Simon Paynton
@simonpaynton
Active 2 days, 1 hour agoForum Replies Created
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February 15, 2026 at 6:49 pm #59885
Do you see “now” as a real moving present sweeping along the line or a a point of access within a fixed structure.
I understand it to mean “now” is local to you. But that doesn’t mean it moves. It just means your current brain state only has access to one region of your worldline. “Now” is real as perspective but it is not real as a process acting on the universe.
Yes, I see it this way. But what connects my subjective experience to my “now”? Why am I tied to a continuously moving point of access to my time-line? My subjective perspective is my experience of living in the now. It’s a real thing, even if it’s only experienced by me. It’s a real experience.
February 15, 2026 at 8:50 am #59868In all fairness, any prediction could be considered true if the prognosticator talks nebulously enough, moves the goalposts, and, above all, talks a lot. Astrologers, psychics, and self-proclaimed “prophets” do it all the time.
They could, and they do, but this was different. She went around telling people their futures. She told me about what happened in my home (loads of arguments, person moved out) while I was away, and it was all true when I got back.
My point is, that if this is correct, then my “time line” extends into “my environment”.
February 15, 2026 at 8:48 am #59867“Now” is not a universal property spread across space. The universe doesn’t care where the time zone line is drawn. Only humans do. Our segmentation of our experience of time flow is just a convention. The feeling that clock time reflects a moving reality is mistaken.
OK, true, the clock isn’t evidence of anything much apart from that its little hands are going round.
But “now” doesn’t have to be universal to exist. “Now” is local to me. “Now” is where I am now, in my time-line.
February 14, 2026 at 7:54 am #59857So yes, we do experience a “present” but not “now”. Experience is a perspective from one region of spacetime, not evidence that reality contains a moving “now”. A camera records one frame at a time, but the film does not move through the camera — the whole reel exists.
I don’t know what it proves. I’m not saying it proves anything.
The film moves past the camera lens, one frame at a time. When I sit still, time still moves, as is evidenced by the clock.
I agree that my life exists as a wiggly curve through 4D space. But I assert that my “now” is where I subjectively feel that I am along that (objective) wiggly curve.
I used to know someone, a lowly speed freak from a council estate, who could tell people’s future. She could read a short distance into the future, and while we were all out that night, she told me about the drama that was unfolding at my home. When I got home, her story was true. She didn’t know where I lived, didn’t know any of the people, had no mobile phone, etc. So, my “wiggly curve” was diffused into “my environment”, even when I wasn’t physically in it.
February 12, 2026 at 9:53 am #59842In spacetime, an object is not a 3D thing that moves. It is a 4D curve or a “worldline”. From my birth to my death, I am not “an entity” or dot moving through time. I am an extended 4D structure. Think of a thread woven though spacetime. (Or as I called myself previously – I am an ontic worm).
Yes, but you only experience that dot moving through time. It’s “now”.
February 11, 2026 at 5:55 am #59830Modern physics does not operate with any variable for time = flow. No equation contains a term to describe ‘time is moving’. Relativity explicitly forbids universal flow as different observers in different locations disagree on temporal ordering.
Is this not “argument from ignorance”? We can’t explain it, therefore it doesn’t exist? That’s asking a lot from modern physics.
If I walk across Ireland from Dublin to Galway (or NY to LA), does Dublin move or are there just different locations along a path. Saying a coordinate changes as time passes is like saying latitude changes as space passes.
Dublin doesn’t move, but as you walk across Ireland, time advances. Also, if you stay in one place, time advances.
Just because time has a localised frame of reference, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I think you’re saying, it’s too hard to work out, so it’s not there.
February 10, 2026 at 5:46 pm #59822I needed to stop confusing time passing with time as a coordinate 🙂
Yes, but the coordinate keeps changing as time passes. Or, as you pass time.
February 9, 2026 at 9:25 am #59809Do we cooperate or compete to survive?
It’s interesting to think about the conditions where it’s optimal for the individual to cooperate, or to compete. As a species, it’s necessary to cooperate to survive. As individuals, it’s sometimes optimal to cheat.
February 8, 2026 at 8:45 am #59790To Sammy, we were too dim to realize that organized religion had evolved for a reason, and to oppose it so much was a character flaw.
Even if it was for worthy goals, there are other ways of achieving those worthy goals, and we don’t have to use religion. Unless one of those goals is “worshiping God”, in which case you’re religious anyway.
February 8, 2026 at 6:21 am #59789To Sammy, we were too dim to realize that organized religion had evolved for a reason, and to oppose it so much was a character flaw.
But everything happens for a reason. That’s a dumb reason to follow religion. It evolved for all kinds of reasons and purposes. So what?
February 8, 2026 at 6:18 am #59788
February 7, 2026 at 11:15 am #59783I consider myself a free thinker, and other people consider me to be a free spirit. In my experience, the two tend to go together as people take their free-spiritedness into their thinking. I consider someone who is not a free thinker to be a dumbass, as it’s an intellectual failing not to be. So, ideologues are behaving like a dumbass.
The free-est thinkers are probably scientists and mathematicians, as it’s their job to be guided by facts rather than ideology.
I think it’s true that a narcissist can’t be a free thinker, as they’re inflexible in their behaviour, and can’t change or learn how to be different. Also they usually think they’re perfect, which is an intellectual failing, and they see the world through a particular lens (their own interests compared with those of others).
In the circles I move in, Sam Vaknin is seen as a narcissistic fake, a charlatan. However I agree that narcissists love to hijack the top spot, as we’re seeing in the USA right now. I believe that “covert narcissists” can change since they tend to have a light side that wants to change. Other kinds of narcissists don’t really have that light side.
February 6, 2026 at 8:10 am #59776Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.
It’s worst in highly patriarchal countries, where the rich men hoover up all the wives, and the poorest men are left with no-one to marry.
February 5, 2026 at 8:57 pm #59773States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”
Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and searches for explicit content like “porn” and “sex.”
Ah, so what they say and what they do are two different things. Or maybe they only look at “married porn”.
It’s not a social invention, not a moral choice, and not something you can switch off with ideology or religion. Enforced celibacy is deviant behavior. It can and does contribute to deviant or maladaptive sexual behavior. Repression doesn’t erase desire. It pushes it underground, where it becomes harder to integrate with identity and self-control. The Catholic Church is the obvious example of this.
This is very true. Repressed sexuality can make it unconscious and therefore unknown to the individual, which can be dangerous. What about the Muslim shooter who shot up the gay nightclub, because he couldn’t handle being gay himself? What about that massive gayboy, Andrew Tate?
I find that people whose survival was threatened as children, end up with a huge sex drive as adults. There’s nothing someone can do about that.
February 5, 2026 at 1:32 pm #59771Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.
This article is super-interesting. I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff. Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views. Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views. That makes a lot of sense. It’s telling how there’s nothing about these issues in the New Testament, to my knowledge (abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, same-sex marriage). So they pulled these views out of their asses.
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