Easily,. "That play seemed to drag". "Funny, time seems to fly for me." "I thought that would never end". "That vacation went by so fast". 'It seems just as if happened yesterday". But more importantly than communicating the feeling of duration, is the experiencing of duration. How does duration change between awake, day dreaming, dreaming, asleep without dreaming, waking up? There is a qualitative feeling that is personal and defines ones life. — Rich
What we feel is the division between past and future. — Metaphysician Undercover
We have memories of the past, and we anticipate the future. We do not feel duration. — Metaphysician Undercover
The "rules", and this talk of "duration", produce a big illusion, making us think that duration is something real. — Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we feel ourselves, our memory pressing into the present. The future is possibilities that we are moving towards. This is the experience of life in duration. There are no divisions anywhere. — Rich
This is duration the time of life. The duration in which mind evolves by learning, experiment, and creating. The future is a virtual action of possible movement, of new creation. — Rich
If duration is an illusion, then life is an Illusion, — Rich
Of course there is a division, the past is substantially different from the future. — Metaphysician Undercover
You really haven't explained how "learning", "experiment", "creating", "the future is possibilities" translates into "duration". — Metaphysician Undercover
But this is not necessary to life, it is just the human enterprise of applying rules. — Metaphysician Undercover
The future possibilities manifests as memory just like all our thoughts. They are different in kind, but still all memory. As we take action, the new memory presses into the old and new possibilities arise - in memory. — Rich
I don't see how future possibilities could be memories. How could something which hasn't occurred yet exist as a memory? That makes no sense. — Metaphysician Undercover
But there is still a sense in which the mind itself furnishes the background within which all such judgements are made.
— Wayfarer
I don't disagree with this. I would ask instead what a mind is, especially in this context. I suggest that the background, the context in which our discussions take place, is quite public; indeed, that it is pretty much delimited by our language.
I would also not phrase the physicist attitude to mind in quite the same way as you do. I would say instead that sensible physicists will steer clear of issues of mind until physical theory can play a useful role in its elucidation.
Nore does science treat mind as only output; I suspect it is closer to a strange loop, with inputs leading to unexpected consequences. — Banno
I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. — Einstein
What puzzles me is why Nagel thinks anyone would be afraid of something if they had no motivation to concern themselves with it. If I do have a motivation to concern myself with religion then that leaves the question as to just what is nature of the motivation. The motivation may be different for each person, but why fear in any case? — Janus
↪Magnus Anderson How something can be at rest all the time and moving? Hmm. I'll try it out later today and see if I can teleport myself somehow. — Rich
The arrow is resting AT every instant but it is not resting BETWEEN instants. — Magnus Anderson
You are just START/STOP which is the nature of the Paradox and my very first question to you. Do you believe feel like your life is coming stopping and going? This is rhetorical. I don't need an answer. — Rich
↪Magnus Anderson I cannot teach you how to conceptualize a problem. Unfortunately, there is no training for such a skill I'm any educational courses other that art. So you either have to train yourself through hard work or be at the mercy of others to tell you the answers for the rest of your life. I can only suggest that you try to conceptualize the problem in your mind. — Rich
The profound point that I think Einstein misses, is that the Pythagorean theorem can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So I agree with him that it's not dependent on the human mind; but it is nevertheless an intelligible principle, something that only a mind can see. — Wayfarer
The profound point that I think Einstein misses, is that the Pythagorean theorem can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So I agree with him that it's not dependent on the human mind; but it is nevertheless an intelligible principle, something that only a mind can see. — Wayfarer
Nagel says that it's a cultural issue, that what he is calling 'fear of religion' is widespread in modern culture, and that it drives a lot of the debate around evolution and religion. (It's not coincidental that Bergson's best-known book was Creative Evolution.) I think it's a frequently-expressed cultural attitude in the West, and that it is behind this post. But I might be wrong, and in any case, it's tangential. — Wayfarer
The profound point that I think Einstein misses, is that the Pythagorean theorem can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So I agree with him that it's not dependent on the human mind; but it is nevertheless an intelligible principle, something that only a mind can see.
— Wayfarer
Do you really consider that to be a "profound point"? I don't: I would say that surely Einstein would not have been stupid enough to miss something so patently obvious! — Janus
Bergson, like Kant, strives hard to show that spiritual values can co-exist with the findings of science. He does this by contrasting the largely false world of common sense and science (in which he, nevertheless, takes a keen interest) with the true world of intuition. He is perfectly lucid and even superb so long as he demonstrates that both the intellect and our practical preoccupations manifestly distort the world view both of everyday experience and of mechanical science. But, when he comes to the way out, to his ‘duration’ and his "intuition," vagueness envelops all and everything. His positive views have therefore been rightly described as "tantalising," for "as soon as one reaches out to grasp his body of thought it seems to disappear within a teasing ambiguity."
Mature and accomplished spiritual knowledge can be had only within a living tradition. But how could a Polish Jew, transplanted to Paris, find such a tradition in the corridors of the CollŠge de France or in the salons of the 16th arrondissement? It is the tragedy of our time that so many of those who thirst for spiritual wisdom are forced to think it out for themselves--always in vain. There is no such thing as a pure spirituality in the abstract. There are only separate lineages handed down traditionally from the past. If any proof were needed, Bergson, a first-class intellect, would provide it. His views on religion are a mixture of vague adumbrations and jumbled reminiscences which catch some of the general principles of spirituality but miss its concrete manifestations.
Tradition furnished at least two worlds composed of objects of pure disinterested contemplation--the Buddhist world of dharmas and the Platonic ideas in their pagan, Christian, or Jewish form. Here Bergson would have had an opportunity to "go beyond intellectual analysis and to recapture by an act of intuitive sympathy the being and the existence in their original quality."(20) But for various reasons he could not accept either of these traditions. Like Schopenhauer, he regarded art as one of the avenues to the truth,(21) but, otherwise, his "intuition," this "ecstatic identification with the object,"(22) this "spiritual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it, and consequently inexpressible, "(23) is never explained as a disciplined faculty.
Because of this disseverance from a concrete spiritual practice, Bergson has now no disciples, and his work belongs to the past. As Rai'ssa Maritain put it so well, "Bergson travelled uncertainly towards God, still far off, but the light of whom had already reached him." Unable, like Moses, to reach the promised land, he, nevertheless, cleared the way for the Catholic revival of the twentieth century, which enabled many French intellectuals to regain contact with at least one living spiritual tradition. At the same time, he realized that the inanition of the spiritual impulse slowly deprives life of its savor among the more finely organized minds of Europe, and he wrote in 1932, "Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first whether they want to go on living or not(!)....
Most strikingly, the origin of his criticism of relativistic time came from the first rendition of the twin paradox. WE now know that such time dilation is quite real. — Banno
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