Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id HAA04306 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 31 Jan 2002 07:24:45 GMT Message-ID: <00f101c1aa27$b68069c0$6324f4d8@teddace> From: "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> References: <200201310129.g0V1Tk506664@mail12.bigmailbox.com> Subject: Re: ality Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 23:20:06 -0800 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Joe Dees
> >You keep coming back with the same point-- that spacetime is real--
> >despite the fact that I'm clearly not denying its existence. Space is
> >bound up with time. Space, after all, is present. What is spatialized
is
> >right now. The past doesn't have any space. Potentiality takes up no
> >space. Only the present has space. Space (and matter and energy) is
> >what marks the present off from what is past and what is potential.
> >Since all events in space are also in time, we may speak of spacetime.
> >All of our experience occurs in spacetime. But time is continual motion.
> >The present is continually bleeding into the past, as what was merely
> >potential becomes actual in a new present. And on and on and on. So
> >time is more than just spacetime. This doesn't mean there's a time
> >without space. Present time is spatialized. But its inherent motion,
> >which space entirely lacks, makes time into something fundamentally
> >different, and without this difference there would be no possibility of
> >novelty and therefore of freedom. This is simply to take time at face
> >value, rather than assuming it to be a fourth spatial dimension.
Einstein
> >was correct about spacetime. His error was to imagine that spacetime
> >is synonymous with time. It is not. It is synonymous with space.
> >
> Your example, if taken at face value, would not only excise the 'space'
from past experience, but the 'time' as well. Where is the time in a
memory? The same place that it's space is. If we play a memory back, we
re-member, that is, virtually re-live, ourselves as occupying specific
dynamically changing positions relative to our environment that we once in
reality occupied; both their re-membered movement and our re-membered
dynamically changing perpectives in relation to them are co-present in
memory.
>>>
The meaning of memory is that the past is still present. This is simply to
say that time is intrinsically real, whether spatialized (the present) or
not (the past). It's because mentality is an expression of time that the
past remains present to us. What we remember is, not neural recordings in
our brain, but the past itself. In our imagination it's re-spatialized,
though never like it really was, of course.
> >> Your cryptoreligios pseudoassertion that unless people accept your
> >flawed schema they must forsake self, mind and freedom is ludicrous,
> >especially when compounded by such unsupported (because
> >unsupportable, because wrong) statements such as "Time is both prior
> >and posterior to space".
> >>>>
> >
> >"Prior" and "posterior" are functions of time. Space has no priority,
> >and it has no posteriority. That's why it's space, not time.
> >
> And, I suppose, that time has no before or behind, no left or right, no
above or below. In fact, time cannot even be within, for that.too is a
location.
>>>
Time has two qualities, before and after. What it lacks is left, right,
above, and below. These are spatial properties. Funny that I'm explaining
this to a grown man. As to "within," when this term is used spatially, such
as a location within my house or my body, then no, time has none of this.
But when it refers to something within my mind or myself, this is temporal.
In this sense, time is within, and space is without.
> It does no good to appeal to a wished-for future and to say that when we
have new technological tools that your view will be validated,
>>>
This is an interesting inversion of reality. Of course, it's always the
mechanists claiming that technology is just about to validate them. Any day
now, we'll find memory stored in the brain. We'll find that TV set in the
occipital lobe. We'll trace the causal chain from the shapes and functions
of organs and bodies all the way back to DNA. Pure sci-fi, all of it.
Ted
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