Geez! For Pete's sake. I never realized how many folk cannot think for themselves. The sheer number of 'effin media puppets is saddening.

Did you go to the Affordable Health Care Act website?

The facts of the matter are clear. There is a wide range of talents and ability within people. Not all folk are good at the same things. In America, there is no excuse for not having cultivated an economic(socio-political) system which is capable of providing all types of folk with a means to be successful, if by that I mean being able earn a decent wage - doing what they're good at - in order to live in reasonable comfort.

Our economy isn't a free market and it never has been. There is no such thing. Even Adam Smith - the father of capitalism - was against patents, coercion, corporationism, and any laws and/or principles which created an inability for one to be held accountable for the negative consequences that their actions had on the populace.

As this pertains to the OP...

Why shouldn't it be the case that all jobs be required to pay a living wage? A living wage is one that enables someone to live and prosper in today's society - at today's level of living expenses - without the need for public assistance. Who in their right mind would be willing to argue that not all law-abiding citizens of The United States Of America 'deserve' to have a decent paying job available, especially when those jobs and the socio-economic landscape is created, influenced, and cultivated by us!

I don't get some folk. It's as if they think that some people do not deserve to be paid enough to live on. We aren't born into society by choice. One's birth place and circumstances should not be the sole determining factor of whether or not they can be self-sufficient.

Indeed. I've looked at the field equations, and they are waaay above my understanding of maths. Even the first paper is difficult because it is so counterintuitive.

Distance is the measurement of the space between two points. Similarly volume is the measurement of the space in a given area. Time is the space between events, and your belief isn't required in order for that to be true. We measure time. Time is not the measurement itself, like with your examples. The difference is nuanced but crucial for understanding.

No offense intended moe, but you're not making a whole lot of sense here. If there is no such thing as time, then what sense does it make for you to say that it is an interval. An interval is a section of time. Furthermore, intervals exist regardless of whether of not we've invented a word for them "intervals". The same is true of time.

Well Moe, there are some things that require us to figure out what they are not, in order to help us figure out what they are. Another common way to figure out what some thing is, is by our looking at how we use the word(the name of the thing). In fact, all completely manmade things(concepts that are existentially dependent upon humans) can be identified in this way. So, if time is manmade then all we need to do to figure out what time is, is look at how we ordinarily use the term "time".

It seems to me that the most general description of time is the space between events.

We perceive the passage of time. We perceive the sun and moon. We can perceive change as it takes place. It simply doesn't follow that any of those things is equal to perception.

The bolded example was meant only to lay a bit of groundwork. There are some basic things that need to be understood prior to getting into time dilation. One of those things is grasping the importance that frames of reference have to movement.




Time is whatever someone says it is, or 'perceives' it to be?

Nuh.

Earlier you said it was a concept. So now, it is a concept and a perception of reality?

I'm quite familiar with academic sense of "perception", but I'm fairly confident that you're not using the term academically. That's not a problem, but my not knowing what you mean by "perception" will inevitably lead to unnecessary confusion. I don't like guessing games either, so...

Do everyone a favor and define "perception" for me.

Two things here.

First, unless you can somehow get into everyone else's mind and experience time as they do, there's no way that you can know that time is a little different for everyone.

Second, if time is a perception, then what is it a perception of?

This line of enquiry may be of help. So, are you saying that concepts aren't ever physical things, or that physical things cannot be concepts?

I mean, it seems that you're claiming that time is a concept, and presumably that all concepts are manmade things, and thus not real, or physical, or some such.

Is that much about right, so far, with regard to what you're calling "time"?

My example has nothing to people's opinions on what took place. Not much sense in my continuing here. If you cannot understand the basics of time dilation, then you'll not be able to understand time travel.

So, you saying that unless math is based upon what we don't know, it's wrong?

Nuh.

We've never been inside of bacteria either, but that doesn't stop us from gaining knowledge about it. Point being that our having knowledge of X doesn't necessarily require our being in or to X.


Interesting how you've implied that educated guesses are somehow inferior forms of drawing conclusions. Turn about is always fair play, especially in philosophy.

If being an educated guess isn't acceptable for actually being and/or gaining knowledge on your view, then how on earth do you expect to claim knowledge of what you're talking about here? You have no working knowledge of the math, science, and/or knowledge that you've been rejecting.

More importantly though, do you understand what I talked about in the earlier post with regard to time being different to observer A and B regarding the same set of events?

No. That is about how time passes. Particularly, how it's passage is relative to observation and motion.



This is a report of your thought/belief about the matter at hand. Rather than get into where it's mistaken, may I suggest that you set all your preconceived notions aside in order to actually consider other ways of looking at it? Until that is done, you'll not be able to understand the positions that you're rejecting. If one cannot understand a position, then one's rejection cannot be meaningfully justified.




Yes and no. Scientific theories are verifiable/falsifiable. So, part of 'proving' them right is the very ability to be able to prove them wrong as well.




