is science "socially neutral"?

Exactly the logic of "time beggining"- acording to our assumptions there is nothing before the big band, and because there is nothing happening there so we can measure the passing of time of it happening, then time itselft must have not existed.

There was ragtime before big band.

We can't talk about time (from a scientific point of view) without talking about thermodynamics and entropy. Although the current state of cosmology is pretty laughable (see dark matter, dark energy and even dark flow), the theoretical possibility of a heat death of the universe - i.e. attaining maximum entropy - can't be discounted with current knowledge. Such a state - i.e. equal dispersed (and very cold) diffusion of remaining matter, would be timeless. Although, of course, there wouldn't be anything around to observe or experience such timelessness.

Also classical logic is not the be-all-and-end-all of logic these days - not for a good while, even. For e.g. constructionist or intuitionistic logic, better matches the limitations of what questions are actually decidable through computation. In that system of logic, where the law of the excluded middle does not apply, there are propositions which cannot be determined to be either one one thing or its negation. (unless P = NP, of course, in which case, all bets are off - somehow, I don't think we'll be so lucky).

Ocelot, of course there are myriads of logical systems. However, I have yet to see one which concerns itself with empirical tests of propositions.

Mine too. And if hobbits aint real, then its not my revolution.

Ragtime was significantly before big band. Ragtime is a late-19th century musical form.

New Orleans Jazz sort of comes between the two.

Absolutely. That would be science, not logic. Similarly logic does not determine rationality. Rationality requires some element of motive or criteria of optimality (normative framework), which again logic cannot give us.

I blame Star Trek. Spock's constant "that's not logical, captain", should really have been "the rationality of your decision is not evident, captain", to be accurate. But that's Hollywood for ya.

It's almost as if the definitions of natural phenomena change with the progress of scientific inquiry...

I provided several.

No you haven't you've merely asserted that this is so. I notice you've now moved from your original position of saying it is "illogical" to assert this, to now saying it is "impossible". This seems extremely strange as vast numbers of people since the very first religious cosmologies have made this assertion.

Except that they don't, because:

a) you can't go further north than the North Pole
b) you can't go further up Ben Nevis than there is Ben Nevis to go up - if you go higher, you're no longer up Ben Nevis
c) you can't go back in time to before time began

Right, so now you've done a 180 and decided you can measure things that aren't real (though apparently only if you measure them in "scare quotes") but that measuring them is not proof of their reality. Therefore you have no argument for why time can't have a beginning, and your supposed critique of (modern, official, whatever) science falls apart.

~J.

Exactly. Modern official science is somewhat a religion.

Because time cannot have a beggining.

You can't. You can only measure real things. When you state "measurements" of something imaginary, like a Hobbit, those "measurements" are as reas as that Hobbit. But, as opposed to a Hobbit, time is real, it is measurable, and, as I said- it is measurable indefinitely into past or future.

'Time, by definition, has no beginning, ergo time has no beginning. QED.' Move over Spinoza, we are truly in the presence of genius.

Ovularity: that peculiar form of circularity based on the Humpty Dumpty principle that "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less".

Time has a beginning, period. Wow, what a proof.

Now you're getting it. Merely asserting things as true by definition is an inferior epistemology to a critical realist methodology which seeks to construct intersubjective knowledge of reality that is consistent with observed phenomena.

Time is observed, and can be measured indefinetly into past of future, there is not end of point of it (in either direction) that is observable no more than Hobbits are observable.

This video explains why I'm not going to offer a point-by-point defence of the big bang model against the charges of 'it's just another narrative, man'.

It is paradoxical to talk about time 'beginning' because what we understand by 'beginning' is something taking place in time. It's all well and good to say "then we have to change our definition of 'beginning'" but the problem with this is that time beginning would be a singularity, there is nothing to relate or compare it to hence seemingly no possibility of a definition. I'm not saying this 'proves' that time doesn't begin, but it is important to note the semantic difficulties here.

To me things like "time has a beggining" and "nothing can be faster than the speed of light" are 'postulates'. Which is to say, things which can't really be proved but are accepted anyway, for the time being, in order to produce useful conclusions.

Are people saying postulates are like the dogmas of the Catholic Church?

Sheesh. If you have problems with the concept of time 'beginning', then ffs stay away from quantumn mech. But, guess what, as impossible as it is to visualise a meaning to the equations of q.m., the equations work. Otherwise you couldn't be reading this (computers, flat-screens, etc, are constructed using these equations).

Evolution has shaped our brains and how we think to work most effectively at the scale we live or die on. The range of light we call the "visible spectrum" is just the range that our local star happens to produce most of. So when we move away from scales we evolved to think in, our innate conceptions become less effective. So what. Only a theist would believe that our evolved mental furniture would be the key to the language at the universe at every level. The Michelson-Morley results don't make intuitive sense either. And yet, there they are. Deal with it.

On the plus side, the fact that the results of scientific observations produce results that our imaginations can literally not conceive of, is pretty strong evidence that there is a reality out there.

None of which depend on, nor prove the illogical concept of "quantum superposition".

Is pretty strong evidence that modern official science is based on arbitrary claims as much as christianity.

There's a difference between a truth and its expression. Most of us would agree that there's only one world, but we would also agree that there are many languages which can be used to describe that world. How different would science be if the 'same' ideas were expressed in a different language and a different social context?

Newtonian physics maybe wouldn't seem like 'clockwork.' Darwinian natural history maybe wouldn't seem 'red in tooth and claw.' Modern mathematics wouldn't seem like a version of finance capitalism.

The thing is that physics doesn't rely on the semantics of English. It formulates a self consistent mathematical model and it is done.

Peano's model of the natural numbers begins with a first member. There's nothing internally inconsistent about time starting at a given point.

