Relativity says that size and time are relativistic, but so actually an illusion

By your use of "reality" in your propositions 1) and 2), do you mean that the two realities referenced are (exactly) the same? If the same, can you tell us what it is? And if different....

. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion — Pneumenon

My thoughts ( where we just sort-of been finishing-up over on another thread) is that CHANGE is real, where on the other hand, TIME is the illusion.

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion

Of those two postulates, which one is less offensive to you? That is, which one seems fundamentally more plausible and less counterintuitive? I want to know your intuitions. — Pneumenon

I would say the first. I find it easier to mentally construct the appearance of permanence out of a fundamentally flowing reality.

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion — Pneumenon

For clarity, please provide your definitions of the key terms here--time, reality, flux, permanence, constructed, change, illusion. Also, why not consider as a third option that the reality of time includes both permanence and change--enduring things and their varying qualities, not to mention the fixed but growing past and the constant but advancing present.

1 seems like a cop-out, as if refusing to really consider the question. — Pneumenon

What question?

In my stillness, I experience flux, in my variation, I see permanence. Each needs to assume the other as fundament.The same eye sees the hands of the clock move, and the ever-changing self sees always the same present. Don't make me choose.

Take these two:

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion — Pneumenon

I don't even know what either of these statements are saying. It seems like they make some substantive claims about reality, but when I try to nail these claims, they just slip out of my hands.

In my stillness, I experience flux, in my variation, I see permanence. Each needs to assume the other as fundament.The same eye sees the hands of the clock move, and the ever-changing self sees always the same present. Don't make me choose. — unenlightened

Interesting. What happens if I put on my transcendental idealist hat?

Time is the form of our internal intuition, says Kant. My consciousness of my apperceptive unity as mine happens upon reflection, because I become conscious of the manner in which I am affected by my own reflection, but only as a posterior consequence, giving rise to the timeline whereby I organize my experiences.

The data stream would appear to be pure flux, if anything, although ultimately noumenal. The source of the form of intuition that I impose on it would appear to be eternal and static because necessary, although that too is noumenal, or at least, its source is.

I don't even know what either of these statements are saying. It seems like they make some substantive claims about reality, but when I try to nail these claims, they just slip out of my hands. — SophistiCat

Think Heraclitus and Parmenides. Unless this is a lead up to saying that both are nonsense, in which case we can just go outside and play golf or something.

1 seems like a cop-out, as if refusing to really consider the question. But, perhaps I have it backward: maybe the refusal to consider the question springs from having 2 as an intuition, and not the converse. — Pneumenon

Care to elaborate on this some more? I'm not sure what question you think 1) is avoiding.

Refusing to answer the question basically means shallower depth of consideration with regard to time, i.e. refusing to reflect on the issue in a philosophical manner.

So people who don't agree with you aren't really thinking it through? Sounds pretty bigoted.

Read the post.

I did and my understanding hasn't changed.

Then I can't help you.

Take these two:

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion — Pneumenon

In 1, why is it not "and permanency is an illusion"?

Good question. If everything is flux, you make stuff out of the flux, although the permanence of the stuff you make is never true permanence. But if everything "just is," then any change is only apparent. That choice of words was very deliberate.

Good question. If everything is flux, you make stuff out of the flux, although the permanence of the stuff you make is never true permanence. But if everything "just is," then any change is only apparent. That choice of words was very deliberate. — Pneumenon

Sounds like change is "apparent" either way, which is a good basis for an intuition. What basis is there for the intuition of permanence?

What I mean is: in the first case, permanence is apparent because it always goes away after a while, no matter how permanent it looks. Whereas, in the second place, change is an illusion because it was never there to begin with.

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion

Of those two postulates, which one is less offensive to you? That is, which one seems fundamentally more plausible and less counterintuitive? I want to know your intuitions.

I find that 2 is easier to believe. 1 seems like a cop-out, as if refusing to really consider the question. But, perhaps I have it backward: maybe the refusal to consider the question springs from having 2 as an intuition, and not the converse. 2 seems more plausible to me because it seems to line up with relativistic physics, and overall woobly-wobbly subjective nature of time that philosophers long before Einstein have suspected for centuries. — Pneumenon

2 is more of a comfort to believe, particularly considering the relativity of time, and the uncertainty it lends to our notion of reality. In my opinion, it is 2 that’s a cop-out, and 1 lines up better with quantum relativity as I understand it (Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ outlines this quite well). But I think that both raise inevitable questions:

If permanency is constructed, where are we getting the idea from in the first place?

If change is an illusion, what purpose does it serve as such?

... CHANGE is real, where on the other hand, TIME is the illusion. — 3017amen

:up:

Think Heraclitus and Parmenides. Unless this is a lead up to saying that both are nonsense ... — Pneumenon

Think Democritean / Epicurean atomism.

