Is time an aspect of an object, even?

Scientifically speaking, time is that which a chronometer measures. There is such and such a tension placed upon a visual apparatus with a slightly lesser tension, and the first tension changes the apparatus at what appears to us to be regular intervals.

I do not understand time at all, except in common parlance. I know that I must clock in 2 days from now 5 minutes prior to 7 am (central standard). But to define what seems to be something wider and more general in terms of my life now doesn't seem quite right.

I rather like Heidegger's take when he says that we are time. But, at the same time, I am not certain what it means. It just strikes me "right", in comparison to the alternatives.

Is time an aspect of an object, even? — Moliere

Time is either going to be a global dimension through which things move or it is instead a measure of local change. And as usual when faced with a compelling dichotomy, the answer is going to be you need to combine both to get a full answer.

So time is clearly about a local potential for change - what could happen in the future of some object or substance in terms of its degrees of freedom. How could what is currently the same become something different.

And time is just as clearly about a global constraint on all that. Time has a universal direction in which the past represents an accumulation of all the ways the present has become historically limited. And that leaves then the localised degrees of freedoms - the possible future of all those existing objects or substances.

So time measures change against some notion of stasis. It measures the differences that make a difference. When we say an object moves through time, we mean that it doesn't change while the history all around it is changing - eliminating degrees of freedom in many other locations. And then there comes the moment where the object does itself change - becomes further historically marked in some way we consider different enough to make a difference. Now it is the changing object being seen against a static backdrop.

So it is all about flux vs stasis. And we can read that off the world either as local flux seen against generalised stasis, or local stasis against generalised (cooling and expanding, thermal arrow of time) flux. It's all relative, as relativity says.

I do not understand time at all, — Moliere

I don't either. Leibniz's demonstration of the relativity of space is pretty simple. I don't remember if he addressed time with it as well, but this is how it would go:

Leibniz on relativity of space: If time is absolute (therefore a container for objects and present in a void), then God would be able to move the whole universe 50 miles to the west. We can see that even in principle no movement would be observable and by Leibniz's law, no movement took place. Space can't be absolute.

Same argument to address time: If time is absolute (and so something objects pass through and present in a void), then God would be able to turn the universal clock back by 4 hours. We can see that even in principle, no time change would be detectable, so blah blah blah.. no change in time took place. Time can't be absolute.

Criticisms? So.. Kant.

Could be.. I'm going back through demonstrations of relativity, That might help me connect the dots you've distributed.

This came to me again today while I was listening to a Cure cover of a Jimi Hendrix song. It took me back to my childhood when the door to the future seemed like the gate on oblivion. There was a lot of pessimism about there being any future for the human race.

I like their Stone Free cover.

The concept of the object is a the construction that takes place in time,
until its got the rhythm "to ride the breeze" of your imagination,
Stone free, yeah, to do what I[you] please

Similar to a music you can anticipate future beat.

Leibniz and Kant may not be much help then as they were still operating in a Newtonian reference frame in which the best that could be imagined was Galilean relativity.

Modern physics changes things by bringing change directly into the picture as action or energy. Nothing has substantial being - neither massive objects nor the massless space they occupy. It is all just shapes given to energy transactions. So it becomes natural - if not formally expressed in that fashion - to measure time in terms of energy units.

The greater the momentum, the slower the local clock runs. The speeding particle gains "more time" because it takes longer to decay. Or conversely, you can say it loses the potential for change and becomes more the changeless object. Like the photon that goes so fast it never really exists so far as it is concerned.

By contrast, a static mass is in a least energetic state and so experiences the actuality of global temporal dimensionality the most fully. It can actually fail to change in knowing itself to remain in the same location while everything else has moved. And then know that is itself moving as mostly everything else is staying the same now.

So the picture of time is completely changed by including energy or action as part of the co-ordinate system. It may still sound a spatialised description - as when we count the revolutions of a clock hand making its exactly repeating round trips (a way to watch something move, but not let it run away out of sight). But the clock has to be wound up. So the spatialised trickery is still the measurement of some energy potential. Which we soon discover when accelerating the clock in a rocket.

I like their Stone Free cover.

The concept of the object is a the construction that takes place in time,
until its got the rhythm "to ride the breeze" of your imagination,
Stone free, yeah, to do what I[you] please

Similar to a music you can anticipate future beat. — Cavacava

Yep, it's Purple Haze (which contains the line: "Tomorrow is the end of time."

Concepts are timeless though, aren't they?

Leibniz and Kant may not be much help then as they were still operating in a Newtonian reference frame in which the best that could be imagined was Galilean relativity. — apokrisis

Leibniz argued directly against absolute space (which is associated with Newton). Why do you think he was operating in a Newtonian reference frame?

Same argument to address time: If time is absolute (and so something objects pass through and present in a void), then God would be able to turn the universal clock back by 4 hours. We can see that even in principle, no time change would be detectable, so blah blah blah.. no change in time took place. Time can't be absolute. — Mongrel

I don't see how this argument makes sense. If time were absolute then God could turn back the time by 4 hours. But no time change would be detectable to us. So how do we know that God didn't turn the clock back 4 hours, and a change in time which was undetectable to us didn't take place?

As you say, that is what he argued directly against. So he may have been reacting with a religious/idealist point of view. But the context was still a particular model of spacetime that lacked direction or growth and was considered to be statically eternal.

I mean do you think his arguments work against the relativistic view and its particular features, like the Einstein hole argument?

They can sound similar, but then they may be quite opposite in fact...

