As I neither attended class nor created a Q&A last week due to illness, I do not have a convenient pair of questions to answer in my blogs. Instead, I will write about various time-related ideas which sparked my interest either in class on Monday, or when I read the assigned article.
On Monday, we discussed the fact that, as far as we know, all human cultures conceive of time as a thing that flows. The major difference between different cultures' conceptions of time seems to pertain to the 'shape,' as it were, of time's flow. Most Western cultures view time as linear, running in one direction only. A large number of Eastern cultures, however, view time as cyclical.
A cyclical view of time initially appears to solve the 'beginning of time' problem. If one marks out a particular piece of time by pointing at a spot in a circle (visually representing time) and asks an adherent of the cyclical view 'What comes before this?' the adherent can simply answer by pointing at the piece of circle immediately before the spot one indicated earlier. No matter how many times one repeats this experiment, the answer will be no different.
However, upon closer inspection, this view solves no more problems than the linear view. After all, if one repeats the experiment described above with a line and an adherent of the linear view, the adherent can simple draw another piece of line before the spot one pointed at. This also can go on forever, representing the view that time is either a ray (extending backwards infinitely from an endpoint) or a true line, not a line segment. Neither view, sadly, actually solves the problem, because both require the concept of infinity to work, and the human mind cannot quite grasp that concept fully.
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