot assert that there are past events that 'remain' somehow fixed - their remnants constitute the evidence by which we construct a history - but since history is suspect, the remnants of any event serves merely as evidence for a likely reconstruction of what happened (or, more precisely, an argument for what happened). What actually happened might never be properly known nor understood. The point here is that the 'actually happened' might not even exist. Consider some recent critical events which have occurred in our lifetime. What 'actually happened' is still being debated. Once we determine what 'actually happened' we produce an authoritative account of it then it becomes fixed in memory - until we see that we need to revise it.
Before this becomes a subjective vs. objective argument (not my intention) - I am asserting, that for any given point in space-time, something does happen. I think though, what 'actually' happens, is irrelevant. Now, of course, I say that and I certainly invite the observation that relative to my own cosmos, if I cross the street and get struck by a bus and die, how could I, in good sense, say that that is irrelevant? What actually would have happened in that case? Was it that this particular mass of carbon and assorted other chemicals was struck by a large moving lump of steel and assorted other chemicals and that since the carbony mass could no longer sustain it's internal chemical processes? Or did something else actually happen?
Anyway, that's about as far as I can go with my crazy speculation (I'm out of rum).
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