I suppose so. “Time” is a purely semantic construct. So, my denial of it’s existence is a semantic argument.
You run into trouble from a quantum physics standpoint when you begin thinking that time is real and discover it’s fundamentally incompatible with observed phenomena like quantum entanglement. Feynman himself was a proponent of retrocausality.
All I would have to do is describe the location of the specific particles that make up John.
The food particles in his stomach would be in a specific chemical state and location consistent with your statement as would the state and location of the particles in his bladder. These would be different in either case.
(If you want to point out that we can adopt the perspective that there’s no such thing as time, fine. Certainly, we could take omphalosian ideas (aka, Last Thursday-ism) that much further. But if you want to do this while simultaneously maintaining that there is, clearly, indisputably, such a thing as three-dimensional space, you are doing something very odd, because the things which motivate us to talk of space are the same kinds of things as the things which motivate us to talk of time)
The location of those particles before he eats dinner or after he eats dinner?
Also, I do not see how retrocausality negates the existence of a time dimension; indeed, discussion of such things would generally seem to involve concepts of “before” and “after”.
You’ve provided a circular definition. You can’t describe something meaningfully in its own terms.
Hydrogen and oxygen have different properties when they are bonded and when they are not bonded. The term “water” has meaning because it describes this. Time doesn’t describe anything.
You bootstrap the definition up by looking at what English speakers use the word “motion” to describe. That is, after all, how we all learnt to speak this language.
Suppose I were to say “There is no such thing as distance; only frozen slices of a single Planck-length-sized unit cube”. What would the retort be? I presume it would be something like “Sure, but you also need to describe how those slices relate to each other. One way of arranging them would be different from another. And what we mean by distance, angle, position, etc., is found in the details of this arrangement”. Well, so it would be with time, then…
I don’t understand. Is there something more to your argument then “We can take snapshots of the state of the universe at any given instant. Also, I’ve heard something about time being quantized/discrete… This all suggests to me that we should just look at each snapshot individually and say there is no structure relating them”?
I could maintain that nothing exists except the phenomena I am experiencing right here and right now. Everything else is an illusion. Sure, it looks like there are planets far far away, but that’s just light waves in my immediate vicinity giving that illusion. Same as it seems like I have memories and other evidence of the past, but we needn’t posit an actual past to give them substance; all that historical information is contained in the description of the present-day configuration of the universe, which happens to be placed in such a way as to suggest but not actually demand such a past. To describe the entirety of the universe is just to describe the phenomena I am experiencing right here and right now. There exists nothing but a million frozen, tiny slices of these.
Indeed, we could go whole hog with it and say, the experience-slices which exist are not just the ones which mesh with my current ideas about the past and the elsewhere, but, in fact, there exists an experience-slice for every possible configuration of the universe. There exist ones where I’m in Lava World and Flatworld and so on… And there is no further structure connecting them! No “before” or “to the left of” or “as a result of”. Nope, there’s nothing but pure possibilities, so that, Library of Babel style, actually, there’s hardly anything nontrivial we could categorically say about the physical world.
And you could do that, if you wanted to. You could do that for all kinds of things. But you only want to do this sort of thing for time, and not space and not anything else, and that is odd to me.
You also seem to think the Planck time is important somehow, but I don’t see how your argument actually relies on it.
They are both in different universes which are simply touching at a given point. In one universe the fleet has been launched. In another it hasn’t. The two people are touching and their respective slices of planck intersect at this point.
This is why I said in my OP that I can communicate with my future selves. All the universes that contain a possible version of me, Scylla, intersect.
Not true. As has been pointed out, if I describe the location of every particle in the universe precisely I have also described what you call the 'time."
Again, no. No fourth dimension necessary.
You have a distinct person in each timeslice for each person. They exist as whole universes. So, in the first universe you have two distinct entities who are virtually identical. In the final universe. You have two distinct entities who are not identical.
The “older twins” planck slices all intersect together as do the “younger” ones. They also respectively intersect at those locations where they are together.