In my opinion, it is 2 that’s a cop-out, and 1 lines up better with relativistic physics as I understand it (Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ outlines this quite well). — Possibility

:100:

Is there a way to steer the ship between these? Doing so would necessarily involve dissolving the question somehow. But the dissolution must take some form more sophisticated than "Whatever, this is pointless." Nor can it be some Wittgensteinian version of the same.

Perhaps: these are translatable, transposable. Each stands in a peculiar relation to the other. Can an illusion fall out of a construction, which is constructed from that illusion? No - neat and dialectical and all, but that just stands us at square one. It does not satisfy. It's not a ship we can sail on. There are waters, yes, but there must be a reason to sail.

Perhaps: neither is valid from the point of the other, but this need not bother us because we're not shackled to one or the other. We can move freely (flux) but any such move requires an antecedent reason (being). But, this does not satisfy either. Just a glorified description of change disguised as progress.

Perhaps: we cannot put everything into one box. But, we are free to require some globalizing/universalizing apparatus to justify any move from flux to being or back. We need not globalize the same way every time. But, what does "globalize" mean here? I could say that it means we demand some context besides "useful for this one thing right now." But this requires a substantive ethics to make sense of. And without that, we're marooned again.

Puzzling.

2 is more of a comfort to believe, particularly considering the relativity of time, and the uncertainty it lends to our notion of reality. In my opinion, it is 2 that’s a cop-out, and 1 lines up better with quantum relativity as I understand it (Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ outlines this quite well). — Possibility

It all depends on how you choose to interpret both theories. 2) has trouble if you understand quantum mechanics as being inherently indeterministic as it is traditionally understood, but there are other interpretations that don't involve fundamental chance. Similarly 1) has trouble with the traditional interpretation of relativity, but that isn't the only way to interpret the theory and there are versions of the theory that incorporate an absolute order of time.

All this is just to say that the science is unclear when placed in a philosophical context. Hence why I roll my eyes when people talk about "science vs. religion", as if there is only one religion and one scientific way of looking at the world.

Thanks 180. It does seem pretty much common sense-like.

Team flux here. Constancy is just ordered flux, the invariant in variation. I'll only add: both are perfectly real, only that the one furnishes the sufficient reason for the other.

Oh, and regarding time: there's no one time, but multiple times, emerging temporalities, indexed to the relations of rhythms established between locally and globally persistant invariations.

Team flux here. Constancy is just ordered flux, the invariant in variation. I'll only add: both are perfectly real, only that the one furnishes the sufficient reason for the other. — StreetlightX

Same here, but mostly the second half of what you've said. Emphasis on flux is good as a counterbalance to an overemphasis on permanancy, but neither are comprehensible without the other. Which, I guess is boring, but seems all you can really say at this level of generality.

@Pneumenon
As a general, like, methodological thing - I always feel like once the term 'illusion' crops up, that signals there's a fork in the road, where there are two paths opened up:

One way is to 'delete' the illusionary thing, to make room for the 'real' thing. But that leaves you with a situation where you have to account for the reality of the illusion, as illusion. And that gets almost impossibly sticky, if you deny reality to the illusion.

The other is to see what's being called 'illusion' as a symptom of a widening of scope. What's called an 'illusion' is still real, as the thing it is, it just can also be understood in a different way by shifting context.

What's called an 'illusion' is still real, as the thing it is, it just can also be understood in a different way by shifting context. — csalisbury

Yes! Even im the mundane sense of say, seeing an illusion in the desert (mirages), those illusions are always real: other people can see them, they're an effect of the play of light and angle of incidence and so on. Even illusions must be accounted for, perhaps especially so.

Reality is not only fake, but also gay. Monad gang.

A thought: flux loses meaning without differentiation. This is one of those points where philosophers become very coy because it's a battle of the unstated assumptions each person has with that-stuff-we-can't-talk-about and that we all seem to be conscious of, to one degree or another, but can't say out loud because it ruins the game.

Regardless, though, flux-as-flux cannot be absolute. At the point where it all becomes white noise, you no longer really have a flux, so much as a nothing.


I suppose I don't agree with the sufficient reason bit, if only because consistency of behavior between invariant structures begs the question of an organizing principle. I am guessing that the assertion that flux provides sufficient reason for permanency hangs on the reducibility of organizing principle to descriptions of flux - but that relies on brute facticity, at which point sufficient reason is out as a methodology. If you want sufficient reason, then permanence has to inhere somewhere, or rather, something must inhere somewhere.

1. Reality is fundamentally flux, and permanency is constructed
2. Reality fundamentally is, and change is an illusion — Pneumenon

Reality is. Change is a part of that reality. Time is a part of that reality.