Re: The Nature of "Now"
- From: Arnold Neumaier <Arnold.Neumaier@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:16:24 EST
Knecht schrieb:
On Jan 11, 11:03 am, Arnold Neumaier <Arnold.Neuma...@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Now is what exists. The past is conjecture made up by memories in the
now, the future is conjecture made up by extrapolation from the memory.
Arnold Neumaier
If the observer is willing to put a little effort into it, the past
... only very little of the past. How much can you reconstruct about
the dynamics of the material of your house before it was built?
And we only know tiny fragments of the times before written records
(a fairly permanent sort of memory) existed.
can be reconstructed quite accurately with various types of
recordings, photographs, written records, oral reports, etc.
This is part of the memory, and hence covered by my description.
I was not only referring to the subjective memory of a particular
person, but also to the scientific record. It consists of memories
of the past, available recorded in the now, and from it we
reconstruct what we consider to be the past.
Not a
perfect reconstruction, to be sure, but for all practical purposes, a
very good one.
Very good only compared to typical expectations of what can be
reasonably done. Very bad compared to the amount of detail we can
gather about the present.
The future is very much more of a matter of "conjecture". We can
predict what is likely to happen, with varying degrees of confidence
(depending on the type of system) over varying lengths of time
(planetary motion:very long times; weather: a few days) based on how
the system has behaved in the past and its location/state "now".
The state of a house in the past is not worse predictable as that
of the house in the future, unless you happen to have detailed
photographs of some past events.
I would just emphasize that our reconstructions of the past, in
general and in principle, can be quite a bit more than subjective
conjecture.
So can be our reconstruction of the future. In both cases,
conjecture need not be more subjective than the principles applied
to get the reconstruction.
The predicting the future is better described as
conjecture, although with enough effort and the right type of system,
we do remarkably well.
Arnold Neumaier
.
- References:
- The Nature of "Now"
- From: James D Jones
- Re: The Nature of "Now"
- From: Arnold Neumaier
- Re: The Nature of "Now"
- From: Knecht
- The Nature of "Now"
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