time doesn't exist" doesn't mean it is denying the reality of time or our daily uses and reliance of time. But it is asking rather if time is the objective entity or property of the world, or it is rather internal perception of human mind. — Corvus

In After Finitude, for instance, Meillassoux argues that phenomenology because of its commitment to correlationism is unable to accept the literal truth of scientific statements concerning events happening prior to the emergence of consciousness. When faced with a statement like “The accretion of the Earth happened 4.56 billion years ago”, phenomenology is forced to adopt a two-layered approach. It has to insist on the difference between the immediate, realist, meaning of the statement, and a more profound, transcendental, interpretation of it. It can accept the truth of the statement, but only by adding the codicil that it is true “for us”. Meillassoux finds this move unacceptable and claims that it is dangerously close to the position of creationists (Meillassoux 2008, 18, cf. Brassier 2007, 62). He insists that fidelity to science demands that we take scientific statements at face value and that we reject correlationism. No compromise is possible. Either scientific statements have a literal realist sense and only a realist sense or they have no sense at all (Meillassoux 2008: 17).

With man's insatiable need to make nature conform to his needs and even wants, what are your opinions about our current relationship with nature? Is it becoming better or worse? — Shawn

Imagine a world independent of the mind… — JuanZu

Do you imagine/think that the USA would convert to metric — kazan

Well, maybe they're sacred in some way to Australian Agentines — Arcane Sandwich

Like you, enjoy Albert's art, no interest in that item of Vincent's art. But, many BIG art prize entries don't interest either. Personal taste needs no justification unless it comes with social status/responsibility. — kazan

I'll use materialism for newtonian philosophies and physicalism for the doctrine that physics is the only ontology... — Banno

Physicalism is not the same thing as materialism — Arcane Sandwich

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist. — Corvus

Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Aeon.co

Isn't it natural to presume such a dichotomy?
— Wayfarer

Sure. Is it right? — Banno

You recognise it as a result of having been taught what a right angle is. Right angles area part of your culture as well as a part of the world.

What's problematic is supposed that they are either in the world or they are only in the mind. — Banno

The right angle is there becasue we put it there as much as that it is there in some transcendent fashion. — Banno

The right angles don't EXIST transcendently, nor does any "form". That would entail reifying abstractions. — Relativist

We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense … . They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. — Source

I would not say that the 90 degree angle exists (it's not an object in the world), but rather: a state of affairs exists (the carpenter's square), and that the 90 degree relation is a component in this state of affairs. So in this sense, 90-degree angle does exist- immanently, within the state of affairs. — Relativist

Above all, let's just remember one person that has had personal experience from the courts: Donald Trump himself. He's lost, he's won and he has avoided a lot, yet he gives a lot of importance to courts. A true fascist wouldn't care much about the courts, the important thing would be the raw power, the military, the intelligence services and the security forces. I'm not so sure if Trump really can just fire all the judges and replace them with lawyers totally loyal to him. — ssu

A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued on Jan. 29.

That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance with” it.

Judge McConnell’s ruling marked a step toward what could quickly evolve into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after a social media post by Vice President JD Vance claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” elevating the chance that the White House could provoke a constitutional crisis. ...

But for some of President Trump’s allies, it is the judges ruling against Mr. Trump who are out of bounds.

“Activist judges must stop illegally meddling with the President’s Article II powers,” wrote Mike Davis, who heads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.

Not a table, then. — Banno

Don’t you and I both believe that everything is inseparable from lived experience? — T Clark

According to this view the present is determined by a difference with respect to the past and the future, implied by the absence that is given in them. The present is never identically present but always deferred and postponed (a la Derrida), that is, we cannot deny the absence and non-subjectivity that constitutes it. — JuanZu

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for table-ness? — Banno

There must be something that makes a table what it is, and this we will call tableness, and we will generalise this to other stuff, and say that what makes something what it is is it's essence. — Banno

Identity doesn’t depend purely on form. If it did, then the table would cease to exist the moment it stopped being functional as a table. — Banno

identity seems to track something deeper—perhaps continuity of language, history, and the way we rigidly designate things — Banno

The "form" seems to be a misunderstanding of what happens when we decide to count the newly bonded timber as a table — Banno

Heidegger’s notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Dasein’s being in the world. — Joshs

When the collection of atoms existed as a living tree, it wasn't a table, yet it was the table, just as the wood chips are the table. — Banno

I agree that there is irremediably a type of time that exists as Bergson points out. But I would not be so sure that it is something simply subjective. — JuanZu

We must be very cautious in introducing consciousness as an observer. The two things are not the same. The same has to be said about seeing and measuring, they are not the same. — JuanZu

Initially thought of as having succumbed to European pictorial idioms – and for that reason, to ideas of European privilege over the land – Namatjira's landscapes have since been re-evaluated as coded expressions on traditional sites and sacred knowledge..

