The Philosophy of Time: Does Physics Have The Last Word? - Professor Raymond Tallis

[@alancrabb]

I just LOVE the Gresham lectures. And all free! Thank you.

[@mkultra8640]

Wonderful. What is on display in this talk is something perhaps even more valuable than sheer intellect alone, its WISDOM. Wisdom gained only through a life of experience and thought. A remarkable and well said lecture. I wholeheartedly agree with every word. Simply wonderful. Thank you, thank you. I feel like i have finally heard someone express my own view. Its such a great feeling knowing someone else thinks the way you do. Thats why im so excited about this lecture.

[@BIGWUNuvDbunch]

Since entropy is a monotonic non-decreasing function of time, one can invert the equation and write time as a function of entropy. Therefore, the arrow of time may just as well be thought of an arrow of entropy, and we may eliminate time from our equations.

[@jancoil4886]

Well done. His latest book is an impressive indictment of the poison of scientism. Physics does not and can not explain vast areas of human life. Time? The most important question of time how we should spend our brief amount. On this, physics is as silent as the grave.

[@bilinguru]

I disagree that he sees scientism as poisonous, just insufficient. You have seriously misunderstood this lecture if that is your takeaway. It is not an indictment of physics. It is a celebration of humanism. Philosophy does not have to be a zero sum, winner take all proposition. Both realms have much to offer humanity. It is not only wrong but foolish to denigrate either.

[@disfiguringthegoddes]

This was a great lecture. Tallis is a voice of reason in contemporary philosophical debate.

[@jancoil4886]

An excellent talk. A well-aimed salvo at the brethren of scientism. It is strange that Einstein, no stranger to culture, could have such a tin-ear for the things and ideas that make life meaningful. Physics just scratches the surface of what it means to be human and it has little or nothing to say about the most important issues: freedom, justice, love and mercy. A vast world of human experience is beyond the reach of physics.

[@jimjones8736]

Physics makes no claims on anything that can't be measured and quantified. It never has, and don't take Einstein's philosophical musings too seriously (especially when taken out of context), just like you shouldn't take Tallis too seriously (except on clinical medicine).

[@qbslug]

So we experience time all the time and yet still don't know what it is. Great lecture prof. Tallis. You did at least show us what time isn't

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

I agree with him that a purely science-based approach to explaining time is hardly satisfactory, and a lot of this lecture is a determined, unapologetic insistence on promoting phenomenological questions, very refreshing in a physicalist. I also agree that most of the metaphorical ways of representing time are incoherent, and many of them circular as he points out. However I don't think the idea of treating time as a dimension is as problematic as he makes out. And I don't think his arguments against time travel are valid - he's assuming things would have to work a certain way, and they don't necessarily.

[@stoyanfurdzhev]

Slightly saintly undertone.

[@hyperduality2838]

Schrodinger's cat:- Alive (being) is dual to not alive (non being) --> Synthesis (becoming), The Hegelian dialectic. Continuing synthesis or the 'flow of time' requires duality to be conserved.

[@DarkMoonDroid]

You had me at "Neuromania". LOL 👍👍👍

[@davidwilkie9551]

In Principle, there are no words for Eternity-now Superspin Totality etc that can approach Actuality. Selected approaches aligned to multiple purposes is required specialization to maintain a diverse and effective Civilization.

[@stanleyklein524]

Reduction is dogma and assertion. Horst (2007) carefully goes through the instances of reductive attempts and shows successful reduction in science is very, very rare (and happens in very constrained instances).

[@Davidbirdman101]

where can i buy your books? PLUG!!!!!!

[@richardcrighton8079]

time is like trying to describing a turtle. a turtle is a turtle.

[@upgrade1583]

The rules of physics are perfectly evolved to develop life. I'm concerned however the same rules say systems which increase in complexity become ever more isolated. No wonder it appears the universe is expanding....

[@TaylorjAdams]

In terms of time not being like the spatial dimensions because you can't choose your direction I don't think it's a matter of time being different in it's nature, only in its perceived scale. If you look at going from one town to another from the perspective of an observer sitting on the Sun you'd still be travelling roughly 108000 kph in the exact same direction as everyone else on the planet (up to almost a million kph total if the observer's in the center of the galaxy). The reason we almost never notice the time dilation of relativity unless space travel is involved is the same reason that we rarely have to take into account how quickly the earth is moving unless we're calculating things that are a significant distance away from it. Actually moving in a different direction through space might even have the same solution as actually moving in a different direction through time if it turns out wormholes do exist and we can figure out a way of traversing them (which is why Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is based on real science and you should never let anyone tell you different).

