Keith, squad
thanks for your substantial mail, Keith. I have a few comments on the
relation between the Static/Dynamic split and space and time (I'll
concentrate on time for now).
At 20:54 13-10-98 -0500, you wrote:
>DYNAMIC/STATIC
>
>What are the prerequisites for knowledge of subjects and objects?
>
>Well, in order for us as subjects to experience objects, there must be both
>change and order. Without both, we would not have experience in the first
>place. Why?
>If everything was always changing (not the same) there wouldn't exist a
>"me" or "we" to perceive anything because we'd always be changing into
>everything else.
>If everything was always the same (not changing) we wouldn't perceive
>anything because there'd be no way for a sense impression or thought to
>arise, since that would be a change.
>Therefore, experience entails both change and order--the dynamic and the
>static.
and:
>SPACE-TIME
>
>What are the prerequisites for knowledge of change and order?
>
>In order to recognize change, we must some how notice that things are
>different than they were before. This requires time, as the concept of
>change is inextricably bound up with before and after, that is, our
>experience of time.
>Also, we must be able to recognize a "thing", usually by the fact that it
>takes up space in our field of vision.
I entirely agree that we have to bring in the concepts of epistemic (having
to do with how we learn of the world) and ontology (how we think the world
is) here, in order to clarify things.
Your arguments above are within the epistemic perspective, and these
arguments are not apropriate within the ontological perspective. So I
disagree with your later argument:
>Now it appears to me that if we take the static/dynamic split as an
>ontological truth, then space and time must also be ontologically real,
>since, as I pointed out in my captivating "SPACE-TIME" section above, time
>(and probably space) are inescapably implicated in the notions of static
>and dynamic. Now we have a reality that is always in space and time, which
>while comforting to my common sense, isn't as philosophically flexible or
>satisfying.
Following Kant in his argument for the epistemic primacy of space and time,
this does not imply the ontological primacy of space and time. If we look
at time, saying that we have to use time as a dimension in order to
construe duration and change, this does not imply that duration and change
take place *in* time as a dimension. No more than construing the passage of
the yearly cycle as a motion of the sun through different constellations
implies that the sun moves through these constellations in an ontological
sense. We need some measure to keep track of a changing world, and time is
such a necessary measure. But changes don't happen *in* time, changes just
happen. Driving along the highway, you do not move *in* time; you are
involved in
dynamic and static relations, but time is only part of our construal of
what is going on.
This view is entirely different from the physicist view that time is an
illusion. To 'the physicists', the *dynamics* or flow of time is an
illusion because they take time to be a dimension like a spatial
dimension, equal in both directions and without any preferred now. Hence
the physicist is faced with the problem of explaining the 'arrow' of time,
the preferred direction, and the seemingly unavoidable 'now'.
The answer to these long standing philosophical problems of time, is to
acknowledge that time is an epistemic measure, and that time as a dimension
is not needed in an ontological perspective. The world has no need for
time, the world just *is* in its static and dynamic ways.
(A similar argument can be made for space, but that will have to wait)
Keith continues:
>If, on the other hand, we just accept the static/dynamic split as an
>epistemological assertion, then space and time become some fundamental
>ordering principles without which intellectual discourse cannot exist. They
>don't have to be "really" real (in the ontological sense), they just are
>the inescapable ways in which the intellect understands experience.
So, Keith, I guess I take a third way, compared with your two options,
taking the static/dynamic split as ontologically fundamental, and space
and time as epistemic constructs.
Regards
Hugo Fjelsted Alroe
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