I suppose one could also say that time is an awareness of no change
No. That leads to a contradiction.
There are many things that don't change
I don't see where this premise could inform the argument, but for the fun of it: "Such as??"
Certainly, time can exist without anyone's awareness
Can it??
It appears that you have just jumped into the stream here--from time to time--and so you may be unfamiliar with some of the links that inform the discussion on time. Many scientists do not belive time exists. Many scientists do believe time exists, but that it is strictly a measurement (this definitely requires awareness). Some think time is absolute, independent of perception and/or events; Others think it relational. Einstein said the past, present, and future were ILLUSIONS. What do you think?
This link is an encyclopedia summation that looks at many of the different definitions of time, and showcases many of the differences of scientific and philosophical opinion in regards to whether or not time exists--and (if it does)--what is it?? What is your opinion?
I have copied just a small part of it to give some context.
BTW, thanks for contributing to this. It is a complex topic. The fact that it is so mercurial and puzzling to the experts...just makes it a more enjoyable discussion for the rest of us...
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/t/time.htm#PHILOSOPHY
Relational theories of time
When you set your alarm clock for 7:00, does the time of 7:00 cause your alarm to go off? No, although it wouldn't go off if it weren't 7:00, under the circumstances. Such is the nature of causality. It is generally agreed that time causes nothing. Another question, underlying the question about your alarm clock, is whether 7:00 exists despite what happens. Absolute and relational theories of spacetime offer opposing answers to the question of whether time exists independently of the spacetime relations exhibited by physical events. Absolute theories say it does; relational theories say it does not. The absolute theories describe spacetime as being like a container for events. The term "absolute" in this context does not mean independent of the observer, but independent of the events. The absolute theories imply that spacetime could exist even if there were no material objects in the universe, but relational theories imply that spacetime is nothing but material objects, their events, and the spatiotemporal relationships among them. Everyone agrees time cannot be measured without there being changes, but the present issue is whether it can exist without changes.
Aristotle took a position regarding the relationship between time and change when he remarked that, "neither does time exist without change [218b]." However, the battle lines were most clearly drawn in the 17th century when Leibniz explicitly said there is no time without actual change and Newton protested that time exists regardless of whether anything changes. They offered several arguments for their positions. Huygens, Berkeley, and Mach entered the arena on the side of Leibniz. In the 20th century, Reichenbach and the early Einstein declared the special theory of relativity to be a victory for the relational theory, but they may have been overstating the amount of metaphysics that can be extracted from the physics. Newton's own absolute theory of space used the notion of a space filling material aether at rest in absolute space with distances and times being independent of reference frames, and this is unacceptable, but other absolute theories are consistent with current science.
Absolute theories were dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relational theories were dominant in most of the 20th century, but at the end of the century, absolute theories have gained some ground and there is no convergence of opinion on this prominent issue.
Absolute theories are called "substantival" or "substantial" if they require spacetime to be a substance. These are the kind of absolute theories discussed here. Absolutists disagree among themselves about what it means to be a substance. It does not mean that spacetime is a kind of stuff out of which physical events are composed. Absolutists have described spacetime as "an antecedent arena for events" and "ontologically prior to events" and "an irreducible object of predication" and "the substrata for properties" and "the domain of the intended models of the basic physical theories." The container metaphor may work for special relativity, but general relativity requires that the curvature of spacetime be affected by the distribution of matter, so today it is no longer plausible for an absolutist to assert that the 'container' is independent of what it contains.
