Can you prove time exists? — Corvus

Can you prove temperature exists? or color exists? or charge exists? etc ...

Years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds are just the social contracts on the intervals of rise and setting Sun on our horizon. Without the solar system operation i.e. the Earth rotating around the Sun in a regular manner, which the current calendar system is based on, there wouldn't be such a thing as a timing system as we know it. — Corvus

Well, think of the positive benefits of the time system. Everything would be a mess otherwise. Furthermore, thanks to the time system, your thread is at the top of the first page. If you think it is actually pointless, we can ask to put it on page 26 and consider your recent thread as if it were an old one.

Does magenta colour exist? Yet you need it to print things that exist.

Do "stop" signals exist, or is it just a code of conduct? Yet you need it to put order in trafficking.

Do civil laws exist? Yet you need them to put order in marriages or wills, for instance.

Etc.

Can you prove temperature exists? or color exists? or charge exists? etc . — 180 Proof

A proof that there are many things we say exist, but don't.

Yet another proof that there are many things we say exist, but don't. :nerd:

We say those things exist because they benefit us in different ways. What would be the point of getting rid of time? Space and objects are affected by the flow of time, for instance.

Yes, a good point. However, being beneficial is not also evidences for something to exist. Here we are concerned on the nature of time and its existence. Time as an entity evades our perception i.e. it cannot be seen, heard or touched. Only the events took place and motions in process can be perceived.

We use them, and is important in science and daily life, but it is invisible and unperceivable. Is it something else we have been calling as time? Or there are entities and existences which cannot be perceived, but exist?

If we agree that something that is unperceivable do exist, then surely there must be a lot more things which we deny existence, but affect us should be existing?

We are not trying get rid of time here. We are trying to investigate the nature of the existence of time.

Space and objects are affected by the flow of time, for instance. — javi2541997

Sure, but this doesn't tell what the existence of time is.

Can you prove time exists? — Corvus

Can you prove that movement doesn't exist?

If there's any kind of motion, there has to be time.

Can you prove that movement doesn't exist?

If there's any kind of motion, there has to be time. — ssu

Movements exist for sure. I drop a coin, and it falls onto the floor.
But still I cannot see time. I only see the movement.

Think for a moment about it. Without time, you wouldn't see movement.

Time is an integral part of motion and movement. The coin takes time of what, one second plus, to hit the floor. Now, if it would take 0,1 seconds it would be a lot faster, likely then to be thrown to the ground, not just fall with gravity.

And seeing? Do you see gravity? Mass? Weight? And when light hits your eye's retina, that already is motion. So without motion and time, no "seeing".

Or then think about the Einsteinian bloc universe as an entirity. All of it together. Well, then there's no movement. You need time for movement, for past, present and future. Notice the word on the graph below.

I agree, and I understand that time, as an entity, is complex to understand. Why does this happen? Why does something intangible, such as time, exist?

Well, we give relevance to something that, although it is not purely perceived by our senses, enters into our understanding of the world. I bet my dog is not aware of time, but I do, and when my dog was just months old, I called her a "puppy," but now that she is 6 years old, I consider her nearly "senior," yet she doesn't care about these facts.

On the other hand, I believe that most of us got used to living with 'illusions' or abstract features. Dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, etc. When we were kids, our parents used to say, Don't worry, they are just dreams. Like if a dream is not existing, while I disagree obviously.

Another point: time zone is very important, and its existence affects our online communication. We have to wait until our friends from America or Australia wake up to see your thread, and this is due to the solar system.

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist — Corvus

The experience of any thing is the consciousness of time. When we think or perceive an object , we are synthesizing the ‘now’ of its existence for us as a three-part structure of retention (immediate past), present and protention (anticipation). Without awareness of time there is no awareness of the continuity of the flow of experience. It would be impossible to understand music, for instance, or the spacing of space.

