RE: Is the Past Real?
October 23, 2022 at 7:00 pm
(This post was last modified: October 23, 2022 at 7:50 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(October 15, 2022 at 3:51 am)Belacqua Wrote: There are a number of different traditions (including, I think, some physicists) which say that everything exists all at once. They say that time is an artefact of how we perceive things. Time is among the mental phenomena, like color, rather than being in the noumena.
I don't understand this at all.
It's been a while since I've gathered my thoughts on time, but I tend to fall under this tradition.
It's not so much that everything exists all at once in my view, but rather that events are all that exists. When an event occurs, our minds are perceiving change of one form or another—an object is being repositioned, reshaped, or undergoing some other kind of transformation. Multiple events can occur in succession and have a duration, but time itself is a psychological abstraction derived from the observation of change.
In other words, the notion of time becomes meaningless inside an empty room where nothing happens and nothing changes.