Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
My question was as to why the clock should show any particular reading at all, and if so, then which one.
When you read the time on an ordinary clock, the reading is a direct result of what the reading was the last time you looked at it, and ultimately at what time you set the clock when you started it initially (and, obviously, on it's imprecision and drift, which I will ignore here). There's no mystery and our expectations are usually met.
With a clock that's supposed to have always been going on throughout an infinite past, there's no starting point, and it was never set to being with. And even if there was, without a finite time span between setting and reading, there's no good reason that the clock should read one particular value rather than any other.
And yet we do expect that it would. It's not a question the we don't know in a thought experiment what time it would display. It's that there's not one good reason that it should display any one particular reading rather than any other, and this even though we expect that it has to display one.
That's a contradiction in our different expectations. Something has to give, I think.
EB
A clock is going to cycle through all possible time displays every twelve hours (or twenty four hours, depending on its design).
We cannot know until we look what time it displays; But knowing that it is a clock, we can limit the possibilities to those times a clock CAN display. So it is analogous to a well shuffled deck of cards - draw out one card, and you cannot say which of the 52 possibilities it is, without looking at it first. But you still know that it will be one of those 52 possibilities, and that it has an equal chance of being any of them. You are able to say with complete certainty that it's not the fifteen of clubs, or the three of widgets.
Your hypothetical clock will display a random time, that is somewhere within the range of times it is able to display. There is no way to predict in advance what time that will be, because there is no defined starting point or earlier time point where the time displayed was known. Once you look at the clock, you can say with certainty what it displayed at any given finite distance into the past; and what it will display at any given finite distance into the future. But you still won't know what time it started with, because the question is nonsensical - it never started. You may as well ask what day in the past I was last in Paris - a city I have yet to visit. The question is meaningless, given the known prior information that I haven't been there yet.
I can only infer that you, like other people here, didn't get the question at all.
You appear to take it as an epistemological problem, i.e. what is it an observer would be able to tell depending on the specific set-up. Or, whether he would be able to tell anything at all. Alright, you answered that one proficiently, but I wasn't interested because I already knew the answer.
My question isn't an epistemological one. It's an ontological question, if a metaphysical one: Assuming an infinite past and a clock that has always been running, we all expect that it should give a definite reading. If you disagree with that here, please explain.
So, assuming the clock gives a definite reading, why should it be any particular reading rather than any of all the other possible readings for this clock?
Still, maybe I misunderstood you. Maybe you think it's perfectly acceptable to say that the clock would give a particular reading without any reason or cause for that.
Pure hazard? Purely arbitrary?
Whoa.
EB