Don't you find it weird
That today is the 1st August 2011. And it WILL NEVER be this date again in the whole history of the universe. That this is the only time in the trillions of years that the universe will exist, that it will be 1st August 2011. It will never be this date again. And that it will never be 2010, 2009 etc etc again.
And my birthday is 8th January 1992. I missed and will never experience 7th January 1992. And I have no idea what I missed out on. Don't you find it weird the fact that no time is ever repeated, that it's a continuing line heading towards the eventual demise of everything? Don't you think that's weird?
And that it when I started writing this it was 2 minutes ago. It will NEVER BE two minutes ago ever again. And I'll never know what I missed out on.
And about people that you've met once, or places that you've been once. How most likely you'll never be there again, and that that person and that place is hurtling towards the same eventual demise as you and everything around you.
Don't you find that weird? Maybe it's just me, I don't know.
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Time is an illusion
Lunchtime doubly so.
It so is!
It's just the sheer definity of it all. And also, for all the amazing and genuis things that we as human beings can do, we're still absolute slaves to time. It's the one thing that we can't, and most likely, will never be able to conquer. We may be able to control nature (we already do to a certain extent), leave this planet, colonise the universe, even start to change and control the universe (in a far future) but we will ALWAYS be slaves to time. That's so weird.
That was a reply to grouchland ^ ffs
Human beings are part of nature
They cannot conquer nature without conquering themselves.
When I seperate us from nature, I mean the nature around us. Basically everything but us. The weather, plants, animals etc
It's pure semantics, nothing else.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.
do you not find you can slow down/speed up time depending on what you're doing
You're not affecting time though. Just your perception of time. We can't go back or go forward in time. We can't repeat a past time peroid.
idk im no philosopher
wait what about Groundhog Day
Ah, I hear that was based on a true story
Nah.
It'll be that date again next 2011.
I feel more relaxed about that since I stopped wearing a watch
seriously. Stupid eh.
And time is repeated in your brain thanks to deja vu and that. I get that a lot.
Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day
To eat is to have fortune
Man who fart in church sit in own pew
I know that isn't a chinese fortune at all but I like it
today has been rubbish
I'm glad we're getting it out of the way now
This is my stock response to a lot of things, but go and read Ada by Nabokov.
The main character is a philosopher who specialises in time, and the book features a massive chunk of his work called The Texture of Time, all about how time only exists in human perception but the idea of duration is a physical fact. It's not entirely sound as a premise, but it's a fascinating way of looking at things, and the way it's worked into the whole structure of the novel is genius. Actual genius. It's the greatest novel ever written.
Ah that sounds really really good! I'll check it out
Have you ever read One Hundred Years of Solitude? It's pretty much my favorite novel, and plays with the perception as time as a thing.
I haven't, sounds interesting though.
Ada is awesome, I did my dissertation on it, with the title 'Nabokov's Time', looking at how he addresses it as a preoccupation in all of his novels (testing the idea that he saw literary creation as the only way of escaping the inevitable decline and destruction of time and life. It was really pretentious, but pretty good if I do say so myself).
Do you still have a copy of your dissertation anyone?
I would like to read it, much so.
Anywhere* (I always confuse anywhere and anywho)
Not here at work, but PM me your email and I'll send you a copy when I get home.
Go here, click on Part Four.
http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
Will give that a good read in a bit. Just watching Man Men
Time doesn't exist in the manner that you are thinking it does.
See, time is a line. On which we only travel in one direction. This is partly due to entropy, partly due to simply the way that the universe is set up. The thing is, `time` as you define it, by dates and such, doesn't exist. The universe doesn't know time in that sense, only in order and disorder. Life experiences the dimensions only of which it can perceive; our three dimensions of space and one of time.
The interesting thing is that, if anything, you should be glad that tomorrow, or this past second, won't exist again; if it DID the universe would be so catastrophically impossible to control, or predict, that no life could exist at all.
Or, as dan put it, Time is an illusion.
Yeah I've read about the different arrows of time.
Psychological, entropy, thermodynamic etc etc. I know that dates, and such are a human invention. A way to put order in a disordered universe. But they still represent something, (one revolution of the earth). And I just find it mind blowing, that one specific revolution of the earth and everything that happens in that time period, will never happen again. That it's in the past, and the series of events that happened on that day will never happen again, and it only lives in memory. I just find that mind blowing. It's less the concept of a day i'm fascinated with, more the idea that the past is the past and it will never ever happen again.
Here's a potentially even more mind-blowing question:
If we are travelling along a timeline in some linear fashion, and the stretch which we have put behind us is the past, which as you say, cannot be retrieved, is the future, spanning off in the opposite direction, equally non-existent, or does it possess some concrete certainty? As Nabokov puts it:
Here a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman’s driving license, how did the “Prof” reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since “it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.
Throw him out. Who said I shall die?
I find the perception of time to be pretty amazing.
I wish I could control my perception of time, if I had some type of placebo or something that could force my mind to think that time is without fact going faster. Drugs might be the answer, lots of drugs.
not really
not really
No not really.
Fish knives, however...
Not really.
Surely it would be weirder if that wasn't the case?
No
Much more interesting to think about the existence of the universe, how immense it is and how little we know - how did it start? Big bang? Where did the ingredients for the 'bang' come from, the space for it to exist in (or not to exist in). What if there were no universe, there was just nothing, and no-one ever existed to witness the nothingness - how long did this state exist for and how did it change? Why?
etc, incomprehensible - no surprise people turn to religion for answers.
The big bang created space, there was no space before it
It's impossible to talk about 'before' the big bang. Because the big bang literally created everything, time included. There is no, where did it come from, because it couldn't of come from anywhere. The big bang created everything. There wasn't nothing, because 'nothing didn't exist'. There was only a singularity which exploded. And it's stupid to say what if there was no universe. Because that's impossible. The universe is everything, literally everything. Time, space, matter.
don't be silly
wirdsmith kinda mentions it upthread,
with ``we can only see what's behind us (past) but not what's in front of us (future)``
but even more than that, it's kinda odd that apparently
``the people of Piraha heritage living in the Amazon have no concept of time beyond the present so the concept of future for them doesn’t exist. They don’t even have a word for the concept of “future” in their vocabulary`` and also ``no history beyond living memory.``
No concept of the future existing. Or of the past beyond your own lifetime. Kinda hard to get my head around how that can be.
Oddness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people
Also,
``the Chinese and the Aymara people both associate "ahead = past" and "behind = future". 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, the term used for "tomorrow" and "yesterday" is the same.``
!
Also,
``In an experiment comparing a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80 asked to estimate when they thought 3 minutes had passed, it was found that the younger group's estimate was on average 3 minutes and 3 seconds, while the older group averaged 3 minutes and 40 seconds, indicating a change in the perception of time with age.`` possibly supporting the claim that time seems pass faster as you get older.
isn't that
becuase as you get older you have experienced more time & so each unit of time is a much smaller proportion of your life
ie when you are 6 the week before your birthday seems to take an absolute age, but it is 1/312 (1/52 x 6) of your total life to date, and for about 2 of those years you werent really concsious of anything
whereas when you are 30 it is 1/52 x 30 so 1/1560 of your total life to date
anyway time is an abstract
Oh my fucking god....
...I've got some jaffa cakes in my coat pocket!
slightly wrong, but you're forgiven.
I actually had a ^near-this moment last night
when I remembered I still had half a packet of skittles in my bag. I nearly came and posted it on here, but then I just sat in bed and ate them instead.
1 year since DiSer has had an existential time crisis
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/TimeCrisis.jpg