[video]

[maddest]

Belated well wishes to everyone for the various everythings-

Now that we're post explosions, shall we touch base with one another? I feel utterly out of touch. Like this year has started out of the gate like a horse with its tail on fire.

Perhaps it's all the new arrivals. Hello, little things! I hope all your questions have been answered. If they haven't perhaps I could give it a go, hm?

Comments

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

That's just perspective. Just because the number becomes a smaller amount of the whole as you age, doesn't mean it goes by any faster.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

But perspective is our only connection with existence. The world cannot exist independent of it, not in any meaningful way.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

It only matters when it's testable. Self-delusions about time aren't interesting.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

Why not?

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

Why should they be?

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

Nonsense, doctor, you're the one who's discounting something. It's your responsibility to explain why you feel it has no bearing on your research.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

I only said that I had no interest in it. It doesn't influence me, and I have no reason to search it out.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

Of course it influences you!

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

In what way?

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

In every way possible. You live, you breathe, you exist in a social context.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

You've always seemed to imply that I ignore that sort of thing.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

No- that you don't understand it.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

It amounts to the same. There's no reason to pay attention to it.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

True. But you're a product of it, all the same.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

I choose my own 'values.'

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, weighing it, with the tools socialization has given you. Using language to understand and describe it.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

... Yes, I suppose I'm part of my own culture, but what difference does that make to anything?

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

It means that you will never be able to escape seeing things through that lens.

Take the idea of opposites, for example.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of bias. It'd be careless to ignore it, but it doesn't mean I have to fall into other delusions-

What sort of opposites?

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about bias, I'm talking about basic tools of conceptualization.

We think of the world in terms of opposites. Man, woman. Day, night. Up, down. They're schemes by which we sort concepts, if you will. They're artificial- and ultimately quite restrictive, but they're a fundamental part of how people are taught to think.

The same could be true for time.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

Those aren't opposites. Points of direction have the closest possibility to be, but the others aren't even arguable.

You can have different ways of measuring time - and you'd need to, depending on the sort of planet you're on - but even if it's artificial, there's still a logical structure to it.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's true.

But it's still something superimposed. People exist in different ways at many different points, and we register time as being the transition between those points.

Before the universe was created, was there time? With nothing there to change.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

Everything around us exists at the same point we do. What we consider time passes on whether we're paying attention to it or not, whether it's marked or ignored.

A pointless question. Of course there was time.

[mister-hatter.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's that simple.

[law-of-reason.livejournal.com]

So what is it to you?