Putting time in perspective

Imho fwiw,

The construct of Time is a byproduct of creation, i.e. Mass and Motion, and is relative in a cause and effect relationship. To the conscious mind, time is perceived as a timeline, I think Einstein used the terminology of an arrow or vector in the block universe. The best description I have seen is time referenced as a hallway with a series of doors, we can't see behind the door ahead of us without opening and passing thru. However if you were able to view the hallway from the side - remove the walls , you would be able to see both sides of every door of the timeline instantaneously. Hence time and the cause and effect relationship, with all it's possible variables would be understood from one point.
 
CaptainObvious said:
I'm not sure the ego can be completely set aside. Yes, it can be leveled out to a point of some humility, but smashed completely? Not in my experience and I'm not just talking about myself. I know many people who are actively trying to tackle this issue, as am I, and have been for years. This is not to say that my limited experience is the be all and end of of it, but the longer I'm at it, the more I can see the magnitude of the job. I do agree that in the overall scheme of things we are wholly insignificant. It's just keeping that thought day by day without losing ones own relevance to the here and now which is difficult.
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I'm not sure you need to set ego completely aside. I'd suggest the consciousness of your own identity is enough ego for the purpose. But I think it sounds like that is what you are basically saying.

It's interesting to hear why an unimaginable magnitude of time ( the assignment of numbers between two events) is not made conceptually clear by compressing it into the analogy of a 24 hour clock.
 
Man, tough discussion to have without the face to face inputs. I think Einstein was right to the degree that time cannot be segmented as it flows continuously. However, I don't think there is a future time that actually exists anywhere but in thought. We live in the present which is always at the very tip of time as it moves forward. The past, even a millisecond ago is no longer real. It is only an experienced memory, which can and does affect the present.
My question is, can one slow time down to a point where you are nothing but an observer and no longer a participant. Those with near death experiences claim to have had something which I would call similar to what I'm referring too. Aside from the religious or spiritual things they believe came from that experience(again, I'm trying my best to refrain from that) it is possible that somehow their mental energy was outside of them? If, and it's a big if, that happened at the subconscious level, then can it be manipulated at a conscious level?
The question then becomes if one can be an observer without participating, can that person jump back into the timeline at some point other than the present? I would think not as I've already made the point that there is no future and the past no longer exists. The observer can only watch. If the choice to jump back in, assuming there is a choice to be made, one can only return to the present. In short, time travel as we would normally conceive it would be impossible under these circumstances. Just some thoughts I have and of course it's entirely possible, highly probable that I might be wrong.
 
if you believe in the multiverse to get around the fine tuning problem... a trader goes both short and long and sits on his hand in all sorts of different sizes and every result happens.




dbphoenix said:
So traders have unlimited do-overs.
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CaptainObvious said:
Man, tough discussion to have without the face to face inputs. I think Einstein was right to the degree that time cannot be segmented as it flows continuously. However, I don't think there is a future time that actually exists anywhere but in thought. We live in the present which is always at the very tip of time as it moves forward. The past, even a millisecond ago is no longer real. It is only an experienced memory, which can and does affect the present.
My question is, can one slow time down to a point where you are nothing but an observer and no longer a participant. Those with near death experiences claim to have had something which I would call similar to what I'm referring too. Aside from the religious or spiritual things they believe came from that experience(again, I'm trying my best to refrain from that) it is possible that somehow their mental energy was outside of them? If, and it's a big if, that happened at the subconscious level, then can it be manipulated at a conscious level?
The question then becomes if one can be an observer without participating, can that person jump back into the timeline at some point other than the present? I would think not as I've already made the point that there is no future and the past no longer exists. The observer can only watch. If the choice to jump back in, assuming there is a choice to be made, one can only return to the present. In short, time travel as we would normally conceive it would be impossible under these circumstances. Just some thoughts I have and of course it's entirely possible, highly probable that I might be wrong.
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You're right it is tough when not face to face. I'm not sure that time isn't being given too much interpretation here, so that it turns into something which is really too much of a stretch, even philosophically. There simply isn't anything to seriously suggest that mental energy would do anything other than have psychological results from chemical reactions producing tiny electrical charges by synapses into the nervous system. I think it takes that good old ego inflation to begin to imagine, while remembering it takes chemical reaction to imagine, that such energy would be strangely special in some way to make it capable of being outside the same chemicals needed to think up such speculation in the first place. To extend mere thoughts enough to enable time travel is what Marvel's Doctor Strange was made for, not mere humans. My take on this is everything being equal, traveling through measurements of distance or time won't have an effect on the physical thing(s) being measured per se. So it can't be reasonably expected that it should be possible to travel back to the same thing. As an analogy, take a 10 mile stretch of road. You know the length and time it takes to get to the end of it. Drive to the end and you still have both distance and time to travel back in. Yet both of those particular measurements won't have any effect on the fact that you cannot get back to the exact original condition of the road as it was when you set out. Both distance and time now represent a completely new journey, not the previous one. First, the road itself (and everything everywhere for that matter) has moved, albeit ever so slowly, toward entropy. It's never going to be exactly the same. Taking or using -new time- to travel back there, won't change that. There is no reason why any -old time- should remain (like the road does in part) as it's only a measurement not a physical entity. Just my thoughts too dude. :)
 
stu said:
I'm not sure you need to set ego completely aside. I'd suggest the consciousness of your own identity is enough ego for the purpose. But I think it sounds like that is what you are basically saying.