This is a very difficult topic, so I'll just quote the opinion of someone who is a better philosopher than me:

More precisely, according to Leibniz, space is the “order” of coexistents, and time that of successives. Hence, the scientific materialist adds, if there were no things there would be no space; and if nothing changed there would be no time. Moreover, for either to exist there must be at least two distinct items: two things in the case of space, and two events in that of time. — Bunge (2006: 244)

So, spatiality and temporality are vicariously just as material, and therefore just as real, as the properties of the material objects that generate them; only, they have no independent existence. — Bunge (2006: 245)

So much for our outline of a relational theory of spacetime. Such a theory is not only relational but also compatible with relativistic physics, in that (a) it assumes the structure of spacetime to depend upon its furniture, and (b) it does not postulate a global structure. However, the theory is not relativistic: it does not include any of the special laws characterizing the various relativistic theories, such as for example the frame independence of the velocity of light, or the equations of the gravitational field. The relational theory of spacetime sketched above is just a component of the background of any general-relativistic theory- if one cares to add such an ontological background. Physicists usually don't: they are in the habit of postulating the four-manifold without inquiring into its roots in events. — Bunge (1977: 308)

One should always start by mentioning Mctaggart on these sort of topics.

The Cartesian coordinate system represents movement, in the sense of remembered displacement spatially, in terms of a partial order on the space and time axes. Such pictures include the "Block Universe" that subsumes McTaggart's B series but does not represent any perspectival understanding of time in terms of McTaggart's A series which only makes mention of the indexicals "past" "present" and "future". This is a serious ontological limitation of pure B series reasoning, because any reasoning restricted to the B series which by assumption is an immutable series, cannot serve as a ground for present, past or future experiences, given the fact that the tenses are mutuble.

McTaggart famously argued that the A series is "unreal", on the basis of what he thought to be logical inconsistency; how can any contingent empirical proposition, say "the cat is presently on the mat", be true when said now but false when said in the past or in the future? For such propositions make no explicit reference to any underlying series. In the end McTaggart failed to find a satisfactory temporal ontology to overcome the issues he raised, but he believed that the A series when taken together with some hypothetical C series that he only partially explicated, could reconstruct the so-called B-series in a non-contradictory fashion. In my primitive understanding, his conception of the C series seems to bear similarities to what are called domains in computer science, which can be thought of as a "growing block" model of accumulated and consistent information. On that interpretation, the B series might itself reduce to some more fundamental concept of consistent and accumulative information.


In a nutshell, McTaggart meant that time was "unreal" in the Hegelian sense (i.e. still real, but in some other sense than the tenses suggest), as opposed to unreal in the Kantian sense of denying any objectivity with regards to a B series, even in the sense of rationally reconstructed noumenal object (which to many Kantians would amount to a contradiction of Kantian logic).

As for Wittgenstein, IIRC he once considered the concept of time as being factorizable in terms of a 'subjective' component he called "memory time" and an 'objective' component he called "information time". My impression of the former is that it was a weaker concept than the A series that did not include the 'eternal present' of the Tractatus, and that also did not assume that a person's memories were ordered in the asymmetric and transitive fashion assumed by McTaggart. As for Witty's conception of "information time" it also did not include the eternal present, but seemed to refer to the instrumental usage of concurrency and synchronization, as per a physicist's usage of "time".

The challenge for the presentist who prioritises the reality of phenomena to the point of denying the reality of the B series, is to reconstruct the B series 'as use', in terms of temporal cognition from the perspective of a solitary individual.

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist. — Corvus

Space and objects co-exist momentarily; they are co-present. However, for us, the present time is shaped by the current virtual time horizons of the past and future. Without this distinction, the present would cease to be the present, becoming instead merely the intensely experienced flow of life.

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist. — Corvus

I don't know a lot about Kant and much of what I do know I don't like, but I do like his discussion of space and time. Here's some of what he says about time, from Chapter 1, Part 1, Section 5 of the Critique of Pure Reason.

1. Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation à priori. Without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession.

2. Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. Time is therefore given à priori. In it alone is all reality of phenomena possible. These may all be annihilated in thought, but time itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, cannot be so annulled. — Immanuel Kant

This is very similar to what he says about space. To him, both space and time are known to us a priori. In my understanding, that means they are built into us. They are part of the nature of our cognitive mechanisms. I find this convincing, or at least plausible. It matches my understanding of how our minds work.

So, what does this mean for your bold statement? It doesn't mean you're wrong. I'd say rather that your claim is irrelevant. I guess you could say that time is an illusion, but it's one that we can't do without. The world as we know it could not exist without it. If time is an illusion, everything else is too - which is an argument that many people have made before and which sometimes makes sense to me, depending on the mood I happen to be in.

Whenever someone claims the existence of some state of affairs, I feel entitled to ask "where?" and "when?" My carrot and lentil soup existed at 6:30 pm in a nice pottery bowl, but I have eaten it and now it is no more, though the empty bowl is in the kitchen.

