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<p>That doesn’t make any sense. If something can be determined then it can be predicted. Are you saying for everything in the universe there is a law for it?</p>
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<p>Free will is technically a man made artifice and therefore we can choose it to mean anything we want. My concept of free will is the ability to make choices and frankly I don’t see there being any better alternative.</p>
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<p>If time existed, wouldn’t someone have made a time machine in the future and came back to tell us?</p>
<p>Bigtwix, I though you were smarter than to believe in such a silly concept as time.</p>
<p>There’s nothing silly about time. You either A) Believe there is time or B) Believe there isn’t time. The consequence of not believing in time is that you then believe there is no motion, no change, no anything. Believing that there is no time requires you to believe that everything your senses are complete lies. You have never done anything, nor will you ever do anything, and at the moment you aren’t doing anything either.</p>
<p>And schaden, your logic about being determined and being predictable is not sound. If you knew everything, then yes you could predict everything. But the limits of human knowledge make our ability to predict so insignificant that there isn’t much we can predict for certain. An example of what I mean is something as follows: if you were to read one word at a time that I am writing, and you covered all words except the most present word with your hand, you could not predict what my next word would be. You might be able to predict my next word, but it is not for sure. I could start talking about anything at any time. But an important thing to note is that for each word that I type, the next word is causally determined to be so. My typing is caused by many things, but if you isolate any word on this post, the word that follows I had already determined in my head right before I typed it. Moreover, given that I am speaking English and therefore have an English grammatical system, my sentences are governed by principles of english grammar. To make a complete and coherent thought, each word I write will be dependent upon what I said before, in order to convey meaning in a way grammatically correct. Yes, I could do some BS like instead in the previous sentence I said “grammatically correct” I could say “grammatically ______” (insert grammatically incorrect thing here). But in doing so I would not make much sense most likely. However, either way I would be caused to do such a thing. The main important thing here that I am trying to convey is that a system can function under a ruleset or set of principles, namely here, I mean the principles of good english grammar, and yet you still won’t be able to predict my very next word googleisthebestsearchengine (i just said that btw to make an example of how being random makes it pretty obvious that you can’t just predict what’s next, even if you know the principles of a system). Certain things, like physics, are at times easier to predict. But many things, given that human knowledge is quite weak, are no so easily predictable. </p>
<p>Basically, if something is governed by the rules of cause and effect, doesn’t mean we can predict things. The human mind is good for what we normally do with it. But when you try to step back and play omniscient God, we are kind of really really stupid. If we knew everything, then we would be able to predict everything because cause and effect is real. But we are idiots so your argument is false.</p>
<p>if there were no time then physicists would be dividing by zero quite often</p>
<p>QED</p>
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<p>There is no such thing as a straight line, to add to that list.
Just because you can use a concept to help measure or whatever, does not make that concept real. </p>
<p>I believe in the present, but the past is in our memories and the future is only a concept.</p>
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<p>And not being able to predict everything makes determinism a flawed argument (what I’m saying).</p>
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<p>I hope you don’t mind if I skip this part.</p>
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<p>Yes it does. Cause and effect only exists because we observe sustained patterns. We only say something causes an effect if the pattern indicates it.</p>
<p>But do I really need to explain this? Is it not assumed that cause and effect inherently predicts the future?</p>
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<p>What does this even mean? I agree we are all idiots but what’s up with the rest of the post? And what about that huge paragraph you just wrote on grammar? What was that all about? I’m assuming you’re a philosophy major and are going by what your textbook says because you don’t really have much insight to anything.</p>
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<p>you can’t just say a measurement is not real and not accept the consequences.</p>
<p>“gravity isn’t real” - then explain why we don’t float away
“mass isn’t real” - then explain why it requires various amounts of force to accelerate things</p>
<p>etc, etc.</p>
<p>but “time isn’t real” requires the most explanation, because it invalidates basically every physics formula through divide by zero errors</p>
<p>Not in the way that time being implied in this post. Time is not linear (it’s probably more scalar).</p>
<p>In fact, time is more likely equivalent to existing (0 for not existing and 1 for existing). </p>
<p>What you’re talking about is rate of change (if that’s why you call time, then I have no disagreement)</p>
<p>i’m not talking about rate of change, i’m talking about (amount of change/rate of change) which most people call time. your definition might be different, but that’s tough i suppose</p>
<p>amount of rate of change? please elaborate</p>
<p>I already explained why time is a a measurement and doesn’t exist in the physical world at all in the God thread.</p>
