Something that has been bothering me lately (time related)

[spoohunter]

It occurs to me that I am not actually right now sitting at this computer, typing this up, but rather lying in bed, age 84, remembering my life. Remembering this moment, where I typed up this post, about life.

Or I'm 32, just married, and feeling nostaligic with an old buddy.

Or I'm 45, in the prime of my career.

Now seems so important, but if you think about time on a larger scale, you are all at once across it. There is no now, just co-ordinates in space and time, a bunch of which you occupy.

[hmkpoker]

Yeah, I know what you mean, I smoke salvia too.

[cambraceres]

It sounds as though you had some rather poignant thought, possibly something with the potential to help and inspire the haggard constitution of this noble site. Then you attempted to convey it and this is the result.

Don't give up though! rephrase, give it to us again, but coherently, and in an overly verbose fashion.

And keep smoking that salvia, it's good for the complexion!

Cambraceres

[spoohunter]

You don't understand what I have written?

Imagine space and time as the x and y axis. Our life is a series of dots. We simulatenously exist in all those dots. The progression of time is an illusion, time is. We are, in time.

[cambraceres]

[ QUOTE ]
You don't understand what I have written?

Imagine space and time as the x and y axis. Our life is a series of dots. We simulatenously exist in all those dots. The progression of time is an illusion, time is. We are, in time.

[/ QUOTE ]

How do you manage to reconcile this couterintuitve view of the world with what you can feel and see, That you are in the moment?

[spoohunter]

There is no need to reconcile reality with an illusion.

[cambraceres]

Then your view of time is the illusion, and as such is invalid. What you can feel and touch and see is the now. Say your being tortured, can you just ignore it, because you are in so many other "times"?

[spoohunter]

No you cannot. Any other questions?

[cambraceres]

The question I'm addressing is yours, or wait, is this my post?

[Copernicus]

Wow, heavy.

Suggestion: before you read the rest of my post, place your cursor over the lower right hand corner of the screen until a hover message shows up.





What day and year did it say? Is it the year you are, were, will be 84? And just in case the computer is set wrong, is the hand that moved the mouse wrinkled? veiny? Quick, turn on CNN...what President gave a press conference they are talking about?


Unless you are of the mindset that nothing is real there are pleny of clues around you that will tell you "what time it is", "does anybody really care", "Saturday, in the park....4th of July"

Strawberry Fields Forever.

[DougShrapnel]

Who let you out of the 5th dimension? Sidenote: I can't believe that salvia stuff is legal.

[Rduke55]

Spoo,
Don't let them get you down. You're probably getting the hostility because J. Stew is our resident stoner. I'm perfectly willing to listen to your weed-addled rants however.
What are your thoughts about our solar system being a molecule in a larger universe? And of course you have to comment on this in the other direction with molecules being solar systems.
Cheers,
Sam

[spoohunter]

I am quite curious as to the depth of complexity. Beyond protons are (quick google search to pretend I know what I'm talking about) quarks and leptons. Are these items increasingly simple? Or increasingly complex?

There seems to be a limit set on how complex things can go outwards (although this is not certain as we can only observe part of the universe), but is there a bottom limit?

[Metric]

[ QUOTE ]
There is no now, just co-ordinates in space and time, a bunch of which you occupy.

[/ QUOTE ]
How very covariant of you!

[gdsdiscgolfer]

You read Slaughterhouse Five?
Vonnegut basically says the same theory. Except he says we, as humans, can only travel through time in a linear manner (from smaller to larger x values in the OP's analogy).

[IronDragon1]

O rly? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time)

[moorobot]

Either we take now as important or nothing is important, even if we take the future to be important we can't do anything about it except for what we can do right now;

we can't do anything about being 32/what is going on X years from now, except for imagining that we know the future and writing what will be then based on this nonsense. Bob Dylan had it right when he said 'we can be happily married, or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires'; we really don't have the ability to see the future. It's a damn shame but we don't. Some people can't even see the past (insert drunken rambing about people with different political views than you here).

[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]

You read Slaughterhouse Five?
Vonnegut basically says the same theory. Except he says we, as humans, can only travel through time in a linear manner (from smaller to larger x values in the OP's analogy).

[/ QUOTE ] When I was at college my and my roomate stayed up all night constructing a theory of time travel/ lack of the possibility of from scratch (this is what happens when you don't have girls over; bring them over, they are way, way +Ev,they bring you Sklansky bucks, cause your opponent to make mistakes according to the fundemental theorem etc.)

The next day my roomate walks up to a professor and tells him about our theory. He looks at him and says "that is known as theory B in time travel". An entire night spent on coming up with somehting already created and known simply as B

Human beings naturally create the same things over and over...

[Mik1w]

someone told me a good description of time... they said something like,

"a particle's path through 3d space is parameterized by time"., ie. time is simply a parameter whose forward progression allows things to trace out their inevitable path.

Not sure what onclusion to draw from this in terms of OP's comments, but Im not sure this defenition is consistent under special relativity...

[cambraceres]

[ QUOTE ]
someone told me a good description of time... they said something like,

"a particle's path through 3d space is parameterized by time"., ie. time is simply a parameter whose forward progression allows things to trace out their inevitable path.

Not sure what onclusion to draw from this in terms of OP's comments, but Im not sure this defenition is consistent under special relativity...

[/ QUOTE ]

It is true that time is a superficial parameter, and not an intrinsic property in Quantum terms. A particle can go either direction though, forward, backwards, sideways.