Question:
Do you really think time doesn't exist?
☯≈♥∞☼
2015-03-05 04:41:48 UTC
So i was going on a date with this girl to dinner and a concert(one of her friends is in a band)and we got into a conversation on the drive to the restaurant about whether or not time exists. She claims it does not and has all these new agey sounding philosophies about it. So anyways, we get to the restaurant about 10 minutes late and our table still wasnt ready so they directed us to the bar to wait and have a drink. So she looks at me and says "that's really bad service because you made a reservation and the table wasnt ready and now we have to wait and might be late for the concert".

Anyone else see the flaw(and hypocrisy) in her "time is fake" argument? I thought it was quite ironic..
Ten answers:
phil8656
2015-03-05 08:03:26 UTC
Funny how they could be late when time did not exist?!?!

That whole thing that time, and even reality, is an illusion is just a misunderstanding of what some philosopher, or scientist, was trying to explain. You could say that centimeters, and inches, don't exist, or are an illusion, because they are man made measurements (like time). But the math they are based on is natural, not man made. And even if they were not natural, only artificial, that does NOT make them illusions. Because the atomic bomb was man made too.

If she brings up that they were late again just tell her that it didn't exist.
claptic
2015-03-05 12:59:03 UTC
when i think of what put us here i see the symbol of a boundless circle, what some call the All. I call it That. That has no beginning and no end. Being limitless, That is timeless because time implies change and That is incapable of change. You cannot add to it because there is nothing to add. You cannot take away from it because there would be no place to put what was taken away. It is incapable of creating, only emanating because creating means a beginning and this implies time and That is the timeless whole. It defies definition so what man can gather about That must be done through observing what has emanated in the rather unexpected dual aspect of Matter, that can be measured, and Spirit which cannot. Time does not exist. That Thou Art
who WAS #1?
2015-03-05 06:28:18 UTC
Obviously she has no Vulcan blood in her, being so illogical.

No point in dating a person like that.

Of course time exists.

Time is a funny thing though, it is quite elastic.

So is our perception of time; quite variable.

Doesn't sound like a fun person to date, seems t me she should have had a little faith, enjoyed the drink and the concert would have happened in its own good time and you-all would have been there right on time. Gotta go with the flow.



Once upon a time I was delayed by a mechanical failure, later to discover that if I had been on time I would have been right in the middle of a horrible accident on Donner Pass (I-80, California) in winter. Sometimes delays work in our favor.
bryan3X6X0
2015-03-05 04:55:47 UTC
Time is something we created. It's man made. It's a measurement. I think that's what she's trying to say.
Rosemonster
2015-03-07 07:56:49 UTC
Time is nothing more than the passing of events, no matter how you measure it. But an event can be the beating of one's heart, or the movement of the cosmos. So when the cosmos stop moving, I suppose time will no longer exist!
Dr Yes level 9 since 1999
2015-03-05 08:42:09 UTC
Apparently thoughts don't exist either. Since they are only temporal electrical impulses.

And these words don't exist either. Since they are only digital electrical impulses.

And I don't exist here either. Since my avatar is only a bunch of photons.
Bogdan
2015-03-05 07:23:52 UTC
Time is illusion which measure our lives.
?
2015-03-06 01:38:35 UTC
it only exists in OUR 3D dimensional reality

Otherwise it is an illusion

Read quantum physics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOBtnU-zSA
?
2015-03-05 04:49:05 UTC
Well she was right about the bad service, just wrong about time...!
Leslie Goudy
2015-03-06 03:37:55 UTC
That is an Existential question and this is something I am somewhat of an expert at. Of course it exists. But, how does one measure it. Shall we measure it as men or as the Creator. Lets just humor me for a minute and move back to where I was taking you the last time I answered your question. In the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is a paradox(energy can neither be created nor destroyed) which is after the big energy goes outward from the arrow of time- there are 7 arrows of time and there is contention about the Quantum entanglement driving it. I don't think it does. I think it's the space in between that holds everything together. This is how they show DNA. But anyway the 4th arrow is going forward into the past --- here you are

THERODYNAMICAL ARROW-



The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of microscopic disorder; thus the Second Law implies that time is asymmetrical with respect to the amount of order in an isolated system: as a system advances through time, it will statistically become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used empirically to distinguish between future and past though measuring entropy does not accurately measure time. Also in an open system entropy can locally decrease with time: living systems decrease their entropy by expenditure of energy at the expense of environmental entropy increase.



2)THE COSMOLOGICAL ARROW-



The cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the universe's expansion. It may be linked to the thermodynamic arrow, with the universe heading towards a heat death (Big Chill) as the amount of usable energy becomes negligible. Alternatively, it may be an artifact of our place in the universe's evolution (see the Anthropic bias), with this arrow reversing as gravity pulls everything back into a Big Crunch.



If this arrow of time is related to the other arrows of time, then the future is by definition the direction towards which the universe becomes bigger. Thus, the universe expands - rather than shrinks - by definition.



