...so cannot change temporal position. — Luke

Of course. That is true of spatial positions too. If a spatial coordinate is fixed, it by definition cannot be changed. That does not mean that an object cannot have length, for instance. Other spatial coordinates exist too.

As I've repeatedly asked: what is it that changes temporal location? — Luke

I think you need to reword the question then. I can't make sense of something "changing temporal location" beyond "existing at multiple times". They means the same thing to me. Can you differentiate them for us?

- yes, but when you suggest that thoughts are material and actually everything is matter, you should come up with some really good arguments. — Eugen

A good argument to me is the absence of any posited immaterial realm that makes any difference. A more thorough argument might go like this:

If an immaterial component of the universe exists, it must either interact with the material component or not.

If it interacts, then there exists some coupling between the material and immaterial worlds, and the material world must have some property such that this coupling is possible.

The success of science depends on the material world behaving in a predictable, deterministic or probabilistic way such that any effect in the material world can be understood to have a material cause, irrespective of whether it has a material or immaterial mediator.

Whether that mediator is material or immaterial, we can construct a theoretical model of it and give it a name, such as the "Piggs field", and use this model to make predictions of mediated material effects from material causes. If the model is good, then belief in something in nature, whether material or immaterial, corresponding to that model is justified.

If the Pigg's field, or whatever we called it, helps to explain the nature of the material world, it is by definition a physical thing, that is, it falls under the definition of the physical or material universe.

If the immaterial world does not mediate cause and effect within the material world then, whether it exists or not, belief in it is unjustified.

Materialism, as in belief in no immaterial worlds, is then justified.

It's not the spatial position which is at issue but the object itself. — Luke

This difference in the spatial position at different temporal positions is movement though. It has to be at issue!

The same temporal part of a 4d object cannot be "defined for more than one time", so cannot change temporal position. — Luke

I see. Yes. The temporal coordinate at one time is fixed. That is a truism. So what?

That's the problem with your kinematic definition, kinematics deals with the effects of motion, not motion itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not my definition, blame Galileo! :rofl: But there is no problem. It does not describe effects of motion, it describes motion. An effect of the motion of the teacup is that it is now on the floor. The motion of the teacup was the variation of its position with time.

When I see a thing moving, such as a car going past me on the road, I see it as moving. I do not see it as having been in one position, and now in another position. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's quite the strangest thing I've heard in a while. I will refer you to yourself:

But I don't believe that you really experience motion in this way. So I think you are either lying about how you experience motion, for the sake of supporting some metaphysical position, or you haven't ever really thought about how you experience motion, and so you are just fabricating this claim. — Metaphysician Undercover

If that's your level of argumentation, we cannot trust that each other are trying their best to explain what seems true to them. Further discussion would be pointless. I'm not having a go; you've described exactly how I feel about everything you have said. I just would have persevered and tried to reconcile our different experiences of motion, or perhaps got a consensus on another thread.

That's not quite right. I like it, but it's not really what I'm getting at. — Luke

Okay, sorry.

If a 3D part cannot be defined for more than one time (per Eternalism), then change in temporal position cannot be calculated and neither can motion. — Luke

Ignoring the parenthetical, sure, yes. I assume by "3D" part you mean spatial coordinates. This is the same as saying "All positions of all objects are fixed". I would agree that, assuming that, motion is impossible. But eternalism does not say this. It says that all of positions of all objects, past, present, and future, exist. It does not follow that the position of an object at a point in the future must equal the position of the object at a point in the past. Any difference is motion, even just judicious choice of reference frame.

- I don't know much about dualism and I do not think that if dualism is wrong. therefore materialism has to be right. — Eugen

Sure, there could be an immaterial monism, a tri-ism, a quadism... Whether materialism is likely right must be assessed on its own terms.

the problem is that it hasn't proven its own base statements and it is not capable to do so — Eugen

You will find that with anything. Proof is never forthcoming. One cannot disprove a fictitious, undetectable thing and therefore one cannot prove the absence of such a thing. When nature appears inconsistent with materialism, reasonable people will have to look to other than matter to explain it. Reasonable people have no problem with this. They do have a problem with insisting that one must believe in vague, malleable, or undefined things that cannot be proven or disproven.

science will only highlight the material translation of thoughts, perceptions, experiences, pain, happiness, etc. but it will never go at the core of these things — Eugen

Yes it will, if the core of these things is found to be a material system (which it almost certainly will be). You are making the argument based on ignorance I described above: an anti-materialism of the gaps. You are seeking refuge for anti-materialism not in the materialist interpretation of explained things, but in the lack of materialist explanation for as-yet-unexplained things. It's kind of ironic, really, since it recognises materialism as the explainer. A more compelling argument might be for why a materialist interpretation of an explained thing must be wrong, which typically takes us into taste. If you can see why these sorts of arguments might be unattractive to people, you can deduce the answer to your question "Why is materialism so popular?"

