How Long Is 'Right Now'

[Occams Barber]

maybe there is no time. And things just happen and occur at various rates; light, sound, growth, planetary revolutions, human perceptions, etc.

...Is time an abstract concept?

You're asking the wrong person.
I do the existence of time.
@jacks is the resident expert on the non-existence of time.

(see post #35 for jacks argument and supporting links)
OB

 

[Landon Caeli]

You're asking the wrong person.
I do the existence of time.
@jacks is the resident expert on the non-existence of time.

(see post #35 for jacks argument and supporting links)
OB

Well, I've been witnessing these trends lately that are literally spherical. Such as when talking about globalism -a globalist having no community is actually an individualist (one would assume they should be polar opposites)
https://www.quora.com/Has-globalisation-brought-about-individualism

Then, someone who becomes such a far left liberal -when he goes even farther to the left, he actually becomes a republican.
Horseshoe theory - Wikipedia

...Perhaps this is how we can know an idea is an abstract -IOW it was invented by the human minds perception of the world. None of it actually existing in reality.

 

[Serving Zion]

I'm not a physicist SZ so I won't pretend to understand the details.

A Plank unit is the time it takes for light to travel the distance of one Planck length in a vacuum. Where I'm in trouble is in understanding how Max Planck derived the concept of a 'Planck Length'. However he did it, it's generally accepted (by science) that one Planck unit is the minimum possible time interval, although I believe that there is still room for argument. A Planck unit can also be expressed as a fraction of a second but I'm not sure if my PC has enough decimal places.

To go back to your 'blur' issue - if a Planck unit is the minimum time interval and we were able to watch a moving object for one Planck unit, the object would appear to be absolutely stationary - hence - no blur. In principle, this is the same concept articulated in the Arrow paradox you brought to my attention.
OB

.. well, without knowing for sure that the concept of a Planck length is robust, neither of us can expect to rely upon it as a valid argument for the case that there can be a minimum observable unit of time. Until such a concept can be proven, then the Arrow Paradox will continue to be a valid paradox against the concept that time is granular, IMO.

.. btw, time only exists because things change. If there was no change, then time would not be observable. Therefore, the concept of time is a thing that we set reference against a known constant (ie: days, years etc). Those constants are chosen because they are fairly steady oscillations and their wavelength is quite well suited to our capacity to observe them (eg: a year is not a useful measurement of time for a fly, but a day can be). Just as our lifespan is limited to ~80 years, we find that days and years are useful wavelengths, but if a person has a longer lifespan they might be able to observe patters of much lower frequency.

It's very interesting, isn't it? .. to see how the mind thinks this way because we observe things according to patterns of oscillation (hence binary computing). I do imagine that science seeks to eliminate some of the interference with time that is imposed by human thought (eg: if the speed of earth's rotation changes, then a day is not a constant unit for time), and although not being much of the physicist to profess these things, I note that vacuum is a factor and I'd also mention that I have read elsewhere that gravity has also been found to interfere with the scientific approach of defining time.

 

[Occams Barber]

Well, I've been witnessing these trends lately that are literally spherical. Such as when talking about globalism -a globalist having no community is actually an individualist (one would assume they should be polar opposites)
https://www.quora.com/Has-globalisation-brought-about-individualism

Then, someone who becomes such a far left liberal -when he goes even farther to the left, he actually becomes a republican.
Horseshoe theory - Wikipedia

...Perhaps this is how we can know an idea is an abstract -IOW it was invented by the human minds perception of the world. None of it actually existing in reality.

Landon
You're so far off topic you're practically off the planet. I'm sure the Politics Forum would be entranced to hear your views.

For what it's worth you may be right about the circle thingy. Down here, around on the other side of the globe, to be liberal is actually to be on the right wing of politics.
OB

 

[Landon Caeli]

Landon
You're so far off topic you're practically off the planet. I'm sure the Politics Forum would be entranced to hear your views.

I'm talking about abstract ideas. Not politics.

How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction

 

[Occams Barber]

I'm talking about abstract ideas. Not politics.

Silly me. I imagined that a post talking about globalism, individualism, far left liberals (going even farther left) and republicans, had a political theme.

OB

 

[Landon Caeli]

Silly me. I imagined that a post talking about globalism, individualism, far left liberals (going even farther left) and republicans, had a political theme.

OB

My point was that it could be that our perception of time, itself, is an abstract, based solely on us, being living beings who die.

