(January 19, 2015 at 12:53 pm)Rhythm Wrote: 1000 years. Mostly because a lightyear is defined as the distance that light travels in a single year. If it travelled 1000 of those, it would have taken 1000 years
(oversimplification of the situation, of course - might not have taken a straight-line course - the bodies are in motion - etc)

I think you missed the part where I asked how much time passes in the photon's frame of reference?

2nd question, from the photon's "perspective," what is the distance from the Sun to that distant moon (1000 light years away as measured from Earth's perspective)?

From the frame of reference of the photon, if the stated distance is 1k lightyears, the time of travel is 1k years. I think you've taken time-dilution to mean something that it doesn't. You're most likely asking me how many years in -our- frame of reference will that 1k years in the photons frame of reference be.

You stated that the distance was 1k lightyears, I can only go with what you've given me. If you want earths perspective (or to account for lensing or motion of the bodies) you'll have to set two concrete examples. Two actual bodies as observed from earth, and at a particular point in time as viewed from earth, not some question-in-a-vacuum. Otherwise, I couldn't say, because the variables are undefined.

It is maybe mathematically more consistent to talk about the proper time (squared), which can be calculated for any trajectory without encountering any infinities. It corresponds to the total time elapsing for the traveller when having gone through this trajectory. For photons, this is exactly zero.

(January 19, 2015 at 12:49 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Let me make very clear that I'm not talking about the will of God or anything here, nor heading in that direction. I'm only talking about the relationship between determinism, causality, and the local experience of human free will.

You've referred frequently to the human perspective as an affirmation of truth, but does this really make sense? It seems to me we can infer from experience only the relationship BETWEEN people and things or events, and not the nature of those things and events themselves. So clearly, the relationship between people and time is that we experience a dynamic environment, and the particular nature of that dynamism is (for example) the mechanical interaction of objects in space: inertia, gravity, etc. But just because I'm sitting at the back of a spaceship watching new things fly past me doesn't mean that the things I'm about to experience aren't already there.

Why is it that you feel the experience of free will is invalidated by the philosophical idea of determinism, but that other experiences, like the sensation of passage through time, necessarily cannot be? Is there really a necessary separation in these categories of experience, or is it something else? Is it perhaps that determinism waves away some of the apparent paradox implicit in free will (and, more broadly, sentience)? Has determinism, then, become a kind of scientific philosopher's stone, like the magical God which resolves paradox without itself needing to be considered one? Because I very much do still think the existence of a subjective perspective in an objective universe is paradoxical.

I'm suspicious of any answer which claims to be the right one, because it is at odds with my own experience-- that answers usually resolve to perspective rather than to truth. You can take yin and I can take yang, and we can chase each other's tails for a while, but in the end, there's always that little bit of irony there-- because all the learning you've done, and are doing, which leads you to take the position of determinism, has been done free-willfully by you. If someone calls you up for a beer, you don't after all tell them, "It is inevitable that I finish this book about causality," do you?

And that's the thing, for me. People claim to have learned something about reality, but then they consistently, and unapologetically, continue to act in a way which contradicts that knowledge. Why is this? I propose it's mainly because people sense that their intellectual conclusions don't very well represent their actual experience of life.

There's a lot of hand waving here. It was good until it started winding down. Given that I'm sure you're familiar with the literature, I'm curious as to why you'd think the subjective experience of acting would feel anything but free when the conditions are nowhere near transparent and could perhaps never be so. It seems like a fairly disposable argument, something akin to, "Well, it looks like the Sun rises from the ocean and travels over the earth and then sinks back into the water where it travels underground and returns to its starting point, hence separating night and day." In fact, it might be ironic that I'm arguing time isn't illusory merely because it's relative while you're arguing that free will isn't illusory because perhaps in some sense it's absolute. Anyway, I'm open to different interpretations of time but to dissolve it into nothing but perspective as it exists only between observer and observed makes zero sense in an evolutionary history of subjective beings. So, there's also that. You've hit on something when you wonder if determinism is like a "scientific philosopher's stone," but rather it's more Darwinism that has been described the "consciousness-raiser" and "universal acid." This is a slight digression but I might wonder what change could occur for the subjective experience to begin if there is no time. Yet even in our own lifetimes we witness our perspective of time emerge from a time measurable with arithmetic. Perhaps we're at a different question altogether but it's almost as if you want to, like some do with consciousness, just pretend it really isn't there.

(January 19, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Alex K Wrote: It is maybe mathematically more consistent to talk about the proper time (squared), which can be calculated for any trajectory without encountering any infinities. It corresponds to the total time elapsing for the traveller when having gone through this trajectory. For photons, this is exactly zero.