I'd like to hear a genuine argument that only what we can see and physically measure exists — Eugen

Because the universe behaves as if it were so, and because, until it behaves otherwise, the assumption of additional degrees of freedom in the universe is unjustified, unfalsifiable, arbitrary, and meaningless. This is not a proof that only matter exists, but rather a reason why the assumption is valid. The popularity of materialism does not depend on its being proven.

I've argued that no 3D part is defined for more than one time. — Luke

Right, I think I see what you're saying. If the path of the 4D object could be written as something like P(x,y,z,t), i.e. whether the object is present at a given spatial+temporal 4D position, you're saying that essentially P(x,y,z,t)=P(x,y,z), i.e. time is irrelevant in 4D. This would be like the Earth in Huw Price's picture. If every object were like this, this would be a 3D universe with a pointless fourth dimension added with no purpose. It would not correspond to motion as we perceive it or mean it in a Galilean sense.

You've replied that what is defined for more than one time is the 4D whole. — Luke

Yes, exactly. And if it is also defined for more than one position, it is moving, i.e. "it is at some times moving".

You can't measure just a part of that whole to derive a value for motion, because the part is neither defined for more than one time nor what changes temporal position. — Luke

You're right to say I can't measure motion in a 4D object at a time without considering times before and/or after. In fact, to fully and accurately assess the motion of an object at a given point of time, I have to consider the object at all times, i.e. it is a field property of the 4D object, not a point on the object. I have been part of disagreement as to whether this means that something like velocity at some time t is a property of the 4D object at time t (local), the vicinity of t (semilocal), or the entire object (ultra-nonlocal).

The way I measure it in 4D is semilocal, but nature is thankfully not confined to human approximations of it. The way I experience it subjectively is also semilocal, that is: in determining which direction a bird is flying in, I need only consider the recent positions of the bird, not the bird's entire history.

Irrespective of how we calculate it, and irrespective of whether we can say that, at a given time, the velocity of an object is a property of that object at that point in time, we can say that, at that point in time, the object has velocity, and therefore is in motion at that time, i.e. velocity, however we get to it, is a time-dependent as well as spatially-dependent concept.

That was our agreed definition of motion. — Luke

If I agreed that velocity is undefined at a particular time, I did so in hideous error. I believe the definition of motion I stuck to that of kinematics, for which motion at a given time is well-definable.

I'm not fully understanding your point. That said, given the first definition of free will you wrote, do you still think that it is compatible with determinism? — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes, absolutely. I am free to choose, that is: I am the agent selecting the course of action of whatever potential actions occur to me, and to realise that action.

The question of whether this is deterministic is the question of how I choose. The situation I am in is fixed. In that situation, I must identify a most-attractive outcome. With respect to that outcome I must think of various potential actions. And of those actions, I must assess which is the most likely to realise that outcome. There is no part of this that is necessarily non-deterministic unless one has assumed non-determinism elsewhere.

Caveat: not all human behaviour is rational. Free will discussions usual focus on rational decision-making and I have followed suit.

Materialism did not invent, but appropriated all the elements of science that do not actually belong to it and denies absolutely everything that science cannot prove. — Eugen

But that isn't relevant. You are asking why materialism is popular today. The observation that dualist philosophy is useless and under-defined, while materialistic science is useful and meaningful, is sufficient, whichever one most influenced the other.

Not all scientists are materialists, and its interesting that, like in philosophy, the necessity of more than matter and energy to explain things like mind always comes down to taste. Everything that has been usefully and meaningfully explained has been explained materialistically. That is, dualism depends not on its power to describe, its own internal logic, or even that it defines its terms, rather dualism depends always on ignorance. If and when consciousness is fully understood materialistically, the effect on dualism will be to either insist on some new, mystical, ill-defined component that isn't evident, or to just stop mentioning consciousness when insisting that not everything is material and therefore materialism fails.

For some, this is attractive, that ignorance is seen as a gateway to introduce magical things: the God of the gaps, or some dualism of the gaps. I think for an increasing number of people, such scramblings reek of desperation. It's certainly not a compelling argument. I'd like to hear a genuinely compelling argument for dualism. As far as I've seen, they've always been assertions of taste, based on ignorance, based on personal anecdote, or contingent on the existence of hypothetical and often intrinsically contradictory things like p-zombies.

Does this imply that the 4D Earth moves? But that would reintroduce the problem that a second temporal dimension is required. — Luke

No, because motion is differences of spatial positions over corresponding differences in temporal positions, and both spatial and temporal positions are present in 4D. It just doesn't look like a moving thing in 3D. It looks like a wiggly or slanted line.

Refer again to the image used by Huw Price. This is, in our everyday sense, a static image: the image does not appear to us to move. But it is an image of the Moon moving around the Earth. That motion is represented in the picture (a helical 4D Moon).

