Math question and a new "No Present" Idea.. Need help!

[Catatonic]

hey, y'all... i'm back with another question for you... i dunno.. maybe trying to support my " there's no present" idea..

what i know is there was a mathematician who said that every distance has  a half, right? or smth close to that...  i forgot his name, sorry... 5 is the half of 10, 2.5 is the half of 5, so forth and so on...

now.. what i want to know is: if you divide 1 by 2 .. that's 0.5 ... divide 0.5 that's 0.25 ... and so on .. hehe.. will it ever stop? i mean... will it ever be pure 0 or smth like that?

as you may have noticed i'm not quite good at maths... so that's why i'm askin you...

cheers

[Awakened_Mind]

"By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental units, or indivisible units, but we do come to a point where division has no meaning" - Werner Heisenberg.

-AM

[Catatonic]

that's a nice quote... but is there any scientific explanation?   

[Awakened_Mind]

It will never come to zero. If you half anything, no matter how small, you are only taking away 50 percent. As long as you forever take 50 percent, there will always be something left.

-AM

[Catatonic]

aha... that's what i wanted to know.

now.. can this explain that there's no present?

[Awakened_Mind]

You can't half a present moment because it has no definite beginning or end. It's a constant flow.

-AM

[Catatonic]

well.. let's take a pendulum for example.  we will mark as " present" the distance from the initial position (A) to  (B), which is the highest point reached, ok?   and this " present" is 1 cm long...

that's how i see it. why? cause most of them people name " present" a time interval.

[Awakened_Mind]

Well the term 'present' definitely has a reference to time, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can be quantified. A moment is a time interval that doesn't start or finish, there is no 'point a' or 'point b'. There is really no points at all.

Cutting a 'moment' out of time leaves you with nothing. A moment really needs to be open-ended to BE a moment.

-AM

[CFTraveler]

In other words, if you can quantify it, it's not the present.
So this doesn't prove there's no present, only proves that you (Catatonic) only accept the quantifiable as real, while others only accept the unquantifiable as real. (Or that's how I'm reading this, anyway).

[Mez]

the present is always NOW. I dont see what the initial maths thinger has to do with it... i know we measure time in a linear fashion assigning it numbers to remember where we've been and where we will be but thats only an indication of "past" and "future" (which dont exist) and an indication of where we are in the middle of those 2 things. Just because you cant halve any number to reach zero doesnt mean the present moment doesnt exist, if it did you wouldnt be sitting here.

[Catatonic]

i just took that example because what i meant was that every action placed in space and time has its " past" and "future", but not an exact moment of " present"... well, no present for me, actually. the pendulum shows a continuous move, as time does ( and yes, i'm aware that time is a man-made thing),  but in order to reach a point will have to reach some other points till there.
talking bout time... it's all a matter of pasts and futures, involving no present whatsoever.
"cutting" in half the distance between those points shows that there is no room for stopping and calling that moment " present"

[Awakened_Mind]

It's actually all a matter of present, with no past and no future. Tomorrow never comes and yesterday never happened. The only time we ever have conscious awareness of is right now. You need to understanding that the present moment is persisting. It doesn't stop. We never leave that middle line.

-AM

[Catatonic]

have you read " the power of now" by eckhart tolle?

[Awakened_Mind]

I ordered it last week actually. Any good?

-AM

[Zephyrus]

Well, I recall a philosophical problem called "Zeno's arrow paradox".

In the arrow paradox, Zeno asks us to imagine an arrow in flight. He then asks us to divide up time into a series of indivisible nows or moments. At any given moment if we look at the arrow it has an exact location so it is not moving. Yet movement has to happen in the present; it can't be that there's no movement in the present yet movement in the past or future. So throughout all time, the arrow is at rest. Thus motion cannot happen.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes)

[Sharpe]

May I add something here?
I think molecules are a perfect way of explaining the present.
They move, which puts in movement into the picture.
The faster they move, the faster time goes, the slower they move, the slower time goes.
The fact that they move is a sign that there is a present, it doesn't matter if they move fast or slow.
Maybe you can measure this speed of molecules.
If you can, you can measure the speed.
So if 1, is the speed they move now, on earth for example.
You can divide that by 2, and continue doing it untill they move extremely slow, so mathematicly speaking, the present can't stop, so time can't stop.

I don't really understand what you mean by present, do you mean time?

[iNNERvOYAGER]

I don't really understand what you mean by present, do you mean time?

Would that be zero degrees kelvin?
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.html

"Why doesn't it get down all the way to Absolute Zero (in outerspace)?

" That is a really interesting question. It turns out that the heat left over from the Big Bang that created the universe is everywhere, and it keeps the temperature in space from going any lower than 3 degrees Kelvin. Measuring this temperature is the strongest evidence we have that the Big Bang actually happened. However, people can do a lot better.........."

so theoretically, we never experience the present, because somethings always moving. The present only occurs before the big band, and upon dissolution of creation.

[Catatonic]

what do you wanna say, iNNERvOYAGER? " we never experience the present" ?  is that like... equal that there's no present or that we are not aware of it?

@Sharpe: i don't really know   smth very abstract, that's for sure.

