Do you agree?

Question

With the world issues that keep brewing around the world over and over again, It seems that th further we go into the future, the further we go into the past?

Many philosophers, and i agree, that there is so such thing as time, time is something that is man made. Do you agree that time is just a man made concept a that we are living in vast present?

But the concept of time is a man made concept. Nothing more than measuring the change in position of the earth, and the amount of light available to you.

Answer 1

Exactly! Like my whole "Back to the Future" theory. After I saw the movies, I began to ask myself, how can you go back to the future? So after thinking about it I came up with a theory. All time exsists at once. Like right now, you are 3, 17, and 45 all at the same time. So if you take your 17yr old self back to visit your 3yr old self the past becomes the present. So the times when you were 17 never exsisted. there's just a void because you have your "past" and your "present" together. So the past cancels out and becomes present.

Answer 2

Your using different ways of describing the same idea, that idea being time. There absolutely is past present and future. For instance, I know yesterday I watched a movie, I know today I am going to a concert, and I know tomorrow I don't work because it's saturday. So there is a very clear difference between identifying the past, present and future from eachother. In a certain sense though we are in an evergoing vast present that you can't escape from. Although time is always "moving" (or however you wanna describe it) you always stay the same - in the present, in the now.
Even if you traveled back in time 50 years, time is still moving you forward at the same rate. Because let's say you had a working watch that could be unaffected by your time machine, then you go back 50 years but your watch still moves forward 2 minutes. It took you 2 minutes to travel back 50 years, so your going backward in "Time" while still remainng in the constant never changing, but always moving forward present, or the now.
Now some quantum physicists are getting into the philosophy that every possibility, past present and future, is happening at once in an infinite amount of dimensions and realities. But we are only seeing one of those dimensions at a time for whatever reason. To me this idea is a little bogus, there's really not much to back it up because quantum physics is so non-comprehensible at this oint in our understanding of it.
So I guess I believe that the "idea" we all have of time is a valid one, becuase there are clear distinctions between past, present and future. But I do think there is some truth to what you are saying in the sense that weare all stuck in an ongoing constant present. We can never be in the past or in the future, for tomorrow wont be the tomorrow anymore once it becomes today.

Answer 3

People mean different things when they refer to time.

If you look right down into the guts of what time signifies in the science, you will find that what time really means is CHANGE. It is almost obvious from our experience that things change (though exactly how valid our experience is becomes a much more protracted discussion), and time is a basis for describing that. If you like, you can re-write all scientific equations without any time variables, per se, and instead just refer to rates instead. If you think of time as a description of rate of change, then there probably is such a thing.

Another way in which time is used is as a reference point. Mathematicians particularly are prone to just slap it on top of our three spatial dimensions as another kind of axis. Something may be at a particular spatial coordinate when you check, but not when you check the next time. Therefore saying "at time A it was there and at time B it was not" seems a perfectly valid way of talking about the difference in that coordinate. And if you like you may even refer to a standard change unit in a particular reference frame, a.k.a. days, hours, minutes, seconds, fortnights, and so on. Just so long as you keep in mind that one reference frame is not necessarily the same as another reference frame you'll probably be fine (see the theory of relativity for more time-warping fun). So if you think of time as a description of data, then there's no reason why it shouldn't be.

The big problem with viewing time as an axis is some people begin to think that, just as with the spatial axes, the time-points are always there and always re-visit-able. If we think of Paris as a point in space, we can certainly visit Paris any time we like (as long as our bank accounts permit). This, however, is obviously NOT the case with time-coordinates. Nobody (so far, at least) EVER visits any particular time-coordinate more than once, and arguably we have so far absolutely no way of demonstrating that any time-coordinate other than the one we happen to occupy even exists. So if you think of time as the 'fourth dimension', or a 'time-stream' that you can boat up and down, there is almost certainly not such a thing.

So the good news is that science is pretty-well grounded, no matter what we find out about time. The bad news is that those 'Time Tunnel' re-runs on TV are doomed to always be fiction and how a LOT of people think about time is just plain wrong.

Answer 4

Time is a man made thing, a material concept to give a point of reference, had there been no time we could understand the value of the present and live accordingly. Man was made with the ability to think and as a man thinketh so is he. As the book says. We limit everything we do to the concept of time it is a pity.

Answer 5

The concept of time is not man-made. The rate of time changes in different places. It is an actual dimension of physics. We just made up a measurement. That's like saying chairs don't exist because people made up the word for them.

Answer 6

Time is not a man-made concept, think about it we live and die just like everything on this planet, its time that allows this change to occur, man evolved some time in the past, man will extinct some time in the future.........so yes time does exist and its a natural phenomenon

Answer 7

Yea something like that. Maybe it's all happening at the same time, past, present and future. Interesting question.

Answer 8

Time is very real. It is a measure of distance. It is why we have seasons and why things occur in a given order. Man did not create these, he observed them. And to that order, he gave a name - time. Do not confuse the invention of language with the occurrence of a phenomenon.

Answer 9

Time is real. Indeed, in an important sense, time is more real than space. Space is the concept, time is the underlying medium of percepts.

Answer 10

The reason it seems like we are returning to the past is that mankind has the same nature as he has always had! Time is relative!!!