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Hi
Judith,
I don't know if I
could see time as being an actual quality. But, to be honest, what
keeps bothering me about my definition is that it involves the use of the
term "changes", and I am concerned that this may involve circularity in
the definition. Can one speak of "change" without some (hidden)
reference to time or temporality?
I suppose we can
use the language of FM and AS, and speak of "change" as simply being the case
where there are at least two measurements and whose respective values are
in different equivalence classes. But we actually mean by "two
measurements" to really be "two temporally sequential
measurements". -sigh-
Is this
unavoidably a circularity? Perhaps not. Or perhaps it
may be that such circularity is unavoidable. I have not yet thought it
through satisfactorily.
Regards,
Tim
Tim et al,
Right, that's what I thought, Tim. But whereas you
see time as an "observer-imposed relation", I see it as an actual quality or
force that is one of the ingredients of all matter. I think time has an
essence that can be figured out and understood by science, in the same way
that life can. I think time behaves differently in relationships with
different systems, such that complexity intensifies the effects. The more
complex a system is, the more it's relationship with time is intensified. I
wonder whether perhaps one of the reasons living systems have behaviors so
different from non-living ones is partly due to this intensification. Just one
more thing I'd love to discuss with my father, you know?
Judith
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 3:58
PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Time and
context
Hi
Judith,
I think we are
indeed each looking of time in somewhat different ways. As do you, I do
not think time is "merely a figment of collective human imagination". Not
entirely, anyway. To me, time is the observer-imposed relation of
changes in some physical clock system as a reference system to
changes in some physical system under
study.
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