Time is by very definition linear

time is by very definition linear
prove me wrong

Time is whatever I want it to be.

Prove me wrong.

it's the measurements of events from past to present and then future, how exactly can this be represented by anything other than a straight line?

because time could just be a circle, and a circle is not a straight line. At least, not a continuous straight line

that's where i'm a little confused, what stops it from being a straight line with no beginning or end?

the discontinuity at the "end" that maps "end" back to "beginning".

Think about it like a clock (hh:mm:ss) that goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 and then back to 00:00:00. You've got a linear progression through the different states of the clock, but there's nothing after 23:59:59, so it resets.

You might think that viewing time as cyclical is an anthropomorphic concept because we live on a rotating planet and use circular clocks to keep track of time, but that doesn't mean that the universe doesn't have cyclical time built into it as a matter of principle.

For example, one might hypothesize that the origin of the universe was at thermodynamic equilibrium. Then, after a spontaneous breaking of symmetry, that equilibrium was disturbed and the universe began to evolve. However, the end-state of the universe should also be thermodynamic equilibrium (heat death) and at that point the universe will have essentially reset itself. It won't be as dense as it was before, but it will be uniformly dense again.

If you built a clock that measured time by calculating the current average density of the universe, the hand would begin at one state called uniform density, leave that state, cycle through some different ones, and then eventually return to it's initial configuration: uniform density.

Take DMT and get back to me

maybe i'm not being clear by what i mean by time
i know that how we measure it is a construct but i mean moment to moment existence
everything happening now is a result of everything that's happened in the past, a constant chain of cause and effect
i can't think of anything that can occur as a result of something in the future or that isn't the result of the past

what am i missing here?
for example i can't think of anything

Time doesn't exist. Time is solely a human contstruct used to track each other. 'Time' is a measuring stick, it doesn't actually exist. We live in the eternal present. Everything exists in the present. Time is us trying to put our own hubris into play next to the laws of of physics and the rest of the physical universe. But it is not actually quantifiable in any real form.

The concept of time just proves to me that as a species we are still arrogant and primitive. We'd make much more advances in knowledge if we just went back to the drawing board on basic concepts every once in a while instead of pretending we know how everything works and repressing progress by repressing the most important question a scientist or budding scientist can have "why?". Too many swear by ignorance because the status quo is set and established when really there a lot of base principles that we are wasting our centuries indoctrinating people into believing we know shit.

Before you get out of high school or for that matter middle/primary we should be taught a list of things we don't know everything about to inspire curiosity in young minds to study and create new theories and find new answers.

There's no such thing as a stupid question as every inquiry takes us closer to knowledge. There's ignorance in the concept "we already know". There's people that literally believe that we are at the peak of realistic human achievement and knowledge because they've been conditioned by the scientific community to believe such a thing. The pseudo-superierity mindset many scientists have actually end up holding us back by censoring and neglecting any path straying from their own base knowledge.

Don't know how I got off Time but it doesn't exist.

Did you think you were being interesting when you wrote this drivel?

>we are at the peak of realistic human achievement and knowledge
how is this not the case?
there's always going to be a new 'peak'

is it even possible to understand less about something than you did before?

>i can't think of anything that can occur as a result of something in the future
teleology. Certain physical processes have an end goal in mind, or an unavoidable outcome. Like light always taking the shortest possible amount of time to reach its destination. It's kind of paradoxical to think about the universe happening moment-to-moment, one planck-second after another, when you're aware that the path of a photon is always the most time-efficient one. Of all the possible paths that a light ray takes, it takes the one that takes the least time, every time. In this sense, the universe is optimized. The future isn't immediately determined by the present, it's also affected by the other possible futures.

You actually got me there. I guess I meant to say, people are led to believe there's answers for everything but it's clearly not the case.

I actually meant to stop at the first paragraph. I don't know how the hell I went off like that. Nonetheless I post my thoughts for the sole reason of being challenged so I may further my knowledge and evolve my thinking and do the same for others

let's run with the universe effectively reseting after reaching uniform density again,
surely there would still a governing chain of events (the red arrow)
what am i referring to if it's not universal time?

Very much this. Time is a mass perceptual illusion very much like lights blinking on and off in sequence appearing to "move" in one direction or the other.

It's always now. It's never not now.

>We'd make much more advances in knowledge if we just went back to the drawing board on basic concepts every once in a while instead of pretending we know how everything works and repressing progress by repressing the most important question a scientist or budding scientist can have "why?"

This times 10^123.

Photons do not exist. Light does not "travel" at any "speed".

>The future isn't immediately determined by the present, it's also affected by the other possible futures
how are possible futures a factor?
there are no possible futures, only futures that we think are possible and we only think they're possible because of the sum of all past events

imagine a film, in one scene you may speculate it's 'possible' for something to occur but that's because you're blind to the rest of it
when you reach the end and rewind it, there's not a chance that the outcome of said scene will be any different

possibilites are an illusion
chance is a measurement of our blindness to the future

You made up your fictional game by your fictional rules; you tell us the fictional answer.

Thank you for your heroic attempts to redeem this board.

What you're referring to is definitely universal time, but there's no way to measure how much of that universal time has actually elapsed.

