No-God and Time

Ho ho, ho ho ho. I do believe that time has a beginning and an end, beginning at the big bang, and ending whenever.

The biggest question in my mind relates to dividing time into units, and the nature of infinity. There are loads of time paradoxes based on dividing time infinitely. I guess a solution is that time is divisible into base units; units of time that can't be any smaller.

Does any of this have anything to do with god? Course not.

I also believe we experience time VERY differently to, say, a butterfly.

I believe in the Heart Sutra.

Thus, Sariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas; no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance, up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom no attainment, and no non attainment.

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SAVAHA

AMCrenshaw said:

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it? To time?

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Eternity is forever without end. Our relationship to it - we don't last that long.

In my personal view, our bodies don't last that long. Our souls, spirits, life force - may or may not last that long depending.

Those who don't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps their life force ceases to exist. >poof< Game, set, match. It's over. I hope this to be true. That's what they believed, ergo, that's how it should be.

Those who believe their soul continues, either in another plane or again in this one at some point in time. This is also good.

Those who have chosen to follow Christ - there are two views of thought. We sleep in Christ until resurrection and know nothing until judgement day; others believe they go immediately unto the bosom of Christ to wait for aforementioned judgement day.

For me - I don't care which one it is. Sleeping, I know nothing. Awake, I still have no travails here on earth. Win/win.

Native American philosophy - all life is interconnected. From earth we are born, nourished, and should return again to nourish new life. This makes sense to me.

Putting our bodies in boxes and then encased in concrete - an anathema to me. What a waste of N-P-K, water, and real estate. Perhaps there are too many of us now to do things properly. I don't know.

What was the question again? :p

AMCrenshaw said:

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it?

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The first rule of science is to admit what you don't know.

We're a species with only a few thousand years of recorded history, and the lives of organisms on our planet span only scores of years. Our universe operates on time-frames of billions of years or more. We have nothing like the species experience or knowledge to talk about existence in terms of geological periods, much less cosmological periods.

We know what we do when we're ignorant: we invent self-serving myths, typically around magic, survival and the propagation of our cultures and species. In short, when we think about things far beyond our own experience, we drive ourselves into individual and cultural psychopathy.

That's why I dismiss this question as irrelevant to a practical, sensible and useful life.

Here's what it would take for me to have a view about eternity: it would take us discovering that the universe is full of long-lived races with massive recorded histories, at least some of which have survived all the changes and cataclysms that we know the Universe to be subject to.

If that occurred, we'd begin to have the information we need to think about eternity -- but I suggest that we'd be asking questions, not inventing our own answers.

That hasn't happened, and even if it happened tomorrow, it would take waaaaay longer than my lifetime to work through such information and even decide what the important questions are.

Ergo, eternity is not a question that our generation needs to worry about, or any forseeable generation either.

To time?

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Inasmuch as time means anything to us, I think that it means a flow of changes that we can't reverse. Time's physically very orderly, in that changes seem to occur at the same relative rates - which makes it very easy to manage.

The best thing about time is also the thing we most regret: its irreversibility. Along with its orderliness, being irreversible gives us causality and consequence, the understanding and management of which is probably the highest human accomplishment. But, being irreversible, it undermines most of the reasons we want to manage it in the first place: to avoid irreversible consequences.

The best thing about time is also the thing we most regret: its irreversibility

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According to Einstein time was like a river that flowed both ways. Too bad he died before the rest of us could understand how that worked. For humans, time appears to flow in one direction only. That may not always be the case. Shamans have been known to bend time, cease to exist in this time.

I rather think of it as the phenomenon the Navigators in Dune used to move those transport ships. And just because I can't do a specific thing does not mean that it cannot be done.

"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it."

YMMV

AMCrenshaw said:

Of course it does. A lot of traditions only think of eternity in terms of God. Because, as some one else stated, Eternity is forever without end and we are not.

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Yeah but I'm an atheist!

I consider the nature of time beyond my day to day experience of it, and my use of it to order my appreciation of history and anticipation of future events, to be largely moot. A matter for those interested in that sort of thing. Whether time and/or space are infinite or not doesn't really effect me, and so doesn't really interest me. I don't even have an opinion on it.

AMCrenshaw said:

Of course it does. A lot of traditions only think of eternity in terms of God. Because, as some one else stated, Eternity is forever without end and we are not.

