"The riddle of time," she asked. "Time is one of the most difficult mysteries in the world.
What was time? You might say that time is seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and so on. Yes, we use these scales to measure time, but what is being measured?
People used to believe that time was made up of countless moments. The moments were connected to each other and could not be separated. They continued at a uniform speed, extending from the past to the future. If it was drawn on paper, it would be a straight line with an arrow pointing forward. This was the concept of " absolute time " that had been passed down from ancient Greece to Newton. Einstein used his theory of relativity to break this notion. He discovered that time was measured differently for people in different spaces and speeds. If there were a pair of twins, the eldest was a space pilot, traveling at a speed close to the speed of light, while the second lived on Earth. When the eldest returned to the ground, he would be much younger than the second. this is the so-called
The concept of relative time. However, the theory of relativity only explained the relative relationship between time measurement and space and speed. It did not tell us what time itself was.
Whether we describe time as a straight line or a curve, we can only live in the present moment. You said that you are fifteen years old this year, and you have lived for fifteen years. But where are the past fifteen years? Assuming that you could live for another eighty years, where would the next eighty years be? As for the present moment, it was also fleeting. Before you could shout the word "now","now" had already become the past. Then, was there such a thing as time?
Since there seemed to be no objective basis for time in the external world, some philosophers tried to discover the secret of time in the subjective world of people. For example, Kant believed that time was the innate form of human perception, and humans projected it into the external world. The French philosopher, Bergerson, believed that in the external physical world, there was only space and no time, because we could not see the continuation of objects in time, but only the extension of objects in space. On the contrary, in our inner mental world, there is only time and no space. Time is the state of our consciousness that continues and seeps into each other. In every moment, we can experience the interweaving of memories and imagination, the past and the future, and thus experience the true continuation of time. However, this kind of time could not be measured by artificial standards. For example, no matter how hard you tried, you could not know your age through your inner experience.
Obviously, the time that Bai Ge Sen spoke of was completely different from the time that Newton spoke of. So, were there two kinds of time, or was one of them real and the other fake, or were they both just fictional? So far, there had been many different definition of time. First, time is the objective form of material existence; Second, time is a kind of power of moving objects; Third, time is a scale set by humans to measure the movement and change of things; Fourth, time is a unique way of survival for humans. Fifth, time is an inherent form of human perception; 6. Time is an inner experience. Which of these definition do you agree with?
8. Was there a necessary connection between cause and effect?
Everything that happened in the world must have a reason. If there was no reason, nothing would happen. This logic seemed to be very clear. However, let us see what absurd conclusions can be inferred from this seemingly clear principle.
For example, a man was walking out of a house when a stone fell from the roof and killed him. According to the above logic, I have to ask you: Why was he smashed to death? You would have analyzed it and said that there was a strong wind that blew the stone down, and he happened to pass by. When you analyzed it this way, you actually mentioned two things as the reason why he was killed. One was that the wind blew the stones down, and the other was that he happened to pass by. So I'm going to ask you: First, why was there a wind that blew the stones down? Second, why would he pass by that place at this time? For the first question, you would analyze how the change in airflow caused the wind to blow, how the lack of maintenance caused the roof stones to loosen, and so on. For the latter question, you would explain why the person went out, why they took this route, and so on. Every time you answer, more things are involved, so I can ask endlessly.
According to this analysis, was it inevitable that this person would be smashed to death? Some philosophers thought so. In their view, everything in the world must have a reason for its result. Of course, there was often more than one reason. It was the result of the joint effect of these reasons, and each of these reasons was the result of some earlier reasons. This formed a large net of causality that extended to infinity. In this big net, everything that happened was inevitable.
You might retort,"No, even though there was a reason for this person to be crushed to death, a reason does not mean that it was inevitable." For example, he might have met an acquaintance when he first left the house. He chatted with the acquaintance for a while, which led to him arriving at the scene when the stone fell, so he was killed. If he had not met that acquaintance, he would have passed the scene when the stone fell and would not have been killed. It could be seen that his death was accidental.
However, according to the above logic, I would say: There was also a reason why that acquaintance passed by his house at that time. These reasons, coupled with his own reasons, determined that he would definitely meet that acquaintance when he went out. He would definitely be delayed for a while and would definitely be killed.
Was this poor fellow going to die? This seemed too ridiculous. But for those philosophers, there is nothing absurd about this. We find it absurd because we do not see the cause and effect of the matter. If we could look down on the world like God and see all the causality between everything in the world from the past to the future, we would know that everything was inevitable. But this is impossible, and it is precisely because we cannot understand the full cause of certain things that we mistakenly believe them to be accidental.
In the history of philosophy, this view was called mechanical determinism. In order to refute this view, some philosophers tried to draw a clear line between causality and necessity. They admitted that there must be a cause for an effect, and there must be a cause for an effect. However, they emphasized that there was no necessary connection between cause and effect. A certain cause a might not lead to a certain result e, but only a set of possible results e, f, S, and h. The realization of e may have a greater possibility, but the realization of which result was accidental. This explanation didn't seem to make sense. In this set of possible outcomes, why did it happen to be the outcome e and not the other outcomes? They could only answer that there was no reason, which was equivalent to admitting that there was an effect but not necessarily a cause, thus giving up the principle of causality, or they had to find another reason b for this, which was equivalent to saying that the cause a b must lead to the result e, thus still equating causality and necessity.”
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