Recent comments in /f/philosophy

Colon t1_j0mq887 wrote

Reply to comment by Micronaut_Nematode in Time is a Wheel, Time is an Arrow: on linear and cyclic conceptions of time by owlthatissuperb

the author addresses your critique (i believe) at the end:

I was tempted to title this post “Time is a Wheel, not an Arrow”. We’re strongly biased towards the linear view, especially at the macro level. We see our lives and our civilization progressing toward some indeterminate end-state. I want to pull in the opposite direction.But both the linear and the cyclical view of time have merit.

and they go on to further their point, citing pros and cons of both thoughts, including that cyclical time can lead to "apathy, nihilism, and despair". furthermore:

*Properly balanced, the two viewpoints synthesize into a paradoxical but powerful state of mind: we can have ambition with equanimity, and progress with stability. Thankfully, the cyclic view is reemerging after centuries of obscurity.*I just hope we don’t overcorrect.

i feel this elucidation makes your comment unfair

edit: entirely unfair. i think you and the people upvoting you read the article with minimal patience or comprehension (if you even clicked on it - it's very clearly not a piece meant to persuade)

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skytram22 t1_j0mox20 wrote

Reply to comment by Top_Net_123 in What Plato Would Say About ChatGPT: Zeynep Tufekci argues that A.I. can be a learning tool for schools with enough teachers and resources to use it well. (The New York Times) by darrenjyc

I have tried grading in-class contribution/participation, but nothing I did motivated students to participate in a class of 50+ students. I just had 60% of students with zeroes, which my department did not accept, so they told me to change my grading policy mid-semester. I also had a few students come to office hours in tears because they felt too anxious to speak up in class. I do think that taking contribution into account for grading is great for seminar classes; as a grad student, though, I'm only given lecture-heavy courses. I design my own syllabi, but when I proposed a participation-based Intro to Sociology class, the professors just laughed and said no.

I have wondered about oral exams. I nearly flunked the one I had as an undergrad—I could not handle the pressure of my professor staring me down like that—but it does feel more straightforward. I will have to give that one some thought.

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SubtlySubbing t1_j0mm0b7 wrote

Reply to comment by Ghozer in Time is a Wheel, Time is an Arrow: on linear and cyclic conceptions of time by owlthatissuperb

Yeah you're on the right track but have some misconceptions.

Time is a measurement of causality. Lightning strikes, then you hear thunder after a certain amount of time. So time definitely does have a single direction, otherwise things could happen before the event that caused it to happen. E.g. you hear thunder before you see the lightning strike, which is completely unphysical. It's kind of impossible to think of a universe if time could move both ways. What's also interesting to think about is without events that cause things to happen (if nothing happened), how can you measure time? Does it even exist then? This whole premise of causality, along with the discovery that light travels the same speed no matter how fast youre going, eventually led physicists to come up with special and general relativity.

What you're talking about with spacetime acting like fluid is just a property of waves in general. It isnt that spacetime is a fluid, it's that both spacetime and fluids (liquids, gasses, and plasma) are what physicists call "media" for waves to travel through. A wave is just engery moving through a medium. And youve even said it! The medium wants to stay still, and this restoring force is the whole reason why waves exist, why energy can travel. There are a bunch of media:

  • Matter (solids and fluids) is the medium for sound (compression) waves or waves that move up and down like water (transverse).

  • Electromagnetic field is the medium for light (photons).

  • Spacetime is the medium for gravity. (General relativity implies gravity is the bending of spacetime).

  • The Higgs field is the medium for the Higgs boson.

  • Crystals (or solids in general) even have little waves traveling through their molecular bonds called phonons.

  • Quantum Mechanics describes everything as a probability wave.

The list goes on and on. If you're interested, look up wave theory. Or if your more interested in how special/general relativity came about, look up the Michelson-Morley experiment (We used to think light traveled through a medium called the "ether". This experiment drove them mad when they couldn't prove it, but their findings were huge and led us down the path to our current understanding of spacetime).

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Pawn_of_the_Void t1_j0mlusc wrote

Reply to Time is a Wheel, Time is an Arrow: on linear and cyclic conceptions of time by owlthatissuperb

Eh. Physically it pretty much is an arrow. Things might feel the same but being literally the exact same doesn't seem supported. Even given infinite time that doesn't mean the exact same things will occur, there are after all an infinite amount of different possibilities, you won't exhaust them and need to repeat.

With respect to how we experience things you can certainly talk about repeating cycles, but a sine wave feels like a more appropriate comparison. A lot of this sameness seems subjective in nature, how we interpret events.

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Negative_Increase975 t1_j0mk8of wrote

Reply to comment by OptimisticBS in What Plato Would Say About ChatGPT: Zeynep Tufekci argues that A.I. can be a learning tool for schools with enough teachers and resources to use it well. (The New York Times) by darrenjyc

I taught high school English for 25 years - plagiarism is not something that came along with the internet. I used to have my students do all of their brainstorming outlining and planning in class and we still covered a full length novel, Shakespeare, poetry, short stories er al. This is another tool that educators will deal with regardless. It’s here and will only become more pervasive.

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