I have this fascination with mathematical formulas and I thought about or rather wished that I could have the facility to understand or at least catch glimpse of what all these symbols and how they operate. But no, they are and will continue to be hieroglyphics to me.
In my grade school days, I thought I was good with math, or at least not that bad at it, that was until I graduated from grade 6 and had my first encounter with algebra, then geometry to trigonometry and from then on, I gave up trying to figure out what all these symbols were about. Happy enough to have the arithmetic skill to count change.
But the fact that I was bad at it did not stop my fascination at the concept behind these seemingly powerful numbers and symbols, which are really nothing but shorthand for something that will take too long to explain using the English alphabets.
As one of my former math professor said, "the shorter the formula the more difficult or complicated the concept behind it is", which didn't really mean anything to my numerically challenged brain, at all. NOTHING!
I guess the most famous formula is Einstein's E=mc2. Which I don't know what it is all about and all my introductory understanding of are from science fiction movies and stories. From which I gathered that underneath the letters are stuffs that changed physics how we view reality from space, black holes, Uranus, etc. and of course time.
Time for us mere mortals (who are not given the magical powers to understand the mathematics of physics) is the passing of moments, the rotation of the earth, the passing season, ageing, white hairs, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. It is fixed and only moves forward, according to common sense and classical Newtonian physics.
When Einstein came along and shocked the physics world with his theories, time became another dimension, space is not space anymore, it is now space-time. Time can be slowed down with velocity. Also his theories opened up the possibility, at least theoretically speaking, of time travel. Here I will stop because everything else from here is dark matter, as in dark. I have no idea about.
Philosophically, there is the idea by Immanuel Kant which says that time has no objective reality: "it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind's nature in accord with the stable scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally." Simply put, time is not real, it is just how our brains are programmed to understand reality.
But for all its mystery time is very real, at least the passing of it. I can feel it in my bones, in my mind, and in my heart (the organ, I mean). In my youth I was unmindful of its passing. its like a blur. time seemed so slow back then. I want to skip my teens, the restrictions, and the awkwardness that came with it and jumped right into adulthood, job and freedom.
That was until I reached the age of 30. The days had shifted to the high gear, everything seemed to be twice as fast as before, days flew by so fast.
I am now into my late forties, two years short of my fifth decade, and things are starting to get blurry with speed. Its been that long? How long has it been since I freaked out my elderly neighbors by riling up their dogs and have the snarling beasts go and chasing after me and my friends?
Now, I am the elderly neighbor who is freaked out when my dogs are teased by children.
I cannot slow down time but I can do things slowly.
Walk slowly.
Eat slowly.
Sit down and stand up slowly, aside from the fact that my joints hurt now.
There's an old Indian proverb that says, "sitting down is better than standing, lying down is better than sitting, sleeping is better than lying down, being dead is better..."
I guess as I grow older I am becoming less and less attached, more detached to things I can not control.
Or maybe, I am just a highly functioning depressed individual who has lost interest in everything except guitar, gardening, art, music...maybe not that depressed, just lazy.
But whatever the case maybe, I have always taken comfort to the fact I am still alive and trying my best to be in the moment as much as possible wherever I am, whatever my situation is and whatever mood I am in.
This is the last day of the old year and the day before the New Year and this is the best time to think about Labelstime. So, my post will be mostly about time.
Chronos was a Titan god, the beings that were in existence before the Greek gods. He was the god of all time and the universe. Chronos became ruler of the cosmos after he killed his father Ouranos. Zeus, his son, in turn overthrew him thus ending the reign of the Titans.
Time is linear.
This is how we normally think of time, a one way movement from one
moment to the next moment. There is the past, present and the future. The past
is what happened after, the present is what is happening now, and the future is
still anticipated. We have knowledge of the past, we have knowledge of the
present, but we could not know the future until it becomes the present.
This idea of time
is self evident in natural processes from aging to cooking to making coffee. We
age from birth to date; we cook by following a process from step 1 to step x
until the food is cooked, but we cannot reverse the process. The same with
almost everything we do i.e. there are processes that cannot be reversed.
