Infinte Regress Timeline...

[Bomb#20]

I am not equivocating. I am using infinite time to mean the same thing every time I say it. An unending supply of time.

I know you think you are, but you aren't.

If one says that time stretches infinitely into the past that means that infinite time has occurred in the past already. But infinite time never occurs. It is time without end. So the idea of infinite time stretching into the past is illogical. The concept contradicts itself.

Time goes forward. It doesn't stretch into the past; it stretches from the past. To talk of time stretching into the past is to speak metaphorically, to invite the listener to think in reverse, to ask him to grasp an analogy between one direction and the opposite direction.

The people you are arguing against in this thread are arguing for the possibility (or in a couple cases for the actuality) of there having been more seconds in the past than any definite integer: that perhaps every single second in history was preceded by an earlier second. That is the concept you are opposing. That is the concept you are labeling "infinite time has occurred in the past already". But that is not an unending supply of time. To think that's an unending supply of time you'd have to take the metaphor way too literally. What it is is an unbeginning supply of time. Nobody here is arguing that there could have been an unending supply of time that ended today. When you apply the word "infinite" to an unbeginning supply of time, you aren't calling it "infinite" because it satisfies the definition of "infinite" in your head. You're calling it "infinite" because that's what mathematicians call it. That means you're applying, by proxy, the mathematicians' definition: a number bigger than any regular number.

To disprove this you have to show another kind of infinity for something real like time, not this continuous error of saying time and numbers are equivalent.

Nobody said time and numbers are equivalent. That's you putting words in your opponents' mouths. Applying the same standard of logic to A and to B is not the same thing as saying A and B are equivalent; it's simply what a person does in order to avoid making mistakes and committing special-pleading fallacies.

Dude, what don't you understand by the term "in theory"?

I know what it means. It means you get to accuse your opponents of talking about abstractions instead of about the real world when it suits you, and then turn around and ignore the real world when that suits you. In the real world the fact that every single object in a group of objects can be perceived does not imply that the number of objects in the group can be calculated. It's only in your mental model of the world that this jump from perception to counting is a valid inference.

When there's no reason to think the amount is infinite and no reason to think the amount is finite, that means we don't know if there are infinitely many. Let us forthrightly admit our ignorance.

I am not concerning myself here with whether or not it is possible for time to be finite. I have heard no good argument showing how it can't.

Neither have I. The people arguing that there was definitely no beginning of time are doing metaphysics instead of science, the same as you are. On this point, the only scientific viewpoint is agnosticism.

How do you know this? Physicists and cosmologists certainly don't know this about space-time. They suspect and hope that space-time is quantifiable and not curved, but they don't make positive claims like you are.

Physicists do know this. They know if you break apart an atom too much it isn't an atom anymore. If you break apart a particle too much and it isn't a particle anymore.

So what if it's not an atom any more? It's still something. You break apart an atom, you get a nucleus. You break apart a nucleus, you get a proton. You break apart a proton, you get a quark. That's as far as we currently have the technology to break things apart, but that's no evidence that there's nothing smaller inside a quark, any more than the fact that Galileo's telescope showed him moons around Jupiter but not Mars was evidence that Mars had no moons.

Real things can only be broken apart so much before they don't exist anymore. And time is a real thing.

When you break a window, you get a broken window. When you break an atom, you get a broken atom. You don't get something that doesn't exist any more. And time is a real thing we have no atomic theory of. Our two most accurate current theories of physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, both model time using differential equations. That means they require time to be continuous. If there is an atom of time, a smallest unit, then that means our best theories about space-time are both wrong.

 

[Juma]

The point is that without time to change, no change would ever occur, so time to change is a quality that has always existed. The eternity of time is a fact.

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

 

[Kharakov]

The point is that without time to change, no change would ever occur, so time to change is a quality that has always existed. The eternity of time is a fact.

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

With due deference (I'm not joking), there is only need for time to have change.

 

[Juma]

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

With due deference (I'm not joking), there is only need for time to have change.

Change is difference over time. So you are saying tautologies.

 

[skepticalbip]

The point is that without time to change, no change would ever occur, so time to change is a quality that has always existed. The eternity of time is a fact.

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

Time is required for any specific object to become different (or change).

Yes, two different specific objects can be different but that isn't what is being discussed. Why do people who consider themselves philosophers play such inane word games?

