(February 12, 2018 at 9:29 am)Grandizer Wrote:(February 12, 2018 at 9:18 am)polymath257 Wrote: You are right. It doesn't 'start' counting from negative infinity. Instead, it is just always counting. At any point you step down, the counting is going on and has been going on for an infinite amount of time. No beginning, no end.
What you say fits in quite well with the logic of a different way of looking at time (e.g., B-theory of time) because counting, like any act, is not really happening in the intuitive flowing way. There is one instance of you counting the number -4, and the next instance of you counting the number -3, and infinite previous instances of you counting each number previous to -4, and infinite successive instances of you counting each number after -3, provided you are God or something like that and you exist in all these time instances where you can afford to count forever and from eternity.
Again, this is more a problem if we assume the A-theory of time.
The clear question is to what extent the past and the future 'exist'. We are accustomed to consider the future as undetermined and the past as determined, but this seems mostly because we remember the past and not the future. There is also the nature of causality: we allow for influence from the past light cone and not from the future light cone in computing probabilities.