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I think time is an area where modern religions have systematically failed to be as articulate as older modalities of religion. For example, in Mesoamerican religions, humans and gods worked cooperatively in keeping time and the order of the universe flowing -- as can be seen everywhere in the Classic Mayan obsessions with exact dates and a calendar more accurate than any other up until the 16th century.
And to take another example...if we take upper middle class post-Napoleonic modes of mourning for the dead...they only make sense if "eternity" is essentially an ideal and more or less timeless place. What interests me about upper middle class mourning of around 1808 to 1908 is that it is at once totally accessible (its traces are everywhere) and as conceptually remote as the Classic Mayan sense of human and divine cooperation in running the time system. Plus some things associated with it may explain why post-traumatic stress is seemingly a post 1908 problem.

Higgins
And to take another example...if we take upper middle class post-Napoleonic modes of mourning for the dead...they only make sense if "eternity" is essentially an ideal and more or less timeless place.

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What sort of modes are you speaking of here?

Unique
Those who don't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps their life force ceases to exist. >poof< Game, set, match. It's over. I hope this to be true. That's what they believed, ergo, that's how it should be.

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That seems kind of cruel to me. H.P. Lovecraft might look forward to oblivion, but I know plenty of 'want to be believers' who would give anything to be, as they would think, 'wrong'.

Through meditation, you witness in great detail the forward movement of time. Everything has a beginning, middle, and end -- in a linear, not circular fashion. As for eternity, we cannot fathom the vastness of time and space. A billion years might as well be an eternity. What's the difference, to creatures with lifespans of fewer than 100 years?

Time by definition must be infinite because we know there was a "before the big gang." I can't believe that the big bang is a singular event in infinite time and infinite space; big bangs must happen infinitely often here.

(Infinity is a much easier concept for me, am I doing it wrong? I just look at one thing. Blow that image up until the view is a factor of ten larger (or smaller) than it was. Repeat until my imagination gets tired, and I remember that I am still no closer to infinity than I was when I started. In this way, I'm bigger than the known universe very quickly, and the next leap is more than ten times bigger than the known universe. The next leap is one-followed-by-a-hundred-zeroes times more than the known universe. After a few more leaps, there aren't enough molecules in the known universe to represent the factor of the known universe that I'm imagining, but I've made all of what, fifteen leaps? That really isn't enough to tire out the imagination yet!)

The future is already existent in one sense; everything will either do A, B, C, D, E, or some other option. This is going to happen, and nothing will stop it from happening; therefore, the future is already set from now until eternity. Our sun will burn out. Our planet will no longer be habitable. In fact, before either of these events, we will have another Ice Age of some size, another period of rapid mutation in life, another die off and rise of different life right here.

We will die out entirely to be replaced by more evolved humans or something else entirely; I know this because I am a giant among ancients but a midget among modern men. I have sat in furniture from the eighteen hundreds, and it feels like a child's toy.

We are changing over time, and we are different from who we were. Is anyone familiar with the Flynn effect? You actually are smarter than your ancestors were. Every decade, intelligence tests must be reset so that the average IQ remains 100 for young adults. The bar has to be raised.

We are stronger and faster than we were, too. The five minute mile used to be a dream, now it's a goal for amateurs, since the pros are nearing the three minute mark.

Women and men are becoming more alike as mate criterion shifts from gender roles to greater equality, making the female place kicker a reality and bringing the female baseball pitcher into possibility.

Time is a wonderful thing; we get better over time. Time is a terrible thing; we will die and be forgotten along with all of our knowledge. But life is a miracle, we will be replaced somewhere in this infinity of time and space.

Now then, the eternity of the soul is another matter entirely. I don't believe in a soul. The echos of a life may last a few years, but there is no eternity, just the infinity, which is mostly void anyway.

(Quite a bummer, really... I wish I could spend eternity with my hubby in this strange extended honeymoon that we call a marriage.)

AMCrenshaw said:

What does that say about the minutes it takes me to write this read these posts and write this response?

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Why should a league have anything to say about a cubit? Really, both measurements are defined in terms of human utility - they say something about humans rather than about each other.

But here's the thing: a cosmological time-scale has no obvious human utility at the moment. Our appreciation of it is at best aesthetic, and pretty poor even at that.

