Philosophy for Philosophers
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My past is a series of events that really happened. I cannot change them. If someone asks "From where did you come here?" I can say "I walked the road from place A." Then that someone may ask "From where did you come to place A?", and I can say "I walked the road from place B". But we cannot continue this endlessly into the past. The journey must have started somewhere. My past and my future differ in this respect. I can look into my future ad infinitum, but not into my past, because my past is real but my future is not.I would say time is infinite in both directions.
You can see an end in the future with that line of reasoning. Where will you go after A? I will go to B and C. After D, E and F, I will die at point G. The end.Tamminen wrote: ↑May 6th, 2019, 1:36 pm @ubojicoMy past is a series of events that really happened. I cannot change them. If someone asks "From where did you come here?" I can say "I walked the road from place A." Then that someone may ask "From where did you come to place A?", and I can say "I walked the road from place B". But we cannot continue this endlessly into the past. The journey must have started somewhere. My past and my future differ in this respect. I can look into my future ad infinitum, but not into my past, because my past is real but my future is not.I would say time is infinite in both directions.
These paragraphs show that you talk about physical time. I speak about subjective time, which is the original meaning of time. Subjective time is a process where the present experience changes to a past experience and a new present experience appears from the future. It cannot change direction in its concrete process of advancing, only in thinking, abstracted from the real happening. Physical time is an example of abstracted time.The catch with "loop time" or "circular time" is that it predicts that the expansion of our observable universe will necessarily reverse eventually. (Which isn't that implausible I think, seeing how the expansion rate already changed at least 3-4 times in the past, so such an event will probably happen again.)
Tamminen wrote: ↑May 6th, 2019, 3:56 pm Let us suppose there is an absolute point of view to the world, and from this point of view time is a closed loop, whatever that means. Now I am part of this loop, and in the middle of subjective time. What I wrote in my replies to @ubojico and @Atla above applies here, which of course destroys the loop as a structure of subjective time. To sum up, subjective time is a linear, never-ending one-way street with a starting point somewhere in the past.
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I think subjective time is just the sensation that time flows in one direction, from past towards the future. (A nice illusion.)Tamminen wrote: ↑May 6th, 2019, 2:44 pm These paragraphs show that you talk about physical time. I speak about subjective time, which is the original meaning of time. Subjective time is a process where the present experience changes to a past experience and a new present experience appears from the future. It cannot change direction in its concrete process of advancing, only in thinking, abstracted from the real happening. Physical time is an example of abstracted time.
Oh yeah important little detail, here I was talking about an 1-dimensional circle. It can't really be visualized I think.
A sensation is the content of the present in subjective time. Tomorrow always comes after today, even if the content of tomorrow were the same as the content of today. This is the internal structure of subjective time, its logic. Going backwards in subjective time is a contradiction in terms. The situation becomes a bit more complicated when we speak of physical time, time measured with clocks, and the problems with spacetime, when time and space get intertwined, especially in General Relativity.
I tried to explain this in my reply to ubojico above. The logic of subjective past is such that there cannot be a real event in the infinite past, and even if there were, there would be no road from that event to where I am now. I think you can see this if you think about it carefully. I admit that also the idea of finite past is somewhat strange and counterintuitive, but there is no logical contradiction in it. Think about the moment when you wake up in the morning and have your first conscious experience after deep sleep, and replace the deep sleep with nothingness. Would you tell me where the logical problems are, I am very interested.You added the assumption that it therefore had a start in the past. But you can tell this how? (Plus the idea of a beginning brings up logical problems.)
Ok I don't understand what you mean. If by subjective time we really only mean the illusion of the passage of time, then nothing follows from it since it's just an illusion. It has no "actual" internal structure or logic.Tamminen wrote: ↑May 7th, 2019, 2:57 pmA sensation is the content of the present in subjective time. Tomorrow always comes after today, even if the content of tomorrow were the same as the content of today. This is the internal structure of subjective time, its logic. Going backwards in subjective time is a contradiction in terms. The situation becomes a bit more complicated when we speak of physical time, time measured with clocks, and the problems with spacetime, when time and space get intertwined, especially in General Relativity.I tried to explain this in my reply to @ubojico above. The logic of subjective past is such that there cannot be a real event in the infinite past, and even if there were, there would be no road from that event to where I am now. I think you can see this if you think about it carefully. I admit that also the idea of finite past is somewhat strange and counterintuitive, but there is no logical contradiction in it. Think about the moment when you wake up in the morning and have your first conscious experience after deep sleep, and replace the deep sleep with nothingness. Would you tell me where the logical problems are, I am very interested.You added the assumption that it therefore had a start in the past. But you can tell this how? (Plus the idea of a beginning brings up logical problems.)