I've experienced a lot of things in my life, but I really can't say that I know what it's like to experience time. — Metaphysician Undercover

I wonder if time isn't the thing we experience, so much as it is one of the things that must exist to facilitate experience. Whatever you experience, you experience in and through time. I don't think you can have an experience in just a snapshot of existence. Things must change in order for experiences to happen.

I wonder if time isn't the thing we experience, so much as it is one of the things that must exist to facilitate experience. — flannel jesus

That's like what Kant said, time is an a priori intuition, facilitating the possibility of sense.

Just classical existence realism. — substantivalism

Both presentist and eternalist views fit in with that, so I'm fine with it. 'Realist' is an adjective, so one can be realist about one thing and not another. Said Berkeley idealist is realist about mind for instance, but that is admittedly not the classic realism of <the matter I see is real> (which sound an awful lot like idealism to me).

The eleatic principle you mentioned above is a very mind-independent worded principle:
"only entities with the capacity to cause changes or be affected by them are real"
But the only literature I can find that references this principle ignores what it says and drags in their mind-dependenct biases. See the paper by Colyvan, which seems to be about half the hits on a google search of the term.

rabid berkeley idealists.

Very often any view different from your own looks rabid.

As there is not definite future or past. . . THEY DON'T EXIST under presentism remember.

Quite the opposite. The terms 'future', 'present' and 'past' are only ontologically meaningful under presentism, the view that divides all events into those three categories. There being no such division under eternalism, all events share identical ontology. Hence the lack of tensed verbs when discussing the view since tensed verbs make reference to something that the view does not posit.

As for past and future events existing, they do under some versions of presentism (I listed maybe 5 flavors above) and not under other versions. The 3D version says only present events exist and the others do not. There is just space and the current state of matter, which evolves in place.


Derailments aside, the topic was supposed to be about absolute frames and presentism. Under said realist view, presentism seems to require absolutism, and absolutism directly contradicts the premises of special relativity. That doesn't make either view wrong, only mutually incompatible. SR premises can be reworded in an epistemic manner instead of ontic, and then the contradiction goes away.

Do you agree with any of that?

We don't know how time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

We don't even know if it passes, so yea, I agree.

Doesn't relativity indicate that the time experienced is unique to the spatial conditions of the individual?

Relativity says the opposite: First postulate is that physics (including the experience of anybody, anywhere) is frame and location independent. Time is thus experienced identically for everybody. If this were not so, you could identify a more objective frame by the experience of time passing more quickly there.

If it's true that one's experience is frame dependent, then relativity is open to blatant falsification.
Of course, from an idealist PoV, flow of time is all that is experienced, and the rest is fiction.

I wonder if time isn't the thing we experience — flannel jesus

Depends on one's definition of time. I can think of 3 kinds right off, and proper time is the one experienced. The others are coordinate time (computed, not experienced), and the flow of the present (zero empirical impact).

I don't think you can have an experience in just a snapshot of existence. — flannel jesus

That's an interesting topic in itself. Experience seems to be a process, not a state. A process is at minimum a change of state over some finite time. The issue of Boltzmann brains gets into this, where you don't so much hold beliefs, but you hold memories of beliefs (same thing?).

The eleatic principle you mentioned above is a very mind-independent worded principle:
"only entities with the capacity to cause changes or be affected by them are real"
But the only literature I can find that references this principle ignores what it says and drags in their mind-dependenct biases. See the paper by Colyvan, which seems to be about half the hits on a google search of the term. — noAxioms

Most other philosophers who see any worth in SR or GR seem to motivate the notion that the central lesson to be learned from said theories is their strong emphasis on causality defining many familiar notions. Simultaneity through casual interactions. Our knowledge of things through casual interactions. Spatial relations through temporal travel of influences or chronogeometry. Time as defined via casual fundamentals.

Classical physics is completely fine with conceptually expanding their ontologies or metaphysics to accommodate unseen entities which possess no casual import. It's also why I consider it a lie that Classical physics cannot accommodate SR, GR, or quantum mechanics. With enough extra structure you most definitely could accommodate anything or through mathematical reformulation.

Is gravity curved because it can only be modeled with curvature? NO! There is teleparallel gravity which is just a reformulation of it in terms of torsion rather than curvature as the emphasized variable. Metric teleparallel gravity does the same but for the metric.

Is Classical gravity only flat? NO! It can be curved as versions of Newton-cartan gravity showcase.

Classical physics can account for all of these with enough sweat and analogue models. However, the real problem is not there empirical adequacy but there non-uniqueness.

All such conceptions within Classical physics insights in general (if it even makes sense to cleanly demarcate between 'classical' and 'relativistic' physics) posit extra structure. The real discussion then is whether we should be, as Lawrence Skylar lays out, either reductionists or anti-reductionists. There is a high level of under-determination and a multitude of possibilities so we left either being dogmatic about one with varying degrees of non-pragmatic virtues to bolster support. . . OR we are left trying to convince you that while all these interpretations sound different they are all really saying 'the same thing' as they agree on the empirical content. The latter being a favorite of certain kinds of logical positivists.

Very often any view different from your own looks rabid. — noAxioms

. . . or equivalent. If one could deflate the languages being used and inter-translate between them as a deflationist may desire then maybe its not so different as it says/means all the same things.

Derailments aside, the topic was supposed to be about absolute frames and presentism. Under said realist view, presentism seems to require absolutism, and absolutism directly contradicts the premises of special relativity. That doesn't make either view wrong, only mutually incompatible. SR premises can be reworded in an epistemic manner instead of ontic, and then the contradiction goes away. — noAxioms

Yes.

If this were not so, you could identify a more objective frame by the experience of time passing more quickly there. — noAxioms

Why would time seem to pass more quickly in a more objective frame?

Most other philosophers who see any worth in SR or GR seem to motivate the notion that the central lesson to be learned from said theories is their strong emphasis on causality defining many familiar notions. — substantivalism

Causality has been defining most of those familiar notions a lot further back than those theories. The eleatic principle dates back to the Greeks.

Yes, Simultaneity is conventional under SR, an abstraction, not anything physical, even if the convention uses causal means. That did change from the physical simultaneity that was presumed before, and is still presumed under presentism.

Classical physics is completely fine with conceptually expanding their ontologies or metaphysics to accommodate unseen entities which possess no casual import.

Hmm, like what? The existence of a preferred moment in time? What else? I can think of more, but the list gets more hand-wavy the further you go. What's classical physics got to do with it? What has post-classical physics taken away that classical allowed? It seems like post-classical actually added more to the metaphysics, not taken it away.

Is gravity curved because it can only be modeled with curvature?

Gravity is curved? You mean a model where gravity is explained by curvature of spacetime? There are alternate models to that, so your 'only' doesn't hold.

Why would time seem to pass more quickly in a more objective frame? — Metaphysician Undercover

Under realist physics, time seeming to subjectively pass faster or slower seems to be a function of boredom vs productivity and has nothing to do with where you are or how fast you're going.

Under idealism, there's nothing with which to compare one's own perception of time passage.