Well it looks like my response got eaten by the entropy deamons in the void...
sophiecentaur said:
"Perfect, Platonic and unchanging" are terms which I feel to be a bit loaded and angled to shoot dead any serious arguments... Whilst I totally respect their intellect, I can't always understand how their ideas are so often used out of the context of 'their' worlds.
Such admittedly extreme terms are not intended as straw men, rather the opposite. I am quite open to looking at another term, a more relaxed sort of theoretical proposition of some sort. I ask myself then: How does this term differ from the sort of extreme paradigm above? If a difference can be shown or even suggested, then I look further there, because that is likely going to be the source of new and better understanding.
I think there may be something of a culture gap here (philosophy/physics)--often certain schools of thought or some idea is associated with its founder, who might well actually have had quite a different view on the matter. For example Plato and what we have since come to associate with Platonism, which itself means quite different things in various contexts (eg mathematics, physics, ethics, etc.). But this is also done in physics, though less often since most of the best physicists also happen to be relatively recent. But by example, consider the expression "Newtonian Physics" or "Newtonian space" or "Newtonian time". Yet, were to actually go back and look at Newton's words, we would find a diverse number of ideas that seem quite foreign to what we now normally associate with the above terms. For example Newton says of time:
Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time ...
Similarly, we will find other oddities with space and physics itself. His calculus is not even used today (we use Leibniz's notation and arguments). And similar cases will be found with other pre-20th century physicists (eg Galileo, Copernicus,... Archimedes, etc.) Aristotle is usually really tossed under the bus for some of what he said in most freshman physics textbooks, which is a pitty, since his ideas were in many places quite a bit more sophisticated. Anyhow, for sure, we need to bear such context in mind when we read such old sages and when we talk about contemporary views that are associated with whichever figure.
Perhaps the two views of time as we have toying with here are best rendered as the "Heraclitean" and "Parminedean" views, but it is dubious we can say either person really held the views we now associate with them in any detail. (Indeed, how would we know, we have barely more than a page of rather cryptic writing from either of them to tell us!)
sophiecentaur said:
If the expression ''relationship between quantities" is used as a substitute for 'process' then time (a very elastic quantity in any case, now that we use Relativity) may not, in fact be regarded as any more than a construct. But, there again, perhaps we could say that about a lot of other ideas too.
Time I went to bed now!
This gets to the heart of the issue as best as I can tell. I am not ready to accept that:
process = relationship between quantities
I am not even ready to accept that
process = a quantity.
I will accept that:
experienced process = a quality
and it may be that:
process (in itself) = a qualitative feature of the cosmos that is static
but I want to know how such an illusion resolves or reduces ontologically speaking. Even in principle, even as a hypothesis or a guess of a shadow of a guess of it might look.
But for sure I cannot see how:
process (in itself) = a quantity (of anything)
that just doesn't even make sense to me.
Perhaps you can elaborate?
For now, I wish you good dreams.
