The Schopenhauer's sessions - Matter, time and space
July 13th 2009 18:30
Following some holidays and "The World as will and representation" from Schopenhauer (read in French, I don't know German..), here we go for a little series of posts.
This one is on time, space and matter (as all philosophers like to start their books).
This time I'm not giving classes on Schopenhauer's view on the subject, which i consider quite wrong, a part from the representaiton part (his conclusions on causality and the relation between matter, time and space are, in my humble point of view, completely wrong! at least in the first 50 pages of his book).
For what I've seen and studied (in physics, not philosophy..) matter, time and space are isolated things, but necessary one to another for us to be able to perceive the existence of the others. I mean: we would not be able to understand what is the space if we didn't have matter. We wouldn't be able to describe matter without putting it in the space.
For time the matter is quite more complicated, since for us it is less intuitive to deal with this. But to percieve time we need too that matter is projected in space in front of us, so that we can make "photos" of it at each instant. If there was no space or matter, I suppose it would be hard to "feel" time.
This is coehent with Einstein's relativity: time, space and matter are separate things but that impact one on the other: lots of matter can make time pass slower, when the space moves to fast for a defined set of matter, it 'inflates'...there are a lot of interest conclusions when studying relativity..
To finish and make the bridge to facts: facts are any set of given information when we freeze one of these variables. Normally we would tend to freeze time: a fact is a set of space and matter in a given instant. But nothing blocks us to see things different: a fact can be a fixed place in the space with all instants from the beggining of time untill the end of time and the matter that's on it, for example.
When we consider that all facts from "real" are inifinite dimensional (there is infinite information available), this can be avoided if we freeze 2 variables: a given place at a time in a fixed instant have only a finite quantity of information, which is the carachterisitcs of the matter which is inside this fact.
Still, I remember: to explain a fact we have to make reference to a infinite set of space and more instants then one and only, so causailtiy can only be really achieved when exploding it to infinite.
cheers.
PS: If you're some kind of fan of these "energies" that some people believe that exist in the world, please forget it: matter and energy are the same thing, in the fammous formula: e=mc2
This one is on time, space and matter (as all philosophers like to start their books).
This time I'm not giving classes on Schopenhauer's view on the subject, which i consider quite wrong, a part from the representaiton part (his conclusions on causality and the relation between matter, time and space are, in my humble point of view, completely wrong! at least in the first 50 pages of his book).
For what I've seen and studied (in physics, not philosophy..) matter, time and space are isolated things, but necessary one to another for us to be able to perceive the existence of the others. I mean: we would not be able to understand what is the space if we didn't have matter. We wouldn't be able to describe matter without putting it in the space.
For time the matter is quite more complicated, since for us it is less intuitive to deal with this. But to percieve time we need too that matter is projected in space in front of us, so that we can make "photos" of it at each instant. If there was no space or matter, I suppose it would be hard to "feel" time.
This is coehent with Einstein's relativity: time, space and matter are separate things but that impact one on the other: lots of matter can make time pass slower, when the space moves to fast for a defined set of matter, it 'inflates'...there are a lot of interest conclusions when studying relativity..
To finish and make the bridge to facts: facts are any set of given information when we freeze one of these variables. Normally we would tend to freeze time: a fact is a set of space and matter in a given instant. But nothing blocks us to see things different: a fact can be a fixed place in the space with all instants from the beggining of time untill the end of time and the matter that's on it, for example.
When we consider that all facts from "real" are inifinite dimensional (there is infinite information available), this can be avoided if we freeze 2 variables: a given place at a time in a fixed instant have only a finite quantity of information, which is the carachterisitcs of the matter which is inside this fact.
Still, I remember: to explain a fact we have to make reference to a infinite set of space and more instants then one and only, so causailtiy can only be really achieved when exploding it to infinite.
cheers.
PS: If you're some kind of fan of these "energies" that some people believe that exist in the world, please forget it: matter and energy are the same thing, in the fammous formula: e=mc2
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