Finally.

So, it's clear that what we all here already know about relativity-- i.e. that it's relative-- leads us to something like a paradox. While that photon was traveling, did time pass or didn't it? Yes it did, and no it didn't. (and this is directed at Pickup more than you, btw) The difference isn't the reality of changes in state in a universal sense, but rather their relation to an "observer" (and I use this word loosely here).

So am I wrong in stating that for a travelling photon which never encounters another body, no time passes between that photon's release from a body and the end of the universe?

---

(January 19, 2015 at 2:32 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Anyway, I'm open to different interpretations of time but to dissolve it into nothing but perspective as it exists only between observer and observed makes zero sense in an evolutionary history of subjective beings.

Okay, let me ask you this admittedly philosophical question. Do all beings hear A=440Hz in the same way? I'd argue this wouldn't make evolutionary sense: a very tiny being, like a bug, can hear higher pitches but not the lower ones: those it can only feel, because its ears are (again I'm assuming) too tiny to really manage the longer wavelengths of deeper sounds. It can also react incredibly fast to moving objects (like an incoming angry hand). This makes me suspect that the insect experiences time differently than we do: i.e. that time is "slowed down" for it. Now, let's imagine a massive being, the size of a galaxy. Due to limitations of the speed of light, it would be responding to events that happen over many millenia, and things like A=440Hz would be so trivial as to be imperceptible to it. It would "hear" the vibrations of A=.000000000001Hz, let's say, as a kind of middle tone; and now it is WE who can process this signal only mathematically.

On paper, both A=440Hz and A=880Hz and A.000000000001Hz look exactly identical; it is only the time scale relative to some other event by which those frequencies are differentiated meaningfully. But without a subjective observer, it seems to me that there IS no other event by which to meaningfully "plot" the function of a wave. So how would you represent a sine wave when you cannot establish the time scale of the function? You can't. It is the framework of a subjective entity by which the math is "rendered" into a specific rate or speed.

In fact, I think it's possible that may even be what subjectivity is: not a happenstance byproduct of complex mechanical interactions, but a kind of node by which events at different scales are brought into relation with each other.

Quote:Perhaps we're at a different question altogether but it's almost as if you want to, like some do with consciousness, just pretend it really isn't there.

Time is clearly there, since we experience its passage. However, let me coin a new word, "time-ness." I'd say that red, the frequency of light from the sun, exists regardless of a human observer, but red-ness, the experience of color, is a human function.

Time, as the dimension or framework along (or in) which events are organized, clearly exists. However, in determinism, I don't think time and the experience of it are necessarily the same thing: i.e. a one-directional arrow, with origin at one point of the line, and the end at the other.

(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Okay, let me ask you this admittedly philosophical question. Do all beings hear A=440Hz in the same way? I'd argue this wouldn't make evolutionary sense: a very tiny being, like a bug, can hear higher pitches but not the lower ones: those it can only feel, because its ears are (again I'm assuming) too tiny to really manage the longer wavelengths of deeper sounds. It can also react incredibly fast to moving objects (like an incoming angry hand). This makes me suspect that the insect experiences time differently than we do: i.e. that time is "slowed down" for it. Now, let's imagine a massive being, the size of a galaxy. Due to limitations of the speed of light, it would be responding to events that happen over many millenia, and things like A=440Hz would be so trivial as to be imperceptible to it. It would "hear" the vibrations of A=.000000000001Hz, let's say, as a kind of middle tone; and now it is WE who can process this signal only mathematically.

On paper, both A=440Hz and A=880Hz and A.000000000001Hz look exactly identical; it is only the time scale relative to some other event by which those frequencies are differentiated meaningfully. But without a subjective observer, it seems to me that there IS no other event by which to meaningfully "plot" the function of a wave. So how would you represent a sine wave when you cannot establish the time scale of the function? You can't. It is the framework of a subjective entity by which the math is "rendered" into a specific rate or speed.

You could only do so, hypothetically, of course. That doesn't mean that the objects we measure behave differently when we are observing them; it means our observation can vary relative to position and still offer a true account. The meaning we impose on the world when giving an orderly exposition of it IS illusory in the sense that signs are only representations and can never capture the whole essence of the external world, but that doesn't imply that what sense can accomplish isn't descriptive of reality as it actually is.

(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: In fact, I think it's possible that may even be what subjectivity is: not a happenstance byproduct of complex mechanical interactions, but a kind of node by which events at different scales are brought into relation with each other.

