Conceiving Infinity
Caesar
Regular
If the universe can take a perceivable form, it seems necessary that it must be static at some level of time, at least so far as humans perceive time. If you reduced the passage of time down to the smallest detectable unit, you would find the movement of energy and matter appear static, otherwise you couldn't detect it at all; it would be a blur. If this is the case however, things could never move at all because if detectable levels of time are static, how is it possible for it to move? If the tennis ball appears static every time you measure its position, why does it's position change, unless time can be broken down further to yet smaller units of static positions that give the illusion of movement.
This is a tricky concept for me to express clearly.... If we are on one detectable level as old as the years we have been alive, then the only way we can travel through the years is if we break it up into smaller units of time; otherwise our age would be only perceivable in years and each year would appear static because we have no perception of the days/weeks/seconds that make up the years. Seconds and even nanoseconds have to be a larger measurement of a smaller unit, but at what point do the units cease to be larger expressions of smaller units? The best explanation I can come up with is either that time is infinite... or it simply doesn't exist and we are creating the illusion of time in the same way a comic strip produces the illusion of progression when we run our eyes over the static panels. I prefer to think time is infinite, but maybe the difference between infinite and non-existence is just semantics.
This is a tricky concept for me to express clearly.... If we are on one detectable level as old as the years we have been alive, then the only way we can travel through the years is if we break it up into smaller units of time; otherwise our age would be only perceivable in years and each year would appear static because we have no perception of the days/weeks/seconds that make up the years. Seconds and even nanoseconds have to be a larger measurement of a smaller unit, but at what point do the units cease to be larger expressions of smaller units? The best explanation I can come up with is either that time is infinite... or it simply doesn't exist and we are creating the illusion of time in the same way a comic strip produces the illusion of progression when we run our eyes over the static panels. I prefer to think time is infinite, but maybe the difference between infinite and non-existence is just semantics.
Comments
Your post reminds of a couple of things - one is Zeno's more famous paradoxes and the other is some cosmological stuff I was reading.
Zeno's paradoxes mostly deal with infinite divisibility and the fact that it makes movement through time and space fairly incomprehensible. They're easy to find online.
The cosmology stuff was in relation to the Kalam argument I think, which I won't go into the validity of here. It was dealing with the concept of time being infinite and the most memorable point was that if time is infinite then this moment could not ever arrive because there would be an infinite amount of time before it that would have to pass before this one could happen - and importantly this would be true for every moment.
It brings up the point that actual infinities are ridiculously difficult to conceive and usually end in paradox fairly rapidly. That shouldn't suggest that they can't or don't exist, merely that we don't know how to deal with them yet.
For example, if I have an infinite amount of acid tabs and I line them all up, the line would stretch to an infinite length. Then my dealer calls and says he has an infinite amount of molly caps that he wants me to have, and so I put one cap between every two tabs - the length of the line hasn't changed, it's still infinite. When I start eating the length of the line, the quantity of drugs will still not change.
I like infinities because they can't really be dealt with rationally (yet). It makes me try to find other ways to conceive them.
This is the major mindfuck for me. The mere fact we can even attempt to conceive infinity means that there is a decent chance it exists, and if that is true it is probably the most relevant part of our existence in this reality. If this is true then why are we not experiencing an awareness of infinity all the time? It could be that linguistic constructs drilled into our head at birth ruin our capacity to exist in that kind of state, but if the state is all pervasive moreso than even the sun as factor in human reality then why is it so hard to understand? Then again cavemen didn't necessarily understand the sun in any kind of rational sense, but it still affected their reality just as strongly as it affects ours. Maybe we are living infinity even if it is out of our linguistic/rational models.
Kickass analogy
I'm inclined to agree. I think one aspect of existing within infinity is probably that it can be dissected, examined, analysed, or observed infinitely. Maybe because our physical form is finite we exist on a tangent to infinity. It's all pretty speculative, but interesting all the same.
I think this is a good illustration as it shows that the frames of reference we consider past, present, and future are static and it is our perception that creates the illusion of motion and time.
Imagine now, if each comic strip also went up and down. You would still ultimately be moving side to side. Now say you wanted to get somewhere ahead, but didn't want to have to move all the way through the default direction to get there. You would shift the very block you are in, up, or down, to get to a better position to reach your ultimately horizontal goal, faster. This shows the actual nature of time, and that it's change or movement, is relative to how we construct our perceptions based on how we interact with space and time.