Minutes however, have heaps of human utility. It's perhaps our most bargained (and stolen) measure these days.

The question of eternity? I agree actually (but that doesn't mean I won't ask the question, anyway; it matters to others).

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We're writers; we're allowed to go on about meaningless stuff. It just behooves us to remember that beauty isn't always truth.

Time is interesting to me for a lot of the reasons you bring up. I wonder how irreversible it is in so far as we have managed it.

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I smell a 'there is only the subjective' argument here. I'd strongly disagree with it. Time forces us to agree with one another more than our self-interest would prefer. (Try catching a bus between scheduled routes and see how well your subjective perception works).

But if you're talking about history, well that's not a physical quantity. It's just stories and facts and theories about events and what influenced them. History (I mean the human activity of study) depends on time, but time pays no regard to our study of history.

I reduce time to its natural properties. Included in those natural properties are people's perception of and determination by time

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Our perception is a physical property of the thing perceived? That's like saying my reputation is somehow attached to my molecules.

Isn't this being-in-time primarily suffering?

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Trees abide in time, and so do comatose patients. Do either suffer? I doubt it.

The suffering you're talking about is not a property of time, but a property of: a) our physical condition and b) the operation of our minds. The application of time to suffering is simply how it varies with respect to changes in everything else.

Does anyone believe in timelessness (a dimension of our existence where All of Time, rather than/or eternity, exists?

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Someone might, but not me. We know that our appreciation of time is largely a function of our minds, but the application of time on us occurs anyway. We can create perceptions that feel timeless, but we can also be hypnotised to enjoy the taste of cold pork lard. This says nothing more than that our perceptions are manipulable via our minds.

I note that people who 'meditate themselves into timelessness' don't manage to get vast amounts of constructive thinking done. This tells me that their minds are reducing some function to produce this effect. (On the plus side, you can appreciate colours and other sensations more)

A sense that the future must exist, even if only in the imagination; or that we have no conceivable reason to see why the future will not exist. A sense that the past is still happening now, because, perhaps, of its irreversibility?

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I'm not persuaded that the future exists - except in a story sense; and there are many stories. The past is discernible mainly because time and motion tend to be orderly. There's no reasonable doubt that the past did exist, and there's fairly strong agreement in most cases as to what it was - but that's not an argument that it does exist.

What does the lack of God mean for eternity, philosophically?

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From my perspective, lack of god and lack of eternity point to the same thing: that we're inventing language for ideas we can't define constructively, can't identify physically and can't really use, except for pacification and social manipulation.

KTC said:

I believe in the Heart Sutra.

Thus, Sariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas; no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance, up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom no attainment, and no non attainment.

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SAVAHA

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i second that.

human perception is by definition limited and flawed by its own physicality (we cannot truly relate to a reality with more than 3 dimensions) in the scheme of an 'infinite' universe that is possibly one of an 'infinite' number of universes, each a drop in an ocean. but an ocean of our reality has depth and breadth and shores, and critters living in it... so where does this take us.

if there is a God or Creator or a true reality, they lie well beyond our comprehension as physical beings. Time and Eternity are real when the concepts are applied to our 3-dimensional universe, but beyond that...

I really don't see how ancient/mysterious philosophies can explain time better than modern day science. When we don't understand something, we tend to mystify it, and through doing so we seem to gain a deeper understanding. I don't believe a minute of it. Never in history have we understood more about space and time than we do now. I think looking back only serves to cloud things.

I think time has always, and will always exist. The Big Bang would have had to have started with some sort of matter and chemical reaction to explode outward. That matter would have had to come from somewhere.

Loquax; The Buddha's theory about eternal time come from a logical observation.

Cause --> Effect --> Cause --> Effect. He could see no logical starting point for such a chain, so he reached the conclusion that starting and stopping are human concepts, not intrinsic absolutes.

You have to achieve a peaceful state with a clear, focused mind. While in that state, you simply look around and see what you shall see. At this point, linear time becomes a blatantly obvious phenomenon.

That's not to say that linear time can't be multidimensional. But I believe, at least, that it moves inexorably forward, whether layered or not.

AMCrenshaw said:

If your bad deeds were frozen in-time for an eternity, would that perhaps help you think about your deeds ) assuming nothing else more practical worked!) ? I don't have much time, but I thought you'd find that interesting.

