= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (89)
When reading the first paragraph I stopped to think what my intuition about 'orderings of events in time' is. Before being primed by actual proposals (I luckily didn't know A vs. B beforehand and the naming doesn't give anything away). I thought about some events today and yesterday, their ordering and was mindful of how I phrased it and the tempos used. I didn't came to any clear theory of time this way.
To be specific I used phrases like "yesterday I did A and then I did B", "today I first did C and now do D", "later I will do E and then I will do F". During this mental speech I observed it and noticed that almost always two events are put in an X-before-Y or X-after-Y relation.
Then I went back to the wiki-article and read is sentence by sentence to avoid revealing more than absolutely needed to arrive at a forking of my mental model in two by the differentiations provided.
The result? I didn't see any contradiction between both theories and actually don't find any more compelling. Rather they provide different views on the phenomenon and perception of time. Both aspects were present in my model and mental process.
Maybe this view results from the process applied. Maybe it is because my mental model was rich enough initially. And maybe it is as in calefs comment that people with a computational background are used to dealing with both views.
Thanks for this data point.
In the post, I unthinkingly used "A-theory" and "B-theory" as code for "presentism" and "eternalism". I'd be curious to know how you react to the positions in these articles.
In kind of the same way as calef again: It is a question of definitions or what is meant by 'exist'. A psychological artifact or a reality modelling artifact. There is not really a contradiction. I think philosophy sometimes beats these things to death. They should rather right these wrong questions.
Do you think there can be an equivalence between a theory that says time passes,and one that says it doesn't?
There are lots of dual theories of things. Esp. in math. Think about geometry: In triagulation you can describe areas by their borders or by the centers. Voronoi triangulation converts vetween the 'views'. Implementations of both approaches have different performance characteristics.
How is that applicable to this particular case?
A theory of time which models time as changing will use entities to represent 'now' and 'change'-events, whereas a static-time theory will designate entities to points in time. The former is better suited to answer questions about now (and implementations built upon that will be faster on this kind of query) whereas the latter is better suited to answer questions about fixed points in time or compare these (and implementations based on this will be faster on these operations).
But that isn't a duality in the mathematical sense, because there is no translation of change tfrom the dynamic scheme to the static scheme: it's "horses for courses".
Yes, in a vaguely comparable way that a different "theory" says the tree in the forest makes no sound, and another says that it does. The verbal problem in your example would center on "passes".
Do you think there is an equivalence in this case?
I dunno, are we talking about A-theory, or presentism, and which version? I'm ready to agree that there are at least some ways of formulating A-theory that don't have a B-equivalent.
Do you think there can be an equivalence between a theory that says time passes,and one that says it doesn't?