(March 2, 2017 at 11:30 am)Nonpareil Wrote:What the article explained (and you apparently missed) was that there are a host of considerations about the philosophy of time to consider that don't say over and over and over that "it's a dimension". As a result of your condescending attitude and lack of ability to articulate an answer to my question "what is time", I did additional research.(March 1, 2017 at 10:44 pm)SteveII Wrote: What do you know. I found an article with like 80 paragraphs on space and time and they mention dimension...5 times! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy...e_and_time
What do you know - it is not a scientific article, and still talks about time as a dimension anyway.
This really is the most pointless objection I've seen anyone make in any discussion for quite some time. You keep citing sources that say exactly what you pretend they don't, then demand that others find for you what you have just read for yourself. All so that you can try to claim that time would not exist without things happening within it, which would remain nonsensical and unsupported even if time were not a dimension, and from there try to make an unjustified leap to pretending that you have evidence for causality holding outside of time.
Literally every step of your argument makes no sense whatsoever.
I find myself in the philosophical camp of rejecting the scientific realism you seem to adhere to. I do not believe that time, space or space-time exists. We observe physical objects, events and processes that stand in relationship to each other and therefore constitute a complex relational structure. Some of these relationship can be described in mathematical terms. So, time is a mathematical structure used to represent temporal relations among events. While physical objects exist, events happen--a change occurs. Change occurs via causality. Therefore, time--the mathematical structure we use to represent temporal relations among events--depends on causality. No causality, not mathematical structure, no time.
Back to your assertion that started this discussion, "in point of fact, the idea of causality holding outside of time is nonsensical, since there is no time in which a cause could possibly precede an effect." Since I have just shown that time is not something we exist in and is somehow an enabler of causality, your assertion falls apart. We can certainly conceive of "another world" in which creation (this world's first event) is not the first event but the result of some prior cause (Leibniz argued this in his Fifth Letter).
So, I have outlined my position why I think I am right. That's how a real discussion progresses. And look, I managed no condescension.