We can go back in time, We can watch a old silent film, and see things happing in real life in the 1920;s I have a few Chaplin movies, silent
If Chaplin was not real, than how did the films exist????
How can I have a 1955 boxing mag(I not that old I collect old fight magzines) With the Rocky Marciano on the cover knocking out Archie Moore?? If 1955 did not exist, and how can MArciano had fought Moore if the past did not exist?
(MArciano won by 9th round ko and retire at 49-0 after that fight)
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Try to approach this philosophically, not scientifically.
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Storm> But the question was, does the past exist. We can then argue that it does, due to records OF the past, and light from the past.
However, like in The Matrix, all of this may be an illusion. We’d all be sharing the same illusion, since one of the things that make something a historical fact, is when there is more than one source and these sources agree on an event that happened.
If we abandon the assumption that nature is measurable and I only have my memory to go by… Well, maybe some alien gave me false memories and placed me at this comp 1 second ago. How would I ever tell?
__________________ "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
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technically........there is no past.......nor a future. Everything exists relatively as present.
Today is the present, yesterday was the present.......but disappeared second by second.....there is no past.
There is no future. As we progress second by second, the "future" becomes the present.
If this were a sci-fi novel and somebody invented a time machine......he could not travel into the past or future........only into new presents. Time is relative. If the person traveled to 1963........1963 would be present for him. If he traveled to 2067........2067 would be the present for him.
As humans, we only have one point of view........and that point of view is the world around us. Wherever we are, the world around us that is occuring is considered present......no matter the year.
Gender: Unspecified Location: The Last Circle of Hell
So according to your theory, E.D., we're always living in the past. If the future second by second becomes the present, then the present second by second becomes the past.
no Dwarf......reread my post. There is no past, there is no future......only present. "past" and "future" are only ideas......we can never physically be there, they do not exist. Every second we live, we are living in the present.
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I'll try to keep it philosophical.....If there is no past then how does a person explains what he is now? If there is no future then how can we know what we might become? There is a flux (philosophical term) happening in human existence which makes us perceive that there is flow from beginning to end. Is contradictory to say I'm the same person I was yesterday or the day before. There are changes occuring in me and in everyone else. Experience tells us that thing changes. And when things change that means something started and something will end. Now if you want to go all Matrix mumbo jumbo remenber they clearly stated "everything that has a beginning has an end." That implies a timeline. But to be fair there is that theory that says that time doesn't exist....go figured.
WD........there is one constant in our universe. That is forward motion. That is how we became the person we are today. One second leads into another......one minute leads to another.....one year leads to another......one century leads to another......one millenia leads to another. The very concept of "past" and "future" are as man made as 12:00 am and 12:00 pm. They are merely man made labels used to place events in sequential order.
I am the person I am today because of the series of events that have occured over my lifetime......from one second to the next, from one minute to the next. I have been moving forward since the day I was born and will continue to do so until my death. When I die, my energy will continue to move forward as my body rots and fertilizes the soil, giving life to another life form. There is no beginning.......there is no end. The cycle of forward motion of the energy that gives me life did not start with me........it will not end with me.......it will merely move on to another form.
as for your theory of time not existing........very true in the lamen sense of the word. There is no time, only forward motion.....which as I stated was occuring long before I was born and will occur long after I am dead. There is no beginning, there is no end. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can and will change form.
In the scientific sense of the word, time is very real. In the scientific sense of the word, time is merely a coordinate (dimension) on the fabric of space that prevents two peices of matter from co-occupying the same space.
There is no time, and no forward motion... the "passing of time" is simply a function of our nervous system.... all things that have existed and will exist exist now and will always exist... only the way our brain processes information makes it seem otherwise... remember, time is not the stage upon which we act, merely a fellow player... the easiest way to describe the universe is to think of one of those photos of a road junction at night, with a long exposure time... all those lines of light and elongated blurs of cars, then multiply that by infinity....
I'm sorry Big Gay Kirk..........but uh.......are you trying to tell me that everything I have ever done in my life, I did all at the same time? That I was popping out my mother's birth canal the very same second that I will one day die........my brain just interprets these events as taking place 80 years apart?
Furthermore, since time does not exist.........are you stating that every single piece of matter that has ever existed all existed on the very same co-ordinate of space-time? That I was standing in the exact same spot as millions of other people at the same time, our matter was somehow overlapping each other?........that it's all a trick my brain is playing on me, interpreting it as such that I was in the spot, I left (forward motion), somebody else was in the spot, they left and so on and so on.
I'm sorry man but uh.........lay off the weed. It's good to promote abstract thinking........but you're leaving the abstract and entering into the realm of laughingly ridiculous. The Matrix is not real. Life is not a dream. You are a real physical being........so is everybody around you......do not hurt anybody.
Gender: Male Location: Welfare Kingdom of California
Evil Dead> That I can agree with... that there is a forward motion happening. Even Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle believed in that. Except they called it "The Prime Mover" From which all comes from. The trick here is why is the flux occuring? (again flux in the philosophical term) Or better yet why is it happening? If we were to say that all energy in the universe comes from one destination and thus returns to its original source is like implying a reclying (sp?) event. And I doubt that, but then again there are things I don't understand and won't dispute without the proper knowledge.
In a philosophical sense you are the person that exists now because of your experiences. A mind starts like a blank sheet of paper that as life progress the sheets gets fill with sentences and paragraphs of knowledge. And it all ends when you run out of room to write. If there is an energy that motivates the mechanical body.....then would you consider that to be the essence we call a soul? Now, don't get me wrong I don't seek to connect religious stuff with philosophical thoughts. I'm only trying to learn how does this energy works in the body.
Agree, but there is a philosophy in it that is quite appealing.
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What do you mean? It a pretty straight-forward question...Does the past exist?
I've actually just realized, the question should be...
"Did the past exist?"
...Right? Or are my gramatical instincts off?
Edit: Oh, and E.D., I agree with you...Your first post seemed a little contradictory, is all. Becasue you say, each moment of supposed "future" slowly becomes present, that would also lead to each moment of present becomin the past just as quickly, therefore the future goes straight to the past, and the present doesnt exist, and we live in naught but the past. But I see your point now.
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Last edited by Dwarfdude on Dec 30th, 2004 at 03:43 AM
the past existED.........but at the time it existed we called it the present......all that exists is the present. The future doesn't exist yet.......and when it does exist it will be the present.......same for past.
Yup... spot on... the universe is simply a mess of continuously extant particles, all interacting with each other.... our brains, like any computer, can process only certain types and amounts of information, and so.... we perceive time passing, we perceive travel through four dimensions, but none of that really exists... the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine....
Of course.. because they were bound by their perceptions.... they could feel time passing, so they believed time was passing... but perception is not reality... it is merely the means by which we interpret reality... this is why it is useless to ask where the universe came from... or where the matter for the big bang came from... the universe is an absolute constant... it did not begin, it will never end... our big bang theory is flawed because we cannot perceive of things having no beginning and no end... because of the way our nervous system operates... we are only a small bundle of particles (and remember, at the end of your life, none of those particles are the ones you started with... ) and our processing capacity is very finite... thus it is impossible to comprehend the infinite... therefore the past exists, the future exists, and everything exists... all at the same time...
I don't touch mind altering substances... except alcohol, and then only rarely... and these aren't my ideas... they date back centuries... I simply find them the easiest to believe in.... a lot easier to believe in than the idea that the past doesn't exist anymore except in memeory, and that the future doesn't exist at all...yet...
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Dec 28th, 2004 05:09 AM