Alas, it can make no possible sense to ask "where is space?" nor "when is time?". And for that reason, I can make no sense of claims that space and time exist; I'm with Kant on this one; they are how we have to think about existence.

Time is an integral part of motion and movement. The coin takes time of what, one second plus, to hit the floor. Now, if it would take 0,1 seconds it would be a lot faster, likely then to be thrown to the ground, not just fall with gravity. — ssu

Isn't it the other way around? Without movement and changes, there would be no time.
With the objects moving in space, time was deduced from the interval of the movement.
Time is an illusion, which has no entity or existence.

And seeing? Do you see gravity? Mass? Weight? And when light hits your eye's retina, that already is motion. So without motion and time, no "seeing". — ssu

Same with gravity. There are only motions. When mass or objects are released from the height in space, they constantly fall onto the ground. Hence, an imaginary force called gravity is invented.
Gravity itself doesn't exist.

You need time for movement, for past, present and future. Notice the word on the graph below. — ssu

As described in the OP, past, present and future are products of our minds. The graph seems to be depicting imaginary map of space and time, but time doesn't exist in the real world.

Of course there are changes, motions and movements. But they are not bound by time, or time is not a precondition for them. Rather, changes, motions and movements give rise to time in human minds as a form of perception.

Of course there are changes, motions and movements — Corvus

But they are not instant, happening all at once, so, their process takes time, as maybe the Planck time and/or the speed of light.

Perhaps try getting rid of space instead…

It may that our brains spatialize the sequence of ‘nows’ so we can better navigate our way through the series of discrete nows.

[/quote]

Can you prove time exists? — Corvus

No. Do you only believe things that are proven?

Time doesn't exist. — Corvus

Apparently not.

So do you just adopt beliefs arbitrarily?

I'm with Kant on this one; they are how we have to think about existence. — unenlightened

This is a good way of putting it.

Time doesn't exist. — Corvus

And yet you posted that 19 hrs ago.

‘Time is God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once’ ~ anonymous

Isn't it the other way around? Without movement and changes, there would be no time.
With the objects moving in space, time was deduced from the interval of the movement.
Time is an illusion, which has no entity or existence. — Corvus

Have you considered Eleaticism? Parmenides and Zeno of Elea and all that?

Time doesn't exist. — Corvus

And yet you posted that 19 hrs ago. — Banno

And yet Banno posted that 40 minutes ago.

And yet there will be more replies to this thread after mine in the next minutes or hours, making the thread longer. Therefore, time affects space.

Etc...

Can you prove time exists? Can we perceive time as an entity? — Corvus

Maybe not in terms of philosophy. But what about physics? On the other hand, physics would have to start with the senses and the senses probbly can't touch time, although I would have to check with Einstein on that one. Maybe you have to go by way of philosophy. Or is it all the same?

I agree, and I understand that time, as an entity, is complex to understand. Why does this happen? Why does something intangible, such as time, exist? — javi2541997

Isn't it a product of human mind? You see the sun rise in the morning, and impose an idea that time has passed. Nothing has passed. It was the earth which rotated itself by 1 turn since yesterday morning.

I bet my dog is not aware of time, but I do, and when my dog was just months old, I called her a "puppy," but now that she is 6 years old, I consider her nearly "senior," yet she doesn't care about these facts. — javi2541997

Dogs don't care about time or numbers. Maybe they would do, if they had the concept of time and numbers. But we cannot teach dogs to be ready go for walk at 6pm today, or bark 7 times if she wants the biscuits or 8 times if he wants salami..

The experience of any thing is the consciousness of time. When we think or perceive an object , we are synthesizing the ‘now’ of its existence for us as a three-part structure of retention (immediate past), present and protention (anticipation). Without awareness of time there is no awareness of the continuity of the flow of experience. It would be impossible to understand music, for instance, or the spacing of space. — Joshs

Isn't time then some sort of mental states or awareness? Time is not external existence. We just postulate time from the events, motions and movements. I am not sure if Music is time based, because some dogs and wolves seem to be able to sing without knowing anything about time.

This is a very difficult topic, so I'll just quote the opinion of someone who is a better philosopher than me: — Arcane Sandwich

I have not come across Mario Bunge before, but he seems to be a great thinker. Will have readings on the quotes you provided in the post, as they seem to be much relevant on the topic. Gracias.

Thanks for all your posts. Will come back with more of my replies on the rest of your posts in due course. G'day~