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Well, someone could take a photograph of my bad deeds, or videotape them. I think that would be confronting for just about anyone. On the other hand, I think that reviewing them every day would eventually desensitise me to them - in the same way that watching car-wrecks or amputations does.

"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours,
but no tenses for past, present, and future. That division does not exist.
What does that say about time?"

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I think that this misconception was originally from Whorf (of Sapir-Whorf fame), and came without linguistic examples. It's since been debunked - e.g. here, and in the analysis of how Hopis plan their agriculture.

"Matter, that thing the most solid and well-known,
which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body,
is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light.
What does that say about the reality of the world?"

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Aesthetically, we have a new perception for matter, so that affects our art. In terms of the decisions we must make though, I'm not clear that it changes much. Matter still behaves as it does.

I wonder why our divisions of time are so much more practical. All maths are completely arbitrary, even if they work, for example.

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Maths are not arbitrary - either in pure or applied forms. A result like Rolle's theorem say, is both a logical consequence of basic axioms, and a critical result for the application of mathematics to the physical world.

There simply isn't much fat in the axioms of mathematics, because mathematicians constantly trim any fat down. (And they're much better at doing that than any other branch of philosophy.)

If you want to discard Rolle's theorem, you'll have to throw away axioms that almost certainly, you'd much rather keep - like the existence of zero, or addition that behaves reliably across all numbers.

We have multiple number systems because our symbolic representation of numbers is cultural. We also have competing models for physical systems. But there's a strong reason that we don't have much competition in mathematical systems - it's because fundamentally, all mathematicians are talking about the same thing.

Ruv Draba said:

Maths are not arbitrary - either in pure or applied forms. A result like Rolle's theorem say, is both a logical consequence of basic axioms, and a critical result for the application of mathematics to the physical world.

There simply isn't much fat in the axioms of mathematics, because mathematicians constantly trim any fat down. (And they're much better at doing that than any other branch of philosophy.)

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Even basic arithmetic depends on the human perspective that things can be grouped together. We say 5 and 5 are 10 because it is convenient and helpful to do so. It is no more a fundamental truth than, say, the ability to conjugate a verb. It exists the way it exists because we deem it so. It is a precise and accurate language--perhaps the most precise and most accurate language--but it is still just a language. No matter how closely you examine a line in real life, you will not find Y=MX+B. Just as you wouldn't find the word line.

But damn, aren't those phrases handy to have?

This in interesting to me and since you opened it up to all or most view points, I'll chime in my answer.

I do believe that eternity exists. It's also my own belief that our relationship to it takes on different forms as you move through it. For example, in the human body you decide your eternal destination and when you leave the body, through physical death, you enter into the eternity that you have chosen. As for our relationship to time, I believe that time, as measured by the sun and moon, exist only as a measuring device for those still in the physical body.

AMCrenshaw said:

Does eternity exist? What is our relationship to it? To time?

AMC

p.s. This could be quite fun. Looking for philosophic, scientific, aesthetic, and religious views.

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loquax said:

I really don't see how ancient/mysterious philosophies can explain time better than modern day science. When we don't understand something, we tend to mystify it, and through doing so we seem to gain a deeper understanding. I don't believe a minute of it. Never in history have we understood more about space and time than we do now. I think looking back only serves to cloud things.

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That is true only if we have never (humanity) reached this pinnacle before. Who is to say that human experience hasn't happened over and over again. Written records would not survive; nor would technology survive.

Humanity climbing up out of the muck, over and over again, as it were.
The Adam & Eve story over and over again. Perhaps we've done it faster this time. But personally, I don't believe this is the first time we've reached this pinnacle of "modern" science.

Someone upthread made a Hopi reference. Here is another one. If you can watch YouTube, wrap your mind around Hopi Renewal time. I find it fascinating and making a comforting kind of sense.

As always - YMMV

I think the pyramids would at least show evidence of light fixtures in the ceilings.

loquax said:

I think the pyramids would at least show evidence of light fixtures in the ceilings.

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you're assuming that our technological breakthroughs are the only viable solutions/options. personally, i find our method of distributing energy through a maze of cables and wires rather clumsy and amateurish. Tesla had some simple and 'radical' ideas -- but that's a road we chose not to travel.