Thus in Leibniz-style thought experiments, worlds that at first sight [appear] physically different, turn out to be mathematically identical, [but] in the [Einstein] hole argument, apparently mathematically different worlds reveal themselves as physically identical.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9676/1/Giovanelli_-_Leibniz_Equivalence.pdf

Pure concepts of the understand (timeless) vs empirical concepts (constructed in time) temporal time series ... "Time is a dimension. It's an aspect of an object"

I don't see how this argument makes sense. If time were absolute then God could turn back the time by 4 hours. But no time change would be detectable to us. So how do we know that God didn't turn the clock back 4 hours, and a change in time which was undetectable to us didn't take place? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not "undetectable to us." It's undetectable even in principle. Then apply Leibniz's Law.

I mean do you think his arguments work against the relativistic view and its particular features, like the Einstein hole argument? — apokrisis

How does Einstein's hole argument relate to relative time?

Pure concepts of the understand (timeless) vs empirical concepts (constructed in time) temporal time series ... "Time is a dimension. It's an aspect of an object" — Cavacava

You're saying that a proposition is constructed in time? You mean one word at a time?

A concept is an idea, a thought and a sentence expresses a complete thought, and it is composed? No?

Do you mean spacetime? I don't follow. Why do you think it doesn't relate to the dynamical view I described?

A concept is an idea, a thought and a sentence expresses a complete thought, and it is composed? No? — Cavacava

Yes, but the sentence and the thought aren't the same thing. The same thought can be expressed by different sentences.

Why do you think it doesn't relate to the dynamical view I described? — apokrisis

I'm asking how it relates.

...mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God

Leonard Cohen

No, don't know what time is, or what time it is.

I'm still mystified by what you mean. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath hoping you will explain. Opacity is your weapon of choice again it appears.

You brought up the hole argument to explain something about Leibniz. What were you trying to explain?

They map pretty well in time.

We might say relativity is absolute. God can "turn the clock back," destroy the present states and reorder the world in a way similar to what was four hours ago. But what does this mean? It doesn't undo what has already happened. All it does is wipe out certain states (or viewpoints) in favour of others.

The presence of an objective state means relativity: this state rather than any other, here rather than over there, the present rather than the future, etc. To even think or speak: "the world as four hours ago (past) rather than as it is now (present)" is relativistic in its definition-- viewpoints in relation to each other.

What I was originally pointing out to you was the big difference between reacting to Newtonian vs modern understandings of space/time.

So for instance you were imagining Leibniz running a relativistic argument against Newtonian time by God turning back the universal clock by four hours and seeing no difference.

Well great. Newtonian mechanics is reversible like that. It does have that time symmetry. That is why time seems like a dimension one can freely time travel in.

But once you admit energy into the picture - global time as entropically-directional change - then going back in time is actually going to break a symmetry. If you go back four hours, the whole universe is now four hours hotter ... as well as four hours smaller. There are actual consequences that a thermometer would reveal.

So Einsteinian relativity tries to recover some of the good old Newtonian scale indifference. It gives you a formula for handling "energetic Lorenzian boosts" - the symmetry-breaking effects of going at some other speed less than c.

So on the one hand, we still seem to have backdrop time - and quantum mechanics says thank goodness for that.

But then next up on the batting plate is quantum gravity theory and now we really have to rethink our notion of time so that it does align with a thermal view - uni-directional emergent energetic change.

Talk about time is tricky because really it is about relative rates of change - change overall in a cooling/expanding universe versus change locally due to relative energy scale. And each is the backdrop against which we read off the other - that is the lightspeed view (of a thermalising bath of cosmic background radiation) vs the restmass view (of these lumpy, sluggish particles of "mass" that can "move through time" just by, relatively speaking, not moving at all).

Again, I have no idea whether you have a concrete thesis or any actual interest in the science involved. But a thermometer would tell you if you have wound the Universe's clock backwards (just hold it up in deep space and measure the temperature of the CMB).

God can "turn the clock back," destroy the present states and reorder the world in a way similar to what was four hours ago. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But there is no clock, and 4hrs ago is still there, according to science anyway.

What I was originally pointing out to you was the big difference between reacting to Newtonian vs modern understandings of space/time. — apokrisis

So you thought I was conflating Leibniz and Einstein. OK. That wasn't my intention.

There are actual consequences that a thermometer would reveal. — apokrisis

You're thinking that when God turns the universal clock back, that NOW is moved backward. The universe isn't a point in time. It's all of time. So God is moving all of time back four hours. See? You've got to stop thinking of time as a river that things flow through. That is Newtonian time.

They map pretty well in time. — Cavacava

Propositions and sentences?

Scientifically speaking, time is that which a chronometer measures. — Moliere

Actually, scientifically speaking, clocks don't measure time.

According to quantum mechanics (and general relativity) the universe as a whole is at rest. That is, that the universe is in an eigenstate of its Hamiltonian - i.e. the Schrödinger equation gives a universal wavefunction that is independent of time. This means that physical quantities do not depend on time.

So, whatever physical quantity is used to tell the time, the universe is not in an eigenstate of that physical quantity - i.e. the universe is not in an eigenstate of the positions of the hands of a clock. Rather, the universe is in a superposition of such states!

Thus, quantities "changing with time" has nothing to do with t-dependence, it is a correlation phenomenon.

So God is moving the whole of time as a block. Is He pulling off that feat by shifting it to some other point of ... time?

Sounds legit.

Yes. Do you see a problem?