Time, and nature of reality

[teresaq]

I remember decades ago when my "reality" was shocked. A pastor said something to me that I related to one of the true Israelites. She told me he shouldn't have said that. I was left in shock. "You" didn't say such things!

Another lady, a sabbath school "teacher" said something in the quarterly was wrong. Absolute shock again.

I didn't kiss those 2 women off because the first I knew to be truly spiritual. People came from all over just to watch her and her sister because they were a different species altogether. The second I had highly admired for her spiritual knowledge. She was probably on as high a plane as the other 2 but I had more intimate knowledge of the sisters.

But I did have a battle going on in me! to say the least. Now I thank God for those women. Neither the church, nor the pastors, nor the GC equal God when it comes to infallibility, or much else. We are all fallen human beings who can be wrong.

I do understand why some fight with all their might something that sounds like heresy. Unfortunately many times I forget whence I came when I get frustrated with them. :(

[Tom Wetmore]

An article of interest on the topic, more or less - The Paradox of the Present

[fccool]

Thank you for the link to keep the discussion going.

I think that author misunderstand the concept of the present, and hence he begins to interpret it in terms of "past" and "future".

Let me expand on that and point out the seeming problem that creates the so-called paradox.

We live in a cause-effect universe. Causality is one of the basic concepts of science. Besides the problem of infinite regress if we take on the issue of causality, it does help us to trace back some logical relationship between events. The gaps between these sequences of events we dub "time". I terms of causality, it's hard to imagine everything happening all together at once. If everything happening at once, then perhaps it's not different than nothing happening at all. In homogeneity there's no distinction.

In terms of the point that the author makes, the "now" is the present snapshot of the universe as it presents to us. The cause of this presentation can constitute "past" in terms of our understanding of it, but this "past" does not exist. We are not looking "at the star" we are looking at the visible light in point of "now" which was obviously cause by some event. There's no paradox there.

For example, if we assume that big bang did happen for the sake of illustrative argument, does it mean that our present experience is actually billions of years old simply because it was caused by a really old event? If so, then eventually we have to trace all of our present experience to some "past" cause. It's simply a problem in thinking and interpreting reality based on mathematical models rather than ontology.

I find the conclusion a bit strange and "water is wet" type of conclusions in terms of general understanding of causality. Sure, you can say that the present is a collection of overlapping past events, but not in the way that author sees "past". Author seems to understand past as "somewhere back in time", and not in terms of a snapshot of all of the events we currently experience, independent of cause of these events.

Time is a construct of mind that helps us to understand, interpret, and keep track of these events. In reality it only exists in context of motion. It's abstract. It does not exist as a "dimension of its own".

I believe that the problem of this idea comes from interpreting the reality based on the "picture projected on TV Screen" instead of understanding what makes this projection possible. Perhaps more on that on a separate thread, and keep this one to the subject of time.

[teresaq]

Based on your "big bang point" I can see this could be a really important issue to consider. I will have to read this a couple more times to understand the idea better.