On 30 December 2013 18:43, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com>wrote:
> Dear Jason, > > You seem to be ignoring the role of the transitory that is involved in > the discussion here. The fact is that we are asking questions about things > we are trying to understand. Merely stating that this is that ignores the > point. Where doth change emerge if it does not exist at all? > This is my problem with Platonia, it has no explanation for the > appearance of change. We can point at this or that (figuratively speaking) > as an explanation, but the finger that points does not vanish upon > alighting on the answer. > This is a problem that a lot of people have with the whole idea of a block universe and related concepts, but the fact is that space+time can be considered as a 4 dimensional block. This is most easily understood if you consider the past. As generally understood, the past is a perfect model of a block universe. I know there are some caveats about this - delayed choice experiments, time symmetric physics and so on - but if we restrict ourselves to what might be called a "layman's" conception of the past, it is a perfect example of a block universe. To take a concrete example, the Battle of Hastings is embedded in the "map of the past" at the spatial location Hastings, and the temporal location 1066 A.D. To the people fighting the battle, it appears that time is "flowing" - they don't know what the outcome will be, to them it's still undecided. But we can see from our "superior" future perspective that the whole thing is simply embedded in a 4D block of space-time, and the outcome is already there, embedded in space-time in a futureward direction from the battle. The whole thing is a frozen timescape, within which it appears to the participants that time is flowing. There is no reason to think that our present is any different. We see time as flowing just as the people in 1066 did, and for the same reason: if something is taking dfferent values along the time axis, e.g. a bird is changing position by flying past my window, that something appears to change. Watching a film in the cinema is another example of this, which is especially clear if the film is on celluloid, or the modern equivalent (it's a bit less clear perhaps if it's digital). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