Well, I suppose that that's one way to look at it, but it's not the only way. Explanations, such as dark matter, string theory, and dark energy are not properly called "inventions" of science, if we are placing those things into the general category of inventions, like typewriters and automobiles. If you do not mean "inventions" like that, then you're using the term "invention" quite carelessly.

We posit such things as dark matter/energy, because observation requires it. Our maths warrant our positing them, which is remarkably different than saying that positing them 'saves our math'. It's no different than our continually adding new knowledge to any other knowledge base.

Knowledge is accrued.




This is just plain nonsense. Formulas are mathematical constructs. Spacetime isn't just a mathematical construct. To quite the contrary. Mathematics is used to describe observation. Space and time can be observed in any number of ways. In fact,and ironically enough, the attribution of causality necessarily presupposes both. In other words, in your fervor to reject time and to put forth your own misguided belief about why others do what they do, you've not taken note of the fact that everything you've said here has been facilitated by the very existence of that which you're claiming to reject.




Oh my. What insight. Remarkable. Tell me though, because evidently I'm confused a bit by such revolutionary insight into the shortcomings of modern science.

Exactly what would count as being "the wrong math"?

Understanding time dilation involves understanding how frames of reference work(understanding our assessment of movement).

Understanding assessing movement requires at least three objects within the same frame. Think about sitting in your car at a stop, foot on the brake, and looking at the car next to you through the passenger window. Your visual field includes only the inside of your car and the car next to you. I'm sure that we've almost all had this wierd experience:If the car beside you moves forward slowly and steadily, it will feel as though your car is actually moving backwards, even though you know you have your foot on the brake. That feeling is the result of not having a third object in the same frame of reference from which to determine which car is actually moving. It's impossible to tell which is actually moving, because relative to one another they are both moving...

However, if another object outside of both cars were in view, such as a light post, you would be able to tell that it wasn't your car moving by virtue of noting that the relationship between your car and the post remained unchanged, while the relationships between the other car and your car, and/or the other car and the post had.

Assessment of movement involves observation. We see objects by virtue of their reflection/absorption of light. Roughly speaking, light bounces off them and into our eyes. All of this takes time. In the scenario above, all three objects are so close together that the difference in the amount of time it takes for the light to reflect into our eyes is negligible, however, if three objects in the same frame are spaced far enough apart, and given the right circumstances, we will experience time dilation first hand.

Imagine two observers witnessing the same collision of two objects. If observer A is moving away from the two objects at near light speed, the amount of time it would take for him/her to observe the collision would be much greater than observer B, if B were standing still in close proximity to the collision. That is because of the amount of time it would take for the light to reach observer A is much greater than observer B.

The observers would not witness the collision at the same time, even though the event only happened once. One consequence, of course, is that both observers could offer accurate accounts that would not seem to agree with one another, because they would include remarkably different times of occurence.

In addition, because observer A is travelling away from the event at close to light speed, each movement making up the event would take longer and longer to reach him/her. The result would be that the event would actually be taking much longer to take place to observer A than to B. The event would be observed as happening in slower and slower motion to A, but not to B, so the overall time that the event required to be complete would also be remarkably different to observer A and observer B.

This begins to lay some groundwork for the relativity of time.

Good and evil aren't just words. "Good" and "evil" are words, but they're much more than that in the same way that "murder" is a word, but murder is much more than just a word.

Oh geez. Rubbish. It doesn't follow from the fact that folk see things differently that there's no such thing as good and bad or right and wrong or good and evil.

This IS a philosophy forum, so at least make a valid argument for ****'s sake.

Well, I don't think that growth itself gives meaning to anything at all. Every example of giving meaning that we have at our disposal is of a human giving meaning. That doesn't mean that only humans can do it, but I think that saying that anything other than humans can do it requires some kind of strong justification.




I don't see how growth shoulders such an explanatory burden.




This can't be true. There are too many folk who do not believe in things such as spirituality. Some others do not believe in knowledge, love or many other constructs of the conscious mind. Many folk do not even believe in such a thing as minds.

Given all that, I see no reason to think that what you've called "a universal denominator" qualifies meets the criterion for being one.




To say that "the universal meaning of life is we all hunger for meaning" falls prey to being a bit meaningless in the same way that A=A is literally meaningless. Meaning requires distinction to be drawn and maintained. To use the term "meaning" as a description of what meaning is doesn't qualify as an acceptable explanation.

BBQ is always good!

I suppose I'm working from the premiss that all meaning is attributed. Thus, the meaning of life, is the meaning that each of us attributes to it, rather than meaning which is assumed to be inherent within life itself. There is agreement it seems in some of our respective thought/belief, but it also seems to diverge.

To me, there is no meaning that doesn't consist entirely of thought/belief. Therefore, prior to agents capable of thought/belief, there could be no meaning.