Abstract
Exponents of both sides of the controversy concerning whether or not ‘the present’ is objective have claimed that the issue should be capable of being resolved scientifically. It is here suggested that this is a mistaken view. The t-coordinate of physics has been widely endowed with overmuch ontological significance and there is no scientific warrant for the view, espoused by some of the B-theorists, that past, present and future are necessarily ‘equally real’. From an epistemological point of view, ‘the present’, at any particular location, is simply the terminus of all events which can be known with certainty and thus the temporal order, as it applies to any assumed events later than the present, is no more than a schematic construction.
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References
C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, Cambridge 1938.
R. M. Gale, The Language of Time, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
A. N. Prior, Past, Present and Future, Oxford 1967; Papers on Time and Tense, Oxford 1968.
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D. Park in The Study of Time, Ed. J. T. Fraser, et al, Springer-Verlag, 1972.
Philosophy & Scientific Realism, pg. 133
Between Science & Philosophy, pg. 255
loc. cit., pg. 155–6
See for example J. A. Ornstein, The Mind and The Brain, Nijhoff, The Hague, 1972. For a critique of what has been called the’ strong correlation thesis’ see R. C. Solomon, Brit, J. Philosophy of Science, 1975, 26, 27.
E. Cassirer in The Study of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser et. al., Springer-Verlag, 1972. Concerning the notion of ‘becoming’ see also P. Fitzgerald in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XX, Reidel Pubi. Co. Dordrecht, 1974.
loc. cit. pg. 16
Annales de L’Institut Henri Poincaré, 1952–3, 13, 109–158.
loc. cit. pg. 295
loc. cit. pg. 167–8
Philosophy and Scientific Realism, pg. 141–2
My attitude to this particular issue was described in my contribution to The Study of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser et al., Springer-Verlag, 1972. Also in my book. An Inventive Universe, Hutchinson, London, 1975; Braziller, New York, 1975.
On this point see, for example, Lawrence Sklar, Space, Time and Space-Time, pp. 272–5, University of California Press, 1974.
The Physicist’s Concept of Nature, ed. J. Mehra, Reidel Pubi. Co., Dordrecht, 1973.
Philosophy of Science, 1968, 35, pg. 375.
J. T. Fraser, Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge, Braziller, New York, 1975.
Notes
Grünbaum (loc. cit. pg. 159) writes as follows: “... if nowness were a mindindependent property of physical events themselves, it would be very strange indeed that it could be omitted as such from all extant physical theories without detriment to their explanatory success.” As against this Gale (loc. cit. pg. 224) has pointed out that any law or theory “is general: the statement of it is temporally unrestricted since it quantifies over all times. Since the law or theory holds true for any time it obviously cannot serve as a criterion for picking out some one time as the present: if it holds for all times it cannot hold for just one time.” And therefore “... there is no physical criterion for determining what is the present.” To Gale’s point it may be added that although physical laws and theories also do not pick out a spatial location, this analogical situation does not imply that there may not be a distinguished ‘present’ even if there is no distinguished ‘place’.
The term ‘objective’ will be used in this paper in the strong sense — i. e. as referring to whatever may be said to exist or to happen quite independently of man’s own presence in the world, or of his thoughts and perceptions. Thus I shall not be concerned with the we aker sense of the term which refers to whatever can be publicly agreed.
Hinckfuss is among those who still regard relativity as having disposed of an objective present. He writes: “... if the simultaneity of events is relative to a frame of reference rather than absolute, then there is no such thing as The Present.” (The Existence of Space and Time, pg. 106, Oxford, 1975). This seems to me an illicit extrapolation from the non-existence of a universal reference frame to the supposed non-existence of a ‘now’ at each location. It is very significant that no ob server whatsoever can signal to me that he has observed an event at my own location before I have observed that event myself. In that respect the A-theorist might claim that there is something absolute about the occurrence of an event here and now.
Indeed it isn’t at all clear what he could mean by this. Is it that the physical content of the future is just as real as the physical content of the present? No doubt at any moment it can reasonably be expected that there will be some future and that it will have some physical content. But this seems to be saying little more than the old adage “What will be, will be.”
Even though the possibilities in question may refer to an earlier present; for instance when it is said “It was a possibility yesterday that he might be coming.”
It is of interest that Grünbaum in one of his footnotes (no. 13 of ref. 8) remarks that the conceptualized awareness on which ‘now-awareness’ depends must surely require a physical sub-stratum and therefore this awareness might also inhere in a suitably complex piece of hardware.
According to E. A. Burtt, the representation of time as a straight line was first adopted by Galileo and was associated with his concept of natural law as expressing necessity. E. A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Second Ed. pg. 86, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932.
Mario Bunge Has made the further point th at the world-line of an elementary particle is necessarily ‘fuzzy’ because of the Uncertainty principle. Philosophy of Science, 1968, 35, 355.
In this discussion I am referring, of course to events as experienced and not to events at the source of origin of the experienced signals which may be light-yearsaway.
Cantorean concepts are, of course just as applicable to a series which is bounded at one or both ends as to a series which is endless.
This transition between micro- and macro-concepts of time has been particularly clearly brought out in various papers by P. T. Landsberg; for example in his contribution to The Study of Time, Ed. J. T. Praser et. al.
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Denbigh, K.G. (1978). The Objectivity, or Otherwise, of the Present. In: Fraser, J.T., Lawrence, N., Park, D.A. (eds) The Study of Time III. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6287-9_14
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