Hawking says time is an entity that turns into space however
— Gregory

Actually the metaphor is that, as a point on a closed surface like a sphere, or the earth, is never itself a boundary in any unique sense, meaning that you can keep on walking past it when you get to it, so time has no end or beginning point. If we think of time - or anything - as linear, then ends and beginnings can make sense. But not in terms of closed surfaces. Nothing to do with sky or anything turning into anything else. This Hawking's metaphor as described in his book. — tim wood

The truth of space is time, and thus space becomes time; the transition to time is not made subjectively by us, but made by space itself. In pictorial thought, space and time are taken to be quite separate: we have space and also time; philosophy fights against this 'also'. — hegel

Well I have to say I like the metaphor of philosophy as a dance. Extending the metaphor Life is a dance.

Some dances are more enjoyable than others, some lives are more enjoyable than others. A good philosophy is then one that enables one to have an enjoyable life. Ultimately a philosophy is personal, it has very little to do with truth or statements, they are only useful if one wants to communicate one's philosophy. — A Seagull

Believe! (and maybe watch a movie) — Gregory

OK, well what makes a good dance? — A Seagull

What makes for a good philosophy? — A Seagull

The ascetic ideal is certainly central to (certain varieties of) religion. Not so much to philosophy. — Snakes Alive

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.

And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant. — Snakes Alive

Read a philosopher? You're thinking like an academic. If you want to know how to live, you must enquire into the question. That enquiry just is the practice of philosophy. Reading other philosophers may or may not help. Much of written philosophy consists in over-intellectualizing fairly simple questions. — Janus

Philosophy itself is, in fact, a kind of “training for dying”.

To have pure knowledge, therefore, philosophers must escape from the influence of the body as much as is possible in this life.

You mean he wanted to destroy what other people once believed, instead of expressing his own opinion accurately? — Rystiya

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly. — Nietzsche

Well, I didn't quote you as saying “reason” — DingoJones

Those things you mentioned may be missing from philosophy, but wouldnt that mean philosophy never lived at all rather died? — DingoJones

Also, there is no reason philosophy cannot be applied to those things is there? So are you talking about the limits philosophy, or philosophers? — DingoJones

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. — Wittgenstein

What I find problematic, however, is some people in the humanities who claim that subjectivity is not just a limitation of science (it is), but also the way forward to some sort of alternative that goes "beyond" science. I think Husserlian phenomenology falls close to this position. The problem is that the whole approach seems to me to be predicated on not taking seriously one's own objections: if subjectivity and first-person experience cannot be treated by science then the answer isn't to create another "science" (or uber-science) that can handle it, but rather to accept that we as human beings are bounded to use a combination of third and first person approaches in order to arrive at understanding. — Massimo

but the objective truth of what they are actually touching still accounts for the senses they all experience — Pfhorrest

Make a science out of what? — Pfhorrest

Thoughts and feelings are interpretations. Experiences are not. The three blind men touching the elephant each feels like (perceives that) they're touching a different thing, and none of them are correct, but the objective truth of what they are actually touching still accounts for the senses they all experience. The hard part is coming up with a model that does account for all their different experiences. — Pfhorrest

Besides being an introductory text, our objective is to present an overview, as general as possible, of the more recent developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, especially beyond the local equilibrium description. This is partially a terra incognita, an unknown land, because basic concepts as temperature, entropy, and the validity of the second law become problematic beyond the local equilibrium hypothesis. The answers provided up to now must be considered as partial and provisional, but are nevertheless worth to be examined.

An important question is whether a precise definition can be attached to the notion of entropy when the system is driven far from equilibrium. In equilibrium thermodynamics, entropy is a well-defined function of state only in equilibrium states or during reversible processes. However, thanks to the local equilibrium hypothesis, entropy remains a valuable state function even in non-equilibrium situations. The problem of the definition of entropy and corollary of intensive variables as temperature will be raised as soon as the local equilibrium hypothesis is given up.

By material body (or system) is meant a continuum medium of total mass m and volume V bounded by a surface Σ. Consider an arbitrary body, outside equilibrium, whose total entropy at time t is S. The rate of variation of this extensive quantity may be written as the sum of the rate of exchange with the exterior d^eS/dt and the rate of internal production, dⁱS/dt:

dS/dt = d^eS/dt + dⁱS/dt (2.7)

Once entropy is defined, it is necessary to formulate the second law, i.e. to specify which kinds of behaviours are admissible in terms of the entropy behaviour. The classical formulation of the second law due to Clausius states that, in isolated systems, the possible processes are those in which the entropy of the final equilibrium state is higher or equal (but not lower) than the entropy of the initial equilibrium state. In the classical theory of irreversible processes, one introduces an even stronger restriction by requiring that the entropy of an isolated system must increase everywhere and at any time, i.e. dS/dt ≥ 0. In non-isolated systems, the second law will take the more general form

dⁱS/dt > 0 (for irreversible processes) (2.10a)
dⁱS/dt = 0 (for reversible processes or at equilibrium) (2.10b)

It is important to realize that inequality (2.10a) does nor prevent that open or closed systems driven out of equilibrium may be characterized by dS/dt < 0; this occurs for processes for which d^eS/dt < 0 and larger in absolute value than dⁱS/dt. Several examples are discussed in Chap. 6.