Assuming that the universe begins at uniformity and ends at uniformity, there are certainly a number of distinct non-uniform states that it can take between the states of uniformity. However, all you'd ever be able to know is that you're in one of these particular states, that the other states are possible, and that you're not currently in the other states.

Say, before the "big bang" which was this universe's beginning, everything was uniform. A few of the particles in the uniform state jiggled their way out of place and fucked everything up, leading to the causal chain that eventually resulted in us shitposting MS paint images on the internet. A trillion-trillion-trillion earth-years from now, everything will reach heat death and we'll back at uniformity. And after more time has elapsed, some jiggling will occur, and a new chain of events will result in some new organisms shitposting on a different internet, perhaps about the same subject.

(cont)

You really have no concept of "nothing".

The conclusion we'll possibly reach (and they will also probably reach) is that there's no way to know exactly how many times this has happened. How many times did the universe reset and then regenerate sentient life that shitposted about the origins of the universe? We might be the first iteration. Or we might be the nth iteration. But one thing is clear; there's no clear causal chain of events that happened in the nth iteration that determines which particles jiggle themselves out of place and cause the n+1th iteration, and in that sense there is no event between resets that affects what happens after the reset.

Stay ignorant, pleb. Stick to your animal senses to try to figure out the mysteries of life. Surely that will work out some day.

>I'm ignorant, so therefore everyone else is ignorant, and anyone who says they know things I do not know must be incorrect.

Ignorance + Arrogance. What a combo.

This is going to be the only response you get from me, because there's not really any point in talking to people who claim that existing knowledge is not knowledge while providing no hypothesis in exchange. You're basically saying "I'm taking my ball and going home" before you're even invited to play the game. Not fun.

>Photons do not exist. Light does not "travel" at any "speed"
Alright then. Physical objects travel distances. The amount of time it takes an object to travel a fixed distance is related to its speed. In that sense, distance and time are meaningful constructs that describe the universe, and they are related by speed. If photons and time don't exist you're going to have a very hard time explaining how a laser works. Or how anything works, for that matter. I thought you died a long time ago, Zeno.

And neither do you. Perhaps that's why we have nothing to talk about, and you have nothing interesting to say.

>"you're looking awfully black today, kettle" -pot

>there's no way to know exactly how many times this has happened
at the moment, i agree
that's why i'm saying universal time is completely linear and, from what we know now, infinite on either end
>But one thing is clear; there's no clear causal chain of events...
that's where you've lost me
care to elaborate?
that's one of the few things that we can know for certain because
>literally everything is an example of cause and effect
>there is nothing shown to have broken this rule

There are no particles. There are only fields, fields are not defined, and fields are not particles.

The distance an object is travelling is vastly more immense than you are even now considering.

Sitting still, you are moving millions of miles.

You are correct. You have nothing interesting to say. I have heard the vomit you regurgitate from the sources themselves, and they are overly educated fools lacking wisdom.

And you their protege.

It's more a problem of unique outcomes. Let's say we're currently living in the universe that resulted from State A, which happened after a disruption in the equilibrium known as State 0. Assuming everything that happens in this universe is a direct result of the initial conditions of State 1, we could call this universe Universe 1. And eventually, Universe 1 evolves into a state congruent to State 0. That means everything about Universe 1 is exactly the same as State 0; every particle is uniformly distributed, and each particle has a relative velocity of zero compared to every other particle. In other words, everything is frozen.

Presumably, for the symmetry to be broken, some random fluctuation must occur somewhere. A particle stops having relatively zero velocity with everything else. It moves closer to another particle somehow. Density is no longer uniform. Symmetry has spontaneously been broken.

If the symmetry is broken in exactly the same fashion, and state 1 reoccurs, then everything happens all over again. We wind up shitposting in perpetuity. On the other hand, if the dice fall differently, we might wind up in State 2, and that evolves into Universe 2. Universe 2 will return to state 0, and perhaps become state 1 again, or state 3, or state 183 You get me?

So now the question is, what could possibly happen in State N that would allow you to predict what State N+1 will be? Could the particles in what we think is state 0 have non-negligible velocity?

I think of this like I think of the Collatz Conjecture, or the Syracuse problem, or whatever you want to call it.

Basically, you take any natural number. If it's even, divide it by 2 until it is no longer even. Then, multiply it by 3 and add 1. It's now an even number. Divide it by 2 until it's no longer even. Multiply it by 3, add 1. Repeat. Eventually you'll reach 1, or so the legend goes.

This leads to a situation where for any odd number M, all (2^a)*M will lead you down the same path. So each path branches infinitely, and perhaps they all share one common point: 1. So if I picked any natural number n, the set of all numbers that you could have picked initially that include n is infinite. Some numbers are definitely not on the same path (like 21 and 5), but the set of all numbers that you can pick that eventually reach 1 includes all numbers. And in that sense, 1 is state 0. There's no unique number that you can pick and reach 1. All paths converge there. Furthermore, playing the game with 1 as a starting point results in you continuously oscillating from 1 to 4 to 1 to 4 to 1 to 4 and so on. So if you walked by and observed someone playing the Collatz Conjecture game and asked "what number are you on?" and they said "4" you would have no idea how long they've actually been playing this game, or what number they started playing with. Why? Because sometimes there is no connection between initial condition and teleological destination.