To illustrate:
Linear A.
past present future
The past is were everything happened or everything we experienced happened in an earlier time. We have knowledge of our experiences from the past through our memory. The present is what is happening now. The future is what we anticipate. Though we can not know the future, but because of the of causality, we have idea of what the future may be. (Many do not hold on to the necessity of causality, the skeptic David Hume is one of them. His assertion is that it is not logically justified that the future can be predicted by events in the past. He was criticizing induction, the primary process we use for learning.)
Anyway, if we look at time this way, since the past has reality or has become realized, and though they seemed illusory because we have knowledge of them through our memory, this diagram of linear time shows possibility of time travel but only in one direction: to the past.
Actually we do this mentally all the time through recollection but we cannot mentally travel to the future because the events are not yet realized. Hence, when we mentally think about the future, we really think of possibilities or of possible worlds. (This is the subjectivity of time, we have different experiences of time.)
Where am I?
So if we invent time machine it could only travel to the past because the future is still blank. But we cannot travel before the invention of the time machine. (Why invent a time machine at all?)
Linear B:
past present future
This is like consuming time. It's like a rail road where the future is realized and we are just experiencing the present. Time travel is possible for the future. But time travelling is limited to the time the time machine is invented. (So, your time machine is stuck?)
Linear B.
past present future
If we are an observer outside of time, reality would look like a tableau. Everything is all laid out, so technically, there is no past, present or future. These tenses of time are mere experiences of time.
Book illustration.
Linear A.
Its like reading a book where the pages are being written as you read but the read pages are preserved.
Linear B.
It's like reading a book where all the pages are written except the read pages are lost.
Linear C.
Its ike a reading a complete book. Pretty much everything is determined.
Time is Circular
Time is circular.
Circular time means the past can be become the future and the future can become the past. The main idea behind circular time is recurrences. This idea of time is dominant in many religions in the Orient. The belief that everything comes around is evident in the belief of karma and reincarnation. many philosophers have taken this idea of circular time especially those who are influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
Time is spiral
sorry for the drawing...
This is a sort of a combination of linear and circular time. Yes, we experience time in a linear way, that is we have past, present and future, but this idea also includes the concept of recurrences. Yes we experiences recurrences but we there is a distance or separateness from the previous recurrences.
The Classics
Let us look at some of the great thinkers idea about time.
Aristotle: "Time is the measure of change...but time is not change itself"
Pretty much orthodox.
René Descartes: He argued that a material body has the property of spatial extension but no inherent capacity for temporal endurance, and that God by his continual action sustains (or re-creates) the body at each successive instant. Time is a kind of sustenance or re-creation.
Descartes idea of time is best illustrated by this 80's Twilight Zone Episode written by Theodore Sturgeon.
Isaac Newton argued very specifically that time and space are an infinitely large container for all events, and that the container exists with or without the events. He added that space and time are not material substances, but are like substances in not being dependent on anything except God.
Time contains event, but time is not dependent on anything but God.
So time is like a canvass where events are painted, But even without the painting, the
canvass still exist. This is quite comprehensible.
Gottfried Leibniz argued that time is not an entity existing independently of actual events. He insisted that Newton had underemphasized the fact that time necessarily involves an ordering of any pair of non-simultaneous events.
According to Leibniz time necessarily involves ordering of events...time needs this ordering and without it, time cannot exist.
Remove the painting and you remove the canvass.
Of course, there are those who deny the existence of time and there are those who are not bothered by time.
Immanuel Kant has a very different idea about time. Kant proposes that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are "forms of intuition," i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds. To understand this a little bit more, Kant reacted to the theory of knowledge prevalent that the mind is a passive organ that absorbs experiences and through this process we acquire and organize knowledge. the famous motto is Locke's tabula rasa to which Kant opposed. This is his Copernican revolution, sort of.
Kant reacted by proposing that the mind is not a passive organ but an active one. It does not merely absorb impressions but it has the ability to organize these impressions. To do this, Kant proposes a priori knowledge that is transcendental. (Getting lost here... "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them.";;Kant)
Anyway, to make it short, time and space are a priori forms in the mind that made it possible for our mind to actively organize and grasp ideas or impressions. Ouwardly we experience Newtonian time but also there is an element of Leibniz, the organizing aspect or function of time.
Anyway... this is way too abstract.
Hmmmm...
Time and God.
Is God timeless?
This proposes that God is outside the flow of time. To Him, everything is in the present. This means that everything is determined. This view sacrifices freedom.