[@johneyon5257]

36:39 - claim that time travel is only 1 dimensional - if you move from the a spot in NYC in the present - to a spot in London 24 hrs earlier - that involves both time & spatial travel - if you move from a spot in NYC to the same spot in NYC a day earlier - you must move spatially too since the earth is in different places (the surface - the planet - the solar system) - this applies even if time travel only 1 second back - (here's hoping that time machines automatically calculate the positions accurately to the nth degree) - not that i believe time travel is possible - but Tallis' logic is flawed - and that isn't the only part

[@hyperduality2838]

Left is dual to right, up is dual to down, in is dual to out, space duality. Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality. Space is dual to to time -- Einstein. Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein Dark energy is dual to dark matter Syntropy is dual to increasing entropy

[@kasumiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin]

"...Millions of words spent on time's arrow could have been saved had that obvious fact been noted." Brilliant. I love the power that philosophy has in challenging what seems so obvious on the surface.

[@naimulhaq9626]

Extremely interesting artistic , mythological, historical and philosophical account of time. However, what is not discussed here and which constitutes the most interesting aspect of time is discussed by Paul J. Nahin in 'An Imaginary Tale', in which he discusses 'imaginary time'. In page 37 he shows how imaginary time to be equal to distance (space), and again in article 4.5 Imaginary Time in Spacetime Physics (page 97), he discusses interesting aspects of imaginary time. Physical reality is mathematical in structure. Time is not one dimensional, but can be many dimensional. Mathematics of quantum computing shows how the states 0 and 1 can be divided into many qubits of superposition of states that represents multi-dimensional time, space and information.

[@zeroonetime]

Philosophy has reached the end of Time. 1 TIMING run over 0 Time.

[@WildBillCox13]

As an utter tyro it seems to me that you could also time travel by going SLOWER than "World Time". The "ISS Twin Paradigm", so to speak.

[@jimjones8736]

For the science haters posting here: Tallis's knowledge of Physics is a bit wishy-washy at best. He never bothered to entertain the idea of the 'granularity' of time (aka. Planck time), rendering some of his arguments moot. He states 'I am anti-scientism, not anti-science' which is fair enough, but is unfortunately a statement that is typical fodder for the anti-science mentality sweeping the western world. Treat his pronouncements on physics with caution. Finally: Just to set the record straight, Tallis is an emeritus professor (of geriatric medicine).

[@johnbuckner2828]

The way that people correlate entropy with the arrow of time confuses me. It seems that for every occurrence of equilibrium, a self-organizing imbalance had to occur first, so wouldn't that be a type of 50/50 symmetry? Even one who subscribes to a universal heat death should should explain what it really means for a black hole to "evaporate away" without just quoting a mathematical equation. To me it doesn't seem likely that there is such a thing as a totally closed system. There's no such thing as nothing between systems, that's absurd. If we have a big crunch then everything will reorganize. What does the say about the arrow of time? What does it say about the unobservable universe? Also, Wouldn't we have to understand retrocausality and acausality in quantum physics first before summing up time to entropy?

[@jimjones8736]

The universe is by definition a closed system. The total entropy of the universe can only ever increase. This is the same as saying heat never flows from cold to hot. Locally (an open system) entropy can decrease. Living things do this. A good definition of life is an entity that is (locally) able to decrease its entropy. It does this by increasing the entropy of its surroundings. Black holes evaporate a result of a quantum mechanical phenomenon called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (which is thoroughly confirmed, tested and used in all sorts of electronic components) giving rise to 'Hawking radiation' (not yet observed). The most recent evidence indicates that there will be no big crunch. The expansion of the universe is accelerating (observed) due a pressure exerted on its matter by 'dark energy' (not yet detected) which is again a result of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

[@chivoronco4853]

Para entender el tiempo necesitamos tiempo 11:13 para entenderlo

[@BetterBlue]

Is everyone on KZbin w PowerPoint tools insane or is it just me .

