We are talking about what time is rather than how you define second.
Time is a measure of change.
The unit of time, the ‘second’, is a measure of change.
See how nicely these two work together? After all, if a ‘second’ doesn’t measure what time measures, how can it be a unit of measure of time?
The chair you are sitting on.
A chair is not a system that does not experience change. It comes into being, changing from raw material to fully-formed chair. It experiences change when you sit on it (it compresses – and maybe, if one is too heavy, it breaks!). It experiences change through the decay of its materials.
No… you’re positing a ‘static’ system which does not experience change. Can you give me an example that fits your definition?
The chair you are sitting on.
When I sat down on it, the cushion of the chair deformed. That’s change. When I sat down on it, it moved –
that motion is change. Perhaps there’s a better example you have in mind?
Cause and effect cannot be at a timeless point. What do you need the cause for if effect is already there.
Read a good commentary on Aristotle’s
Physics. Already, way back then, he was addressing these ‘problems.’
Time exist. Therefore according to your system of belief it should be sustained by God.
Well… thanks for telling me what my system of belief teaches.
What Catholicism teaches is that God sustains creation. Not re-creates, not forces interactions, but just keeps in being.
But… according to
your understanding of it… what does “God sustains time” mean? (If we want to resolve the issue here, we need to understand where your understanding deviates from what the Church is actually teaching…)
You need a variable to create time continuously because time changes. God is timeless, therefore He cannot change. This means that God cannot sustain time.
That’s like saying that, because I’m not a chocolate cake – that is, because I’m “outside of” the chocolate cake on the table – I cannot interact with that cake. You see the absurdity of your argument, don’t you? The fact of God’s existence outside of time does not mean that instants in time are inaccessible to Him…
Time is different from motion and change.
We agree on this. Time
measures motion and change.
You brain construct motion.
Wait – are you a transcendentalist, now? Are you saying that, without a brain to perceive it, there’s no motion?
You don’t have any sense to experience time.
I just demonstrated how our senses experience change and motion. If you want to disagree, please show how my examples are wrong. If you just say “we don’t have any sense experience of time,” without any argument or attribution, then we’ve just
turned into a Monty Python skit…
Time to me is the fundamental variable of cosmos which allows motion.
OK – so, what you’re calling “time”, I think I’m calling a “temporal framework.” Fair enough.
However, if time (as you define it) is a “variable”… then its value measures something. In other words, you’re really arguing for time as I’ve presented it to you: time measures things (in this case, change).
Now, to your claim: “we argue that time changes.”
OK – by this, I think you’re merely saying that, what we perceive as the “present moment in time” changes (let’s say that for all instants in time – from the beginning of creation (
t[sub]0[/sub]) to the last moment in time (let’s call it
t[sub]p[/sub]) – we humans always perceive one moment of time as the “present moment.” Inasmuch as time proceeds sequentially, the moments of time increase monotonically (that is, we perceive
t[sub]n[/sub] as occurring ‘before’
t[sub]n+m[/sub], for all
n and
m).
Now… with that in mind, you’re simply claiming that the change of the perception of the “current moment” from
t[sub]i[/sub] to
t[sub]i+1[/sub] is problematic? I’m not seeing the problem. Our human perception of the flow of time is caused: we see the sun move, or the trees sway in the breeze, and we recognize that the “present moment” moves from moment to moment. There’s your “cause” for the movement of the present moment.
(In fact, this argument really proceeds from the definition of ‘time’ as the measure of change.
)
