Abstract
Argument: The past constrains the present, and is revived in it as a “track” in its development. The present departs from reproduction through novel change in the revival and constraints on becoming imposed by the external world. The future is the set of possible presents that might be reasserted in the perishing of the current present. Belief in the future is impelled by agency, regularities in becoming, and the asymmetry of microgenetic process.
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Notes
Existence refers to a finite world of temporal facts. The relation of the finite to the infinite is a topic for metaphysical study. For Whitehead, the concept of an absorption of temporal fact into the eternal harmony of God’s nature provided a resolution of permanence with transience in such a way as not to lose novelty; L. McHenry, Whitehead and Bradley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).
G._E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953).
For background, see Brown, Self and Process, 175–178, 187; and Brown, Life of the Mind, 335.
Discussed in Life of the Mind. On time, see J. T. Fraser, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Washington DC: Tempus, 1987).
For example, see M. Bender, “Dysfunction in the Visual Perception of Space and Motion,” in Physiological Aspects of Clinical Neurology, ed. F. Rose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).
For example, see W. Richards, “Time Reproductions in H.M.,” Acta Psychologica 37(1973): 279–82.
See P. Horwich, Asymmetries in Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
For example, the tribal chief who continues to pray for a successful hunt after it is concluded. See discussion by A Dummett and A. Flew, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supple. 28(1954):27–62; Symposium, “Can an Effect Precede Its Cause”?
The transition from simultaneity and timelessness in subsurface mentation (e.g., dream) to seriality and time in waking consciousness may underlie some of these examples. See Self and Process, 132, for a discussion of precognition in dreams in relation to levels in time awareness.
See discussion in G. Feinberg, S. Lavine, and D. Albert, “Knowledge of the Past and Future,” Journal of Philosophy 89(12)(1992): 607–42.
See J. Earman, A Primer on Determinism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), on isotropy and a fixed future. Anisotropy also occurs with certain physical phenomena, such as radiation, gravity, and exponential decay, or phenomena such as the wave of concentric circles made by a stone falling in a pond. See also H. Zeh, The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989).
See discussion in W. Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) and Horwich, Asymmetries in Time.
Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 501.
S. Cahn, Fate, Logic and Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
G. von Wright, Philosophical Logic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Classical logic is imputed to be the doctrine of the laws of thought, but those laws are dynamic and relational, unlike logic, which has one ontological theme: being as objective permanence. See G. Gunther, “Time, Timeless Logic and Self-Referential Systems,” Annals New York Academy of Sciences 138(1966/67): 396–406.
Tintern Abbey, 97–101.
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© 1996 Plenum Press, New York
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(1996). Asymmetry of Past and Future. In: Time, Will, and Mental Process. Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_3
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