Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:54 pm
I'm just saying that Pinback's definition is very offensive to one of my alts.
Well, that's because his definition is wrong. There is time, and it does exist. Time is the manifestation of the increase in entropy in the universe. In the three dimensions, we measure things through the concept of
distance. We measure it for distances between arbitrary points through the arbitrary variables X, Y, and Z. We measure it for objects using length, width, and height, To make those measurements we use arbitrary values which have standard, precise definitions.
He mentions that there is no such concept as the 'meter' in reality. That point is true, but we have a
convention that we use the meter as a unit of measurement of either X, Y and Z distances or Lengths, Widths and Heights for size or volume.
Or, another way to put it is in computer terms. On the 80x86 platform, when we have a function returning a value, the convention is that arguments are passed on the stack and the function result is returned in the EAX register for 32-bit programs, and in RAX for 64-bit programs. On the IBM z/Architecture and the older 24/32 bit ESA architecture, the convention is that arguments are passed in a list pointed to by register 1, registers 0-12 and 14 & 15 are saved in an 18-word save area pointed to by register 13, the caller provides the save area, and the function result is returned in Register 0. Note that in both cases it is not required to be done this way, this is simply a standard convention.
But X, Y and Z or Height, Length and Width are insufficient to cover positioning of objects, their spacial location and attributes due to one issue. Nothing remains stable. The universe and all of its components are moving around and moving toward and away from each other, at different speeds. Where your wife wants the couch today may not be the same place she has you, she, or someone else move it tomorrow. If she moved it without telling you, and you come home (during pre-Covid days when people went out to work), you notice the sofa is not in the same place.
We can do that because we have memory of what was. Now, because where an object is or a distance between two objects may not be in the same place over a span of time, we treat time as another dimension, we refer to it as the fourth dimension. Now as we measure spacial coordinates as X,Y, and Z distances using an arbitrary convention of measurement called the meter (or the arbitrary convention of the foot, inch, and yard, etc,) from an arbitrary 0 point, and we measure the size or volume of an object using height, width and length distances using the same arbitrary system of measurement from an arbitrary zero point, we measure time using an arbitrary system of measurement. Time is measured in the convention of
duration or
interval. Duration is the amount of time elapsed from a specific point in time to another point in time. Interval is the duration from that point to another point.
As we measure distance through X, Y, and Z, and volume through Length, Width, and height, we measure time through duration, and we do it through the arbitrary convention of the
second. While the second is "commonly understood and historically defined as 1⁄86400 of a day," we have an exact definition for it. "being equal to the time duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental unperturbed ground-state of the caesium-133 atom," where "hyperfine" means "zero magnetic flux" and "ground state" means "lowest energy state."
But this is just a convention, we could have divided up time by other amounts, and before we had electricity, we mostly divided the day into two parts, sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise, then days into weeks, months, and years, We had to; you can only successfully plant, and harvest crops, during certain seasons. And if you don't time them correctly, you starve. (Or you go back to hunter-gatherer groups and subsist off whatever animals you can hunt.)
But time does exist for self-aware entities because we can remember prior events, and we can recognize changes in our environment. A mother human, no matter how many children she has, moves them one or more at a time and takes the last one without going back again because she can count. A mother cat moving its kittens will go back one extra time because it has no concept of "many," it just knows of kitten present and no kitten. An animal lives in forever "now," with no concept of the past, no concept of the future. Human beings do recognize past and future because we can measure it.
Time may not be real to the Universe; it's estimated that back at the Singularity, before the Big Bang - if "before" has any meaning in this context - time and duration as we know it may not have existed or may be completely different from what we perceive it as. What we perceive as a second might be a billion years then, or the reverse.
Consider that the expansion of the Big Bang happened ~13.5 billion years ago, ~9 billion years before the earth existed. Gorgeous star formations came and went, and probably nobody saw them for billions of years depending on how long it took sentient life to occur on other planets if it did. The earth formed about 4 billion years ago, became capable of supporting life ~ 3.5 billion years ago, and life formed ~ 3 billion years ago, so for ~ 500 million years the earth had spectacular sunrises and sunsets than nothing ever saw. As humans are the only self-aware entities on this planet, and only developed about 200,000 years ago, for almost 4 billion years, nobody was able to experience, as Rex Smith sang in
You Take My Breath Away, "There are words, for the magic of a sunrise, only none of them will do."
But time and duration do exist for human beings. And that is all that matters.