From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Wed May 25 2005 - 07:36:48 BST
Mike, you can go over as much old ground as you like, as far as I am
concerned (so long as it's not partisan politics and international
conflict).
Time is fascinating, and I have some agreement with both Scott and Ham.
Both are suggesting that our common sense view of time "flowing" plays
tricks on us. Simply seeing it as the 4th dimension in the "4D World"
of pop-science is convenient but highly misleading.
It's definitely more to do with how we rationalise our sequencing of
experiences rather than some physical (or metaphysical) dimension.
Hence I already have some sympathy with Scott's "LCI" - a chicken and
egg problem - I never did follo-up Scott's reference to this last time
he made it - must do. Being an intellectualised aspect of experience,
in Ham's words, means it's as much to do with how we experience, as it
can be something we actually experience.
If you then accept that time is not a fundamental entity, at least not
of the kind common sense metaphors have suggested to date, it leaves
us with some interesting causality conundrums.
At the risk of repeating myself, the person I've read most recently on
this subject is David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality) - the problem
for common sense is that if you drop 4D SpaceTime as your world-view,
evidence points to the "Multiverse" - altogether harder to "believe"
in day to day life. (But nobody said it had to be easy.)
I found John Gribbin's "Cartoon History of Time" an excellent
introduction - much more accessible, and no less learned, than that
other book with a remarkably similar title. (Heisenberg and
Schroedinger both saw the metaphysical paradoxes around time and
causality in the world post-new-physics - Einstein and Hawking just
seem to wish to deny - awful generalisation, but hey.)
Scott, can I come back to you separately on your remark about the SQ/DQ split.
Ian
On 5/25/05, hampday@earthlink.net <hampday@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Mike --
>
> > It seems to me that DQ can be slotted very neatly into our existing SOM
> language - > Time.
>
> Time is an intellectualized aspect of experience, so it "fits" into the
> DQ/SQ concept. However, it is only one dimension of the experienced world.
> Space (which some regard as three additional dimensions) must also be fitted
> in, since man's physical reality is a space/time world.
>
> > This raises a whole lot of questions. How does it fit in to the scientific
> > understanding of space and time as an integrated four-dimensional
> continuum?
> > How does it stand next to Kant, who saw time as a "mode of perception"?
> > But what I should really be asking first, is: does this sound crazy to
> you?
>
> Not crazy at all, and Kant was correct that time is a mode of perception --
> as is space. Man stands at the crossroads of space and time. His finite
> perspective is limited to the ever-changing "present", although connected by
> memory to the past, and his cogizance of space is anthropcentric, that is,
> relative to his perceived position as the locus of all material phenomena.
> My reading of discussions by leading astrophysicists indicates they hold a
> similar view, so I don't think you're observations thus far are in any way
> "unscientific".
>
> The principal distinction between man's conscious awareness and the
> objective world he surveys is that the former is proprietary (subjective to
> the self) while the latter is objective (other to the self.) I think that's
> a fundamental truth, and I explain "other" as the "content" of proprietary
> experience.
>
> Incidentally, this is the proper starting point for a metaphysical thesis,
> and I commend you on this approach. I don't know how you're going to apply
> it to the MoQ, but it would seem that someone should have by now -- perhaps
> you're the one. Anyway, I'm sure we'll all be watching how your theory
> develops.
>
> Essentially yours,
> Ham
>
>
>
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