What is 'time'?

[Stoned Rose]

This confuses time and timekeeping. We set arbitary units about time but they aren't time no more than our units like an inch is relevant to space.

They are our measurements of time rather than actual time itself which exists whether or not we choose to measure it. Think of it this way - we might never choose to measure how tall you are but this doesn't mean that your height has changed. You still exist in the "up" axis.

For the record I seem to think the 60 minutes thing came from the Sumerians and was due to divisibility and their numbering system or something. There was a good BBC4 documentary on it a few months back.

I understand how time exists regardless of our 'system' of managing / measuring it. What I was asking was why/how this system came about and how it 'stuck' with the human race?

The concept of days came about through astronomical means (as did months/years and the larger units of time). It was simply the time between the sun being at the same point in the sky on successive cycles.

Seconds are actually a measurement of angle, I think it was the Babylonians or the Sumerians who first used a base 60 number system (which would seem quite strange to us now). They split everything up into 60.

This term 'second' was then migrated westward where it was used to denote 1/3600th [1/(60x60)] of a whole circle of angle. There are 3600 seconds in a whole circle of angle. There are also 3600 seconds in an hour.

To add to the confusion the Egyptians loved base 12 number systems. As a result they split the day into 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night.

Essentially these two base number systems are mashed together into our current timekeeping system.

As you can see it's not like somebody said "Oh there'll be this many minutes in an hour and this many seconds", it's actually a system which has borrowed from different cultures which has spanned centuries. It's sort of evolved as some kind of botched job.

Interesting fact, the French actually attempted to make time-keeping metric once with ten hours in a day one hundred minutes in an hour etc.

It didn't end well and they reverted back to the old system soon after.

Cracking post mate :)

 

[MCFCinUSA]

Top post.

Could you elaborate? give some examples of the situations you allude to above mate?

how kind and polite of you..

(and so I'll indulge this one time where normally I might keep my own counsel & not embarrass others on this thread who are so deeply ingrained in their own dogma and sophistry, yet who I respect)

we have MRI machines that can image what's going on inside our bodies Stoned, yet my kung-fu master can determine what's going on inside of mine by simply holding my wrist (and that includes but isn't limited to determining my blood cell counts & if I've got kidney stones - that were later detected by Sonogram when I returned to the USA); I've also known other people, and I can't elaborate, who with regards to 'future' events have shown as others have postulated within this thread - that things are not always what they seem and are (for want of a better word) a singularity.

I don't claim to know, but I've been told & have experienced enough to more fully appreciate the limits of our understanding and knowledge - that indeed we don't really know very much at all.

'time' is therefore whatever you think it is (or can make sense of) - but if you're talking about future events, they may not be as random as you believe they are, which is something pretty heavy to try and bend your head around, as are a lot of other things about the nature of our existence and the limits of our perception.

I love the fact you have a Kung-Fu master mate :)

so do I.. I've had several, but if it wasn't for him I don't think I'd still be here.

(and the current one is straight out of a David Carradine movie.. ah, a man who will forever be remembered as being passionate about his work, and his wanking)

 

[Irwell]

Intriguing stuff.

But this implies that things 'just are' or 'just were'. That things have 'always been'.

We know that many things in our world can't just 'exist'. They have to be created, whether that be creating a baby or creating a house. They don't just 'be'.

When you talk about babies or houses, we have changed the form of the materials they are made from but we haven't created those materials. All the material that makes up that baby or that house already existed, it is just the end form that has been created. Our bodies produce the baby as a result of complicated chains of chemical reactions interacting with each other. The illusion of choice is much the same as well in that the complex chains of chemical reactions interacting are what causes specific 'decisions'. It is nothing more than a set of chemical reactions in the brain caused by reactions to a specific set of sensory inputs caused by other chemical reactions. Given those same circumstances our brains will always make the same decision.

How do you explain how these 'physical constants' happened to exist in the first place?

If the multiverse theory is correct the ones we observe in our universe don't necessarily all exist in all of the universes. They may well all have their own sets of physical constants that determine how things react and interact. Given infinite combinations of constants there must be a universe that exists with our particular combination. The odds of us happening to be in a particular universe would be infinitesimally small, but we are in one and it just so happens to be this one.

Surely something as infinitely complicated as what we are discussing was 'just there'?

Why would it not be 'just there'? Given infinite universes within the multiverse, all with their own combinations of physical constants, one of those universes must be how ours is. To my mind, the idea of something with infinite complexity is such that it must have always existed and can't have been created by something else. How much complexity would a creator need for their creation itself to have infinite complexity?

 

[Shadz69]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

 

[MCFCinUSA]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

this is what I'd expect, and I'm not out there discussing my personal experiences with people Shadz - especially because in my professional life people must have confidence and trust in me, but certain things help me move forward when I get threatened (which can be a pretty regular occurrence in my line of work) but I am fascinated in general by lost knowledge and the unanswered questions many of us will ask in our little lifetimes.

 

[BigJimLittleJim]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

this is what I'd expect, and I'm not out there discussing my personal experiences with people Shadz - especially because in my professional life people must have confidence and trust in me, but certain things help me move forward when I get threatened (which can be a pretty regular occurrence in my line of work) but I am fascinated in general by lost knowledge and the unanswered questions many of us will ask in our little lifetimes.