Time is clearly there, since we experience its passage. However, let me coin a new word, "time-ness." I'd say that red, the frequency of light from the sun, exists regardless of a human observer, but red-ness, the experience of color, is a human function.

Time, as the dimension or framework along (or in) which events are organized, clearly exists. However, in determinism, I don't think time and the experience of it are necessarily the same thing: i.e. a one-directional arrow, with origin at one point of the line, and the end at the other.

I guess I'm not sure what basis you could have for demonstrating this.

(January 20, 2015 at 1:08 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:

(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Time, as the dimension or framework along (or in) which events are organized, clearly exists. However, in determinism, I don't think time and the experience of it are necessarily the same thing: i.e. a one-directional arrow, with origin at one point of the line, and the end at the other.

I guess I'm not sure what basis you could have for demonstrating this.

It seems to me trivially obvious that subjective experience of time varies widely from person to person. To a bored small child, an hour is an eternity. To an adult having tons of fun, it zips by like nothing.

Whether or not time can be accurately modeled as a ray |--------------> rather than as a line <---------------> is another issue entirely. causality certainly seems linked to time, but then there's all that pesky shit going on in particle physics which appears to blur the line between cause and effect.

(January 19, 2015 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(January 19, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Alex K Wrote: It is maybe mathematically more consistent to talk about the proper time (squared), which can be calculated for any trajectory without encountering any infinities. It corresponds to the total time elapsing for the traveller when having gone through this trajectory. For photons, this is exactly zero.

Finally.

So, it's clear that what we all here already know about relativity-- i.e. that it's relative-- leads us to something like a paradox.

There's no paradox...

Quote: While that photon was traveling, did time pass or didn't it? Yes it did, and no it didn't. (and this is directed at Pickup more than you, btw)

There is not the time in relativity, so the question is meaningless unless you prescribe which time you are interested in.

Quote: The difference isn't the reality of changes in state in a universal sense, but rather their relation to an "observer" (and I use this word loosely here).

I have literally no idea what you mean by any of that.

Quote:So am I wrong in stating that for a travelling photon which never encounters another body, no time passes between that photon's release from a body and the end of the universe?

It would be the standard interpretation to say that no time passes when one follows the trajectory of the photon. This is consistent with the fact that arbitrarily little time passes for observers moving between two points if they are travelling arbitrarily close to the speed of light. As a limiting case, you have light speed with no time passing.

As an arbitrary numerical example, if you have two stars which are one lightyear apart as seen in their rest frame, a traveller on a spaceship moving at 0.9999999999999995 times the speed of light will pass by these two stars within little more than one second as measured by her on the spaceship. Of course, the pilot of the spaceship will see the two stars moving past her with only 0.9999999999999995 times the speed of light, and they will look as if they are merely 300000 km apart instead of a light year. (So from the venture point of a photon, all of the universe is in one place and it takes no time to travel from A to B. You might call this a paradox, but it merely tells you that going to the rest frame of a photon is a limiting case, a pathological choice of coordinates.)

However you want to interpret that, fact is that the outside observer in the spaceship example will have measured one year passing during this trip, while the pilot has measured one second.

Stoopid image Filterz!

(January 20, 2015 at 10:32 am)Alex K Wrote: There is not the time in relativity, so the question is meaningless unless you prescribe which time you are interested in.

You're stealing my line. I'm saying that the universe as a whole has no reference framework to compare against.

Quote:It would be the standard interpretation to say that no time passes when one follows the trajectory of the photon. This is consistent with the fact that arbitrarily little time passes for observers moving between two points if they are travelling arbitrarily close to the speed of light. As a limiting case, you have light speed with no time passing.

Okay, I'm trying to determine what happens to calculations when there's no reference frame. In the case of a photon traveling very far (say a million light years by Earth measurements), you have one frame of reference in which no time has passed at all, and one in which a million years have passed. Who's "right"? Both/neither/meh whatever.

I'm saying for "change" to occur in any measured sense, you must have not only a reference, but a subjective reference, to "pin down" what it means for something to happen at a particular rate. Without this reference point, all you really have is interrelated data-- but do events play out infinitely fast, or infinitesimally fast, without that subjective reference point? What's the "rate of unfolding" of universal events?

In a deterministic universe, that subjective reference is discarded as an irrelevant byproduct of mechanistic interactions. The problem is that in this model there's now no standard by which the "rate" of change in the universe could meaningfully be measured. Time ceases to have any meaning, and so, therefore, does causality. Basically, without anyone there to witness the measured relationships in timed events, time collapses into a singularity.