The Road Trip Rant: Complexities like time, space, and naval lint

[Arcdelad]

okay....so as I was watching the mile markers slowly (ever so slowly) ticking away I devisaed a mental gimick to make my ride go smoother (bear in mind I have no Ipod, am I am too literary snobby to do a book on tape - they dont put spencer or keats on tape as far as I know)...I would intentionally look away from every other sign telling me how far it was to tusla, or st loius, so that when i DID look at the second sign, the miles to a certain place was inevitavlly lower than if I had looked at the sign before (duh...you skipped a sign)..

its been stated many a time that "a watched pot  never boils"...this is pretty analagous to my watched marker or sign scenario...BUT....what drives a person to NOT watch a pot, or to skip looking at every 2nd sign? in all honesty, time is constant, and therefore doesnt speed up or slow down depending on one's actions....this raises two important points though 1) time is a human creation, not a natural invention, and 2) the nature of one's personal reality can indeed bend the fabric of time

1) my pa once told me that time is what keeps everything from happening at once, and is what lets us meet at certain times that are consistently agrreable to all people partaking in the occasion...however, hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds, months, years, millenium are all arbitrarily decided things that are mankind's inventions...the cavemen had no calandar or clock...therefore, if time is a manmade creation and not a natural one, why cant we bend and shape it to our whims? we cant disavow gravity becuase it is a natural creation, but time is not, and therefore shoudl be subject to human control....i think time in that sense can be compared to shelley's monster in that it now controls us, but thats for a later rant...

2) thorouex (sp?) and emerson were big fans of existentialism - which basically states that if your mind is not percieving something at that exact moment, it doesnt exist (the whole if a tree falls in a forest and noone is around thing was born from this)...an example of this is that if you walk in your house and leave your car parked in the driveway, the car no longer exists becuase you cant see, hear, smell, taste, or feel it - all the gateways to our brain get zero input from said object....taking existentialism one step furthr, one could state that reality is bound by our perception, and thus each persons reality is different...reality becomes just the movie and subtitiles that the chemicals and electricity in your brain produce, and my movie looks different than your movie (so maybe Jim Carrey's pen CAN be blue)...red to me may look orange to you, but as long as we both point to that color and say red there is a societal consensus...as this relates to time, have you every told a person that today was long, only for them to tell you their day was short? same day, different reality and perception of time from each person...

SO....time is a creation we can bend, and we can bend our own perceptions of things like time, ultimately making time perhaps the flimsiest part of our reality...we bend and shape it every day...which in further leads maybe to things like time travel...if time can be bent by..what is the extent to that?

...and thank you to the nice cop in missouri who let me of with a warning for going 83 in a 60.....those towns and their GD speed limit droppage can get ya sometimes....

[usonian]

hmm, where do i begin?  i agree with everything you said about individual perception and how it makes reality relevant to each person but as far as time being an arbitrary creation of mankind (womankind, peoplekind, you know what i mean) i would have to disagree.  we may have created the second, minute, hour, day etc. but it did have some bearing on the world around us (my technical brain is taking over on this one).  obviously a day is from one sunrise to the next but it was the egyptians who broke each night and day cycle into 12 pieces creating what we now call hours.  this was based on their numbering system which in turn was based on the number of lunar cycles in year.  the hours and minutes and seconds are based on the sexagesimal numbering system of the babylonians who used 60 as a base in all of their mathematical calculations.  so our concept of time is based off of a consistent part of reality that we can all observe in the rising and setting of the sun, phases of the moon, mathematics etc. 

also, while they may not have been cavemen persay, the ancient pueblo created calendars of all kinds.  chaco canyon was built by the pueblo and is an amazing network of buildings and cities that were all designed to mark and measure the passing seasons.  the sun dagger is a pretty popular example of the way they measured the seasons by allowing light to pass through slits in rock formations and move across spirals carved in the rock behind them.  so yes, our measurement of what we call time is a complete fabrication but give the ancient civilizations a little more credit than pulling the minutes your casio wristwatch displays out of their asses:)

oh, and i'm glad you cited thoreaux and emerson instead of that bs movie i heart huckabees for examples of existentialism (not that i would expect less from your literary education).  i'm all for presenting deep theoretical ideas and issues in a form for everyone to understand but i hate that damn movie and get sick of everyone thinking they understand existentialism because of it.

that's all i got for now, time to go home.

[Emmalina]

Always fun to explore topics beyond the realm of WoW....

Arc, the whole color situation you described is something that has confounded me from the moment it entered my mind, it's absolutely fascinating to think that your Blue is potentially not my blue. We may all have the same favorite color, however we all just call it by a different name.