[@quarkraven]

Thought provoking talk, and worth listening to in full. However, he doesn't in my view understand entropy or time in a physical sense. Most of what he discusses is an addition to time, such as the experience of a summer night or a medical career. I agree that our subjective experience and associations with time, the meanings we give to time through the complexity of life and history, cannot be captured by physics alone. But these are not essential to time ontologically. Those stories, all which have time as an element, also include much else. If he wants to define time expansively, such as to include experience and history, that is well and good, so long as we are clear that is not unique to time. That can also be said about any concept at all. Take the color red. What is the color red? Physically, you could say it is the light of a certain range of wavelengths. Socially, you can say that it is all of our associations with red; blood, Communism, flags of Nations, roses, cardinals, fire and sunsets. To grasp the full humanness of red poetically, there is much beyond a band of wavelengths. Yet, the common feature of those flags of nations and roses and cardinals etc, is precisely that band of wavelengths. We can certainly distinguish the expansive associative meanings of red from the essential definition of red physically. Yet when it comes to time, he seems to want to deliberately conflate the two in order to make the hand wringing point that physics as a field of study doesn't account for all those associations. Fine, but it doesn't purport to. I gladly concede that a physics textbook won't ever tell you how to take the square root of a medical career. He glossed over entropy, arguing that the arrow of time which arises from entropy is circular in that it assumes time in the first place. That is simply wrong. There is no distinction between past and future without entropy. Entropy, counterintuitively, is more fundamental to the irreversibility of the sequence of events than "time" which is simply a construction with which we measure the rate of the passage of those events. Again, time is not the thing that allows us to distinguish past from present. Entropy is. There is no assumption of time in entropy. Rather there is an observation of the difference between past and future for which entropy, not time, is the explanation. Time reversible events are (in the abstract) possible, such as an orbit or swinging pendulum. Only with entropy are they irreversable and thus time uni-directional. Space-time is also something he doesn't seem to grasp, as equating it to adding Dartaneon to the Three Buckaneers. A humorous metaphor, but quite wrong. Special relativity first characterized the profound relationship between space, the speed of light, and time. He seems to want to dismiss those results which have been tested and proven, simply because he doesn't like them. It's more of a naive aesthetic judgment than deep thinking.

[@cheesyptp]

so many reading slips. Needs editing

[@hyperduality2838]

Thesis is dual to anti-thesis, the time independent Hegelian dialectic. Time is dual. The future is dual to the past. Relative time (Einstein) is dual to absolute time (Galileo). We remember the past and predict the future. Space is dual to time -- Einstein The 'now' or the present is the synthesis or the union/intersection between the past and the future -- duality. Union is dual to intersection, integration is dual to differentiation. Thesis and its dual anti-thesis produces synthesis or reality, duality creates reality. Duality is being conserved, the 5th law of thermodynamics!

[@sherlockholmeslives.1605]

Is Raymond Tallis a polymath?

[@stanleyklein524]

Yes.

[@TaylorjAdams]

Time doesn't flow, time has flow (objects flow through it). 1 s/s is how quickly objects flow through time from their own perspective whereas an object that's moving much slower than you through space might be moving 1 second through time per second you move from your own frame of reference. The grandfather paradox has been solved far too many times in far too many different ways for it to be worth mentioning. If your model of time allows for paradoxes then it's not the time travel that has issues. You can't solve logical inconsistencies with physical barriers. Hypothetical time machines that have been proposed by science would involve none of the travelling issues you're talking about because just like how you have to travel through time to move in space you'd also have to travel through space to go to an earlier time. For instance if one end of a stable wormhole was near a neutron star for a while whilst the other was out on its own then because of the gravitational pull on only one end it would create a portal between not only two different areas of space but of time as well. Travelling back in time would look the same as going through a door logically speaking (and if you're a determinist would also have the exact same amount of impact on any causal chains involved).

[@Aluminata]

Time is the product of mass.

[@stanleyklein524]

Thanks. I fell better now.

[@mycount64]

physics understanding of time may be incomplete... unfortunately our perceptions are entirely vacuous, anecdotal, without merit except for its serving evolutionary purpose. We do not perceive time as it is rather as is necessary to evolve.

[@bilinguru]

He makes up words and his French accent is atrocious, but he is a profound thinker.

[@AliVeli-gr4fb]

unfortunately for him, physics have last (and first and middle) word for time

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

Nope.

[@jimjones8736]

Definitely

[@stanleyklein524]

Yes. they aspire to a theory of everything (everything they can encompass. All else to hell with).

[@PhillipYewTree]

I’ve rarely heard drivel as mindless as the first 5 minutes of this talk.

[@johneyon5257]

you must never have been to a church/mosque/synagogue

[@moiafro]

I wonder what he'd think of biocentrism and if it has any credibility