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

Times mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remain can stretch even the most profound philosopher.

Professor Tallis seeks to rescue time from the jaws of physics, examining the claims that time is merely the fourth dimension of space-time, that there is a passage of time or that time has a direction or arrow. He restores tenses and our sense of now that are often denied or ignored by physicists and connects these with our unique human freedom. For most of us, time is composed of mornings, afternoons and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation and grief. Thinking about time is to meditate on our own mortality.

Yet, physics has little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is afforded by the equations of mathematical physics.

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[alancrabb]

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

[mkultra]

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.

[jancoil]

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.

[disfiguringthegoddes]

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

[jancoil]

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.

[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.

[davidwilkie]

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.

[DarkMoonDroid]

You had me at "Neuromania".
LOL
👍👍👍

[hyperduality]

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.

[stanleyklein]

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).

[johneyon]

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

[upgrade]

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).

[naimulhaq]

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.

[hyperduality]

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

[chivoronco]

Para entender el tiempo necesitamos tiempo 11:13 para entenderlo

[richardcrighton]

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

[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.