Time does not exist

Well, thanks for posting this debate. You bring to light an interesting viewpoint on the subject. Let me start off by saying that I agree with your thoughts on the need for humans to categorize things and name them. It is part of human nature. We rely on language, intuition, and our senses to arrive at our categories, whether they be words spoken or written, or thoughts in our own heads. So still, what is referred to as "time" is a reference to something that in some sense exists - as a practical matter of everyday life we could not get by without temporal references. Someone might say, "I'll meet you here at 4:30 p.m.," or, "Today is my 40th birthday," or, "It took me two hours to get home from work, when it usually only takes thirty minutes." At the very least, these are only references to relative or fixed events measured against an arbitrary absolute standard (such as the length of a second being defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom") but it is a quantity of something that is measured nonetheless. How often do you reference time? Now, how often do you reference something else non-existent? ("God" does not count as an answer.) Either way you cut it, whether you look at it from a Newtonian standpoint or a Kantian one, whatever we call "time" is crucial in our understanding of and existence in the universe. But you deny the existence of "time" altogether: You are questioning the existence (or rather, asserting the non-existence) of one of humans' fundamental conceptions of the fabric of reality. You are entitled to your belief, but the burden of proof falls to you - and you have a large basket to fill. Without the concept of time, our entire construction of reality falls apart. Now, when I said that "we are aware of past moments via memory," I should have made it clear that I was speaking only in regard to the individual's perspective. We learn and remember other things about the past through experiences and add them to a larger storehouse of knowledge in our brains. I did not mean that memories are comparable to your hard drive/tape deck analogy you mentioned in Round 1; memory is more of a collection of associations of events, sensory inputs, and a rather general knowledge of your own personal conscious life. This was the idea Proust was trying to bring to life in "Remembrance of Things Past." As far as relating any of this to your comment: "...our memories are no real concept of time, when something occurs that moment has instantly past(sic) and there is no way of confidently re-creating it and that means there is no guarantee that it actually occurred," it sounds like you are trying to use Hume's skepticism of cause and effect in reverse. So now, for there to be any reliable knowledge of an event, we must re-create that event. But, as soon as we do that, according to your rationale, we have no guarantee that our re-created event occurred either, so we fall into a vicious circle of regression about what has or has not happened, which would mean an automatic abandonment of anything that could be called "knowledge." I have to ask, in this situation, where do you place the foothold for knowing anything about anything? Where is the foundation for other knowledge placed? I also know, also in relation to memory, and independently of anything you may think, that I had certain experiences at certain places at certain times yesterday: I bought a shirt that I did not have three days ago, and now I have it - an event happened. I also bought a Pink Floyd concert DVD: it is a direct recording of that event, not a re-creation - I am pretty sure that it happened, as I don't believe little Pink Floyd dolls live in my TV and play the exact same concert the exact same way (camera angles and all.) The concert is 2 hours, 43 minutes, 7 seconds. Those numbers are a measurement of something - namely, time. You say that just because we name something does not mean it is real. I agree. But your argument seems soaked in subjectivism in the first place: "our security and understanding of were(sic) we are, how we got there and were we are going is merely an illusion developed through assumptions." In that case, especially combined with your automatic denial of any possible knowledge, much less theory of knowledge, who is to say what is real and what isn't? My invisible friend Fuzzy the Bear is real enough to me; it "exists" in my head; what other justification do I need for accepting Fuzzy as part of reality? Then you go on to say, "What we observe is not time, it is motion. We follow the motion of all things happening in our lives, we follow the motion of the sun, the motion of cars, the motion of a hand on a clock, not time." That's too bad because motion (as well as everything else) is defined in terms of space and *time*. This is Wiktionary's definition: motion (countable and uncountable; plural motions) (uncountable) A state of progression from one place to another. (countable) A change of position with respect to time. (physics) A change from one place to another. No time, no motion, and vice-versa. You invalidated your own argument. As for your theory of multiple universes, you are still defining your own argument in terms of time. And although time is a dimension, it is not space. You can measure both, but their properties are completely different. You can increase your velocity in space, and get from point A to point B in less time, but velocity still involves an absolute or relative temporal reference. I say that in regard to your argument about the ruler. In the piece-of-paper experiment, the distance moves from (x) to zero once the holes are lined up. Time-travel is not something I take seriously, and is not relevant to the debate, so I won't speak of it anymore. Also, please elaborate on what does and does not exist. Think through the necessary and contingent conditions that would have to be in place for your argument to be correct. Bottom-line: Time, unlike "God" or the Fairy Godmother,etc, MUST exist for humans to function or for everyday life to have any meaning.