Philosophy Because I Can

[Gosco]

I feel writing about some philosophy because it's fascinating to me and maybe it'll be fascinating to someone else. I work a job in which the mental requirement is very low, thus I think a lot. You'd be surprised how far from the starting subject you get when you simply just think. I've gone from baseball to magic carpets and ended with why are there colors?

So the subject I want to talk about right now is time.

What is time?
Why does time exist?
How does time effect us?

I know it's cliche to ask questions like that. It always sound corny, but when you try to actually answer them, it becomes interesting.

What is time?
Is time a force like gravity or magnetism? Is it even it's own entity? There are plenty of people that think time is just a word we use to describe the passage of moments. It isn't anything it is just a description. I think that you have to acknowledge that time is it's own entity. A force or just a thing that exists. When a moment passes to another moment is something. And just like anything else that exists, it has to have a point at which is began existing.

There is an argument out there that maybe time has always existed. If you go back in time that there will be an infinite amount of days. This argument is not accepted by most philosophers (Which doesn't make it wrong but it's hard to believe). To say that in order for this day to exist, that there will have been an infinite amount of days before it, would mean this day could never exist. An easyish way of putting this is lets say we have a kitten in our heads. The kitten doesn't exist yet but we say that for that kitten to be alive, it must have an infinite amount of ancestors before it. Well that kitten can't exist then because there will always have to be one more cat to exist before the kitten can exist. It would be impossible to get to that kitten.

So what does all that mean. Well we are making the argument that time didn't always exist, that it began at some point.

Why does time exist?
In order to dive into this question we have to ask another question. (Sorry, it's philosophy, that is just kind of how it goes.) What does time do? What is the point of it? I've  thought about this long and hard and a lot. And after years I've come to my own conclusion. I haven't researched the philosophical arguments at all but here is my conclusion. So time is the passage of a moment to another moment and when you have a passage of a moment, you have the ability for an object in one moment to become something else in the next moment. So I'm just saying a big fancy way of saying time allows change. If we didn't have time things cannot change.

Think about it. If there is no time, then whatever is, is what it is and always will be. Hehe I love that sentence. If there is a tree in a field and there is no time, that tree will always be a tree it can't change. If the tree fell over it would be a broken tree. That means it was a tree one moment and a fallen tree the next, that's the passage of moments, time. If there was no time we'd be babies, teenagers, adults, and elders all at the same time.

So what if time exists in order to allow change? What if something created time because it wanted things to change?

How does time effect us?
If we are able to change then we are able to make things different. That is pretty simple. I haven't thought about this question so much as the others but it's important to be able to change our position, I think. Without change, we would just be what we are always and have no control of what we could be, which doesn't seem fun to me.


I always have little questions and ideas to stimulate my mind so I welcome and comments or PMs. I just felt like posting something.

[MasterMischief]

I do not remember where I picked this up...but how about Time is only energy acting on matter?

The concept of linear time, one minute after another, is a human concept.

[Beguile's Mistress]

*nods*  I had a conversation with a friend online and we realized that ten people can read the same thing at the same time and have ten different reactions that will result in ten different outcomes.  Oh, the power that you wield on the net.

[Gosco]

Energy acting on Matter? That's interesting but what does it mean exactly? That time is just a force acting on the matter or that energy (light, sound, heat) acting on matter is time?

[MasterMischief]

I think it meant that time was a calculation of the interaction.  As you pointed out, if there is no time, there is no change.  What is really causing that change?  It is not time, but other external energies.  Decay.  Although, decay is not exactly the force at work.  The things that cause the decay are.

[hardlucksixth]

He's got a point. If you were to (theoretically) remove any factors that could act on a (theoretical) object, theoretically, it would last forever.

Like, if you had a book that existed in some sort of lightless, airless, peopleless, temperature-less (not something like true zero or whatever, just no temperature), radiation-less, etc etc place, there would be nothing that would cause that book to degrade, so it wouldn't "age" - someone who found that book would not be able to tell if it had just been made or had, in fact, been chilling in an impossible anomaly for god knows how long, thus, defying our "perception" of time - which is, as stated before, our perception of energy acting upon matter.