Also, since in 4D time is just another dimension, I do encourage you to consider the mountain analogue. A mountain's slope is a spatial gradient just as motion in 4D is a spatial gradient. The only real difference is that the former is a gradient with respect to another spatial dimension. Would you say that the mountain is flat? This is analogous to saying that 4D worldlines are also flat, which is what the absence of motion in 4D looks like (viz. the Earth in Huw's picture).

I think that's ridiculous. My tea cup is sitting on the table right now, and it used to be on the counter. So you say my cup is in motion because it's not where it used to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well there's a couple of ridiculous things there. The first is the straw man that changes in position between different times in the past describe a velocity that must still hold true now, i.e. that there are no forces.

The second ridiculous thing applying this straw man to: "My tea cup is sitting on the table right now, and it used to be on the counter" to imply that it did not move.

My everyday experience of something moving now is based on recent and current sense data on the positions of the thing. If the positions change, it is in motion. How the positions change allow me to estimate its velocity. The true motion might be qualitatively and quantitatively different from that estimate. However all I have to is wait a moment and I'll build a better model of its motion. In short, I build up a model of the thing's motion by building up time series of its positions and analysing their differences: kinematics!

To be in a position is not to be in motion, the two are contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't say it was, but their not contradictory. Unless knowledge stalled millennia ago.

Sure it can, because it's bigger than the fly. A big thing doesn't need to know where the small thing is going, to get in the small thing's way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Now that IS ridiculous. In the thing's way... no clue there? :rofl:

In Gallilean motion, a body does not move from one time to another? — Luke

Correct. There's no concept of having a temporal velocity through time in classical kinematics. It does not preclude the possibility, it's just an irrelevancy, since there's no rotation possible from time to space directions or vice versa in Galilean motion.

I can't say that motion is impossible by definition, but you can say that motion is possible by definition? That's hardly sporting. — Luke

I didn't say that. You can say eternalist motion is impossible by definition. As I said to MU, if that's your definition, then I will agree with you that eternalist motion is impossible, a truism. But then you're not talking about everyday kinematics in which motion is positions changing with time, and your entire argument is then circular.

What "is defined for more than one time" in a 4D universe? ... Instead, you have one part of 4D Earth existing at one temporal position and another part of 4D Earth existing at another temporal position. — Luke

You have answered your own question: the geometry of the Earth. There is still time in 4D, it is just a dimension, the other 3 of those 4 dimensions being spatial. The spatial coordinates of an object are defined for a continuum of temporal coordinates, i.e. the geometry of a 4D object is a path through 4D space.

There's obvious there's more to us than a bunch of atoms and that nature has also an abstract part, not only the concrete one, so why do philosophers like Harari, who simply ignore obvious facts and produce so much aberration are so popular nowadays? I don't want this to be a topic about denying or defending materialism, but rather the reasons behind its popularity. — Eugen

Probably because its adherents have figured out that insisting on imagined things is not a compelling argument for believing in them. When faced with one philosophy that explains nothing and concerns nothing apparently real, and another whose explanatory power is good enough to make it accurately predictive in the real world, spotting the fake isn't hard.

All bad deeds (sin) cause a finite amount of harm.

Therefore, no bad deed (sin) should require eternal punishment (because no sin can cause eternal damage). — Wheatley

In another defense of God, who is to say that sinning causes Him finite harm? Perhaps every flirtation with rival gods causes him eternal agony? Would a punishment for that sin of eternal agony then be justified?

In summary, the Axiom of Causality logically implies:

1. The doctrine of Karma (you reap what you sow) — TheMadFool

As I'm sure you know, that was not a derivation. What's been drawn is an analogy. In defining their religion, the Buddhists have incorporated a kind of causality, specific in its relation of human causes to effects, but vague in the mechanics. To that extent, Buddhism is consistent with the axiom of causality by design. But that does not mean that causality implies karma, any more than the fact that the Big Bang implies a creationist God because the universe was created.

The axiom of causality as written does not limit the eventual effects of human actions even to other humans, and does not limit the numbers of causes and effects to be equal, or their kinds. It is not even evident that karma could even obey those axioms. For instance, everything I do may come back to haunt me (or a future incarnation of me), but what 'magnitude' would that leave for other effects, for instance the breeze generated in the air if I punch a person, or that person's demise? Surely all of the magnitude would be gobbled up by the equal and opposite reaction of future me being punched in karmic retaliation?

To quote my favorite series: "We love a rose because we know it will soon be gone. Whoever loved a stone?". — Outlander

Off-topic, but... my favourite show too!

(A) is a question of cost. We can get living humans to wherever a space elevator might go, it just ain't cheap.
(B) - (C) is a question of time, linked to the problem of keeping humans alive in transit, and without (B), (E) disappears.
In short, if we could put pregnant human females into stasis indefinitely, we only have to tackle (D). Now we're probably more than halfway there on that one: we've already sent a probe out of the solar system.