According to it, the local and instantaneous relations between thermodynamic quantities in a system out of equilibrium are the same as for a uniform system in equilibrium. To be more explicit, consider a system split mentally in a series of cells, which are sufficiently large for microscopic fluctuations to be negligible but sufficiently small so that equilibrium is realized to a good approximation in each individual cell. The size of such cells has been a subject of debate, on which a good analysis can be found in Kreuzer (1981) and Hafskjold and Kjelstrup (1995). The local equilibrium hypothesis states that at a given instant of time, equilibrium is achieved in each individual cell or, using the vocabulary of continuum physics, at each material point.

...As a consequence, when working at short timescales or high frequencies, and correspondingly at short length scales or short wavelengths, the generalized transport laws must include memory and non-local effects. The analysis of these generalized transport laws is one of the main topics in modern non-equilibrium thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and engineering. Such transport laws are generally not compatible with the local equilibrium hypothesis and a more general thermodynamic framework must be looked for. — chapter 7

I guess you missed the first thread in this series, the introduction page, which lays out the structure of the whole project. There are only four "against" essays just eliminating the broad kinds of views I don't support, and then seventeen more essays going into detail on what I do support out of the remaining possibilities.

And as you'll see in those later essays, I am totally a pacifist, and equating objecting to certain philosophical views with violence is pretty absurd. — Pfhorrest

A polemic is contentious rhetoric that is intended to support a specific position by aggressive claims and undermining of the opposing position. Polemics are mostly seen in arguments about controversial topics. The practice of such argumentation is called polemics. A person who often writes polemics, or who speaks polemically, is called a polemicist. The word is derived from Ancient Greek πολεμικός (polemikos), meaning 'warlike, hostile',from πόλεμος (polemos), meaning 'war'.

We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being through strife necessarily. — Heraclitus

I am very aware of it, and it forms a pivotal part of this entire project. Treating facts and values analogously is not treating them as the same kind of thing, and in the very next essay (Against Cynicism) I argue explicitly against treating them as the same kind of thing. — Pfhorrest

Would you care to elaborate, and possibly relate this to the essay under discussion? — Pfhorrest

Max Planck wrote that the phrase "entropy of the universe" has no meaning because it admits of no accurate definition. More recently, Walter Grandy writes: "It is rather presumptuous to speak of the entropy of a universe about which we still understand so little, and we wonder how one might define thermodynamic entropy for a universe and its major constituents that have never been in equilibrium in their entire existence." According to Tisza: "If an isolated system is not in equilibrium, we cannot associate an entropy with it." Buchdahl writes of "the entirely unjustifiable assumption that the universe can be treated as a closed thermodynamic system". According to Gallavotti: "... there is no universally accepted notion of entropy for systems out of equilibrium, even when in a stationary state." Discussing the question of entropy for non-equilibrium states in general, Lieb and Yngvason express their opinion as follows: "Despite the fact that most physicists believe in such a nonequilibrium entropy, it has so far proved impossible to define it in a clearly satisfactory way." In Landsberg's opinion: "The third misconception is that thermodynamics, and in particular, the concept of entropy, can without further enquiry be applied to the whole universe. ... These questions have a certain fascination, but the answers are speculations, and lie beyond the scope of this book."

A recent analysis of entropy states, "The entropy of a general gravitational field is still not known", and, "gravitational entropy is difficult to quantify". The analysis considers several possible assumptions that would be needed for estimates and suggests that the observable universe has more entropy than previously thought. This is because the analysis concludes that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor. Lee Smolin goes further: "It has long been known that gravity is important for keeping the universe out of thermal equilibrium. Gravitationally bound systems have negative specific heat—that is, the velocities of their components increase when energy is removed. ... Such a system does not evolve toward a homogeneous equilibrium state. Instead it becomes increasingly structured and heterogeneous as it fragments into subsystems."

Another fundamental and very important difference is the difficulty or impossibility, in general, in defining entropy at an instant of time in macroscopic terms for systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium; it can be done, to useful approximation, only in carefully chosen special cases, namely those that are throughout in local thermodynamic equilibrium.