Dude, he wanted you to say.........wax off............it's from the Karate kid movie, just a bit of fun mate :)

 

[Shadz69]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

this is what I'd expect, and I'm not out there discussing my personal experiences with people Shadz - especially because in my professional life people must have confidence and trust in me, but certain things help me move forward when I get threatened (which can be a pretty regular occurrence in my line of work) but I am fascinated in general by lost knowledge and the unanswered questions many of us will ask in our little lifetimes.

Dude, he wanted you to say.........wax off............it's from the Karate kid movie, just a bit of fun mate :)

Yep.No offence intended.Post what you like.I posted about a house I lived in being haunted and got slated for it.I accept stuff happens that we have'nt got a scooby's about.

 

[MCFCinUSA]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

this is what I'd expect, and I'm not out there discussing my personal experiences with people Shadz - especially because in my professional life people must have confidence and trust in me, but certain things help me move forward when I get threatened (which can be a pretty regular occurrence in my line of work) but I am fascinated in general by lost knowledge and the unanswered questions many of us will ask in our little lifetimes.

Dude, he wanted you to say.........wax off............it's from the Karate kid movie, just a bit of fun mate :)

thank you for pointing that out.. there's another way of completing it which is nothing to do with the waxing you're referring to, aha haha

FYI - to follow on from stuff above, I'd done a high kick in Tai Chi and thought I'd pulled a muscle, but it was barely more than a twinge & I'd forgotten about it when I went to visit this new master I'd been recommended to see (this was twelve years ago) .. so he is holding my wrist and says I've got a trauma in my left leg, and I go "no I haven't, I'm very fit" and he goes "yes you have" and then one of his assistants grabs me in the crotch to the left-hand side and I go "Ouch!" because I really felt it, and the master starts in with me "ah hah! ... your body is trying to tell you something, this is where your liver meridian runs, and your liver is enlarged by 2.5 cm..." and he proceeds to give me chapter & verse on my entire physical condition, the whole works, including wanting to see what kung-fu I've been doing because he thinks I've been abusing it and it can be very strong, etc etc (you cannot believe what this guy was able to tell me unless you experience & see it for yourself) .. it's a whole other reality out there if you're schooled in 'harder' science which cannot account for any of this or other such situations; you simply have to be there to see it for yourself.

 

[Bigga]

MCFCinUSA finish this sentence,Wax on...

this is what I'd expect, and I'm not out there discussing my personal experiences with people Shadz - especially because in my professional life people must have confidence and trust in me, but certain things help me move forward when I get threatened (which can be a pretty regular occurrence in my line of work) but I am fascinated in general by lost knowledge and the unanswered questions many of us will ask in our little lifetimes.

What's refreshing is that someone of scientific background can testify to experiences that non scientific people experience and get laughed at for. Often the paraphrase used is 'if you can't test it, it can't be real regardless of your experience'. Pretty much the whole gist and it's very patronising.

Reverting back to subject of 'time', my mother used to recount the night her brother died during the Biafran War in the '60s. He came to talk to her and explain he was 'leaving' and for her not be upset. She never has discussed the whole talk, but she said she awoke crying. She was in England, he was in Africa and she had no way of immediate contact. Time must've felt like it had frozen for her, that night.

It was only some weeks later she received a letter stating the day he passed(that night they spoke) and other things that were contained in the letter.

This is also another concept of time to the individual.

 

[Stoned Rose]

Intriguing stuff.

But this implies that things 'just are' or 'just were'. That things have 'always been'.

We know that many things in our world can't just 'exist'. They have to be created, whether that be creating a baby or creating a house. They don't just 'be'.

When you talk about babies or houses, we have changed the form of the materials they are made from but we haven't created those materials. All the material that makes up that baby or that house already existed, it is just the end form that has been created. Our bodies produce the baby as a result of complicated chains of chemical reactions interacting with each other. The illusion of choice is much the same as well in that the complex chains of chemical reactions interacting are what causes specific 'decisions'. It is nothing more than a set of chemical reactions in the brain caused by reactions to a specific set of sensory inputs caused by other chemical reactions. Given those same circumstances our brains will always make the same decision.

I'm not sure I follow. You're suggesting things interact to produce other things right? surely that means that the universe is a result of the interaction of things that came before it? Therefore it couldn't have 'just been'.

How do you explain how these 'physical constants' happened to exist in the first place?

If the multiverse theory is correct the ones we observe in our universe don't necessarily all exist in all of the universes. They may well all have their own sets of physical constants that determine how things react and interact. Given infinite combinations of constants there must be a universe that exists with our particular combination. The odds of us happening to be in a particular universe would be infinitesimally small, but we are in one and it just so happens to be this one.

Interesting but I feel this theory relies on a lot of 'ifs, buts and maybes'. I'm not discounting it though Irwell.'

Surely something as infinitely complicated as what we are discussing was 'just there'?

Why would it not be 'just there'? Given infinite universes within the multiverse, all with their own combinations of physical constants, one of those universes must be how ours is. To my mind, the idea of something with infinite complexity is such that it must have always existed and can't have been created by something else. How much complexity would a creator need for their creation itself to have infinite complexity?

Again a really interesting concept but I'm not sure I follow the idea that the more complex something is, the higher the likelihood it is it 'just exits'. Also if we go down the 'infinite complexity' route we are making assumptions that there isn't something out there even more complex, making our 'infinitely complex' thing, actually not infinitely complex.

Great contribution btw mate.