<p>Suffice to say, time doesn’t exist, other than the fact that it is a useful measurement. It’s a label man has created. We can changed the labels of many things, but it doesn’t change reality, understand? The month of June - sure it refers to something, and it is a useful measurement - but point to it in reality — does it have any bearing on anything in our reality whatsoever, outside of your mental mind games? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t exist - space time doesn’t exist because time doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>Motion and change do exist. Time is an illusion — there is only one ever-present now. Hell, just go back to the God thread and start reading.</p>
<p>I’m surprised the one argument against time-traveling is that “we aren’t swarmed by future people” — like that argument hasn’t been used 10,000 times before.</p>
<p>How bout the fact that it defies the conservation of mass? You are adding mass to the system - in fact how are the particles transported at all? How can you put any particles whatsoever on top of air molecules? This hasn’t occurred in our universe ever before. Are your atoms interspersed with the air molecules? In fact, how do you make sure the machine sits in open air at all?</p>
<p>How about the fact that if you if you did travel back to say, 1985, well ---- assuming there is a young “duplicate” of yourself — isn’t he going to travel back to the same spot you did just now? And he’ll run into his past self again like you did, and that past self would travel to the same spot ---- in essence 999999… no, an INFINITE amount of yourself + time machines would instantly warp to the same point in space at the same time — being more massive than a billion black holes – if we could even comprehend would infinity would mean… and you seen how time travel is instantly derailed, although there are about a million more arguments.</p>
<p>But the main argument is that time doesn’t exist. The only theoretical way we can simulate time travel is by creating a device that can result in a universal movement of every last quark and particle in the entire universe back to their exact points at a different reference time. But that’s still not real time travel. Only partical movement.</p>
<p>That’s the answer to this entire thread, ladies and gentleman. This entire universe, everything, real and imagined ---- it all boils down to particles whizzing around. Stuff moving from a to b. Even down to the synapses in your brain - it’s all governed by physics. And I don’t even much care for physics.</p>
<p>It’s all movement, and your concept of “choice” is merely more unchangeable physics at play (I’m not saying humans have even come close to figuring it all out).</p>
<p>You don’t have free will just like the equation 1 + 1 = ? doesn’t have free will. It’s 2. It’s always 2. The end.</p>
<p>Major endless lolling @ Schaden</p>
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<p>“/” means divided by, not of</p>
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<p>motion divided by change is time, call it an arbitrary measurement if you want, but that doesn’t prove it’s not “real”</p>
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<p>I agree that it’s physics, but how else would choice happen? If stimuli didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to make choices, if we didn’t have our own perception of the world and choices didn’t present themselves, then we would not be able to make them.</p>
<p>In other words you are saying there is a law for everything? </p>
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<p>Essentially you are saying you can predict the future. event+event=outcome. always. Do you not agree? Then explain the example I posted a few pages back. </p>
<p>I don’t see how you agree with me that time is an illusion and then believe everything is pre-decided.</p>
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<p>/facepalm to end the lolling.</p>
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<p>You’re changing up my words a bit, but I digress.</p>
<p>Motion is relative and change is relative. Therefore any time you use will always be relative to something else. There is no concrete thing such as “time”. You exist or you don’t</p>
<p>@ Schaden
“And not being able to predict everything makes determinism a flawed argument (what Im saying).”</p>
<p>What? How is it flawed. Like it’s already been said a million times in this thread, determinism doesn’t claim to be able to predict everything. In fact, prediction has nothing to do with the arguments of determinism. I don’t understand how it is a flaw to not address prediction of cause-effect events if the argument itself does not resolve to address this issue. Are general and special relativity flawed for not explicitly stating what I ate for breakfast yesterday morning? Clearly Einstein’s theories were flawed, since he failed to mention that I had coffee and a muffin.</p>
<p>“Yes it does. Cause and effect only exists because we observe sustained patterns. We only say something causes an effect if the pattern indicates it.”</p>
<p>Wait, so you’re saying that cause and effect only exists because we observe it? That’s absurd. </p>
<p>“What does this even mean? I agree we are all idiots but whats up with the rest of the post? And what about that huge paragraph you just wrote on grammar? What was that all about? Im assuming youre a philosophy major and are going by what your textbook says because you dont really have much insight to anything.”</p>
<p>What I meant was… you say that if determinism is true then we should be able to predict everything. I’m saying the human mind is too weak to do such a task. If you were omniscient, then hypothetically speaking you could predict everything. But just because everything is determined does not mean that we can predict everything. While often in physics, cause-effect relations can be basic enough to predict quite easily. However, in terms of rational agents it become extremely difficult because many causes are at play, not to mention you can’t ever experience something from another person’s point of view. So your argument, I’m saying, is incredibly flawed in jumping from the thesis of determinism to the conclusion that everything can be predicted (if not worse, you think that determinism would mean that we can predict everything?).</p>
