Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
I think one of the most interesting philosophical questions about the concept of time is whether it exists on its own. “Common sense” suggests that space and time exist as if always and independently of things, but what kind of” time ” can we talk about in an absolutely empty space? Moreover, can we talk about time without an observer? After all, when we talk about time, we mean a certain line from the “past” through the “present” to the “future”, but the ” present “is, in essence, the moment of existence of an observer, for whom the” past “exists in memories, and the” future ” – in plans, expectations, forecasts.
It is also known that the concept of time is constructed culturally and is not necessary to describe reality. For example, the Amondawa Indians, whom the researchers first met in the 1980s, have no idea at all about abstract “time” and the corresponding words in their language.
In philosophy, this question was formulated in a classical form by Kant, who called space and time “a priori forms of sensuality”, that is, pre-experiential “templates” by which our perception works. In other words, in the philosophy of Kant and subsequent philosophers who developed his ideas, space and time do not exist “objectively”, but are only a way of our perception, a tool with which human consciousness structures a chaotic set of individual stimuli delivered by the senses.
Different philosophical trends give different answers to the question of the essence of time. The philosophy of dialectical materialism considers time to be a form of existence of “developing objective reality(matter),” which consists in the sequence of unfolding of material processes, their duration and development, i.e. in the sequential change of phenomena and states.
By itself, the term “time” does not make sense. Meaning appears only when the subject observes a dynamically changing process and, if he intends to understand it, then, regardless of his desire, there is a need to differentiate it at the expense of time indicators – metronomes, bells on the fleet – that is, any semblance of a clock. Thus, time is a purely abstract concept associated with the description of any dynamic process-outside of this, the term “time” loses its meaning. This means that there is no temporary movement either to the future or to the past, if you do not start the corresponding dynamic process !. For a person, a journey into the past and future can only be related to their own biology and only during their own life. For the human community, it is a chain of social phenomena and calendar events. For nature, which has the deepest stretches both into the past and the future-this is their reverse restart, or acceleration of all processes in it, so as to be in the past and future-everything is simple !. If someone wants to be in the past, then the flag is in his hands, if he, for example, finds rejuvenating apples !. At the same time, everyone else around him, along with nature, should also be rejuvenated with him – there is no other way to the past !. There are many speculations with the concept of “time”, when there are abstruse theories about time travel and other manipulations with it, but they arise in isolation from the essence of the concept of “time”, only as one of the measures of dynamic processes !!.
The essence of time is the alternation of causes and effects with simultaneous movement in space, which is the “extension of a shape-changing object” in space. The mentioned extension is cyclic, but not in the form of a circle in the plane, but in the form of a three-dimensional spiral.
Time is a rotation, around a single center, like the universe, like a galaxy. Kali yantra (kala-rotation, time). The essence of time is repetition, a cycle. And the consequence of time can be a rotation in a spiral to the highest (development), or a rotation in a spiral, down (degradation). That is, creation and destruction. And where a person spends his time depends only on him.
In my opinion, philosophy does not and cannot provide answers to metaphysical questions. Rather, philosophy is a necessary condition for the possibility of constructing certain scientific models.
Throughout the intellectual history of mankind, many questions have been asked about the ontology of time. In modern philosophy, there are several main points of view on each of them.
What is time? Is it something real that exists regardless of the change, or just a measure of the change? Substantial theories of time claim that time is a real substance. Despite the fact that change is necessary to measure time, time itself always flows – it is something like a “container” containing events, but existing independently of them. Relational theories of time do not agree with this. According to them, the substratum of time is change, and without change, time does not exist.
The British Hegelian philosopher John McTaggart, in his article “Unreality of Time” (“Unreality of time”, 1908), tried to justify, for example, the unreality, illusory nature of time from idealistic positions, but much more important for the philosophy of time are the concepts of “A-series” and “B-series” (A-series, B-series). These are two different methods of understanding how events are arranged in time. First, it is possible to determine the location in time according to such properties as” in the future”,” in the present/now “and” in the past ” (A-properties) – that is, implying a temporal perspective. You can imagine a series of positions extended in time from the past to the future, along which the “observer point” moves into the future (or a fixed observer point along which the series moves into the past). Thus, events move for the observer from the future, through the present, and into the past. This is the A-series. Second, you can define a temporal location as the ratio of two absolute temporal points (“earlier than”, “simultaneously with”, “later than” – the so-called B-relationship) – for example, “on Wednesday, July 8, 2015”, “after the New Year holidays in 2014”, etc. This is the B-series. Almost all modern theories that consider time adhere to one of these positions (A-theory or B-theory).
How do the present, past, and future differ from each other? According to “presentism”, objects exist only in the present – the past and future are not real.”Eternalism” claims that everything really exists-the present, the past, the future. Eternalists believe that if we talk about the existence of objects, then temporal coordinates do not matter at all – objects separated by time exist in the same way as those separated by space. “4-dimensionalism” and “block-universe theory”are closely related to eternalism. 4-dimensionalism considers existing objects as four-dimensional, where time is something like another dimension of space (more precisely, space-time). The theory of the block universe-roughly speaking, deals with the same thing, considering time as another dimension of mathematical space (“The views on space and time that I will present sprang from the soil of experimental physics, and this is their strength. They are radical. From now on, space itself and time itself are doomed to fade into the shadows, and only the union between them will preserve the understanding of independent reality. … Three-dimensional geometry becomes a chapter in four-dimensional physics. “- G. Minkovsky, “Space and Time”).
The” growing block theory ” (or growing past) states that the present and ever-growing past are real, but the future does not exist and is only potentially possible.
How do objects have an identity in time? “Endurantism” states that each object exists in one or another temporal location entirely, as if “moving” through time. “Perdurantists” believe that objects extend in time exactly as they do in space – each instantiation of an object in certain temporal coordinates is its “temporal part”, and the object itself is the sum of all temporal parts. Figuratively speaking, each existing object is a four-dimensional “worm” in space-time.
It can be noted that A-theorists are naturally characterized by presentism/theory of the growing past and endurantism, while B – theorists are characterized by eternalism and perdurantism.
We have only briefly considered a few of the philosophical questions concerning time and their approaches, since this is a huge topic, strongly related to physics and other sciences.