From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Dec 19 1999 - 15:56:02 MST
Menno Rubingh <rubingh@delftnet.nl> On December 19, 1999 Wrote:
>I think that a honest, rational physicist already *knows* that time is a
>fiction. Exactly like energy, velocity, pressure, and ALL physical
>quantities, time is a mathematical *abstraction
For a concept to be meaningful you need contrast. If everything physical
and everything made up everything we know and everything we don't know
everything possible and everything impossible, is "a fiction" then what on earth
could the term possibly signify? If I said "time is dipheasatory" it would have
just as much, or as little, meaning.
>I don't think Left, Right, Back, and so on, are Real, either. :-)
OK, but what do you mean by that, if space and time were "Real" how
would things be different?
> I say that "time" is only a mathematical concept that lives only in
>my mind.
I think you're confusing two different things the first, that "now" is subjective is
definitely true beyond any question, the second, that time is subjective is probably
not true, every instinct in my body tells me it is not true, but I can't prove it and we'll
never know for sure. Thus I've stopped worrying about it.
>Can you look into my Zombie "mind" and see something there that is ''conscious''
>of Time ?
Yes.
> How are you qualified to say that it is baloney for me to assert this ?
I'd tell you how I do it but it would be pointless. If you are not a Zombie then
I don't need to convince that I'm right. If you really are a Zombie then I might
as well be expressing my artfully phrased, rigorously logical, morally uplifting,
monetarily valuable, and politically advantageous arguments to a lump of clay.
Life is just too short for that.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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