Is God eternal?
God is subject to the flow of time but he is not affected, as nature is, by time. This sacrifices many of God's omni- attributes. God is limited because God is not in control of time; he is subject to time. God's knowledge is also limited because he can not look beyond the present. This view puts emphasis on freedom.
Anyway...hmmm...
Happy New Year and do take the time to reflect about time...but most of all, whatever our idea and philosophy of time is...I mean...hmmmm... I think a simple Happy New Year is enough :-)
The New Year is significant to
most of us because it signifies an end and a new beginning. So for most of us,
the ending of an old year means looking back and reflecting or hind-sighting on
what happened within the passing year. We take time to take a look at the good
things, achievements, and even the failures that transpired in the last year.
We make assessment and we make resolutions for we believe that we cannot change what happened in the past be it good or
bad, but we could make changes for the coming 365 ¼ days; every new year is a
new beginning.
Of course this is a stupid idea, but who cares...
an hourglass...primitive clock
But what is time?
Time is how we measure the passing of events and how we organize these sequence of events. Time is measured in
hour, minutes and seconds, and with today’s technology, time can even measured
to smaller units like the millisecond. It is also measured in days, weeks, months, years, decade, millenniums, and etc. We may have different time zones, different clock settings but basically we all have grasp of this definition of time.
With the invention of the clock, our
conception of time has become related to speed. We think of time as directly
related to movement like production, schedules, plans, trips etc. Time is a
unit just like any other unit by which we measure things like the gram, meter,
inches and feet if you’re an American, or as a basis from which we compute
things like profit, speed, velocity, etc. This is our shared understanding of
time, the physical time. So, this is time for most of us:
1.Born
on _____________.
2.Study
for _______________.
3.Go
to work at __:__ then leave work at __:__.
4.Go
to church on ________.
5.Celebrate
birthdays on _______________.
6.Get
married on _________________.
7.Retire
on ____________________.
8.Die
on ______________________.
Of course we do not know the exact time for all the items in the list, but they are pretty much determined.
A big schedule!
People waiting for their train schedule in China. Looks like they are wprshipping the god of time.
I think with the invention of the
clock, our whole understanding of existence and being changed dramatically: we
have become the slave of time. I was reflecting upon the never ending debate
about determinism versus freedom, but I think one of the factors that favors determinism
(in all its shade) is when we have all become slaves of physical time, hence,
even the freedom we think we have is even more belittled by the imposition of
schedules upon us by physical time. Though we think we have freedom, but in
reality we have lost all that freedom that we think we have when our lives, even
to the minutest details, are subject to schedules.
Of course physical time is
concerned with measurement and measurement is limitation. Anyway, time has become a factor in measurement and this is the
common conception productivity: production x labor x time x interest x etc. : time is money.
Since the industrial revolution...our conception of time.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why the study
of the humanities, the arts, the process of reflection, philosophizing, all
other creative and conceptual activities are treated with contempt by people
who understood time in terms of physical and financial productivity. This fact is lamented by educators because most of the curriculum created today focuses
on production and productivity thus relegating the arts and the study of the
humanities into the backseat. It can be said that the soul of human study is slowly
being killed by the study for the quest for the continuing improvement of productivity. Introspection, reflection. philosophizing, conceptual creativity...creativity, they are second to useless in this age utilitarianism.
Anyway…where am I?
So, Time is something (for lack
of better and understandable term) that is outside us. Its invention, mean the measurement of physical time, is a way for us of
understanding and relating to the physical world around us, from going to
school to observing atoms.
Time is a factor.
I imagine time as a conveyor belt that moves
us from one place in time to another place in time.
So for me (or for us) time
is linear, ever moving forward but our consciousness of it is measured by the
present.
Time is a conveyor belt that brings us to the end of our journey: death. Of course we believe that death is a way of bringing us outside the conveyor belt into timelessness or into an infinite conveyor belt but is not subjected to the physical deterioration of the movement from one point to another. You know, I think, sometimes annihilation is much, much better.
And what is that present?
Day? Hour? Minutes? Seconds?
Paul Tillich said it very well:
The moment we say, “This is the present,” the moment has already been
swallowed by the past. The present disappears the very instant we grasp it. The
present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems we have nothing
real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. Therefore there is
a dreaming character about our existence…