To Newton, the time variable t in the laws of physics ranges over real numbers that label absolute instants. To Leibniz, t ranges over real numbers that are used to express relationships among events. What is implied by saying time is a relationship among events? For example, if events occur in a room a second before and after 11:01 AM, but not at that instant, must the relationist say there never was a time of 11:01 AM in the room? No. The relationist will say 11:01 exists, though not as an absolute instant. 11:01 exists because the whole system of instants exists as a means of expressing the facts about events. It exists because the universe's events have the order they do, the order of an interval of the real numbers. Something somewhere must be happening at 11:01 or else we were mistaken in assigning the order of the real numbers to events. There can be no 'empty' time, the relationist says. Will this relationist strategy for time work also for space? Can there be no empty space? No merely possible places? That is a bigger philosophical problem. We need to speak of an electron's taking a different path from the one it actually took. Is there a coherent role for these nonexistent events in the relationist's 'relationships among events'? This question needs to be answered in order to properly assess a standard problem for the relational theory, a problem raised by Newton. He argued that if one reference frame is stationary in absolute space while the other is moving at a constant velocity, then, we cannot tell which one is really moving; we can detect only the relative motion; but if one is accelerating and the other is stationary in absolute space, then we can detect which is which. We can tell whether our spaceship is accelerating forward in absolute space by whether we are pushed back into our seats. Absolutists have argued that this difference in what we feel is not properly explainable by a relational theory of space, but only by absolute accelerations. Relationists have counterattacked by asking how acceleration relative to an absolute space has anything to do with feeling pushed back in our seats. Translating this debate into the idiom of relativity theory, the Newtonians are saying that their absolute theory is required to explain curved world lines. The relationists' counterattack is asking how curvature of the world line is to be explained by appeal to absolute spacetime. The absolute theorists have an answer. Are there two points on the world line such that along some alternative world line that also connects the points the spacetime interval would have been shorter? If so, the world line is curving in absolute spacetime independently of the observer's reference frame. That's how the existence of absolute space enables us to tell who is really accelerating and who is not. Notice that this answer requires the notion of alternative, possible, but not actual, world lines. The absolute theory can supply these because it takes all spacetime points as being substantial. The relational theory cannot do this, absolutists argue. At least it cannot if it appeals only to actual physical events, actual world lines composed of these events, and actual spacetime relations that hold among them. If the relational theory were to take spacetime points more seriously and consider them to be permanent possibilities of the location of events, then the relationist could use a very similar strategy to explain the feeling of being pushed back in our seats (namely that the feeling is due to curvature of the world line), but then the theory would collapse into substantivalism, and there would no longer be a difference between the two theories, John Earman has argued. To the absolutist, a spacetime point is a place where something could happen. The relational theory must use only actual events, not possible events, Earman argues. The relationists Leibniz and Russell would agree. Lawrence Sklar disagrees. He says that if relationists are going to talk about locations between material objects where no objects exist, then they "had better allow talk about possible objects and their possible spatial relations" because "versions of relationism that eschew such notions are pretty implausible...." The same point applies to possible events.
One of Leibniz's arguments against Newton's absolute time is still used today. If the entire universe were shifted five minutes in absolute time, no one would be the wiser. This pair of observationally indistinguishable states of affairs is metaphysically distasteful to anyone who subscribes to Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. The principle says that if no one could observe a difference between the two, then they are really just one. So, absolute theories are incorrect because they imply that the time shift makes a difference. Some absolutists would turn Leibniz's argument on its head. Rejecting Leibniz's Principle, these absolutists ask us to consider the possibility that everything has stopped happening for five minutes or, instead, stopped for ten minutes. Because we can imagine this difference, it's a real physical possibility, and the relational theory of time is refuted because it implies that the different freezings of time are not real physical possibilities.
Hartry Field argues for the absolute theory by pointing out that modern physics requires gravitational and electromagnetic fields that cover spacetime. They are states of spacetime. These fields cannot be states of some Newtonian aether, but there must be something to have the field properties. What else except substantive spacetime points?
The flow of time
"It is as if we were floating on a river, carried by the current past the manifold of events which is spread out timelessly on the bank," said Plato. Other writers describe the passage of time as the "moving now" that cleaves the past from the future. "The passage of time...is the very essence of the concept," said Gerald Whitrow, and philosophers are eager to expose the real story behind the metaphor. It is universally agreed that time doesn't pass by at a rate of one second per second. Some philosophers have argued that the passage of time is a feature of the world to be explained by noting how events change. An event such as the death of Queen Anne can change from having the property of being future (to one of her contemporaries), to having the property of being present, to having the property of being past. Agreeing that events can change their properties in this manner, J. M. E. McTaggart argued that the concept of time's flow is absurd because it is contradictory for Queen Anne's death to be both present and past. Many other philosophers believe events do not change any of their properties. An event's 'changing' from being future to being present to being past is not a real change in its properties, but only in its relations to the observer. So, it is concluded that the notion of time's flow is a myth. The question of why the flowing conception of time is such a compelling myth is answered by Ludwig Wittgenstein who asks us to be more attentive to the proper use of our words so we don't consider time to be a process:
In our failure to understand the use of a word, we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.)
On yet another analysis, the notion of time's flow is a subjective feature of psychological time to be explained by a person's having more memories and more information at later times.
And so on... |
