Care to go into detail with that statement?

by Anonymous 11 years ago

It's a philosophical question. The post is not about predestined fate or anything, it's about the future, whether determined or not, exists as of the present. I believe it doesn't, and that the future, like time, is a concept that man has made uo.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

It doesn't, not yet at least.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

I agree "the future" is a mental construct. However, unless I misunderstand your belief that time is man made too, I can't agree... We certainly measure time in units we made up (e.g. minutes and seconds). Time itself, however, evidently existed long before humans came to be. Also, in our own lives we perceive the passing of time. I believe time is real.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

Not every culture sees time as passing. I forget the examples, but in my anthropology class we're learning about some who don't even have words for future and past because they don't see time as passing or having passed, you are where you are and that's just where you are. Hard to wrap your mind around huh? When given paper plates and asked to arrange them in the way they think time moves, Americans and other people of Western culture arranged them in circles or lines, they arranged them in no particular shape, just randomly. Time is only real if you believe in the theory that space and time are woven together, which is only one of many theories about how space is constructed.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

Perhaps you're being much more philosophical than I'm am. I'm saying we see events. They appear to happen in a certain order. The sun rises, it moves across the sky, it sets. Our perception of this flow of events is what I'm referring to as time. No spacetime theories needed to believe time flows in one direction.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

I think that's a bit more philosophical than space time. Now that I understand what you're saying more, the fact that you see time flowing in one direction is part of your habitus. The language your society uses forms the way you see things. In societies where there is no word for past or future, time isn't going in one direction. Other cultures see time going in a circle or in no direction in all, and that isn't philosophical it's a fact. We see time as linear, but that doesn't make it so.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

Soup, time does exist, and it has for a while. http://science.discovery.com/videos/through-the-wormhole-does-time-exist/

by Anonymous 11 years ago

You're thinking of space time, not the idea of a future or measurements of time. There's another video right under it that says "is time an illusion?" and in your own video that you posted it said some physicists don't believe in the idea of time.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

@ct: The rotation of the Earth and its orbit exists, but the units by which we measure those do not. I think I may have phrased that opinion wrong. This is what I meant.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

Oh, gotcha.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

"The future is a concept--it doesn't exist! There is no such thing as tomorrow! There never will be because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now." -Alan Watts.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

But there is such a thing as tomorrow. We plan things in advance frequently. While you're thinking about the past or the future in the present, the past and the future still exist to you, if only as a thought. Of course it disappears when we don't think about it--it only exists in our minds (but it //does// exist). Think of any other intangible thought. Let's use liberty as an example. If you don't think, liberty no longer exists, because it is solely confined to thoughts rather than manifesting itself in the physical world. But does liberty not exist, then? Of course it does.

by Anonymous 10 years ago

But the futer does.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

Ah, there it is.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

The future does exist because the future is a fourth dimensional coordinate of our universe. Left and right refer to coordinates in the second dimension, so just because they don't exist in the first dimension, doesn't mean they don't exist in the second or higher dimensions. To determine if anything exists, we have to look at it from one dimension higher than it, so we would look at the future from the fifth dimension, not the third. If we could see the universe from the fifth dimension, the future would be in plain sight.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

What's your basis for claiming that the future exists in a higher dimension? This sounds too interesting to not hear. As far as the post goes, the future is just a bunch of events that have certain probabilities of happening. Until the event occurs, there is no existence for any of the events. But once it does occur, then we are in the present and not the future. Thus, the future is just a set of probable events without a realization (the occurrence of an event). Based on that analysis, the future cannot exist. Did I make sense to anyone else beside myself? I never thought about this until just now so my post may lack refinement.

by Anonymous 11 years ago

As 4th dimensional beings, it's hard for us to imagine the entirety of the 4th dimension or higher, so I'll drop everythign one dimension, so the 3rd dimension is now time. Picture a hollow tube closed off at one end. The cap at the end is our universe i nthe 2nd dimension. As it moves through the tube, things change. If the cap moves back 1cm, it reverts to how it was the last time it passed that point. Thus, we can think of it's position in the tube as time. We can see the 3rd dimensional tube so we know it's there, but the people living in the 2D universe can only see the cross section of the tube their universe is in. So to them, the rest of the tube doesn't exist. If you bring everything up a level, we live in the 3D cross section of a 4+D universe. We perceive time as the 4th dimension because that's the dimension our cross section moves through as time progresses. Now, if we raise things one more dimension, we'll be able to see the who timeline of the universe. Ours would be a bubble in it, but the rest of time will be plainly visible. If we were to say the future (doesn't) exist, we are by default referring to it from it's 'domain' dimension. Time frames exist in the 4th

by Anonymous 11 years ago

, so we must consider that dimension when we try to look for it. Saying "The future doesn't exist" in the context I think OP is using is like a person forever stuck on one level of a building saying another like him doesn't exist because that other lives on the floor above him. They can never make contact, but it doesn't mean the other doesn't exist. THey simply exist in different 2D cross sections of the 3rd dimension.

by Anonymous 11 years ago