PHILOSOPHICAL CLUB

Evening Star, Issue 21718, 12 May 1934, Page 5

PHILOSOPHICAL CLUB

ADDRESS BY MR J. G. BEGG A meeting of the Dunedin Philosophical Club was held last night at the University, when Mr J. C. Begg read a paper entitled ‘ The Physical and Mental Criteria of Time. ’ In the course of his address. Mr Begg said that necessity and ingrained -habit caused thought to move in a common world which was orderly and well fitted into the block of space and time. That this was not identical with the private world of direct perception was clear when, for example, the distortions of perspective were considered. Strictly speaking, however, the distortion was the other way about, for the native source of evidence was in the world we knew in conscious experience. If the private world were confused with public Nature paradoxes arose. Time, like material objects, suffered distortion when transplanted from experience into Nature, as was manifest when we compared the duration of a clock hour of suspense with a clock hour of pleasant activity. If Nature were regarded with the naivete of common sense the discrepancy was not too violent to be tolerable, but modern scientific interpretations of Nature had robbed it of a stable time standard and substituted a variable or purely symbolic time in which past, present, and future had no absolute significance. AVithin an individual mind, or private world, however, a real meaning always attached to simultaneity and to past, present, and future. Also an instinctive urge impelled us to include our fellows in such a system, although the medium of communication and emplacement, physical Nature, did ,not now offer a stable framework. Physics, of course, was not concerned with communities of minds. When Laplace toldNapoleon that his science had no need of the God hypothesis he might have added truthfully that it had no need of the fellow-man hypothesis, the freewill hypothesis, the beauty hypothesis, the goodness hypothesis, or the absolute truth hypothesis—and now could bo added the time hypothesis as formerly conceived. That some, at least, of these concepts were nevertheless demanded by the mystic urge nobody would deny, and it was doubtful if we could ever agree that there was no real meaning, for example, in the belief that past suffering of a friend was over and done with. At the close of the paper an interesting discussion took place concerning the problem raised.