<p>Only philosophy textbook I’ve ever had was an intro logic book last year, which doesn’t really talk philosophy so much as it does logic. That grammatical example was an original example to show that you can’t say just because you know the principle or rule behind an interaction, doesn’t mean that you can predict it.</p>
<p>@ Peter parker,
I don’t think arguing that time isn’t real makes too much sense. In the sense that time measurements are not real, I agree. Any measurement of time for that matter is a symbolic marker for some duration or cyclical moment. If you argue for just an eternal present, the main problem I see you running into is that any decision you make is never in the present, nor are any of your senses. Your senses and brain activity is always a split second apart from the present. But if you argue that there is only a present this is a problem because the past cannot rightly affect the present according to your view. If I decide to press one key on my keyboard, by the time that my brain relays that information to my hand/finger, the thought has already passed, and then my finger presses the key. However, if as you say there is only the present, then the nonexistence of past would mean I would run into an epistemological problem. How does my brain send the message telling my finger to press the key if by the time my finger initiates the key pressing the message is from the past. The same sort of thing happens with stimuli as well. Say if you are watching a camera take a picture of you and it flashes. The instant that it flashes you do not actually perceive it. Instead it takes a ridiculously small fragment of a second for your eyes to transmit the signal to your brain. So the second your brain goes “im seeing the camera flash”, it is actually not seeing it flash. Instead it flashed very shortly before and your brain only made sense of the input very shortly after the actual present. No perception or thought is ever really in the present. It lags behind the present, but very closely.</p>
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<p>Cause and effect would not exist if we did not predict them to happen in the future. We say the cause of an object falling is gravity because weve observed gravitys effect many times. If we found that not to hold true we would not relate it to cause and effect. If we were not 100% sure the event would occur again then it wouldnt be related to cause and effect.</p>
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<p>Exactly. On that note, why dont we talk about time again? How do we even know were alive or have been alive? Our senses are telling us we are alive (and that weve had experiences) but can you ever be really sure?</p>
<p>Like I said earlier, the whole question is absurd.</p>
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<p>Perception does not equal the present, existing does (like I said). The time that it takes for the light to bounce off an object into my eyes and then into my brain is a sequence of events lasting a duration that can be compared to another duration or the earth revolving around the sun. It doesn’t mean there is a “time lapse”</p>
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<p>Is it not implied? Would we know *anything<a href=“physics”>/i</a> if it weren’t for an event happening over and over again? If an apple fell up instead of down would we not call it the same thing (gravity)?</p>
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<p>Ok but you finally agree with me that determinism is essentially saying that everything can be (hypothetically) predicted.</p>
<p>b u m p</p>
<p>schaden was in a real discussion? I thought he was just a ■■■■■.</p>
<p>Maybe I should actually read this thread first before reassessing though.</p>
<p>I’ll be here all day, my friend.</p>
<p>I’ll bite here.</p>
<p>I don’t think traditional determinism states that everything can be theoretically predicted.</p>
<p>However, I think that, sure, yes ----- in this deterministic universe, with only one course, that hypothetically (but not realistically) the course could be predicted, although it would be of the most daunting tasks ever concieved.</p>
<p>Now I suppose you’ll say, if people know the course, can’t they try to change it?</p>
<p>Well obviously, if any such knowledge of the course did occur in an individual, that could have been/ should have been predicted by the system, and such individual’s attempts to prove to himself that free will exists would also have been taken into account (with unfathomable complexity).</p>
<p>However, it is very well possible that the course of the universe/ end universe simply can never be the exact same as a predicted universe/ stimuli given to a human being. However that gives no greater power to human beings than any other glob of mass. The human will always run out to change such system/ or preserve it, based on what side the synapses were stacked on lol.</p>
<p>The simplest metaphor is a movie. You watch a movie through, you restart it, you play it over, and its the exact same movie with the same course, always. Now with our universe who knows; maybe the begginning conditions could have been different but once those conditions were set the rest of history was determined.</p>
<p>You can even have a movie where the characters discover something that reveals a predicted future scene of the movie (accurate or not). It’s not going to change the fact that you restart or rewind the movie and the same tape is being played.</p>
<p>Making a movie a metaphor for life is assuming time exists. I think time is just an illusion.</p>
<p>Earlier I tried to say a DVD is more similar, only you can’t fast forward or rewind it. </p>
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<p>There goes the argument though…If everything can be predicted…not by a human…say a computer then the human can go in and screw up whatever was supposed to happen and then all of a sudden nothing can be predicted again.</p>
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<p>Think modern determinism Peter, modern.</p>
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<p>I kind of forgot what determinism was since I haven’t been here for so long but that’s why I think determinism is wrong, because not everything in the universe can be predicted.</p>