A more workable solution is, once we've solved the indefinite stasis problem, to send out a great number of such vessels. Sure, most of them will be destroyed, some will go off course, some will have failures in the stasis system, but we only need one, right? So take a statistical approach! And, if it seems misogynistic to sacrifice so many women, bear in mind I'm all but ensuring that the first non-terrestrial human civilisation will be a matriarchy. Though if we forgot to send seeds to the destination several hundred years earlier, it might be a short-lived cannibal matriarchy, but what a movie!

Time to me is frequency seen inside-out and from a distance. Consider a universe containing a single, unchanging, rigid, simple ball. What is time? There is no change, no objective measure, no frame of reference we could justify over another...

Now replace the ball with an oscillator, such as a hydrogen atom. We could take a single period T of the oscillation as a unit of time. During one period of oscillation, the configuration of the atom changes, but it always returns to the same configuration after T. There is again no sense of change from one period to the next: this universe is a cyclic one, but at least there is some time.

Adding a second oscillator with the same period, or a factor of the first one's period, adds nothing. But what if we add a new oscillator with a period pi * the first oscillator's period? We can now count the tickings of the first oscillator with respect to the configuration of the second, and vice versa. The configuration of each oscillator is still cyclic, but the configuration of the system of the two will never repeat itself.

With such a system, I can make you a clock. Unfortunately, we don't exist, it's just two oscillators, but it's the thought that counts.

After the brilliant responses of and , it seems a shame to give a straight-faced one, but you're edging into Heidegger territory, . Heidegger held acknowledgement of death as crucial to living an authentic life and denying it as a cause of living an inauthentic life.

Flippantly, the thing's you'd do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow would be quite different to those you'd do if you your death were indefinitely postponed. Perhaps, for instance, you were married and, knowing you had only twenty-four hours to live, you'd go out and shag everyone you could, something you would never do if your impending death were removed from the equation because it would hurt your wife. That would be the authentic you, the being-toward-death, with all the supplication to external considerations removed, as opposed to the inauthentic you, being-for-others (simpler Sartrean terminology used; I can never remember Heidegger's neologisms).

What does this have to do with suffering though? Do you mean acceptance of death is a suffering?

:up:

Also a good argument for it being contradictory for something to be both omnipotent and omniscient, which is an extreme case of the OP.

If such a thing knows for certain and infallibly what a future event is, they must also know that they cannot stop that future event from occurring, otherwise then they would know that said future event might not occur -> contradiction.

If something knew of a future event and had the power and will to stop that event from occurring, then the knowledge of that future event was not certain and infallible, otherwise it must have transpired regardless -> contradiction

Probably not original, but new to me.

To be clear, you disagree that "3D Earth doesn't move from t1 to t2"? That is, you believe that 3D Earth does move from t1 to t2? — Luke

I am not making statements about my beliefs here. That motion is present in the eternalist universe if defined as per standard kinematics (or indeed relativity) is a fact independent of my belief. It may be demonstrated, and has been demonstrated. Belief is something that you might have that stops you accepting the demonstration. I am satisfied that, in Einsteinian motion, a body moves from one time to another. I am satisfied that, in Gallilean motion, this is not held. I am satisfied that Gallilean motion is merely an approximation to Einsteinian motion.

To assert something like "motion is impossible in an eternalist universe", you have to have some definition of "motion". We had agreed on the standard kinematic definition that accords with personal experience. I'm happy to take relativity into account or not, you choose. But you must have a consistent definition, and not say on the one hand that motion is e.g. Gallilean and on the other than, in the eternalist universe where by definition Gallilean motion is nonzero, that motion is not possible by definition.

...which change temporal position. Of course this isn't a Gallilean or Presentist idea of motion; it's an Eternalist description.
...
Where have I been inconsistent on this? — Luke

If "change temporal position" means, as it should, "is defined for more than one time", there is no inconsistency: that holds true in an eternalist universe. If it means "requires some objective driving thing that moves time along or moves something through time", then your idea of time is apparently presentist despite all protestations.

But when I ask you to explain what the motion in your model represents, you can only do so in "pseudo-presentist" terms. — Luke

That is made up. I have said a ridiculous number of times that motion in a 4D or eternalist universe looks like a geometric path that is not always parallel to the time axis. I have asked you to explain how such a path could be possibly said not to describe a standard kinematic definition of motion. You have, so far, not attempted this.

You might be able to calculate motion, but how does that make it Eternalist rather than Presentist motion? — Luke

The definition of motion you claim to ascribe to is the same whether the universe is eternalist or presentist. There is no feature in that definition that depends on whether future or past times exist or not.

