Talk:Timeless universe

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Please help with formatting and formalities, all the major points of the article covered in the references. There is a lot of work to be done to examine all of the many scholars who have done work upon this since Mach, and I am certain the history section can be greatly expanded as well. Also notice that "paradoxa" and "phenomena" are the correct plural forms, and that "Aetios" and "Stobaios" are also accepted spellings. I know Latin, Greek, German and English and have checked the German/English sources for accuracy, everything should be fine.

I also want to stress that I have absolutely no acquaintance or connection with any of the people mentioned in the article who are currently living.

Flawed Argument

This article does not sufficiently differentiate a "timeless universe" from eternalism. The space-time of relativity is an eternalistic model as it includes a measurable time, and Gödel's work showed to Einstein that general relativity was incompatible with our "intuitive time"; not that there was no time at all.

No argument over time can attribute it to being "exclusively a human illusion" since any conscious entity perceives time. This anthropocentric statement needs to be rephrased.

Similarly with it being a "human illusions caused by our ordering of observable phenomena". Any ordering of change events -- whether considered to be in an ever-progressing present moment, or in the only possible present moment (different interpretations of presentism) -- automatically leads to a conceptual extent over which such change is manifest. For a given observer, events can be collated and their separations can be quantified and compared. This makes temporal extent as real as spatial extent, and is arguably the essence of time (cf. several philosophical works).TonyP (talk) 13:49, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

For a given observer, events can be collated and their separations can be quantified and compared. This makes temporal extent as real as spatial extent, and is arguably the essence of time (cf. several philosophical works).

This might be the essence of time, but it also might not be. The timeless universe theory seems to differ from other time theories, such as variants of "eternalism" and "presentism", by permitting no dimension of time at all. So I guess it could be a variant of "presentism" (but which variant then?), but not sure how you get to a similarity with "eternalism". Descriptions of variants of both presentism and eternalism all seemingly attempt to explain what past, present, future really represent, the timeless universe simply dispenses with their existence as altogether illusory/unnecessary. (This results in a kind of "eternal present" but the kinds of presentism I find described in works upon the subject seem altogether different from Mach's universe.)

You and I may personally disagree with that approach but it certainly does differentiate it from the other approaches, such as the A or B series interpretations of McTaggart, or attempts to reconcile it with space-time theory in various ways.

But I think your criticism that this article does not sufficiently differentiate is very valid in a general sense. There should be some detailed/systematic classification of these theories and their many variants. Barbour offers differentiation between a "timeless classical Machian universe" and his own proposed timeless universe (The End of Time, p. 120) but I can't find any publication where an overview or general classification scheme has been attempted.

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No argument over time can attribute it to being "exclusively a human illusion" since any conscious entity perceives time. This anthropocentric statement needs to be rephrased.

That statement that "any conscious entity perceives time" is unfalsifiable/unverifiable, as we could never interview say an ape and get any useful answer regarding whether they "perceive time", or what they might think this time to be which they hypothetically might perceive. This will remain so, at least until contact were made with an extra-terrestrial intelligence capable of advanced conversation, or until such conversation with any animal species were achieved. A degree of perception of cause and effect and hence event orders based upon memory imprints can only be evidence for that statement if the existence of time is accepted a priori, it appears to be begging the question. 188.33.233.85 (talk) 21:36, 6 May 2024 (UTC)