"Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away."
Is this expression common anywhere else?
Usually people don't care about actual distance. It's not useful for much, unless you're drawing a map. Also, note how new transport options change the perception of the world. 200 years ago, my ancestor would probably not bother with a casual visit to a town 70+ km away. These days, I don't think much of running errands over that distance - it's a 1.5h bus ride away, so I can go there in the morning, do stuff, and come back before dinner (and thanks to the current tech, I can also clock in some work time during commute).
Btw, there's this joke about a soldier asking a sergeant "what is timespace", and the sergeant answers "get a shovel and dig from here till sunset".
There are also congested areas in Col/Cle/Cin where it might take 20min to go three miles so distance is also time there.
I'm sure it has happened occasionally, but I wouldn't know how to process the information. Especially since equal distances can take different times depending on speed limits, etc
I would do the same referencing smaller cites or states/locations close by. 6 hours from the gulf or 2 hours from this college.
This might have been the consequence of switching from imperial measurements to metric in the 70s.
Edit. But I guess you were talking about our perception of time.
And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.
Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.
But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically.
> In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady?
I think so. Physics is a construct that we have to describe how our universe works.
Lets think about things in "ticks" where a "tick" is just one particle or I should say interaction happening in our universe. Or better think of our universe as a big state machine. Between each new state there are many ticks arranging the matter and getting ready for the next observed state. And by observed state I mean observed by the universe -- or realized. Now we have two time domains to think about. One, tick time. How long is a tick? Would it matter if some ticks took "longer" than others. Then you have the notion of time outside of a tick, that gives ticks its "tick time" or what makes some ticks "longer" than others. If this is anywhere near the case then time outside of the umbrella of each realized universe state does not matter.
I may not be doing a good job of getting the notion out of my head. But try to think of it if you were in a video game. Lets take it back to maybe the "Max Payne" days given it is a game that has some dealings with time. If you were playing the game on a laptop and closed the lid and the computer suspended would Max be able to detect or care even that the time between rendering one frame the other went from something like 60FPS (well back then 12FPS) to 2 hours our observed time to render the next frame? We would be the hypothetical observer. Max would not have a clue.
Anyways thinking about how time works is always fun. About all we can do is learn how time works from our observable position.
I can of course imagine a scenario where different entities, even in the same universe, experience the passage of time differently. For instance, a positronic robot whose consciousness is only switched on for one minute of every hour. To this being, events could appear to happen willy-nilly, without causation, due to activity between ticks, but the robot would have no way of knowing why the world works like this without talking to another being without the limitations who has been making observations in "real time". So perhaps something like this is happening to us and could explain some weird quantum phenomena, but I'm having trouble thinking of any way we could test it.
Yes, the problem of how to test such things. That is why it is so fun to think about it.
For all we know between the seconds a trillion trillion tiny life forms that resemble ants slip out between the cracks of space time and take a untold amount of time (to their reference) to nudge each particle just so according to a small tattoo on their forearms. When they are all done they slip away just as mysteriously as they came. And each time they come back to arrange our universe it is done so by ancestors of many generations removed of the last workers who came to enforce our its will on our universe.
This also brings me back to Lawrence Krauss? with the notion of there is not really nothing in nothing and we can't truly ever have a "vacuum" void of all. I think it was in his book Something out of Nothing.
Not the one who downvoted you btw. I did read somewhere that Buddhism doesn't have the concept of ego, which genuinely confuses me as there seems to be a very real process occurring in our brains that labels and categorizes information, which introduces distortion and the "ignorance" that leads to delusion and suffering (in the Buddhist view).
What exists itself is the truth. Who can see it as it is? No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is.
Every living thing suffers.
What exist itself is the truth.
The call for a try to define ego as a precise as possible ("as a mathematician") and in the sibling post from user blueprint probably shall make you attemt just this, but fail at it. I think the "ego" dies when you see what you are looking for in what it is. Not in words not in labels not in labels. Just become aware that your model-maker is trying to model the world that really is there. You are what you are beyond the modeling process.
What exist itself is the truth
No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is.
One fun thing to consider: When there are no models no labels no boundaries no judgements, where does something start and where does it end? Does that even make sense? Objectively the real world is just what it is, one. No things at all. These are just models. The underlying world is still what it is. One.
> Objectively the real world is just what it is, one. No things at all. These are just models. The underlying world is still what it is. One.
What is the answer of 1+1?
Math.
Is it access to a real realm of reality or just a bunch of tools to help us make it in the world?
Yea thats a good question. Looks like a question where my answer is probably "both".
By the way, everyone is in reality. So how can you say "access" to a real "realm" of reality?