Again, I've never suggested anything about a second temporal dimension. — Luke

As I quite clearly stated in the quote, SophistiCat suggested this. But actually, to all intents and purposes, yes you have suggested it. Your claim that nothing moves in an eternalist universe is based solely on the fallacy that motion in the eternalist universe would be something equivalent to the motion of a 4D object with respect to the block. This makes no sense if all times are already defined in the block. You would need at least one other time to propagate through so that you could see the motion of the object in the block. Whatever that is, that's an additional time dimension. This is the mistake you make whether you're aware of it, or whether you accept it, or not. You generalise a 3D + time view of motion to 4D + time, note that that "+ time" isn't in the eternalist universe, and claim that motion is impossible. But there is still time in the eternalist universe: it is one of the four dimensions. The consistent thing to do would be to ask: "what does this 3D + time definition of motion look like in straight 4D?" As said, it looks like geometric paths in a block that are not parallel to the time axis.

I'm okay with the fact that 4D objects don't move, whether that makes sense or not. — Luke

If you're happy not to make sense, go right ahead. I'm not the police. :rofl:

That's contradictory, to say that it is moving, and that it is at a place.
...
No, motion is not having different positions at different times — Metaphysician Undercover

It was to Zeno. It is not to kinematics, which accords with my everyday experience of motion: the thing is not where it once was. An assumption that motion is anything else would lead to a different argument and different behaviour. As I said to Luke, I'm not arguing against a different definition of motion: that's just the annoyance of using the same label for multiple meanings. If you define motion to be impossible, then I agree it is impossible. If you define it to depend on a presentist idea of an objective passing 'now', then I agree a universe without such a thing would not be in motion. But this is just me adopting your language. It does not change the fact that the derivative of position wrt time in an eternalist universe is not generally 0, i.e. that things move kinematically.

Being bigger than the fly, that's an easy thing for the stoopid frog, it merely has to get in the fly's way. — Metaphysician Undercover

It cannot do that if it only knows where the fly is now, and not where it is going.

While respectful of your valuable personal experiences I'd say a single individual's observations are, at best, anecdotal experience. How do you explain the, almost simultaneous, birth of religion in different cultural, social, and political settings? To me, this bespeaks a widely prevalent predeliction toward religiosity. — TheMadFool

Of course, but when you then state that such a thing is "inherent", it begs the question of why such an inherent quality is not universal. One looks at the differences between myself and someone, say, raised in the Catholic church and ask: might this account for why my inherent quality was never realised? Granted, yes it might. Might it also account for the illusion of such an inherent quality? Yes, also. This is in contrast to an explanation that relies on me having a special mind. The claim that the quality is inherent starts to look suspect, and it is the claim that needs justifying, not scepticism of it.

The emphasised part I've already covered. Religions did spawn independently all over. However it is not true that these religions were uniformly creationist, and it was "the inherent nature of ours to believe in creator gods" claim I objected to. Many were non-creationist because they did not have the bright idea that the world had not always existed. Intellectually, creationism is a great achievement, not an inherent prejudice of the mind.

Taking the thick end of the wedge, belief in the Abrahamic creationist God is extremely widespread: over half of the world's population believes they believe in the creationist God of the Old Testament. Is this evidence that the idea is inherent? No, for two reasons:

1) Well, according to the Old Testament, pretty much the first thing God told Moses to do after his revelation was kill or sexually enslave neighbouring peoples who would not accept God: destroy or breed out disbelief. Why? Why not appeal to their inherent creationist prejudice? Granted, the Old Testament is not a reliable history, but more reliable history tells us this went on for a very long time after. The means evolved, the results are waning, but it's clear that there are several features of creationist religious belief (that themselves might be inherent capacities) that do not rely on an inherent belief in a creator (in fact suggest a lack of such an inherent belief) that nonetheless did an amazing job of making such a belief universal. Add to that an effective sort of temporal crusade, where the non-believer the creationist encounters is their own baby, and it's even more dubious to assume that the near-universality of creator myths, which is overwhelmingly belief in the Abrahamic God, requires any inherent creationist bent at all.

2) Simulation theory bears this out: multiple similar ideas appearing throughout history are the products of a miniscule number of minds. The prevalence of simulation theory as a considered concept is not a measure of mankind's amenability to build such concepts. That was one man with an idea that many men and women found amusing, and very few compelling. Likewise the more mainstream ideas of creator gods did not appear independently among their believers. Those myths originated from a small number of minds, and, rather than emerging from some inherent prejudice, were adopted by a great many people due to a variety of processes not depending on, but not eliminating, such a prejudice. The necessity of tools such as genocide, mass murder, terrorism, exploitation, incarceration and indoctrination shriek of evidence that, were such tools abandoned, belief in a creator God would not catch on as well. The question is how well would it catch on, i.e. what is its memetic fitness as an idea alone? Unknown. But as civilised nations have turned their backs on religious crusades and holy inquisitions, relying mostly on childhood indoctrination to perpetuate the idea, belief appears to be waning. This is not consistent with the idea of a universal, inherent prejudice toward creator gods.

