Sorry for bumping this, but it did take me this long to explicit my replying thoughts enough to post them, and then remember to actually post them.
Lukster, I'd've told you this by PM to avoid bumping an old thread, but I thought others would appreciate knowing too.. This is if you haven't bought the book yet.
Barbour's idea, in brief, is that all the possible permutations of matter, likened to time "capsules" are imaginable as a configuration, where the experience of existence goes from one capsule to the next. A fair share of the book works to very coherently demonstrate this hypothesis could make for a valid theory of time.. or non-time, as a matter of fact:
Barbour eventually reasons that "God" itself is the 'power' that guides our souls, or experience, or existence or what have you, along all these permutations (differentiated by as little as one quanta - think about it: one quanta of difference among all the matter in the universe, how many total permutations is that?).. and that (I'm paraphrasing from faint memory here)
what could be more sublime than being so guided by God? yadda yadda
So, time would not exist. He called this realm of timecapsules Platonia.
Originally posted by Suave
Yes they do. It's just that they're invisible and they have magical powers so nobody knows about them. They're unseen helpers with life's many problems, like coping with reality for example.
It's not exactly related, but I just read 1984 (in one swift night), finally. (exactly off topic is the memory that I had of first hearing of the novel, as a movie in fact: I was 10 years old, browsing Blockbuster, and thought "wow, a movie so freakin old, it sees 1984 as the future!!"
That means you, lazs)
The analogy that excuses this seemingly off topic anecdote is that in the book, the protagonist is finally broken down and corrupted by his torturer, with the help of pain inflicted, into admitting that reality, the past, even reason, do not exist because no one else bears such ideas.
That a tree makes no sound if no one is around to hear it falling down.
Human thought is not omniscient nor omnipotent, yet, so it is safe to assume it isn't infinite, yet.
There is therefore a certain quantity of reality that goes unnoticed by same mind, and it stands to reason that said unseen reality is no less real than what
is perceived.
It's not such a far-fetched idea that there are such limits to our understanding.
It's contradictory to pretend there are such things beyond the limits of our understanding, and yet accept any conclusions about them; any statement made about them is unavoidably anthropomorphist, and self-contradictory.
That includes a statement on anything's existence or non-existence outside the extent of human thought.
Sort of like that Zen maxim: speak the idea, and it vanishes.