 

[Juma]

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

Time is required for any specific object to become different (or change).

So what?

 

[skepticalbip]

Time is required for any specific object to become different (or change).

So what?

So that is what Kharakov was saying and you tried to twist it to something completely irrelivent by offering an absurd tautology of different things can be different.

 

[Kharakov]

With due deference (I'm not joking), there is only need for time to have change.

Change is difference over time. So you are saying tautologies.

Yeah, I know. I was thinking about dropping a dime on the tautological nature of time/change, but.. anyway, one side of this thread revolves around the claim that time had a beginning, instead of always existing.

Here is the claim (more or less):
1) There was no time for change to occur
2) change occurred- the change that occurred is time to change began to exist

Bootstrap levitation, to borrow a saying from Walter Slovotski, or was that Karl?

 

[Kharakov]

So what?

So that is what Kharakov was saying and you tried to twist it to something completely irrelivent by offering an absurd tautology of different things can be different.

 

[ryan]

The point is that without time to change, no change would ever occur, so time to change is a quality that has always existed. The eternity of time is a fact.

You are getting sucked into making your own claims when you don't need to. We only have to argue that we don't know if time existed before the Big Bang; that is enough to show how audacious untermensche's positive claim is.

 

[untermensche]

I wonder if you are using "countable" and "fully counted" interchangeably. You're right that anything that can be fully counted is finite. But we will never know what is infinite because we will never be able to fully count them.

We can know that real things are theoretically countable because there is no reason to think differently.

If it exists why couldn't it in theory be counted? Why would we think human limitations implies infinity?

It is that simple. Space is something real. That is whole underpinning of Lawrence Krauss's book.

Lawrence Krauss's book, along with every other book that can be made about science must use certain postulates/assumptions. Science makes no positive claims without them....

It assumes the universe is out there and that repeated controlled experiments can better tell us how the universe behaves.

And repeated experiments tell us that there is a small amount of energy contained within what used to be thought of as empty space.

What got everyone excited with your posts is that you made a positive claim without using any assumptions.

I don't agree, we have to assume that time is real, like matter, and it is not imaginary like numbers. Like this number infinity.

 

[untermensche]

Ridiculous. I have the freedom of religion without any religion.

Semantics is important. The freedom of religion comes from religion.

No it doesn't.

The freedom of religion comes from something beyond religion. From a place that looks at all religions as the same thing deserving the same freedom.

No religion thinks itself is the same thing as another. It is truth, the others are not.

And it is perfectly possible to have the freedom of religion and have no religion. If everybody chose to have no religion the freedom would still exist even if all religion was dead.

 

[untermensche]

I know you think you are, but you aren't.

If one says that time stretches infinitely into the past that means that infinite time has occurred in the past already. But infinite time never occurs. It is time without end. So the idea of infinite time stretching into the past is illogical. The concept contradicts itself.

Time goes forward. It doesn't stretch into the past; it stretches from the past. To talk of time stretching into the past is to speak metaphorically, to invite the listener to think in reverse, to ask him to grasp an analogy between one direction and the opposite direction.

It makes no difference. You can think of the time that has occurred already as stretching to the past or you can think of the time to come as stretching to the future. But really time stretches in no direction. We move through time as if through a tunnel. We are always in the same place in the tunnel. Time is always the present. It doesn't stretch out away from the present in either direction. Thinking about time in the future is only a process of the imagination.

The people you are arguing against in this thread are arguing for the possibility (or in a couple cases for the actuality) of there having been more seconds in the past than any definite integer: that perhaps every single second in history was preceded by an earlier second. That is the concept you are opposing. That is the concept you are labeling "infinite time has occurred in the past already". But that is not an unending supply of time. To think that's an unending supply of time you'd have to take the metaphor way too literally. What it is is an unbeginning supply of time. Nobody here is arguing that there could have been an unending supply of time that ended today. When you apply the word "infinite" to an unbeginning supply of time, you aren't calling it "infinite" because it satisfies the definition of "infinite" in your head. You're calling it "infinite" because that's what mathematicians call it. That means you're applying, by proxy, the mathematicians' definition: a number bigger than any regular number.