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Elon Musk expressed outrage on Saturday after a federal judge in New York temporarily restricted his government cost-cutting team’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems.

In a rapid-fire series of posts on his social media site X, Mr. Musk criticized the decision and called the judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, “an activist posing as a judge.”

Judge Engelmayer said in his decision that there was a risk of “irreparable harm” in allowing Treasury access by political appointees and “special government employees,” which includes Mr. Musk and members of his team. Access to those systems, he said, could leave highly sensitive financial information vulnerable to leaks and hacks.

In a separate statement, the White House called the judge an “activist” and the ruling “absurd and judicial overreach” for effectively locking the treasury secretary out of his role.

“These frivolous lawsuits are akin to children throwing pasta at the wall to see if it will stick,” Harrison Fields, a spokesman, said in a statement. “Grandstanding government efficiency speaks volumes about those who’d rather delay much-needed change with legal shenanigans than work with the Trump administration of ridding the government of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Mr. Musk said on X that the Treasury Department and his team had agreed upon a list of adjustments to be made to the payroll system that were “obvious and necessary changes,” including incorporating a do-not-pay list and mandating categorization codes and notes in comment fields outlining reasons for payments.

In response to a post from the conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who said the Trump administration should consider defying the order if it becomes permanent, Mr. Musk suggested without evidence that the judge’s decision was part of a “super shady” scheme to protect scammers.

The judge’s decision barred Mr. Musk and his team from access to the systems at least until Friday, when a hearing before a different judge was scheduled in the matter. Those workers who have been allowed access since Jan. 20 must “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems,” according to the order.

It was unclear if the Trump administration and Mr. Musk’s team would take steps to comply with the emergency order.

Last month, just after President Trump took office, a top Treasury Department official, David Lebryk, refused to give Mr. Musk’s team access to the government’s payment system. He was placed on administrative leave and later announced his retirement. — NY Times

We usually imagine time as analogous with space. We imagine it, for example, laid out on a line (like a timeline of events) or a circle (like a sundial ring or a clock face). And when we think of time as the seconds on a clock, we spatialise it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units. This is clock time. But in our daily lives we don’t experience time as a succession of identical units. An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends. This is lived time. Lived time is flow and constant change. It is ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. When we treat time as a series of uniform, unchanging units, like points on a line or seconds on a clock, we lose the sense of change and growth that defines real life; we lose the irreversible flow of becoming, which Bergson called ‘duration’.

Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones, and (especially if we’ve heard the song before) future notes may already seem to sound in the ones we’re hearing now. Music is not just a series of discrete notes. We experience it as something inherently durational.

Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Aeon.co

A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.”

The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.

Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the Trump administration from granting access to those categories of officials.

The defendants — President Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Treasury Department — must appear on Feb. 14 before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is handling the case on a permanent basis, Judge Engelmayer said.

The situation could pose a fundamental test of America’s rule of law. If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced. The Constitution says that a president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but courts have rarely been tested by a chief executive who has ignored their orders.

Federal officials have sometimes responded to adverse decisions with dawdling or grudging compliance. Outright disobedience is exceedingly rare. There has been no clear example of “open presidential defiance of court orders in the years since 1865,” according to a Harvard Law Review article published in 2018.

Saturday’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when Mr. Trump had given Mr. Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.”

The lawsuit was joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.

They said the president had given “virtually unfettered access” to the federal government’s most sensitive information to young aides who worked for Mr. Musk, who runs a program the administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

While the group was supposedly assigned to cut costs, members are “attempting to access government data to support initiatives to block federal funds from reaching certain disfavored beneficiaries,” according to the suit. Mr. Musk has publicly stated his intention to “recklessly freeze streams of federal funding without warning,” the suit said, pointing to his social media posts in recent days.

In her own social media post on Saturday, Ms. James reiterated that members of the cost-cutting team “must destroy all records they’ve obtained,” and added: “I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: no one is above the law,” she wrote. ...

Before Mr. Trump took office last month, access was granted to only a limited number of career civil servants with security clearances, the suit said. But Mr. Musk’s efforts had interrupted federal funding for health clinics, preschools and climate initiatives, according to the filing.

The money had already been allocated by Congress. The Constitution assigns to lawmakers the job of deciding government spending. — Judge Halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team

A video falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine appeared to be a clip from E!News, though it never appeared on the entertainment channel.

In fact, the video first surfaced on X in a post from an account that researchers have said spreads Russian disinformation.

Within hours it drew the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted it. So did President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.