The 3D Earth doesn't move from t1 to t2; two different parts of the 4D Earth each exist at those times. — Luke

Exactly as I described.
— Kenosha Kid

I never claimed that you said it; I said I thought that you agreed to it. — Luke

Okay, I was agreeing with the emboldened part. The first part does not enter an everyday, Gallilean idea of motion, which is the idea I've stuck with and that you said you were speaking of. In relativity, yes, objects have a fourth velocity component: temporal velocity. This is defined as the variability of temporal position within a reference frame with respect to the body's proper time (which is time in that body's rest frame). This has not entered any of my argumentation, not because I disagree with it (I lectured on it for years), but because it complicates descriptions and is not pertinent to an everyday definition of motion.

This movement through time is not a necessary condition for movement in space. Light, for instance, moves through space but has no proper time interval. Essentially, a photon cannot be said to move through time.

What I've been asking you to do is stick to one definition of motion and not change the definition as one moves from a presentist picture to an eternalist picture, or from an eternalist picture with a spotlight to one without, etc. You said you meant by 'motion' the typical, everyday, kinematic idea of different positions at different times: dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt for instance. Is this present in eternalism? Yes, because things exist at different positions at different times.

Switching to an Einsteinian/Lorentzian-type definition of motion that has a fourth coordinate to "move" within, is this present in eternalism? Yes, because again a continuous worldline through x, y, z, and t is defined, and so is the proper time T of the body under consideration. dx/dT, dy/dT, dz/dT and dt/dT are all there, and motion according to this definition is evident.

This T is not an other dimension, but a transformation of reference frame. Another way of moving through time might be, as SophistiCat suggested, to posit a second temporal dimension, call it ?. If this were true, then in the block representation of (x, y, z, t) one truly could expect the 4D object to move within the block, since particular values for (x, y, z, t) at one ? could differ from (x, y, z, t) at another ?. The lack of such movement of the 4D object within the block is what you've been describing as a lack of motion. But this is not any typical definition of motion. Neither in the Gallilean sense nor in the Einsteinian sense does motion depend on a higher-order variable ?.

I thought you agreed that "The 3D Earth doesn't move from t1 to t2"? Now you're saying that it does? — Luke

You said that, not me. It will be harder if you cannot remember which of us has which opposing argument. I'm perfectly happy with the description of the Earth moving through time. I am happy with that in an everyday, subjective, pseudo-presentist, practical sense. And I am happy with that as an interpretation of even a straight line parallel to the time axis of the block.

[EDIT] But that sort of "movement" is not what we mean by "motion" in an everyday or kinematic sense. I'm satisfied with that description from a study of special relativity, in which the 4D velocity of a body "at rest" points along the time axis. In that sense, and I am happy with that sense, it does "move through time". However this is no longer everyday kinematics. It is not v = dx/dt. It is relativity theory.

What's worth noting here is that given the inherent nature of ours to believe in creator gods, it looks as though we all have a subconscious desire to be artificial in the sense of having been created.

On the flip side, we also have an atheistic streak, telling us otherwise - that there's no evidence of a god. Yet, even if god has been chucked on the scrapheap, the central motif of creation stubbornly persists - simulation theory (Nick Bostrom). — TheMadFool

Sure, I thought this might be more your angle, and was thinking of simulation theory too. Claims like "the inherent nature of ours to believe in creator gods" I tend to suspect as false, at root because I was no indoctrinated by my Christian parents as a child and was genuinely surprised to discover that people not working for their church believed in it. If anything, I had a harder time wrapping my stupid single-digit year old head around the idea that the Earth could even have an origin.

I agree that the capacity to ascribe agency without evidence is inherent in us all, but there's a difference between having a capacity (I can love) to a particular activation of that capacity (therefore I love Trump). There are/were plenty of places whose religious systems did not include creator gods: Jainism, Buddhism, most modes of Hinduism, Dreamtime. The likely default, primitive view of the Earth is not that it had a creator, but that it has always existed: origin stories are not a foregone conclusion. So it's at least "inherent nature to ascribe agency" + "contingent derivation of a cosmological origin". This idea alone has obvious memetic power and is also a step in the direction of something like Big Bang theory.

How likely it is that this alone would yield creationist beliefs is difficult to say. The widespread belief in a creationist God now owes some to its memetic fitness, owes some to its accord with our inclination to ascribe agency, but owes most to an "improved" method of replication whereby children are indoctrinated at an impressionable age with ideas they are taught are unquestionable (or you're punished/no child of mine). Remove that, and I suspect the belief in creator Gods would seem far less than inherent and would need even more forceful means of persuasion (a crusade here, a Holy Inquisition there).

