(April 27, 2016 at 8:52 am)robvalue Wrote: I see no logical problem with an infinite past. The obvious objection is the intuitive one, "well how did we ever get here"?
I have two possible counters to this, off the top off my head:
1) This is taking the naive, linear and "mobile" view of time, and of cause and effect. Our way of viewing what we call time may be entirely the wrong way to look at it. Viewed from the correct perspective, maybe an infinite past makes perfect sense.
2) Our reality may be artificial. It may be generated entirely by some other process in another reality. In this case, an arbitrarily powerful simulator could return to us whatever information we managed to request from the past (using scientific methods of observation). It could generate as far back into the past as is required, just as it could allow the present to continue into the future in an unbounded sense. So this could allow for an artificial unbounded past at least, if not an actual infinite one. This gets around the "how did we get there" problem by virtue of the simulation being started at whatever point the process see fit. All "history" is calculated to be consistent with this.
Your reasons for assuming an infinite past are "Our way of viewing what we call time may be entirely the wrong way to look at it." and "Our reality may be artificial."? is based on what? With this line of reasoning (I use that term loosely) can we know anything? It seems to me that you are merely trying to avoid an infinite regress no matter what the intellectual cost may be.