Picture it this way. take two tape measures, identical. Lay them side to side touching. All the numbers match up, right? Picture each inch marker as “time.” For the first two feet they run side to side and match up perfectly. Now bend one tape measure away from the other for a distance and then bend it back towards the other until they intersect. The numbers no longer match up.
Minimum in what sense? Does it make sense to say “Universe A is closer to universe B than universe C is to universe D?”. If so, it would appear to make sense to discuss a notion of distance between universes which corresponds to what we would normally think of as temporal distance. And if one can do that, how is there not a dimension of time?
(Sorry, I know I said I’d be quiet and let you respond for a while…)
I would say that is an intrinsically nonsensical statement. The concept of “cube” doesn’t exist without distance. Planck time exists without time. It is simply the minimum distance separating universes.
No. I can describe every element of time without distance. You can’t reduce it further than that.
If we’re describing it in snaphsots, it’s like this:
Not only is there a snapshot of the state of the universe at all given instances, but there is a snapshot of all possible universes at all possible instances. All those snapshots exist simultaneously. Many of them are connected and many of them intersect at points sharing the same information.
Minimum distance in what sense? It’s not a spatial distance, is it? I mean, one Planck time ago isn’t somewhere to my right or to my left or up or down, is it? This distance is along a different axis, right? A temporal one, so we can say of two universes that the distance between them is, e.g., five seconds? This would make time meaningful to my eyes.
When giving a full description of a possible universe, presumably, you would want something like “At position X = 30 miles, Y = 90 miles, Z = 49 miles, we have a hydrogen atom. At the same X and Y coordinates but one mile up in the Z direction, we have…”, but not something like “At position X = 30 miles, Y = 90 miles, Z = 49 miles, at time 35829523562465 seconds, we have a hydrogen atom. At the same X, Y, Z coordinates but one second later, we have…”. But why this particular selection of coordinates? Why not be even more reductionist? Let us argue that there are only 2 spatial dimensions. A full description of a possible universe gives the state at every X and Y coordinate, period. There are all kinds of possible 2-dimensional universes, and what we think of as depth is just the distance separating such universes. It might look to us like the universe is truly spatially 3-dimensional, but this is just an illusion which we should learn to let go.
No, wait, actually, there’s only one spatial dimension. We think of there being such things as height and depth, not to mention time, but these are just distances separating possible one-dimensional universes.
No, wait, …
You see? We can take any axis out of the picture if we so choose. You haven’t pointed out anything special about time that doesn’t apply equally well to space, or any other coordinate, whether discrete, continuous, or what have you.
Time is perfectly compatible with entanglement, and it’s even explicitly necessary for a retrocausal interpretation of quantum mechanics (which hinges on the notion of ‘retarded’ and ‘advanced’ potentials, both terms that have no meaning without time).
But then you’d have to make infinitely many universes intersect in any given timeslice, since you have infinitely many possible reference frames and thus infinitely many potential observers. And the whole would still be a four-dimensional construct, in an analogue way to how you get a three-dimensional object by stacking two-dimensional planes.
Well, that description still would be four-dimensional, unless of course you want each 3D timeslice to be neatly stacked in a 3D metaspace, so that what we perceive to be one second later would be (at least) 13.7 billion lightyears to the left (or front or upwards or whatever). Then, however, your universes couldn’t intersect, being spatially separate.
Can you restate this without relying on ‘first’ and ‘final’ universe, or referring to any relation between the universes? According to your argumentation, three coordinates ought to suffice.
However, you might have noticed that to do this, your previously one-dimensional system needed to have a dimension added to describe the bending of the tape measure; if you attempt the same in 3D space, you need a fourth dimension as well.
Another view: a photon, to us, takes a time to travel from one point to another, which is given by its speed, c. However, to the photon, according to relativity, no time passes during its journey; thus, the photon should only exist in one timeslice. This is inconsistent with the behaviour according to any outside observer, according to which the photon inhabits several timeslices sequentially.
Your model’s basic problem is that, no matter how often you try to assert otherwise, it essentially proposes a geometry with four space-like dimensions, while relativity requires one time-like and three space-like dimensions.