Simulation theory is a good illustration. It is not derived from a need to ascribe agency but based on probability theory and a difficult-to-swallow definition of "technological maturity". However, it is creationist, so it appeals to that agency need. There's no direct evidence against it, although its definition of "technological maturity" is a leap of faith in itself. And it's entertaining, which is why everyone has heard of it, i.e. it has great memetic fitness. And yet almost no one actually believes it. It's a fledgling creationist theory, maybe it will catch on and convert the swelling atheist numbers, but that remains unseen and seems kind of ridiculous (but then... Scientology!). One guy (does he even believe in it?) came up with it and everyone heard about it and thought about it because it's interesting. It doesn't seem comparable to a natural inclination to believe in creators, at least not yet.

Motion, in the everyday sense, looks like something not having a determinable position — Metaphysician Undercover

Not having a determinable position is a stretch. Even a stoopid frog can figure out where a fly will be such that it can fire its tongue out and catch it. Clever humans have built science and astronomy and technology on the observation that figuring out where something will be in the future is straightforward. If you let go of a bowling ball from the top of the tower of Pisa and halfway down it turned left, that would be a shock.

We often describe it as what happens when a thing changes position. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, but changes with time, i.e. has different positions at different times. I recall that the Moon was there. Now it is there. It has moved.

So there is motion, even though the Earth doesn't move? — Luke

The Earth does move, though, in the same way we mean in our everyday, subjective, presentist definition of movement: the Earth has different spatial coordinates at different times.

The mistake is in generalising 'movement' to some higher-order equivalent in which, in the block reprentation, the Earth (its worldline) moves through the block such that its presence or absence at a given coordinate (x, y, z, t) is not fixed. This would not be movement in any typical sense, but some kind of hypermotion.

The presentist equivalent of that mistake would be Zeno's paradox: right now the Earth is at (x, y, z). That coordinate is fixed in that present moment, therefore movement is impossible.

Should fathers put themselves and their lives above their children’s, or should fathers protect their children at all costs? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Grading on a curve, it seems okay. You're talking about a book in which it's fine to kill your own child if you think that's what God wants or if your child has been disobedient, it's fine to sell your child into slavery, and it's fine to hand your daughters over to gang rapists to steer attention away from your guests. Letting your son be tortured for a few days when you know he's going to be okay in the end seems comparatively noble.

KidAlthough I started off like I was, I'm not considering the scenario that Peter learns of his true nature by coming into contact with real people.

What's the real issue is whether Peter can know his true nature as an artificial being, created by an intelligence rather than having evolved, without ever encountering the real McCoy? Since the answer is "no" and because we're all like Peter before his encounter with his creators, it follows that the possibility that we're artificial can't be ruled out. For all we know, we could be carbon-based AI created by an intelligent life-form and put here on earth as an experiment or for entertainment or whathaveyou. — TheMadFool

Yeah fair enough, I tend to think incrementally. I was working (slowly) toward an argument for an answer to Q1, but I see you've jumped straight to the answer already.

If we assume we cannot know that we do not possess a property, and if having that property is possible, then, yes, we might have that property. Whatever that property might be.

So much for Q1. As for Q2, there's no valid equivalent. Peter learns of his nature based on new information about himself compared to old information about humans, namely anatomy. If we rule out knowledge like this, a different kind of "revelation" is required.

If we were all AI, why on Earth would we think we were human, or even not AI? Some kind of religion got us?

This is the heart of the matter. AI robots living together with no contact with humans would think their form, in terms of physical appearance and ways of thinking, is normal in the sense not artificial/synthetic. The only way such robots can become aware of their synthetic nature is by discovering a hidden clue in their form. — TheMadFool

Yes, or a clue that their form, while what they always experienced it to be, is no longer consistent with human form. In principle, a juvenile AI could be aware that it has, I don't know, the ability to knowingly parallelise computations over 258 cores and assume all humans to be able to do this. If and when they discover that this is not a human characteristic, that would be a clue.

But I wonder whether an AI could rationalise some clues the way humans might. If an AI never felt love, and had no sort of artificial memory or stub of it, it might just compute that it is unlucky, or is a particular human without capacity for love. It may be aware that some humans have no capacity for empathy, or an unrealised capacity for empathy, and rationalise its own lack of empathy as just one of those things. How much human nature might be whittled away like that? After all, humans lacking love or empathy can go through life not knowing they are different.

Eternal damnation is just one of the pieces that goes into the construction of the Christian scheme to draw in and keep paying members to its various organizations. — Lida Rose

I'd actually be fine with that. What horrifies me is that it's much worse: it's designed to teach impressionable children and the adults they grow into to never, ever question the beliefs of their parents or their church; to accept any sanctioned dubious idea no matter how impossible to absorb; to reject any contrary idea no matter how compelling or self-evident or beneficial or interesting.

Well, the problem basically boils down to a single question: how do we know we're [/i]not[/i] AI? — TheMadFool

That's what I'm getting at really. Did Peter actually have sufficient information to know he was an AI before the operation? And, if so, did Peter have sufficient skill in fooling himself that he did not.

Obviously Peter did find out by having an operation. This gave him knowledge about his interior that conflicted with his knowledge of human interiors. So why did no information prior to this conflict with his experience?