[iNNERvOYAGER]

what do you wanna say, iNNERvOYAGER? " we never experience the present" ?  is that like... equal that there's no present or that we are not aware of it?

( Take it light, I'm brainstorming here and following up on the idea that Zephyrus posted about Zeno's Arrow Paradox, and the consideration by Sharpe that logically states that although the arrow is frozen in a single point of observaton in time, does that mean that the molecules that make up the arrow are also frozen and not moving? A good point because if the forces that cause molecules to move and to take their shape were taken away, then the arrow would not exist. No arrow, no paradox.)

(And that leads me to think about what the concept of  present really is. Bounce some of these ideas around and see what happens.)

Yes, that's correct. There's no present in the sense of ever experiencing a state of being completely inert with absolute stagnation.

Unless you are experiencing pre big bang or post dissolution. The cycle of creation and dissolution is an age old Hindu and Sikh concept that started centuries before the modern idea of the big bang, and the eventual bursting of the physical universe when dark matter expands to the point of ripping time and space.

Also, we're only talking about the physical universes, not conditions of the higher dimension that contains the multiple physical universes.

"Be Here Now" is just a catchy hippie sales pitch slogan used by Ram Das aka Dr. Richard Alpert, to get support from his groupies and to sell a book.   

There's no such thing as a Here Now, you're either going or you went 

[Awakened_Mind]

Surely there must be some transition between the two that trancends all dualisms of before and after?

-AM

[rygoody]

hey, y'all... i'm back with another question for you... i dunno.. maybe trying to support my " there's no present" idea..

what i know is there was a mathematician who said that every distance has  a half, right? or smth close to that...  i forgot his name, sorry... 5 is the half of 10, 2.5 is the half of 5, so forth and so on...

now.. what i want to know is: if you divide 1 by 2 .. that's 0.5 ... divide 0.5 that's 0.25 ... and so on .. hehe.. will it ever stop? i mean... will it ever be pure 0 or smth like that?

as you may have noticed i'm not quite good at maths... so that's why i'm askin you...

cheers

Once your brain grasps the concept of infinity outside the metaphor of mathematics you enter a new dimension of conscious existence which... mathematics is no longer useful in. Which is why no ones managed to bring it back to math. Math is not a large enough metaphor to hold full comprehension of infinity. If something can explain infinity to you accurately enough, you will feel a conscious shift, a new feeling.

The concept of infinity in math is merely a map to a next step. The next step doesn't come back to the first step, it will always stay next. What you do in the 'next' the state of infinite consciousness? Well some come up with prophecies, others come up with art or music, poems. Books. Pretty much the infinite consciousness can only come back in creativity. Of course though, that begs the question 'creative mathematics'? I dunno....

[Synergy]

Reading this is quite interesting and made me think of something I came across awhile back.  I cant for the life of me find it again online so I can't reference... sorry...

There is a time delay between everything we see, hear, touch, etc... and when it reaches the brain and is processed.  So by the time we actually 'see' our surroundings, the images are already in the past (by a fraction of a second) and are NEVER in real time... so we never see the NOW exactly... we are always that fraction of a second behind what is really out there. We are literally living in the past... by a few microseconds lol.

Seriously though... Here is how i look at it:
I dont think you can quantify 'NOW' because it just IS.  There is no interval at all... There is no start and finish, since it's just a single point of reference on a scale.  By the time we even think about NOW its already gone.  I guess if you look at it in this way, the present can not exist by itself or else we could not think, move, or do anything as there would be no movement, no processing, no growth.  There is no present without the past and future.   

Of course this is looking at time in a linear sense, and I do not believe time really is linear... its just how we perceive it. 

[CFTraveler]

I guess what I want to know is why most people (in this thread) seem to agree that for something to 'be' it has to be quantified?  Wouldn't the ability to quantify (determine a beginning and and end to something)  the complete oppossite- that the quantifiable is by definition changeable and therefore at some point nonexistent?  And isn't that the exact opposite of 'being'?
No, I don't have the answer, I'm just asking the question.

[Synergy]

I guess what I want to know is why most people (in this thread) seem to agree that for something to 'be' it has to be quantified?  Wouldn't the ability to quantify (determine a beginning and and end to something)  the complete oppossite- that the quantifiable is by definition changeable and therefore at some point nonexistent?  And isn't that the exact opposite of 'being'?
No, I don't have the answer, I'm just asking the question.

\

Isnt that what I just said in my post?  That I dont believe you can quantify NOW... because it just IS.  There is no end or beginning to now, because it is not a period of time, rather just a reference on a scale of time.  By the time you even say the word 'now' its over.  Each instant of now is not measurable as a time period (NOW has no beginning and no end, because if you have a beginning then it is in the past by the time you reach the end of it and it is not longer NOW... see what I mean??).  And in that sense, I agree with the 'No Present' idea... because without past and future, there is no present.  Present in itself is not measurable at all.... I realize I am looking at this backward from most people but it makes absolute sense to me.  In fact I would go one further to say there are no past or future either... they also just 'are'  I dont believe that time is linear at all.... we just perceive it as such to be able to exist on this plane. 

[CFTraveler]

Then we agree. 
I think.