| </span><blockquote><span class="smallfont">Quote:</span><hr size="1" />Originally Posted by (orgaelin,)
I'm looking through your site at the moment James, though I should say looking 'down' as it's one hell of a long page!
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Yea, I need to work with that site some day, take down some old articles and put up some new ones... but anyway let me try to express my ideas of time in this way:
When you divide time into moments, you no longer have “time” but “times” (plural). If we decide a moment is, say, one second long, there would be 86,400 different moments or different “one-second-long times” making up a single day.
Wait! This is not sophistry.
On the other hand, if time is one cohesive whole, like space is alleged to be, it cannot be divided into parts. To divide it, you would have to tear time into 3 separate realities at least – those being past, present, and future.
But let’s say we did this. Let’s say there really is a past, present, and future.
To move from past to present to future it would then become necessary for us to jump outside of time into a void that separates the past from the present and the present from the future. In this case, we not only visit 3 different time realities but visit timeless intervals as well.
If time is indeed a cohesive whole, where one moment is actually seamlessly connected with the next, then the past, present and future are only where we arbitrarily point our attention to onto the field of time. Furthermore, this unity of time would be analogous to a platform upon which all events could be arranged and laid out. To see it this way, one must move one’s attention in a way similar to the way he does when making the right-angle movement away and into the third dimension to get a broad view of the flat second dimension.
To define time in this way validates the concept of time by presenting it more like a spacial dimension than a flowing river. But the way it is usually defined in society is invalid and even dangerous. The usual erroneous definition of time is one of the main reasons we have stress-related diseases such as hypertension, strokes, and heart attacks.
To express events in terms of time is a mental organization of the events for purposes of thinking and communicating ideas. It is a useful tool, just as imaginary numbers are useful tools in mathematics. But both are invented fictions for convenience. The reason we think one thing comes after the other is that we have become hypnotized by our own tools. We think in terms of a river of time – not in terms of relationships and patterns. Over generations and millennia, most of us have come to think that the time-fiction is reality.
Just because seeing events in terms of time is the only way most of us know how to look at the world, it doesn’t mean it is the only way to look at the world. It is obviously of much importance in busy, overly-organized Western society. Not so important on a tropical island to a barefoot millionaire lounging on a beach and sipping refreshment from a coconut shell. |