Thinking about Time

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 :-)