"Time" as you have described it is ours, it's our facade that we put on ther perpetual state of things to give us the illusion of control over them. We attribute these hours, minutes, and seconds to our construct of time to further simplify the concept for us. Given that is our creation we should be able to manipulate it as we please to best fit our needs, but it seems we created so we were not granted that luxury. I'm one of "those" people who does not think people in general are capable of managing or understanding there own existence, so we essentially make something to do it for us. One theory that falls under the label of existentialism is the belief that existence has no inherent meaning, rather we arbitrarily assign our own existence meaning (a la Time) in order to justify our own position in the world. We just loosely fit it to the greater happenings of the universe, or nature, to make it seem more viable, something like "Well we can't control the motion of the planets, so that must be natural. Therefore time, which is structered around this motion, must be natural as well." What gets me is how outrageously we partition it. We call a day one rotation of the Earth, but if it truly were the Sun would always rise at the same "time," and obviously this is not the case. We claim a month to be the period of the phase of the Moon, but it's not. We claim a year to be an Earth orbit around the Sun, but it's not. Math is an unbelievably gorgeous and powerful thing, but we've used it so poorly in our attempt to connect our lives with nature. The pueblos Uso mentioned, and what I know of them, mark a certain event with a moment, then the next time that event occurs there is another moment, and their time increments in between, so there is year is based solely on nature. In my opinion this a very good way to create an accurate system of time, if that is the goal. This is the system we apparently decided to mangle (in Cat form maybe).

Time travel, and the way we have defined it, is a little strange as well. We assign events to a certain numerical "time," then call time travel the experience of events which are associated with an earlier time. Look at the sun...you see the Sun as it was a few minutes ago; you have experienced that Sun as it was before now, so you have "traveled back in time," no? Even looking at your computer monitor only provides you with the state of the monitor a split-second ago, so again you've experienced the past. Perception is not instantaneous, so it could be argued that in relation to us as people there is no present, only what has happened and what will happen. Yet another fundamental flaw with our system of "time." As a more scientific perspective, a clock in constant motion, over a long period, will show an earlier "time" than a clock as rest. Theoretically a clock accelerated at the speed of light will never tick. We cannot possibly abstract something like time to accurately describe the happening of things because we are so far from understanding the happening of things. The only consequences of manipulating time are those incurred by those who have not manipulated it in the same way. Everything has a frame of reference, and we have chosen a single one to perceive all things as a matter of comfort and convenience. So, Arc, in my opinion, the you are the limiting factor in manipulating time, your frame of reference. You can do with it what you please as long as you accept that you have not changed anyone else's perspective. From an existential view, you could decide that things progress in increments of your observation. One person may say their car has existed since 2002, or about 5 years, where as you, the existentialist, could say it has existed from the first time you perceived it to the last time you perceived it....Oh, and...Thoreau 

"Oh! Do not attack me with your watch!"
-Jane Austen
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   Emma

[un4]

Heh.  I'm a Cynic, in the proper Greek sense.  I'm also a Romantic.  Don't ask me how that works 

[Luise]

OOh Emma- Are you a Jane Austen fan too?

I have often thought of the concept of time- I love C.S. Lewis' treatment of time in Narnia.

But my eyes are drooping- sleep calls- and alas...it it time for me to sleep. I'll leave the deeper thinking ..till a later ...time.

[un4]

OOh Emma- Are you a Jane Austen fan too?

Yuck >.<
I prefer Swift.

[Darkling]

I still like Dr. Seuss books myself. Sneeches, green eggs....

[Luise]

I can virtually quote "green eggs and ham" from memory- and that is a scary thing- cause I have a poor memory

[Tassie]

I think you have Existentialism confused with Subjective Idealism. (I copy text from Wikipedia.)

Subjective idealism is a theory in the philosophy of perception. The theory describes a relationship between human experience of the external world, and that world itself, in which objects are nothing more than collections (or bundles) of sense data in those who perceive them. This theory has much in common with phenomenalism, the view that physical objects, properties, events, etc. (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events, etc. Thus reality is ultimately made up of only mental objects, properties, events, etc.

Existentialism can be seen as a philosophical movement that rejects the belief that life has an inherent meaning, but instead requires each individual to posit his or her own subjective values. Existentialism, unlike other fields of philosophy, does not treat the individual as a concept, and values individual subjectivity over objectivity. As a result, questions regarding existence and subjective experience are seen as being of paramount importance, and initially above all other scientific and philosophical pursuits. [T]he main identifiable common proposition is that existence precedes essence, i.e. that a human exists before his or her existence has value or meaning. Humans define the value or meaning of both his or her existence and the world around him or her in his or her own subjectivity, and wanders between choice, freedom, and existential angst.

Not being a philosopher, however, I may be mistaken.  One may be a subset of the other, however, Ii remember the Tree Falling issue from my Metaphysics courses and not the Existentialism one.  [smirk]

[Caedryne]

Has anyone seen, "What the bleep do we know?" What did you think of it?