The thermodynamic arrow of time and the Second law of thermodynamics are thought to be a consequence of the initial conditions in the early universe. Therefore they ultimately result from the cosmological set-up.



3)THE RADIATIVE ARROW-



Waves, from radio waves to sound waves to those on a pond from throwing a stone, expand outward from their source, even though the wave equations allow for solutions of convergent waves as well as radiative ones. This arrow has been reversed in carefully worked experiments which have created convergent waves, so this arrow probably follows from the thermodynamic arrow in that meeting the conditions to produce a convergent wave requires more order than the conditions for a radiative wave. Put differently, the probability for initial conditions that produce a convergent wave is much lower than the probability for initial conditions that produce a radiative wave. In fact, normally a radiative wave increases entropy, while a convergent wave decreases it, making the latter contradictory to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in usual circumstances.



4)THE CASUAL ARROW-



A cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. Birth, for example, follows a successful conception and not vice versa. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow.



An epistemological problem with using causality as an arrow of time is that, as David Hume maintained, the causal relation per se cannot be perceived; one only perceives sequences of events. Furthermore it is surprisingly difficult to provide a clear explanation of what the terms "cause" and "effect" really mean, or to define the events to which they refer. However, it does seem evident that dropping a cup of water is a cause while the cup subsequently shattering and spilling the water is the effect.



Physically speaking, the perception of cause and effect in the dropped cup example is partly a phenomenon of the thermodynamic arrow of time, a consequence of the Second law of thermodynamics. Controlling the future, or causing something to happen, creates correlations between the doer and the effect, and these can only be created as we move forwards in time, not backwards. However, it is also partly a phenomenon of the relation of physical form and functionality to the attributes and functional capacities of physical agents. For example, the causes of the resultant pattern of cup fragments and water spill are easily attributable in terms of the loss of manual grip, gravity, trajectory of the cup and contents, irregularities in its structure, angle of its impact on the floor, etc. However, applying the same event in reverse, it is difficult to explain how the various pieces of the cup come to possess exactly the nature and number of a cup before assembling, how they could assemble (as neither floors nor hands can create china cups unaided), why they should assemble precisely into the shape of a cup and fly up into the human hand (as immobile floors cannot throw and, without contact, the human hand lacks the capacity to move objects unaided) and why the water should position itself entirely within the cup.



5)THE PARTICALE PHYSICS(WEAK ARROW)-



Certain subatomic interactions involving the weak nuclear force violate the conservation of both parity and charge conjugation, but only very rarely. An example is the kaon decay. According to the CPT Theorem, this means they should also be time irreversible, and so establish an arrow of time. Such processes should be responsible for matter creation in the early universe.



This arrow is not linked to any other arrow by any proposed mechanism, and if it would have pointed to the opposite time direction, the only difference would have been that our universe would be made of anti-matter rather than from matter. More accurately, the definitions of matter and anti-matter would just be reversed.



That the combination of parity and charge conjugation is broken so rarely means that this arrow only "barely" points in one direction, setting it apart from the other arrows whose direction is much more obvious.



6)THE QUANTUM ARROW-



According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum evolution is governed by the Schrödinger equation, which is time-symmetric, and by wave function collapse, which is time irreversible. As the mechanism of wave function collapse is philosophically obscure, it is not completely clear how this arrow links to the others. Despite the post-measurement state being entirely stochastic in formulations of quantum mechanics, a link to the thermodynamic arrow has been proposed, noting that the second law of thermodynamics amounts to an observation that nature shows a bias for collapsing wave functions into higher entropy states versus lower ones, and the claim that this is merely due to more possible states being high entropy runs afoul of Loschmidt's paradox. According to the modern physical view of wave function collapse, the theory of quantum decoherence, the quantum arrow of time is a consequence of the thermodynamic arrow of time.



7)THE PCYCOLOGICAL/PERCEPTUAL ARROW-



Psychological time is, in part, the cataloguing of ever increasing items of memory from continuous changes in perception. In other words, things we remember make up the past, while the future consists of those events that cannot be remembered. The ancient method of comparing unique events to generalized repeating events such as the apparent movement of the sun, moon, and stars provided a convenient grid work to accomplish this. The consistent increase in memory volume creates a mental arrow of time. Storing a memory, from an information theoretic perspective, requires an increase in entropy, thus the perceptual arrow ultimately follows from the thermodynamic arrow.



A related mental arrow arises because one has the sense that one's perception is a continuous movement from the known (Past) to the unknown (Future). Anticipating the unknown forms the psychological future which always seems to be something one is moving towards, but, like a projection in a mirror, it makes what is actually already a part of memory, such as desires,

dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of the observer. The association of "behind = past" and "ahead = future" is itself culturally determined. For example, the Chinese and the Aymara people both associate "ahead = past" and "behind = future".[8] In Chinese, for instance, the term "the day after tomorrow" literally means "behind day" while "the day before yesterday" is referred to as "front day" and in Hindi (an Indian language), the term used for "tomorrow" and "yesterday" is the same.



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This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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