So what about the FQXi time essay contest? It's February already.

[apeiron]

If we knew how to describe the world this way, as a self-defining communications system, then perhaps we could envision the original universe as something like a quantum vacuum, where anything at all can and does happen -- but in such a lawless and structureless environment there would be no way for anything that happens to make a difference to anything else. So in effect there is nothing, all events remain merely "virtual."
Conrad

This approach is 1) ontic vagueness coupled with 2) pansemiosis. And you would find it expressed well in the philosophy of CS Peirce, the logician, semiotician and founder of pragmatism.

quoting Peirce...
"If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in order to account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in which the whole universe was non-existent, and therefore a state of absolute nothing."
"But this is not the nothing of negation. . . . The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.
"Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily resulted. I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom. That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness. (CP 6.215-219)
"I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this or that sort -- that is, of some quality. Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality. (CP 6.220)
"The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed. (CP 6.194)"
"[W]e must not assume that the qualities arose separate and came into relation afterward. It was just the reverse. The general indefinite potentiality became limited and heterogeneous. (CP 6.199) The evolution of forms begins or, at any rate, has for an early stage of it, a vague potentiality; and that either is or is followed by a continuum of forms having a multitude of dimensions too great for the individual dimensions to be distinct. It must be by a contraction of the vagueness of that potentiality of everything in general, but of nothing in particular, that the world of forms comes about. (CP 6.196)
"Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow. (CP 1.412)
end quote...

 

[marcus]

We should haul the discourse back around to everyday physics but before doing that, one more essay on What is Time, and this time on Youtube:


Here's a longer version with additional detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahza-ckLZMQ&feature=related

 

[starkind]

Marcus, where could I best initiate a discussion of concepts presented in these papers? For example, the argument that time is a result of motion...it seems to me that the idea of motion already includes time, and leads to a circular argument when motion is used to define time.

And ephemeral time. Instead of using a collection of motions of stellar objects to fix time, why not simply use the furthest observable object as a fixed direction? We can now see objects so distant that they are for all practical measurable purposes constant. So the length of a day relative to that fixed direction is a constant, and also fixes sidereal time, since such a distant object could be used to make a direct correlation between sidereal and diurnal time.

I don't have anyone to talk to about these things and discussion is often the key to understanding...