>At 09:13 AM 2/16/99 -0500, you wrote:
>>Don Mikulecky replies:
>>Time is labeled by a clock. What we can do is mark simultaneous instants.
> We
>>can also discern non-simultaneous events as prior or subsequent. that's
the
>>best we can do. This is a labeling, not measurement.
>>Don Mikulecky
>>
>>Jack Martinelli wrote:
>>
>.... Although there is no absolute character to time, it
>>> is farily easy to construct an
>>> objective procedure for measuring it. Our sense of time is subjective.
>>> If this is what you want to model, then good luck.
>
>The implication of Rosen's perspective (and others, by the way) is that
>time itself is subjective. Since time can only be quantified (labeled) in
>terms of space, and vice versa, this implies that space too is subjective.
If I express A in terms of B, if they are equivalent then, how is it that
either expression is subjective?
It seems to me that in constructing a label there is some assuming and thus
some subjectivity related to what the label is supposed to represent. But
what else can you do? It either works or it doesn't. When it doesn't work
you try something else. I don't think anyone gets it right the first time.
>
>Yet I believe we need to account for the objective character of the
>space-time world in terms that are not just individually referenced, but
>shared by all observers. That shared view is incontrovertable; so what
>accounts for its relative permanence? We need to see how the shared
>objective "reality" is derived from the ultimately subjective one Rosen was
>constructing. The problem has been that everyone has been assuming it would
>work the other way around; that the subjective would be derived in some way
>from the objective/computable. That makes no sense because one can't derive
>the more general case from the more specific, yet the two can interact in
>significant ways.
I'd say that the enlightenment we seek is developmental or evolutionary in
nature. Our visions of "reality" and models start out somewhat vague and
with time gain more clarity. With our early steps we only stumble on
things that seem to be axioms -- very specific statements that also general.
For example, I learned 3+5=8, before I learned a+b=c. It seems that by
extension we might expect emergent ideas to appear through some kind of
study/immersion/threshold effect. More so anyway, I think, than with
issues of generalities or specifics.
This, IMO, is an axiom: "we don't know what we don't know". If this is
true, then how can we grasp the general without understanding how it relates
to specifics? That is, it may be we've been exposed to generalities over
and over but never saw the generality because we've never been exposed to
the context (specifics).
Regards
Jack Martinelli