What If Matter Never Existed

I was just thinking, why should we have matter? Why does anything exist? Would it have been just as easy to have nothing but the vacuum of space as it was to have matter? If there wasn't matter, would there still be time?

 

What if existance never mattered?

 

It doesn't. Its only a projection.

 

Because things have appearances. Imagine if all you ever knew was the sense of touch. What would matter be then? Our personal identities bias the way we view reality. I think there's some general consensus that matter is something abstract from us, but it's not necessarily the case.

 

Just the idea of the 'self' removes the thought process from the body, but as Neonspectraltoast said, it may not be the case. We can't know 'why' something exists, just isn't going to happen. As for the reference to time, you'd have to study a bit of physics...

It's really impossible to say since matter does exist. However, I'm going to take a leap and say because matter can cause shifts in time (the denser the mass you're near, the 'faster' time goes) so from that I would say that if there is no matter, no, there would be no time. Another theory around today is that time is a sequence of events, rather than events taking place in time. If this is the case, without matter, events couldn't take place and so there is no time.

 

Of course. Time is a category of thought, a way of describing things. There is no great overarching construct or flow of Time -- just things happening and our organizing them. To try and imagine what time is, outside of a thinking mind, cannot be done. It doesn't exist "out there" -- it exists "in here."

 

I suppose if you simply classified Time as the 'measure of change'.. but wait.. even then it's simply a construct we use to measure change... so... still, you're right. Nevermind. (Gotta love stream of consciousness posts)

 

How do we organize time? Isn't chronology just a fact.

 

Not really, because we can't properly say anything exists other than the state of affairs right now (which has already changed, and will again by the time anyone reads this). The past exists only in memory; in short, as a conceptual reality. We create a timeline, place the Chicago Fire in 1871, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, etc., but those numbers mean nothing outside of a self-referential system. They correspond to nothing real; the only true thing is that neither of these events is happening now. Based on what is happening now, there is no necessity of these events having happened, or of having happened at any specific "time." We all agree how long it's been, though people who have lived it have experienced its "length" far differently. Human beings construct time as linear, but our perceptions of it are not identical.

 

Stuff like aging and decay, ruins and ancient structures like pyramids and stonehenge, radiocarbon-dating and geologic processes are nothing real?

 

I know what you mean. It is the kind of thought that I have pondered many a dark night. I think it can make you go crazy if you think about it too hard.

 

What would exist then?

 

I don't know why we shouldn't have matter but do we have a choice?

 

They are real as ideas, and as useful ideas. But no, all that is real now is people and objects in particular states which we compare to other states (organized along a timeline as previous and subsequent to the state in question) in order to form an idea of ageing, decay, etc. There is no reason to call a ruin ancient, because the processes that make it are not the same. We identify a similar structure of stones to what was there fifty years ago at, say, Stonehenge, but nothing about them is the same. The makeup of everything changes constantly.

 

No matter

 

Whats the matter? do you want some matter? that doesn't matter, matter is here no matter what.

 

But they are real. They are not just ideas, aging and decay are terms describing what actually happens: the idea of aging doesn't come before the experience of it.

And to clarify: the stones ARE the same. The materials that make the core of the rock do not change because there is no force acting upon it to change it. The exposed rock does change, but you are assuming the 'rock particles' in the air come and replace the 'rock particles' that were once a part of the rock so that it stays in the same shape it appeared years before but in essence is different: this isn't the case.

It does change constantly but not to the degree I believe you are assuming.

 

What about like petrified wood. Not THAT shit changes.

 

:2thumbsup:.. I was thinking this before I opened the thread..