...Because with abstracts, humans tend to invent concepts based on human traits. And since we live and die, we assume time must exist.

 

[Serving Zion]

And since we live and die, we assume time must exist.

I think that in a world without anxiety (or anticipation), time would be meaningless. Eg, if we could have the basic needs of life guaranteed, then there would not be a need to manage time - just as the cats don't need to worry what time of day it is: they sleep, eat and walk around at their own leisure. They still have a knowledge of time, because they know that there is a matter of five days where people are busy and two days where they are impromptu, for example - but it's not as though they need do devise a system of measuring and managing their daily activities. Time is a thing that just happens (in having said this though, there is a visible anticipation while waiting for frozen meat to thaw in the microwave .. ).

Time management is an issue for the human because it needs to ensure that food and warmth are consistently available, despite seasonal variations of supply and demand, and I think that this is the major lesson of faith - that in the beginning the human was free to just walk around and eat fruit from any tree, there was no toiling for food .. but as soon as they took the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil as their source, then all the worries came along and they experienced a type of death - a loss of the life that is found in absence of fear. This is really what the expression of entering rest means in Hebrews 4:10-11 - while it is still compatible with Colossians 3:22-24.

.. just more thoughts toward the idea of the last paragraph in post #22.

 

[Bobber]

It's the blinking of the eye that separates past/present/future.

 

[Ana the Ist]

When we talk about Time we often divide it into three parts; Past, Present and Future.

Present has different meanings depending on context. It can mean ‘right now’, today, this year, this decade or even this century.

Present starts where Past ends. Present ends where Future begins. This suggests that Present has a beginning and an end.

What’s the shortest possible duration for the Present? How long is ‘Right Now’?

Discuss.
OB

It's just one eternal now.

 

[Occams Barber]

It's just one eternal now.

Post #27 reached a similar conclusion.
OB

 

[ViaCrucis]

I almost put this in the Science Forum since I see it as a physics question with philosophical overtones.

By 'shortest possible duration' I literally meant what I wrote. In the physical sense what is the shortest period possible for the Present?
OB

Plank time?

-CryptoLutheran

 

[ViaCrucis]

Are you saying that the Present exists for one Planck unit?

If so (and you may well be right) why not 3 Planck units or 7?
OB

I don't think there is anything like an objective "present"--it is context specific as others have noted. Terms like "present", "now", etc are all relative to the speaker's intentions.

But if we are going by the shortest possible unit of measurable time, then Plank time is about as small as we can get.

Conversationally, time is pretty relative. The concept of the present is just that--a concept. I don't think there is any way to objectively measure it, as it is an ever-fleeting thing; how fleeting depends on context. It therefore becomes sufficient that we understand what we mean when we talk about the present, which is understood through context. We all can understand that when I say "right now" I mean relatively speaking, I'm not talking about yesterday, but relative to the current circumstances.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Nithavela]

When we talk about Time we often divide it into three parts; Past, Present and Future.

Present has different meanings depending on context. It can mean ‘right now’, today, this year, this decade or even this century.

Present starts where Past ends. Present ends where Future begins. This suggests that Present has a beginning and an end.

What’s the shortest possible duration for the Present? How long is ‘Right Now’?

Discuss.
OB

I think I read somewhere that scientists have measured that the human brain perceives the present as an interval of about 5 seconds.

 

[Serving Zion]

It's an interesting topic to have in mind, (thanks for that, OP!).

I don't think there is anything like an objective "present"--it is context specific as others have noted. Terms like "present", "now", etc are all relative to the speaker's intentions.

But if we are going by the shortest possible unit of measurable time, then Plank time is about as small as we can get.

Conversationally, time is pretty relative. The concept of the present is just that--a concept. I don't think there is any way to objectively measure it, as it is an ever-fleeting thing; how fleeting depends on context. It therefore becomes sufficient that we understand what we mean when we talk about the present, which is understood through context. We all can understand that when I say "right now" I mean relatively speaking, I'm not talking about yesterday, but relative to the current circumstances.

-CryptoLutheran

I just wonder whether you could explain the plank unit to us in Lay terms, seeing post #34 has left an unresolved question: "why do you suppose it is not possible to divide the plank?". If I was reading your perspective here, it seems that it is not necessarily the shortest possible unit of time, but the shortest unit of time that science is presently able to detect. I'd quite like to understand this better, especially for now just to know what is the reason that we cannot, say, halve it (eg: is it akin to the nyquist frequency - I understand acoustics fairly well)..