It's interesting to hear why an unimaginable magnitude of time ( the assignment of numbers between two events) is not made conceptually clear by compressing it into the analogy of a 24 hour clock.
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Might you consider, and I'm just asking, that it is the ego which has one thinking that they can imagine the true measure of time? I still fall back to a point of reference being necessary. How can one imagine a million years when they haven't lived, know of no one who has lived that long, or any where near that long? Take that measure out to billions and I just can't get my head around that. Being able to measure the time frame and completely comprehending that measure are two different things IMO.
At this point in my life, maybe my intellectual capacity would be a better way to put it, I do not believe that any of us can escape our primal selves. The Id, to borrow a term from one of my favorite sci-fi movies and a theory of Freud himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego
However, I believe Freud was wrong in declaring that our "super ego" can overcome the primal desires of the Id in all cases. It is within the Id where our true identity is found. Not the identity we can manufacture with our super ego, but the base elements of the human construct. As we humans evolve that may change, probably will change, and the Id will be no more.
As I've stated before, given enough time anything is most likely possible, even life coming from nothing, although I don't buy that theory in it's truest sense. Which leads me to my next questions. Can it be possible that time and space have conciseness? Self awareness? Could the vast nothingness over eons of time developed an awareness of itself and thus a need to expand due to the Id? the Id of time and space? From a purely scientific point it's mind blowing, no? Fiction? Again, given enough time...
 
Ricter said:
"Can it be possible that time and space have conciseness? Self awareness?"

I believe so. Since we are not separate from time and space or the universe, the (this?) universe has therefore achieved self consciousness.
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Is that why it keeps fucking with us? Are we playthings? Makes sense.
 
When Darwin was formulating his theory, his problem was that the age of the earth at that time was thought to be about 100 million years old. He was sure that it took more than 300 million years for evolution to take place. Then when the earth's age was later revised to billions of years, it seemed the problem was solved. Which led scientists to conclude that...

"Evolution Professor: There’s Plenty of Time for Giraffes to Evolve


.............But of course this is all wrong. If evolution is true we must believe it performs its uncanny miracles much faster than 4.5 billion years. The creation of life, the origin of fantastically complex cells, the creation of biology’s myriad designs, new species arising, and yes giraffes could not have evolved over billions of years. They could not have evolved even over hundreds of millions of years. It all must have happened much faster, in what are sometimes referred to as evolution’s “Big Bangs” where evolution leaves the equilibrium and for some reason becomes punctuated.

Of course none of this is a problem for evolutionists. As usual, contradictory evidence is handled with just another just-so story. “Oh,” they conclude, “evolution must have occurred rapidly for some reason.” It’s that easy because when you’re certain you’re right, then evidence doesn’t matter."

http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/12/evolution-professor-theres-plenty-of.html


 
CaptainObvious said:
Might you consider, and I'm just asking, that it is the ego which has one thinking that they can imagine the true measure of time? I still fall back to a point of reference being necessary. How can one imagine a million years when they haven't lived, know of no one who has lived that long, or any where near that long? Take that measure out to billions and I just can't get my head around that. Being able to measure the time frame and completely comprehending that measure are two different things IMO.
At this point in my life, maybe my intellectual capacity would be a better way to put it, I do not believe that any of us can escape our primal selves. The Id, to borrow a term from one of my favorite sci-fi movies and a theory of Freud himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego
However, I believe Freud was wrong in declaring that our "super ego" can overcome the primal desires of the Id in all cases. It is within the Id where our true identity is found. Not the identity we can manufacture with our super ego, but the base elements of the human construct. As we humans evolve that may change, probably will change, and the Id will be no more.
As I've stated before, given enough time anything is most likely possible, even life coming from nothing, although I don't buy that theory in it's truest sense. Which leads me to my next questions. Can it be possible that time and space have conciseness? Self awareness? Could the vast nothingness over eons of time developed an awareness of itself and thus a need to expand due to the Id? the Id of time and space? From a purely scientific point it's mind blowing, no? Fiction? Again, given enough time...
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In answer to your question, generally speaking, I do think it is probably ego that imagines a true measure of time. But I really don't see how categorizing vast eons of time into a more easily workable analogy to compare say, the age of the universe with how long life has existed in it, doesn't allow for a good and reasonable comprehension of time. Whether it is a true one, or complete, I don't think is of a particularly valid relevance. Say you could sit in space looking down on the planets for a billion years. How would it necessarily get your head around the true measure of a billion years? I know people in their eighties and nineties being well aware of their ages, yet say they think all the time like they were in their twenties or thirties, and their lifetime literally feels like the second taken to blink an eye. Their point of reference is clear from all aspects yet they clearly are not completely/truly comprehending time.

I've always liked the idea that consciousness is the universe's way of getting to know itself. I'd go along with Ricter's sentiments also, though I'm not sure how a universe is self consciousness considering that very strong Id you mention. We are not separate, indeed are completely immersed in gases of nitrogen and oxygen but that does not itself give reasonable expectations of air being anyway conscious. In my view these transcendental notions are contrivances to elevate status into albeit naturally, needing to feel more important than is really the case given the human condition. Ego.
 
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