#ISSS2018 Corvallis

3339 TIME HAS GONE TODAY  
Frank Piontek

Past thinking dismissed physics or astronomy as irrelevant to metaphysics or theology. This eventually paved the way for science to dismiss philosophy as meaningless, mandating philosophy take into account physics or astronomy. Laszlo contends the theoretical edifice of theology is not radically different from that of science. Carr illustrates that cosmology relates to philosophy and theology and develops in Time. Contemporary outlooks in science and mathematics shed little understanding on those views.

Little is empirically understood about the origin of the universe. The predominant cosmological singularity, “Big Bang” model states that the universe was started instanteously; in the shortest fraction of a second from a miniscule point where all matter, energy, time, space and existence emerged. An obvious question to associate relevance between physics and metaphysics is: what came before the Big Bang?
Hawking contended we cannot empirically determine what happened prior to the Big Bang, (T=0); so prior events (T-0) have no meaning. Paradoxically; empirical meaning (T=0) proceeds from the Meaninglessness (T-0). If meaninglessness produces meaning; has Astrophysics has reached its epistemological limit.
Also regarding the Big Bang, mathematicians indicate interplay between mathematics and astrophysics is necessitated.  Yet mathematics (and therefore astrophysics), have been shown by Gödel to lack final systemization and are not free from internal contradiction. Consequently such Noncontradiction, or Truth of a system, cannot be formalized within that particular system. Given this Gödelian view, how can any science of phenomena be free from noncontradiction? Bertalanffy notes that any observational statements already presuppose an accepted conceptual universe and that perceptual cognition is not a reflection of real things nor is knowledge an approximation to truth or reality.

Mathematics also engages us into a current issue regarding numbers. Are they abstract objects (Whitehead and Gödel) or do they even exist at all (Nominalism)? Since it is alleged that there was no time prior to the Big Bang, what about Time?

Generally, from Boethius onward, time is viewed from the present into the past and projected into the future. Many disagree including; Hegel, Heidegger and Einstein. That Number is Time was a tenet of Greek philosophy from Plato & Aristotle onwards. McTaggart adds Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Bradley and almost all mysticism to an unreality of time school. Bergson contended the problem of Time is the central crux of philosophy and excepting the problem of evil; it is the hardest in all of philosophy.
By accepting the predominant linear view of Time we obfuscate our understanding of evil. Time unfolds and flows backwards not forwards. Plato argued learning is recollection and the being of anything can be known only through recollection; which comes from anamnesis.  Schelling argued that the ruling dimension is the future that is the time in time. Bertalanffy portrays a philosophy of Nicolas of Cusa, which relates that whatever we do or think has already been in us, i.e., latency. Plotinus, not Heidegger, first maintained the primacy of future in the understanding of time. Both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty accept nature as an unfurling.

Time is anamnesis. We recollect and discover our currently forgotten; but simultaneously created free-self. We are complete yet we forgot how we did it. We live, remember and recall. Time is the record of our moment; what we had volitionally done; the logical consequences from our now. That now is unfurled from anamnesis.

Omniscience knows this; we forgot and now live that forgetfulness. Time is the rewinding of the Divine “VCR/DVD” as we are shown ourselves.  Our soul making and the evil we created is complete, yet we forgot how we did it.  A Book of Life is written, we don’t recall our page number.