Is time physical?

[Sparko]

Are you kidding? How do you know God can't see our future free will acts?

How could he if you haven't done them yet and the future doesn't even exist? There is no way to even know what the situation would be that you would be making those decisions in. How would God know that you would or would not get the COVID shot (or catch COVID) before there even was COVID?

And how do you have free will if what I do tomorrow is already set in stone? Frozen in time? And B theory does not need a god, or any prior cause.

As both Stoic and I have said, it could be that the decisions made in the block universe were made freely. Just because you can't change them doesn't make them unfree. Just looking at your past will tell you that. Yesterday you made many decisions. Today you know what they were and you can't change them. They are "fixed" - yet every decision was freely done. Now just imagine you are God looking back from the far future. Everyone's decisions are "fixed" and in the "past" and can't be changed but are all free. That is the block universe. God just has a point of view that encompasses it all. Past and Future.

[seer]

God maintains and can change the block universe whenever he wishes. He not only created the universe, he holds it together. Under A-theory there is no future for God to know. He becomes as clueless as we are about what will happen unless he causes it to happen directly, which means he has to eliminate free will in order to make sure everyone does what he wants to cause that future to occur. Under A-theory either we have no free will or God has no power/foreknowledge. Pick one.

Are you kidding? How do you know God can't see our future free will acts? And how do you have free will if what I do tomorrow is already set in stone? Frozen in time? And B theory does not need a god, or any prior cause.

[Sparko]

A -theory is more compatible with the doctrine of Sovereignty. You could have a God in B, but as Seer pointed out, it's not necessary. When coming to truths in philosophy, I have observed that there is an aim at what is most simplest and irreducible. A -theory seems more irreducible than B. You could say that all time is in God's Hands with A in a very absolute sense. You could also say that with B, but not absolutely. God is just an optional feature with B theory. The One Self Existent Being who is The Uncaused Cause seems more consistent with A than with B. Everything is simpler: We've reduced everything to One God, One Being, and we've reduced time to being just one present moment. It's a truer sense of everything, all time and space, being in God's Hands, under His Sovereign Rule.

God maintains and can change the block universe whenever he wishes. He not only created the universe, he holds it together. Under A-theory there is no future for God to know. He becomes as clueless as we are about what will happen unless he causes it to happen directly, which means he has to eliminate free will in order to make sure everyone does what he wants to cause that future to occur. Under A-theory either we have no free will or God has no power/foreknowledge. Pick one.

[seer]

A -theory is more compatible with the doctrine of Sovereignty. You could have a God in B, but as Seer pointed out, it's not necessary. When coming to truths in philosophy, I have observed that there is an aim at what is most simplest and irreducible. A -theory seems more irreducible than B. You could say that all time is in God's Hands with A in a very absolute sense. You could also say that with B, but not absolutely. God is just an optional feature with B theory. The One Self Existent Being who is The Uncaused Cause seems more consistent with A than with B. Everything is simpler: We've reduced everything to One God, One Being, and we've reduced time to being just one present moment. It's a truer sense of everything, all time and space, being in God's Hands, under His Sovereign Rule.

[seer]

The laws of physics are no different in the case of the Block Universe than they are with presentism or the growing block universe. The ability to locate the objects in the universe at a given time based on the knowledge of their positions and velocities at a different time doesn't change. The ability to say that the galaxies that are observed in the sky, are much much closer together 13 billion years before those observations are made, doesn't change.

A growing block theory is different, it requires time flow.

An external observer could study the universe at times close to our own, and come up with those same laws of physics, and use them to extrapolate to the past and predict what the part of the universe looks like that exists 13 billion years earlier, and see that it is much smaller in the spacial dimensions. The only real difference is that he can then look at that part of the block universe to see if the extrapolation is correct.

The language he would use to describe it might be different than ours, based on a different POV, but what he would describe would be the same, if he restricted his observations to the period of time in which we exist, and the spacial areas that we are able to observe.

That really doesn't deal with my points. If Block theory is correct, the universe never actually expanded, therefore Big Bang cosmology is incorrect. No species gradually over time morphed into another species, I never grew from a child to an adult. No evolution. There is NO motion/change Stoic, anywhere. Your external observer could never understand the laws of physics as we know them since many of those laws are based on movement. And he would not see movement, just a frozen, tenseless cosmos.

