Thadeyus wrote:*
Raises hand*
Hello.
Sorry to have come into the thread very late.
Jac3510 wrote:Time is nothing more than the measurement of change. Where there is no change, there is no time.
This idea/concept has me intrigued.
Can you offer a possible example of some where/thing that has experienced no change and hence/possibly no time?
Very much cheers to all.
Not really, without getting into a very long and drawn out thread. The problem here is what such an example would even look like. Even if you had one thing you could isolate that didn't change at all, the fact that other things are changing around it means that thing at least changes insofar as its relation to other things change. So the only way to really posit a completely changeless entity is to posit a completely changeless universe, and the only way to do that is to either create some hypothetical situation in which the entire universe froze for a "period of time" (if that even makes any sense) or to posit a B-Theory of time. The closest thing I can think of to what you're asking about might be the singularity cosmologists are trying to get away from.
I would highly recommend reading this article:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/ as it goes into this issue in great detail. The bottom line is that, like a great many issues, you have to choose between Aristotle and Plato here. And, as I think is usually the case, Aristotle got it right, and I think that science is progressively showing itself to be more easily understood on Aristotelian assumptions than Platonic. But I'm sure nothing I just said is very helpful to you, so, again, I would just recommend again reading the article I just linked to as well as the one at Notre Dame that I linked to a few posts back.
Thadeyus wrote:Thank you for your response.
Um...
my thoughts are that matter does simply change. Simply by the interaction of matter. Vast tracts of our solar system seem quite content to roll around and here and there randomly smash into itself....
No 'Will' or 'Thought' about. As for 'External influence', how far afield does one have to go before there is no farther 'external influences' can be found?
Look at the part I put in bold and underlined. You're just begging the question. An interaction
is a change by definition, so you can't appeal to interaction as the means for arguing that matter just changes.
Beyond that, you are also just incorrect on any level--scientific or philosophical. Matter does not just change. Change
always requires an external agent to bring about the change. While we can demonstrate that philosophically, it's much easier to just point to a common understanding of modern science: if maximum entropy is reached in any closed system, all activity and all change ceases. That's because all change requires energy to power it.
So, no, matter does not just change. All change requires something else to change it. Some of those types of causal chains, however, require a First Cause by nature (since they are chains of instrumental causes--that is, the things bringing about change are instruments
of something: think of a train engine pulling a series of box cars, so each boxcar is an instrument of the train engine). For reasons we've discussed in great detail, that necessitates there being a First Cause that is itself not caused by anything but is the source of all change. Such a Cause cannot have the potential for change, for if it could, then it would require an external agent to change it, meaning it would no longer be the First Cause. Any being, however, that has no potential for change is pure actuality, and in that case, for reasons we have discussed in some detail already, that being can only be identified with God.
