Philosophy of Time part 3 of 3

Leading philosophers including William Lane Craig, Quentin Smith, Paul Ricoeur, David Hugh Mellor, and Michael Friedman discuss time. Topics include the nature of space and time, the reality or unreality of time, Einstein's special theory of relativity, the A-theory and B-theory of time, whether the present enjoys a privileged status, and whether temporal becoming is merely an illusion.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Philosophy
• of
• time
• 3

[gigi4123]

Very interesting. Is this a fragment of a longer documentary, or there are only these three parts?

[semperadlucem]

This is most of the episode. Taken from a series of short philosophy vids called "the examined life." Do amazon search for "examined life dvd" and you will find the set. This episode is called "is time real?"

[Steve2323ZX]

@kanojo1969 I don't remember. The comment was written 5 months ago

[kanojo1969]

@Steve2323ZX You do realise that the 'guy with the beard' is Dr William Lane Craig, right? It seems weird that you don't seem to recognise him in this comment, but in other comments you mention him by name.

Yeah, I know, 5 month old comment. I don't care.

[kanojo1969]

@Steve2323ZX This really isn't about theism vs atheism. It's just that Dr Craig is a special case because we know he supports the Kalam argument completely, and that argument requires a very conventional definition of time due to it's chain of causality. So when examining the nature of time, it would be pretty weird if Dr Craig veered from that totally conventional interpretation.

Having said that, AtheistAltar's comment makes perfect sense to me.

[RobertoStampini]

Thanks for posting this. I'm doing research for a short piece of animation which I intend to make on this very topic. However, as I collect the information I'm beginning to wonder if I've already made the film.

[ryan84160]

@Steve2323ZX That is William Lane Craig for you. If an particular idea is not intuitive, it must not be true. If this were the case, we should be able to completely dismiss relativity and quantum mechanics because they are readily intuitive. I have no idea why anyone treats this guy like a serious philosopher.

[ScalarPhotonZ]

@ScalarPhotonZ Let tau be a smooth real-valued function on space-time with tau(A)<tau(B) iff event A is rendered before event B. Then within a given IRF, the velocity of the "preferred frame" at any given event is given by:

u = -c^2 * (grad tau) / (partial dtau/dt)

[ScalarPhotonZ]

@ScalarPhotonZ The simplest example would be the existence of a "preferred inertial frame" for which this additional structure would be in perfect agreement concerning the chronology of events. But more generally, provided the structure is "sufficiently smooth", at (more-or-less) any event there will exist a "1st-order approx. preferred frame".

[ScalarPhotonZ]

I've been working on the idea of taking Special Relativity, and then adding an additional structure to space-time in which any two events will be rendered as "one before the other" or "simultaneous", not depending on reference frame. This isn't meant to override SR's prediction of how different IRFs chronologise events, but act as an additional chronology besides that of the IRFs. I assume for events with lightlike or timelike separation, that this additional structure will agree with all IRFs.

[Chaos2285]

i heard a fart at 1:07

[AtheistAltar]

@Steve2323ZX You'll have to read my comment again, then. I said I have reason to believe that Craig, due to his initial acceptance of theism, will not question his naive realist stance on the philosophy of time because he thinks that his senses are informed of some divine reality or wisdom. I never said atheists are all smart and theists are all dumb, I'm just saying that when it comes to this issue, Craig is suffering from a systemic bias.