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[Serious] Is the Past Real?
#81
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 16, 2022 at 7:44 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:
(October 16, 2022 at 4:36 pm)scamper Wrote:



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Post placed in hide tags in case anyone needs to quote this insanely long drivel in a reply.

Boru

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I think you just won the internet. Smile
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#82
RE: Is the Past Real?
This should convince anyone and everyone that the past is real:

Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 2022 October 17
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#83
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 18, 2022 at 10:23 pm)Jehanne Wrote: This should convince anyone and everyone that the past is real:

Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 2022 October 17

Brilliant point, actually. Media, photo taken or video filmed in the past when viewed later in the future is the evidence that the past is real.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
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#84
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 18, 2022 at 10:45 pm)Tomato Wrote:
(October 18, 2022 at 10:23 pm)Jehanne Wrote: This should convince anyone and everyone that the past is real:

Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 2022 October 17

Brilliant point, actually. Media, photo taken or video filmed in the past when viewed later in the future is the evidence that the past is real.

And since information only goes to the future light cone, we don't get such from the future.

But does that mean the future is NOT real?

And, just because *some* aspects of the past are real, does that mean that *all* aspects are?

Are there some aspects of the future that are real because of their almost certainty?
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#85
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 18, 2022 at 10:23 pm)Jehanne Wrote: This should convince anyone and everyone that the past is real:

Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 2022 October 17

It seems to me the reasons many people think past is not real is of much the same nature as the reasons for believing the Bible is literally true.     These reasons usually can not be defeated by either reason or evidence.


Also, the possibility that the past is not real really can not be excluded.   It is just that the past being real is so much simpler an explanation for why there appears to be a past,  so it deserve to be given a much higher probability estimate.
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#86
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 19, 2022 at 12:36 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:
(October 18, 2022 at 10:23 pm)Jehanne Wrote: This should convince anyone and everyone that the past is real:

Astronomy Picture of the Day -- 2022 October 17

It seems to me the reasons many people think past is not real is of much the same nature as the reasons for believing the Bible is literally true.     These reasons usually can not be defeated by either reason or evidence.

The past can be predicted, though, in a testable manner! Namely, the light echos from a very distant event, or, better yet, through gravitational lensing.
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#87
RE: Is the Past Real?
I have to wonder if you can have a theory of causality consistent with denial of the past. I don't think it's necessarily the case that causality as a concept has to survive, but if it's a fiction, it would be one of the more difficult fictions to give up.
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#88
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 14, 2022 at 11:36 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Personally, I ponder the nature of time often and yet I really don't have a firm position. My symathies lie with presentism because I feel the past is truly gone and to the extent it exists it is in presents ghosts. Then as time goes on those ghosts fade while the set of possible paths that could have led to this moment increases. Then I think, certainly there is the way things actually happened so in some sense the past exists in some immutable way...from a god's eye view so to speak...regardless of whether from an objective reality (i.e. there are past objects) or an Akashic record.

Anyways, I was just curious what others thought about time.

Apologies if this idea was already said because I'm not going to read through 9 pages, but this is relative, no? For us the past has to exist. The present moment is a cumulation of past moments. If everything that ever happens is cause and effect, the present effect must have had prior cause. The prior cause happened prior to the present moment, thus it happened in the past. The past is real.

Now, what I just said is based off of our homo sapien understanding of linear time. It's my understanding that relativity has already shown that there is no distinction between past and future, and all time is happening at once. So in that way I'm not entirely sure the past is "real."
[Image: nL4L1haz_Qo04rZMFtdpyd1OZgZf9NSnR9-7hAWT...dc2a24480e]
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#89
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 19, 2022 at 12:56 pm)Angrboda Wrote: I have to wonder if you can have a theory of causality consistent with denial of the past.  I don't think it's necessarily the case that causality as a concept has to survive, but if it's a fiction, it would be one of the more difficult fictions to give up.

certainly, a theory of casualty unchanged from how we normally understand it works perfectly well in the scenario where our perception of the past is all the artifact of a computer simulation which creates illusion of causality, but the computer itself resides in a real world with an real but entirely different past which we can not perceive, but which also follows the same manner of causality.
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#90
RE: Is the Past Real?
(October 19, 2022 at 11:24 am)polymath257 Wrote:
(October 18, 2022 at 10:45 pm)Tomato Wrote: Brilliant point, actually. Media, photo taken or video filmed in the past when viewed later in the future is the evidence that the past is real.

And since information only goes to the future light cone, we don't get such from the future.

But does that mean the future is NOT real?

And, just because *some* aspects of the past are real, does that mean that *all* aspects are?

Are there some aspects of the future that are real because of their almost certainty?

This cone thing is something I don't understand, but I imagine it's a scientific concept against an omniscient witchy deity as well as human woowoo psychics.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
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