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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2002
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Count me as a wouldn't. What is the point or wrapping paper if you know what's in the parcel?
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Joined: May 2002
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veteran
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veteran
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Quote:
Quote:
… the essence of "time" is it's "progression" …
Parm my beg to differmints but that "progression" is purely linguistic and is derived from our conception of time. It has nothing to do with time's nature.
Hmm.
Didn't we once have this same discussion in a wild and weird clime, that lieth sublime, out of space, out of time?
Well, if so, Faldo, it didn't take, so repeat after me...
To conceptulize is to lingualize and any "nature" that can't be conceptualized has no meaning. For example if I say, "time is nondirectional" then "time" must stop being "time" because the concept "static time" will then become a semantical absence of the essense of "time" which is "change", and that would be linguistically confusing.
A "change" must start at one point of being and then become another.
The direction of the movement in four dimensional space of "change" is inconsequential,backwards or forwards will serve equally well, but all "change" must be progressive and this progression we all agree to call "time".
Remember?
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
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Count me as a wouldn't. What is the point or wrapping paper if you know what's in the parcel?
To mark the occasion and make it a special gift. Even if at the giver's request I have given explicit instructions about what I want for my birthday I still want it wrapped rather than just thrust naked at me (except where the present intrinsically involves naked thrusting, of course).
Bingley
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
… the essence of "time" is it's "progression" …
Parm my beg to differmints but that "progression" is purely linguistic and is derived from our conception of time. It has nothing to do with time's nature.
Hmm.
Didn't we once have this same discussion in a wild and weird clime, that lieth sublime, out of space, out of time?
Well, if so, Faldo, it didn't take, so repeat after me...
To conceptulize is to lingualize and any "nature" that can't be conceptualized has no meaning. For example if I say, "time is nondirectional" then "time" must stop being "time" because the concept "static time" will then become a semantical absence of the essense of "time" which is "change", and that would be linguistically confusing.
A "change" must start at one point of being and then become another.
The direction of the movement in four dimensional space of "change" is inconsequential,backwards or forwards will serve equally well, but all "change" must be progressive and this progression we all agree to call "time".
Remember?
So you saying if we agree that this baseball bat is made of foam rubber it won't hurt when I whup you upside the head with it?
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
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to see the future, it to be trapped--
once you see the future, and expect that future to be true, you are forever closing down millions of pathways
I understand what you're saying and agree- in part - but I believe you are defining time in a way that applies to an individual and that "glimpse" might well be a wish or something similar and it is indeed easy to close off other avenues because the "glimpse" is appealing.
I meant that it might be possible to have a glimpse of the future that is not personal, or even envisionable otherwise.
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Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,529
veteran
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veteran
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,529 |
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So you saying if we agree that this baseball bat is made of foam rubber it won't hurt when I whup you upside the head with it?
Has it come to this, Faldage? Have you become so jaded by life that you can no longer abide philosophical discussion without interjecting your passion "baseball" into the conversation to keep your once-sharp mind awake and alert?
WELL? 
Oh well, I guess Faldage has dozed off.
Well then, just for the record I, myself, will explain what would have happened if Faldage had hit me upside the head with a baseball bat...simply put he would have been put in prison for ten years at hard labor with time counted off for good behavior.
Good behavior? Not likely with Faldage, but in prison Mister Faldage would then have ample time to contemplate fully this simple aspect of the meaning of the concept of time...
No matter if he and I had agreed that a baseball bat was made of foam rubber, the meaning of words are determined by the culture that is the unit that goes forth through time. Poor Faldage, and worse, poor me, are merely crusty skin cells that are shucked off innocuously as the larger unit goes on to Disneyland or Happy Farms or whatever its fate might be.
Words have no absolute meaning, Faldage, words only have function 
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
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Words have no absolute meaning, Faldage, words only have function
Exactamenticals. Time means nothing, or, in the words of the old Aladamnbamian philosopher:
What's time to a pig?
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Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,529
veteran
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veteran
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,529 |
Quote:
Exactamenticals. Time means nothing, or, in the words of the old Aladamnbamian philosopher:
What's time to a pig?
Gee Phaldotage, when Alabamdamna homespun philosophers ask "What is time to a pig?" it is meant to be rhetorical. The stock answer is "The same as it is to a man."
All time is biological.
Pigs sit, time passes, and they get hungry.
Humans sit, time passes, and they get hungry.
And the same mechanism is in play for pig and man if we substitute the word "horny" for "hungry".
Now, just for kicks let's try a mind experimentt...
Gather up some newly born babies and see that they are properly raised by apes without contact with human Culture or language.
Then, when they reach their majority, round them up and put them in a cage and ask them "What is time?
Their growls and grunts will be equal to our long winded explanations about the nature of time.
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Joined: Jul 2006
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 2 |
Quote:
Quote:
I'm reading Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind. She quotes various folk at the beginning of each chapter. Her quote for Chapter 13, What Is a Memory, is:
"What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't
really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates
everything in sight."
--Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Great book, but the sentiment expressed by Pirsig above is analogous prose without logical semantical function. Time is progressive. The memory of the event is not the event and that memory occurs in the present and then influences the future.
And while we can construct worthwhile allegorical concepts like "time stood still" and "backwards in time", the essence of "time" is it's "progression" and to use the term otherwise requires the complete obliteration of the meaning of the word and the creation of an altogether new meaning for the term "time".
Zen and the art... is about a man showing his past to his son, whom he hasn't seen due to being locked up in a mental institution - the past being the roads of America, the future being the son, whom he desires to get to know, sitting behind him on the motorcycle. So there is nothing wrong with the image. Read the book again - it's a teacher.
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Joined: Jul 2006
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Jul 2006
Posts: 2 |
Quote:
to see the future, it to be trapped--
once you see the future, and expect that future to be true, you are forever closing down millions of pathways
the future is like a dandelion head 1000 wisps, chose one, latch onto it, and you follow that path.. all the other wisps, gone with the wind..
but until the moment you chose 1 wisp, 1000 choices are available. (and once you make a choice, its like landing on another dandelion head, 1000 new choice appear.
to know the future, is to be trapped by that path, to lose free will. sages through the ages realized that.
Deidre, a classic celtic tale, starts out with all of Deidre's life being fortold.. the civil wars, the death, the loss, her banishment and punishment.. all told.. and all come to pass. deirdre find freedom in her death.. the one event that has not been fortold.
or read Dune.(same idea, that to know the future is not a blessing, but a trap.)
can anybody choose differently from what they do? WHEN they do?
We employ procrastination and rashness to express beliefs about acting in order to survive. Thus choosing is seen as a matter of gefühl with events/options and Self - a melt of remembered choices becoming experiences and projected trajectories stemming from those memories projected into time-not-lived to converge at a desired result. Hopefully. Or the lunatic's way ;-) utter trust - acceptance that things become what they become; rolling with the ball and making the best of it.
It's all a matter of attitude and character. The point being that one chooses, and WHEN, as one IS. Choosing then is the amalgamation of doing and being - the convergence in the now that makes destiny, as one's actions ripple into the universe.
Last edited by pipanny; 07/24/06 07:11 PM.
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