[Yorick]

Originally posted by Barry the Sprout: I kind of agree with 250 about the nature of time - its a bit of a contradictory ideal in the way a lot of people see it. Time is infinite, so what is to say at which point of that time line we exist, consciousness exists for an infintesimally small point along that line, a line that it would be impossible to end. OK, so time could end tomorrow could it? What on earth would happen then? The Universe requires time to exist, so without time we don't get a universe. Whilst it might be possible for matter to stop existing, it would be impossible for the entire of existance to stop existing. This is a concept I find very difficult to explain... Argh! My second point is slightly concerned with what some people say about "living in the moment", bascically that that is impossible too sadly. The "moment" that we perceive at any instant has already gone, replaced by a new one which we will not perceive until a fractionally small amount of time later. The relationship between subject and object necessarily requires that the object that we see (the world in general, for example) is never the same object as the one that exists at the time of our perceiving it. OK, so maybe little has changed, but you don't know that. Of course, you can come back by saying that the only object that ever actually exist is the one that is perceived, the sensory data is the only really provable part of the process. So it would be possible to live surely in the moment, as the moment consists of only subject and subjects sensory data, no object at all. The problem with this is that it opens the door to rationalism that in turn denies the proof of the existance of time itself, which kind of makes the argument pointless. We now consider time to exist as it is a natural assumption, like the existance of matter. It is a priori knowledge. Yet if we reject the existance of a priori knowledge and reject the existance of objects in the first place then we also reject the existance of time, as unproven. Hows that for a headache then...

Certainly is. "I think...therefore I am not."