[Machinist]

A -theory is more compatible with the doctrine of Sovereignty. You could have a God in B, but as Seer pointed out, it's not necessary. When coming to truths in philosophy, I have observed that there is an aim at what is most simplest and irreducible. A -theory seems more irreducible than B. You could say that all time is in God's Hands with A in a very absolute sense. You could also say that with B, but not absolutely. God is just an optional feature with B theory. The One Self Existent Being who is The Uncaused Cause seems more consistent with A than with B. Everything is simpler: We've reduced everything to One God, One Being, and we've reduced time to being just one present moment. It's a truer sense of everything, all time and space, being in God's Hands, under His Sovereign Rule.

[Stoic]

You can't have it both ways Stoic, If B theory is correct the universe never started small then expanded, nor would it be expanding today. Species A never gradually changed to species B. Species A still exists and always will. There is no gradual change, there was never any change at all. Please be consistent.

The laws of physics are no different in the case of the Block Universe than they are with presentism or the growing block universe. The ability to locate the objects in the universe at a given time based on the knowledge of their positions and velocities at a different time doesn't change. The ability to say that the galaxies that are observed in the sky, are much much closer together 13 billion years before those observations are made, doesn't change.

An external observer could study the universe at times close to our own, and come up with those same laws of physics, and use them to extrapolate to the past and predict what the part of the universe looks like that exists 13 billion years earlier, and see that it is much smaller in the spacial dimensions. The only real difference is that he can then look at that part of the block universe to see if the extrapolation is correct.

The language he would use to describe it might be different than ours, based on a different POV, but what he would describe would be the same, if he restricted his observations to the period of time in which we exist, and the spacial areas that we are able to observe.

[Sparko]

I don't know. Sparko's idea was cool.

If this were true though, you could also say that at every time slice, there is a growing block.

I read a sci-fi short story like that. They invented a time machine and went back and changed something but when they came back to the present it hadn't changed. But when they went back in the past it was changed. They realized that the past is disconnected from the present. Their past is not the past they went to. It was basically another past.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Feedback-Audiobook/B08LF1Y476?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_lo cation=pdp&shareTest=TestShare

https://www.amazon.com/Feedback-Denn.../dp/1713632128

[seer]

Praise God. Praise to Him who is the Self Existent One.

There are many things we don't or can't understand here, but someday...

[Machinist]

Praise God. Praise to Him who is the Self Existent One.

[seer]

Thinking about this stuff can give you the existential blues.

Not blues, headaches!

[Machinist]

Thinking about this stuff can give you the existential blues.

[Machinist]

What was wrong with this:


The growing block view of time can be seen as the combination of two theses. First of all, the growing block view is committed to a dynamic account of time, on which there is an objective, changing present. The growing block conception of time shares this commitment with a number of other A-theoretic accounts of time, including presentism and the moving spotlight theory. The second commitment is ontological; past and present times exist, while future times do not exist. On the growing block view, there is a block of objectively past time-slices and one present time-slice. As the present changes, new present slices are added to the block. The combination of these dynamic and ontological commitments means that the growing block view of time is often portrayed as a middle ground between presentism and eternalism and as a hybrid of A- and B-theory.

I don't know. Sparko's idea was cool.

If this were true though, you could also say that at every time slice, there is a growing block.

[seer]

Yeah, a multiverse nested in one universe. Ima go with that.

What was wrong with this:


The growing block view of time can be seen as the combination of two theses. First of all, the growing block view is committed to a dynamic account of time, on which there is an objective, changing present. The growing block conception of time shares this commitment with a number of other A-theoretic accounts of time, including presentism and the moving spotlight theory. The second commitment is ontological; past and present times exist, while future times do not exist. On the growing block view, there is a block of objectively past time-slices and one present time-slice. As the present changes, new present slices are added to the block. The combination of these dynamic and ontological commitments means that the growing block view of time is often portrayed as a middle ground between presentism and eternalism and as a hybrid of A- and B-theory.

[Machinist]

I think he is imagining a hybrid of A and B theory. so that each "slice" is actually moving forward in time. Like a river. That would mean that each time period would not necessarily end up the same as another. Like logs flowing down a river.
The 1950 slice that exists right now might end up different when it reaches its 2020 than "our" 1950 slice did. It would be a soft of multiverse in one universe.

Yeah, a multiverse nested in one universe. Ima go with that.