Of course it must be an unending supply of time. If not we are talking about a finite amount of time. Time is not an integer and all this talk of integers doesn't apply to it. None of it. Integers are imaginary human constructs. Just like infinity. There is no infinity in nature that humans used to construct the notion of infinity from. It comes purely from the human imagination. To actually think it is real is religion.

Nobody said time and numbers are equivalent. That's you putting words in your opponents' mouths. Applying the same standard of logic to A and to B is not the same thing as saying A and B are equivalent; it's simply what a person does in order to avoid making mistakes and committing special-pleading fallacies.

You are not applying a standard of logic to infinite time. There is no standard beyond saying an unending supply of it. All you can apply standards to are numbers.

Dude, what don't you understand by the term "in theory"?

I know what it means. It means you get to accuse your opponents of talking about abstractions instead of about the real world when it suits you, and then turn around and ignore the real world when that suits you. In the real world the fact that every single object in a group of objects can be perceived does not imply that the number of objects in the group can be calculated. It's only in your mental model of the world that this jump from perception to counting is a valid inference.

I admit my abstractions and their limitations.

Yes I freely admit it is impossible to count every quark in the universe. But I don't admit that this human limitation implies in any way this imaginary number called infinity is hiding out there somewhere.

Physicists do know this. They know if you break apart an atom too much it isn't an atom anymore. If you break apart a particle too much and it isn't a particle anymore.

So what if it's not an atom any more? It's still something.

It means that you can only break apart real things so much. Break the atom too much and it is no longer the atom anymore.

Real things cannot be broken infinitely. That notion is absurd.

 

[untermensche]

Things can differ. No need for time to have difference.

With due deference (I'm not joking), there is only need for time to have change.

Time and the cousin of time, change, can both begin together. Neither has to exist first for both to begin together.

 

[skepticalbip]

....... yadda, yadda, yadda, snipped........

I don't agree, we have to assume that time is real, like matter, and it is not imaginary like numbers. Like this number infinity.

Time being real doesn't mean it is like matter. Relativity paints time as an axis of spacetime. Any movement is movement through this spacetime. Neither the x,y,z, or t coordinate can be "counted" (only segments measured by our arbitrary scales) but they each are "real". The only apparent difference is that we have freedom of movement in two directions in either the x,y, or z coordinate but only in one direction in the t coordinate.

 

[untermensche]

....... yadda, yadda, yadda, snipped........

I don't agree, we have to assume that time is real, like matter, and it is not imaginary like numbers. Like this number infinity.

Time being real doesn't mean it is like matter. Relativity paints time as an axis of spacetime. Any movement is movement through this spacetime. Neither the x,y,z, or t coordinate can be counted (only segments measured by our arbitrary scales) but they each are "real". The only apparent difference is that we have freedom of movement in two directions in either the x,y, or z coordinate but only in one direction in the t coordinate.

We MODEL spacetime with lines.

But there are no lines out there. Lines are as imaginary as numbers.

 

[skepticalbip]

Time being real doesn't mean it is like matter. Relativity paints time as an axis of spacetime. Any movement is movement through this spacetime. Neither the x,y,z, or t coordinate can be counted (only segments measured by our arbitrary scales) but they each are "real". The only apparent difference is that we have freedom of movement in two directions in either the x,y, or z coordinate but only in one direction in the t coordinate.

We MODEL spacetime with lines.

But there are no lines out there. Lines are as imaginary as numbers.

No shit?

 

[untermensche]

We MODEL spacetime with lines.

But there are no lines out there. Lines are as imaginary as numbers.

No shit?

So why all this nonsense about lines?

 

[skepticalbip]

No shit?

So why all this nonsense about lines?

Who said anything about lines (other than you)? Coordinates are directions. Lines aren't necessary unless you want to do some sort of plot on paper or a computer screen. Do you really believe that North, South, East, West, up, down, yesterday, tomorrow are lines?

 

[untermensche]

So why all this nonsense about lines?

Who said anything about lines (other than you)? Coordinates are directions. Lines aren't necessary unless you want to do some sort of plot on paper or a computer screen. Do you really believe that North, South, East, West, up, down, yesterday, tomorrow are lines?

What point are you trying to make?

I said time is real.

Either it is something real in itself or it is something that arises because of the interaction of real things. Either way it is something real.

I don't see how talking about the x,y,z coordinates is any objection.