If you can help us to establish that, it will be useful to add along with all the other thoughts. Thanks!

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

The passage of Time can only be perceived by change. No change then no passage of time can be seen. The atom needs to deteriorate or the watch change, to know that it has occured. Not that it might not then exist mind you, but it wouldn't be perceived as such.

So the shortest unit of 'present' is the shortest unit during which a change of some sort can be shown to occur. This is the idea behind the plank as an empiric measure, but maybe something else can come along?

However this is only a unit of time, it doesn't describe what time is. A priori, I think Xeno's paradoxes cannot be beat. Fundamentally, the smallest unit of 'time' (whatever that is) would entail non-change, for any change would necessarily have a start and finish position. Multiples of 'instances' where no change occurs, when added together, can never give us change (and therefore time). So time is thus a product merely of perception and not necessarily a 'real entity' in any way. For all we know Parmedides and the Eleatics were right all along, and everything is an unchanging monistic unity; or our perception alters the material world in a Buddhist Sunyata sense; or maybe time is an illusion itself of infinite created universes only slightly different than the last; or only this very instant exists and there is no future and no past, only the perception that there had been or will be.

The only answer is to smash all the clocks. Time is an illusion of perception, so my being late for work and sleeping in, is merely convention and not fundamentally true. I was on time, or am on time, perpetually.

 

[Occams Barber]

The passage of Time can only be perveived by change. No change then no passage of time can be seen. The atom needs to deteriorate or the watch change, to know that it has occured. Not that it might not then exist mind you, but it wouldn't be perceived as such.

So the shortest unit of 'present' is the shortest unit during which a change of some sort can be shown to occur. This is the idea behind the plank as an empiric measure, but maybe something else can come along?

However this is only a unit of time, it doesn't describe what time is. A priori, I think Xeno's paradoxes cannot be beat. Fundamentally, the smallest unit of 'time' (whatever that is) would entail non-change, for any change would necessarily have a start and finish position. Multiples of 'instances' where no change occurs, when added together, can never give us change (and therefore time). So time is thus a product merely of perception and not necessarily a 'real entity' in any way. For all we know Parmedides and the Eleatics were right all along, and everything is an unchanging monistic unity; or our perception alters the material world in a Buddhist Sunyata sense; or maybe time is an illusion itself of infinite created universes only slightly different than the last; or only this very instant exists and there is no future and no past, only the perception that there had been or will be.

The only answer is to smash all the clocks. Time is an illusion of perception, so my being late for work and sleeping in, is merely convention and not fundamentally true. I was on time, or am on time, perpetually.

I was trying hard (and not very successfully) to get posters to remove the concept of 'Now' from the issue of human perception - to reduce it to an absolute physical measurement. How long is 'Now' for an unobserved rock?

Hence my tentative, Nobel prize winning, conclusion at post #27. Not only did I define 'Now' I also eliminated Past and Present as concepts. I thought I was brilliant.
OB

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I was trying hard (and not very successfully) to get posters to remove the concept of 'Now' from the issue of human perception - to reduce it to an absolute physical measurement. How long is 'Now' for an unobserved rock?

Hence my tentative, Nobel prize winning, conclusion at post #27. Not only did I define 'Now' I also eliminated Past and Present as concepts. I thought I was brilliant.
OB

An unobserved rock cannot be shown to have time by physical measurement, as no change can be noted. It only gains Time or a Now once observed.

If there is no was or will be, there is no Now, which can only be framed in opposition to one or the other. Looking at post 27, I don't see why a human 'now' should be any more than the empiric minimum, even if we might perceive over a few such periods. The past remains indelibly a part of the continuum that is the Self, even if not currently experienced - assuming of course there really was something to experience prior to this instant.

 

[Occams Barber]

An unobserved rock cannot be shown to have time by physical measurement, as no change can be noted. It only gains Time or a Now once observed.

If there is no was or will be, there is no Now, which can only be framed in opposition to one or the other. Looking at post 27, I don't see why a human 'now' should be any more than the empiric minimum, even if we might perceive over a few such periods. The past remains indelibly a part of the continuum that is the Self, even if not currently experienced - assuming of course there really was something to experience prior to this instant.

If a tree fell in a forest..... I really really hate metaphysics.
OB