Talk:Eternalism (philosophy of time)

Changes

Could do with some discussion of Julian Barbours theories, and relation to multiverses. Note that there is a logical independence between the claims:

1. All moments of time exist on the same footing
2. Time is a space-like dimension, and there is a single unambiguous past and present for each moment

within it. Barbour accepts the first but not the second. This in turn illustrates a shade of difference between older (eg paremidean) philosophical eternalism (1) and block theory (1 & 2). 18:07, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Could you expand on what you mean by the 'same footing'? I had a glance at Barbour's wiki page but it didn't seem to describe any coherent mechanism for time. He seems to deny change exists yet he claims there are different 'nows' that we experience. How could that possible be? LegendLength (talk) 04:46, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Also, these illustrations fall short of their intentions. Could be replaced Leodiamondwiki (talk) 04:55, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

1908, or 1895 (or earlier)? -- a simple question

   I vividly recall sitting on the stoop of a little-used external door of my junior-high during the lunch break, reading early pages of "The Time Machine" from a thick volume of H. G. Wells's long short stories. The 1st-person character makes the argument that time is just another dimension (except that in some bizarre sense there's no means of controlling our motion -- whatever that means -- in that 4th dimension). The story was published in 1895, so i'd like for us to be more explicit about what (besides "seriousness") lacked in Wells's argument -- BTW more than likely not simply his own concoction -- (and for that matter in AE's 1905 relativity paper) that was present in the 1908 also-ran's paper).
--Jerzy•t 14:57, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Free Will and Many Worlds B-Theory

How is it that free will is salvaged by the many worlds interpretation? The interpretation is no less deterministic than a single world one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.78.90.218 (talk) 07:39, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Translations

Greek

• eternalism: (ο) αιωνισμός [masculine noun]
• block universe: Σύμπαν στατικού τετραδιάστατου χωροχρόνου

Wikipedia has a mistake (in physics the difference is of core importance)

• Universe: the name of our own universe
• universe: any spatiotemporal-like connectome of mathematically procedural (mechanistic) interactions

Physics doesn't have the same criteria with literature. Some Wikipedia users don't know it. Modern science accepts both rigorous observational empiricism and mathematical foundational descriptions. Hard or strong empiricists deviate from mainstream science and claim that mere rigorous empiricism is enough to mathematically describe the ontological mechanisms of substantiality, thus the universe for them is identical/tautological to the Universe and vice versa. They don’t care about the field of study: "foundations of substantiality" like David Deutsch’s constructor theory and Max Tegmark’s struogony (the term mathematical universe hypothesis is very general; mathematical structures are more specific).

Diagram direction

Is there a good reason why this is illustrated as "Time progresses through the series of snapshots from the bottom of the page to the top", rather than top to bottom? Is the unintuitive ordering meant to help the reader think about time as instances which can be considered in other ways? --Lord Belbury (talk) 11:34, 8 April 2022 (UTC)