When some dude describes the model in English his description might contradict the usual concepts of time as expressed in English but who cares? It has nothing directly to do with the model itself, which isn't in English.

It took me a little while to fully comprehend the dubious line of reasoning your taking here.

Consider, it is "paradoxical" to talk about curved space instead of Euclidean space because our intuition implies that any curved space should be embedded within straight, Euclidean space.

But even more, the intuition that our space is flat really is "natural" in the sense that we have particular sense organs and occupy a limited position in space and time. So we can only see a small piece of space and so it will always "make sense", in our limited intuitionistic sense of sense, to imagine that the piece of space we occupy is flat.

But we have oodles of evidence for curves space and a logically consistent model of it. Similarly, one can easily have a logically consistent model of a set of states beginning at a single state. Again, the only thing "paradoxical" is that it doesn't satisfy our intuitive idea of what time should involve. There's no logical inconsistency in the model. Hopefully, we're all pretty certain the earth is round but I think it's reasonable to say that the simplest intuitive idea of what land is like would say that the earth is flat. So basically, our intuition about many things is fricken' wrong.

That is true even if our intuitions about time aren't going to go away either. That is, if we're imagining a sequence of events, we are representing it in our brains. And so it is entirely plausible that a representation of a time sequence in our brains will always involve the possibility of a "before" event and an "after event". But this is again, the qualities of human cognition (or even cognition in) and doesn't imply that the world will satisfy these.

Even more, it seems that philosophy as enterprise has involved building up understandings of the world based on chains of simple, "reliable", intuitions. In other words, it has merely codified the errors that immediate human perception and understanding naturally generate. But if we look at the scientific enterprise, we can see that it, while far from understanding everything, has pretty much discredited intuition as the basis of understanding space, time and material reality. IE, the whole carcass of reasoning based on "what makes sense to me" pretty much needs to be discarded.

My point has nothing to do with intuition, it has to do with the intensional content of the concept "beginning." It has nothing to do with what we can imagine, intuit, or grok. It has to do with the definition of a word.

Your point is that QM dispenses with ordinary concepts. In that case, it is inaccurate to say that the conclusions expressed mathematically by physicists "mean" that time has a beginning. On the other hand, if they do "mean" this, they also must mean that beginning "means" something totally different now--that unlike in ordinary usage, "beginning" does not contain a reference to time. Or, what is more likely, that "beginning" in this one case does not contain a reference to time, that it is meant homonymically in this case.

If I were being more careful, I'd have to say we also speak of a 'beginning,' as in the 'beginning' of a road, or of this sentence, in spatial terms, or even order of logical sequence.

So a beginning implies a limit or a threshold. In what sense to we mean the beginning of time?

A 'beginning' of time clearly seems to also imply a beginning in time--otherwise why locate this beginning in the past?

In any case nowhere am I appealing to what is intuitively acceptable or imaginable, I have no problem saying that science deals with things ordinary understanding cannot intuitively apprehend. The problem is with what is meant by 'beginning.'

"Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor."

By QM, I assume you mean quantum mechanics? Actually, quantum mechanics doesn't have to do with curved space. For that you want relativity.

Of course it is inaccurate to say, in English, time has a start. English is a crude, inaccurate, ill-defined tool. You'll never get something really accurate out of it. No statement of modern physics is going to be really defined by a sentence which people would expected to understand in the sense of ordinary language.

Whatever your protests, "ordinary usage" is pretty much "our intuitive sense". Ordinary usage is shifting and changing and isn't going to be a terribly accurate statement of anything. That's why a scientific approach is really useful and why objections of Fabian's sort more or less boil down to "that's not what I think time be like" - Well sorry dude.

I wasn't talking about curved space, but time beginning. Anyway my point is that if, as you're claiming, "time has a beginning" can't be made to say in English what physics says with its equations, then, mutatis mutandis, physics' equations don't mean "time has a beginning."

It means it roughly, the same rough way that anything in English means anything.

Edit: Also. Relativity is also where time ending and time beginning comes in. A black hole is a singularity where our Einsteinian space-time manifold ends and the big-bang is a singularity where our Einsteinian space-time manifold begin. Roughly speaking, of course.

It means it roughly, but in the rough meaning there is a paradox. If in the exact meaning there is no paradox, but this cannot be transferred to the rough meaning, that is the same as saying the exact meaning is, for all intents and purposes, not the same meaning at all.

Note I'm not saying time has no beginning, or that science can't conclude that it does, or that what science concludes means something totally different from what ordinary language understands. My initial claim was that there is a paradox involved in saying time begins. Many fundamental claims are paradoxical. I am now simply responding to your defense of the non-paradoxicality of science's claim (by simultaneously trying to establish its difference and its sameness from ordinary language, all in a rather unspecified manner) and saying that either science says something different, the same, or similar. You have opted for 'similar.' The question then is what are the definitions of 'time; and 'beginning' by which this would not be paradoxical. If there are none, then there is a problem with asserting that what physics claims is that 'time has a beginning.'

Everything in normal expression has ambiguities and "paradoxes" if by paradox you mean unresolved meaning. And that includes paradox itself. "The beginning of time" indeed means something different than the beginning of a road or the beginning of an era. A "normal language speaker" can generally resolve these "paradoxes" and get some meaning out of a stream of expression where even the "logical level" to which one refers is ambiguous.

On the other hand, a statement like "this statement is false" is paradoxical in the sense that a normal language speaker couldn't easily resolve into a statement whose logical meaning could be resolved.

In my language knowledge, saying a statement is paradoxical as counter-argument is to say not that there unsaid things, things to be resolved but that they simply can't be resolved. The two things are different. And the point is that if Fabian was making a real objection to the big bang, it would be reasonable to assume the objection was of the "not resolvable" rather than "it needs work to resolve" category.