When you decide you have something to you want to know, ask me again.
I understand, thanks for taking the time to reply in the first place. I apologize if I was curt, but I found your posts here hard to understand. Reading your past comments helped elucidate what you mean.
I'm going to sleep now and I'm finding HN frustrating (I couldn't reply to you when I first saw your post) -- how can I contact you? I'm curious how you came to know what you know and if you had a teacher (your past comments hint that you did). I would like to find a good teacher, but I've been dismayed by my contacts with spiritual people and truth seekers. They are nice people, but they all seemed delusional and I had a bad gut reaction to them. You also seem delusional to some extent: you engage in pedantry and over-rationalization (I also do the latter so I recognize it easily). I do find certain delusions to be useful and engage in them consciously for my and others' benefit. Anyway, I want a teacher because my search has been haphazard and I basically stumbled onto my current elevated awareness (in comparison to my previous self) by sheer luck.
Thanks for posting on HN, even if people don't always want to hear you!
As for delusion when you say that to someone please provide something they can confirm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...
Your fallacy is.....
The reason that fallacies exist is because there is underlying structure to arguments. For some arguments, its possible for every statement within the argument to be true, but for the conclusion to be false. The argument which you gave for skepticism toward the concept of ego is one such argument that exhibits structure level weakness. The fallacy label is argument from authority. Often this argument form is used despite it being fallacious, because authorities tend to be authorities for a reason. So using conclusions they derived, despite not sharing the logical backing which led them to their conclusion, can end up providing correct answers. In this case though, in addition to the flaws in argument form, some of the premises the argument is built upon are also untrue. Experts in the past aren't necessarily authorities on their subject matter thousands of years in the future and what someone teaches about doesn't reflect the full sum of their knowledge on a topic.
Seeing this lack of integrity in structure, I set out to provide counterexample which demonstrated the lack of integrity in the argument structure. In that sense, as inputs to the fallacious argument structure, both ego and the terms I gave are alike.
Both the terms I gave and the term ego were inputs to the argument structure, they can be categorized as inputs used in such a way, and they share that category with each other.
> Why do you think deteriorated forms of Buddhism nowadays have attached themselves to the term ego?
Is it deterioration or just accepting new ideas? I don't think that 2000-year-old Buddhism had all the answers, or would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better).
Buddha while alive only gave answers to the level of the questions people at that time were able to bring to him.
No one from modern times asked Buddha about gravity, or electromagnetism, or calculus, or about Bernoulli's principle, nor is he alive in modern times to inform us of what we ourselves can't recognize right in front of ourselves.
However, if, hypothetically, someone were to bring questions about black holes or dark matter to Gautama Buddha, then I feel very confident based on my understanding of philosophy that his reply would be to the effect or meaning of "if you can tell me or point out exactly what X from your question is, concretely, then I will be able to tell you whether it exists or not in reality, by placing that matter upon the formula that operates the world, and checking the result".
> would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better)
What is left is not helpful to us ordinary people for discerning or learning Buddha's teaching. We lost his truth through the process of it being handed down. His teaching is not meditation, four noble truths, eightfold path, nor precepts. It's not that you go to sleep, abandon yourself, stop suffering, and die forever. He taught people what exists, and how it exists, because he knew that was the way to enlighten people. Nevertheless he didn't explain about the steps to achieving enlightenment. First, falsehood must disappear (you must be free of lies). That means you have to open your eyes to the truth. Secondly, you have to be able to see 'what is'. You have to know where right and wrong exist: facts. Third, you need conscience and courage. You wouldn't go to people and teach them through terrible treatment without conscience and courage. Fourth, there must be endless love in yourself to go teach people 'what is' repeatedly. Through the process, you burn up the karma in your consciousness. Anyone who teaches enlightenment can be achieved without agony and love is telling a lie.
This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not conceptualize of change occurring within a stratum like time. Were there any reasons we would track the number of sunsets before the advent of agriculture?
I would really like to see some research on why time behaves so strangely on psychedelics. Our everyday consciousness is mostly stable and steady so it's quite natural to think of it as dependent on time, as if there is a constant metronome quietly ticking away in the background. Most people assume that 2018 will feel mostly the same and take about as long as 2017. Only when things start slowing down and we peer behind the curtains of our egos do we get the sense that things are much weirder than we'd like to think.
Personally, I think the illusion of time must involve a many different brain processes. Memory is certainly one of the keys, but I wonder if the overall state of connectivity or speed or processing of the brain doesn't have an effect. The ego also seems implicated somehow, as we experience time differently in states of flow and moments of awe and wonder.