We could imagine an AI with some data available to its processors designed to agree with externally-derived (external to the designer) consensus (with maybe some peculiarities) about how it feels to be human. Something similar to the memory implants used in Blade Runner. So when an AI encounters humans discussing love, for instance, it can agree with much of what is said, and this agreement would reinforce his assessment of his humanity, the nature he believes he has in common with people.

If all such eventualities can be catered for, no conflict need arise. So my first question was: is this possible? Is a revelation, like the operation, not highly probable long before he was operated on?

1. Is it possible that we, humans, are like Peter, under the [false] assumption that we are not artificial intelligence (AI)? — TheMadFool

A few questions that automatically spring to mind...

• to what extent will Peter's experience of himself have conflicted with his knowledge of other people?
• to what extent can that conflict be put down to human variation?
• to what extent can that conflict be put down to nurture, i.e. Peter's precise history?

Because if Peter lived in a world of humans all talking and philosophising about human experience, and if Peter's experience did not correlate with that, there might be limit to how much he could rationalise the conflict.

There is very little genetic difference between chimps and humans, yet their seems to a larger difference in morphology and physiology, even psychologically. — Harry Hindu

The physiological differences between a human and a chimp are small compared to the physiological differences between a human and a cockroach or a human and a blade of grass or a human and a rock. But those small physiological differences have a huge behavioural and social impact.

↪Kenosha Kid He's been stuck on this point for years. — SophistiCat

I guess he's right then :rofl:

If all objects are 4D, then they don't change over time. I'm not here to convert things to your physics model. I'm here to discuss metaphysics. — Luke

As I said, if you're abandoning kinematics (e.g. v = dx/dt), fine. If you're making claims about kinematics though ("no kinematic motion can exist in a 4D that has x and t"), they can be rejected on kinematic grounds.

But dx/dt is inconsistent with the static 4D nature of the universe as described by Eternalism, as there is no actual change in position over time. — Luke

It's not, and certainly is not shown. Is d(altitude)/d(radial) undefined for a mountain in good ol' fashioned 3D-land? No. It would be a mammoth achievement to show that dx/dt no longer makes sense in 4D, which is equivalent to saying, at the least, all 4D objects are straight lines parallel to the time axis. I have invited you to demonstrate it a number of times, rather than assume such a strange assertion has already be justified.

Nice find. Also here's a brief media summary of that paper, aptly titled How does a quantum particle see the world? — Andrew M

Even better find! I was a lazy Googler; I'd read the paper before so new it existed. Thanks for making more of an effort.

It seems to me that even if the apparatus is in superposition in the electron's reference frame, the electron still needs to go through one of the slits which is then effectively an interaction with the apparatus. — Andrew M

But the electron doesn't 'go' in its rest frame, by lieu of a) it's its rest frame and b) its momentum is undefined. (That said, the paper isn't bothered about rest frames as much as un-superposed frames.) At any time, either slits already have a nonzero probability of being behind the electron.

I am just saying that presentism is not unique in requiring 'special' reference frames. — SophistiCat

Oh sure, I'm not saying it's unique. It could have lots of bad company :) However, any idea that requires a special frame, the logical questions to ask (indeed, the questions I did ask) are: can it exist, can it explain anything if it does, can we justify it if it does? The special frame in question that obeys relativity of simultaneity cannot be constructed (except maybe, as you say, with the addition of a limitless supply of other temporal dimensions to wind through); the one that that can that dispenses with SR needs to explain the seeming existence of SR; the universes it could explain (e.g. the Newtonian universe, or a frame-dependent 'now') are redundant.

[Edited for clarity. Twice. Crappest answer ever, I'm disappointed in myself :( ]

you should seriously view any object, such as the Earth or the Moon, as a four-dimensional object — Luke

Exactly as I did, and as Huw did, in treating them as 4D objects like (in Huw's reduced picture), the cylinder and the helix. (Strictly hypercylinder and hyperhelix.)

Instead, they are whole 4D objects which consist of different stationary 3D parts existing at different times. — Luke

Exactly as I described.

The 3D Earth doesn't move from t1 to t2; two different parts of the 4D Earth each exist at those times. — Luke

Exactly as I described. And further, the spatial coordinates may be different at those times, which is motion.

It doesn't seem like taking it seriously to maintain that there is motion in Eternalism. — Luke

Then, once again, you are defining motion to be presentist, and ignoring the kinematic definition of motion which holds well and unmolested in eternalism. I sense you will always do this, because you're specifically after the conclusion that motion does not exist in eternalism. But this is a circular definition of motion, having nothing to do with kinematics or everyday experience.

At the end of the day, unless you can demonstrate that dx/dt is everywhere zero or meaningless in the eternalist picture, velocity, and therefore motion, will assert itself. Asserting to the contrary is your prerogative, but it is not an argument.