The Elimination of Time and Space

Time and Space can be eliminated without upsetting the natural order. My thesis is that temporal and spatial relatedness describe independent events, and not continua like space or time.

1) The elimination of TIME
The duration of a sequence of events is the number of events in the sequence. It is not, as we generally regard it, a given section of a continuum that we call Time.

Events are normally described as being temporally ordered, as occurring simultaneously or coming before or after other events. This is the basis of all physics. However, temporal order can be viewed in a different way. Here, temporal order is a presentation of an assembly of events linked by association.

This proposal gives us a framework for dispensing both with temporal order based on a continuum and, it follows, with the idea of an arrow of time.

For example "I ask a question (event 1) and you reply (event 2)." The new analysis of temporal order proceeds as follows. When we say that event 1 (asking) comes "before" event 2 (replying), we make an association.  We associate one of these events with a third event, such as the position of the hands of a clock. Depending on the specifics of our grammatical and pragmatic traditions we then call that association "before", and the remaining event the "after" event, or vice versa. There are no conditions in this example (or in any possible example) that specify the temporal priority of one event over the other, of asking over replying. We simply communicate.


2) The elimination of SPACE
The length of a "line" is given by the number of events on the "line".

For example, line 1 is longer than line 2 because there are more events on line 1 than on line 2.
line 1     ----^-----
line 2     ------------------------------------

Normally, we say that line 2 is longer than line 1, even though line 1 has more events. However, "longer" is itself the name of another, unacknowledged, event. We construct that event ourselves, instinctually as it were, by making a new geometrical construction. We might use the limits of the page margin, or the size of a room, or the local terrain for our new construction. This construction will incorporate line 2 into a line that has more events than line 1. We then say that line 2 is longer than line 1; though, we are not talking about line 2, but about the longer line that incorporates line 2.

Concluding, this elimination of Time and Space is a clarification that removes any relative or absolute distinctions normally associated with temporal and spatial parameters such as before, after, longer, shorter, and extension generally. A further short essay will be submitted to show that an event "cascade" creates the structural framework, but not the transcendental framework, for our immediate sense of temporal and spatial relativity and particularity.