> dimension means a measurement of spatial extent. if time is a dimension, it is a measurement of space by definition, irrevocably.
Dimensions aren't just a measurement of spatial extent! That alone is probably where your argument falls down.
> memory is not time
No, I said memory is our sense-organ for time, I was not equating it to time.
> time is the line that runs along the z axis
The z axis is the third dimension in space - depth, if you wish... x, y, z - three variables, width, height, depth.
Time's usual letter assignation is t.
> everytrhing is in place and complete and connected from beginning to end, from things that have been to all possibilities in the future. everything is connected whole and already here
Yep, that's one theory. Determinism is the philosophical label on this.
> all that happens is that your conciousness moves from one point to the next ika movie, but more complete and connected
If we are bystanders observing the separation of events occurring thru time, then we are only more complete and connected because we have more senses at work than the sight-sound mix of a movie. Or were you thinking we were more connected because we participate and can shape those events?
> you think things happen, and since you have your will, you havbe choices between possibilities, so it's interesting.
If you do accept we have our own free will, then that surely contradicts your determinist stance. You're creeping into the murky ill-defined realm of existentialism!
What is 'will' if it isn't 'free'? Obviously, we are constrained in our will - I cannot choose to be a frog or a tiger or a tree or a stone - but logically, there is no contradiction with respect to constraints in will and that will being free.
It's like infinite subsets - the set of counting numbers N:{1, 2, 3, ..} is infinite. And the set of Integers Z:{..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...} is infinite. But N is a subset of Z, but its still infinite!
There's even a relative size of infinity! The number of Irrational numbers (non-repeating decimals) between 1 and 2 is a 'bigger' infinite set than the set Rational numbers (repeating decimals, expressed as a/b) - it's more densely populated. Some nice little mind games with this stuff..
What I'm proposing here is that I do, at any one moment, have an infinity of choices that are realistically available to me, but that infinite set of possible actions is smaller than / a subset of the infinity of universal potential events.
Time is one of those funny ones. We experience the smooth passage of time, but we conceptualise that quantity as discrete packets. It's the whole "analog v digital" debate.. Our auditory system is satisfied with a sample rate of 48kHz (or 96kHz or whatever), but that sample is a discrete packet covering the passage of time, and, unfortunately for our brains that can only conceptualise finite quantities, an infinite number of discrete events in that time. Our visual system is happy with a sample rate of a mere 25Hz...
My point here is the determinism upon which much of your argument rests is incompatible with free will. It's more than "interesting": it isn't possible to reconcile it with "we are disjointed bystanders".
But, I generally agree that this position of free will is difficult - it suggests that life, consciousness, and its associated free will, can somehow independently shape events in the universe that otherwise would plod on its merry deterministic way. However, I don't believe that life is a more elevated existence. So, there must be an element of randomness in nature - which I guess is where quantum physics comes in.
> there is no evolution, only what is, has been and what will be, all whole and complete. sorry, it's just how it is.
By this definition, it's not just evolution that fails to exist / can be falsified, it's pretty much everything - all of physics, your three or four dimensions, mathematics' 11 or 50 dimensions, the present of all things physical, life and all its heady connotations, ...
The argument you put forward is not a disproof of evolution. Nor does it approach a scientific description of things. It's a philosophical position approaching nihilism - which came up a few pages back if I recall.
It's a refreshing debate, but your position is one to which I don't subscribe... That's cool!

No need to apolgise that this is your belief!
> of course, i'm just going by the definitions of the words and what people say...
"people" - unfortunately, it's a just a group of 'theoretical philosophers' that believe that! By its nature, it cannot be proven. It's unfalsifiable!
> within the proper parameters, we can measure tabletops pretty accurately
Those parameters must include contextual information. If we had never seen a tabletop before, we may not recognise the tabletop as being something that's rarely more than say 25 foot square. And without the (apparent) physical placement of other known objects around that tabletop - chairs, cups and the like - and our ability to move in that space, employing parallax and stereoscopic vision, we would not have a sense of scale. So, we as humans cannot measure tabletops accurately - we learn how to give a good guess.
> String theory...
Aaaah, the old unified theory. A noble pursuit! Scale here is significant - at what level does scale break down? We have particle accelerators and mass spectrographs and large hadron colliders and the Higgs Boson, but one Higgs Boson particle surely must ask what it itself is made of? Or, is it the case that we end up in pure maths with String/Superstring Theory, and have gotten to the root of the existence of things, time, etc..? I'm sure Kurt Goedel would have something to say about Maths being the final arbiter of existence! His incompleteness theorem kinda screws that up...
> do you know why you get to wear that square thing on your head when you graduate from university?
Point of useless information: in Ireland, its only the ladies who graduate from university that wear the mortarboard hats...
And stardust:
> string theory in physics is not the only theory discussed here that has no practical impact. Though string theory at least tries to get practical for cosmology and particle physicists.
This is a popular belief for all new sciences. If it were not for good science, good theories, there would be no progress. We'd still be in the Dark Ages, left to struggle with teaching of Aristotelian Physics (what a woeful step backwards that was! When we had such visionaries as Democritus describing Atoms before Aristotle, and Aristotle's teaching later being hijacked by Christianity). No. Galileo did his best to debunk one aspect of Aristotle's Natural Philosophy, which paved the way for Newtonian physics, which resulted in thinking that culminated in Einsteinian physics, and beyond...
Practical impacts of these initially-theoretical-only theories? Well, Einsteinian physics brought a speedy end to World War Two in the east, and Newtonian physics got us to the moon. That, and it got us Scope and Xite, and the plane that delivered my two Scope cards from Italy!
String Theory may allow us solve real problems, like energy requirements, reversal of processes, programmable analog, faster DSPs, who knows?
I'm just humbled that the United States continues to fund research into it in such a significant way, and that the electorate is OK with that.
When things get smaller, they get harder to measure, and become more costly to measure since we cannot scale ourselves down and must find new ways of detection beyond magnification... But that doesn't mean that these are no less practical - in fact, they are probably far more powerful! Thinking of H-bombs, for example...
Cheers lads, Eanna