Abstract
Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical image of time lacks.
In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy takes passage seriously.
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Notes
- 1.
“Physics and perception are like two people on opposite sides of a brook which slowly widens as they walk: at first is easy to jump across, but imperceptibly it grows more difficult, and at last a vast labor is required to get from one side to the other.” (Russel 1992, p. 137), thanks to Dustin Olson for tracking down the quote for me.
- 2.
I use ‘the manifest image of the world’, ‘the familiar world of everyday sense’, and ‘the world as we experience it’ interchangeably. There are some distinctions we might want to make between these but they won’t matter here. And I use the view of time sub specie aeternitatis and from a temporally transcendent perspective interchangeably.
- 3.
The properties of such things were known by their causal effects on macroscopic measuring instruments, and that raised issues about whether we had any direct grasp on the intrinsic properties of things. But structurally the macroscopic environment was thought to be a coarse-graining of the microscopic.
- 4.
A good example is provided by a wave moving across the surface of an ocean. The wave is a stable structure that can be identified and tracked as it moves towards shore. At any given time, it is wholly composed of water molecules, but there may be little or no overlap between the collection of water molecules of which it is composed at one time and that of which it is composed at another.
- 5.
The name for this project was mereology, the theory of parts and wholes.
- 6.
Treat these as definitions that firm up terms that are often used loosely and interchangeably. ‘Asymmetry’ is often used to refer to any difference between past and future. I am using it to refer specifically to the dynamical asymmetries captured in the second law of thermodynamics. ‘Passage’ and ‘flow’ are often used interchangeably. As I use them, flow refers to how things seem at a given moment, whereas passage is a higher order comparison of how things seem at different moments. The point of that distinction emerges in connection with the question whether we perceive motion. No assumptions are made that this list is either exhaustive or exclusive.
- 7.
- 8.
There are many good discussions of reference frames in physics. For a nice philosophical discussion of the connection between invariance and objectivity, see Nozick (2001). The locus classicus of the philosophical discussion of the ‘unembedded’ or non-perspectival view of History see Nagel (1989) and Williams’s (1976) remarks on the Absolute Conception of Reality. See also Ismael (2007) where the formal apparatus for talking about invariant content and the transition from embedded representation, whose content tends to be context-dependent, to forms of representation whose content is invariant under transformations between contexts.
- 9.
And in the spatial case, there is an object—the observer’s body—that moves through the landscape as the frame changes. In the temporal case, whatever we mean by a temporal frame of reference, there is no object that moves through time as that frame changes. But even in the spatial case, the frame of reference is a relation between the contents of two kinds of representations: a visual representation in which space is represented in a manner that is relativized to a frame—either egocentric or allocentric, as the case may be. The viewer’s map of her body and its location in space plays the role of the ‘you are here’ dot allowing her to coordinate visual information with spatial information (Klatzky 1998).
- 10.
This is the proper way to understand William James’ specious present. One has to be careful not to mistake the claim that the temporal content of perceptual representations spans a finite interval for a claim about how temporally wide the state itself is. This would be like saying that because a perceptual state represents an expanse of space, it must occupy that expanse. See Grush (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
There is also semantic memory, muscle memory, and any number of others, which are less relevant for our purposes. See Sutton (2012) for a taste of the breadth of memory processing.
- 13.
Dennett reported some of this work in Consciousness Explained. More recent work by Grush, Clark and Eagleman confirms and extends it.
- 14.
Gazzaniga (1998), and others. The word ‘confabulation’ suggests that memory is malfunctioning. That misses the point that autobiographical memory is not just a record of the past, but how we process information about the past for practical use. Telling the story of your past is a way of making up your mind about its significance. See also Schechtman (1996).
- 15.
We represent the future both in a passive epistemic mode (as when we are wondering, for example whether it will rain tomorrow), and in a deliberative mode (as when we are envisioning possible futures for ourselves and making decisions about how to act). These correspond to the two uses of “I think I am going to” in Anscombe’s (1957) famous contrast between “I think I am going to be sick” and “I think I am going to take a walk”.
- 16.
See Ismael (2011), also Velleman (1989), Joyce (2002), and Price (1992). In Ismael (2011) ‘making up one’s mind’ is analyzed as a kind of mental performance. This imaginative picture is regimented formally in decision theory, in which the future is represented by a set of act-dependent possibilities, which are resolved into a singular outcome by the decision process itself.
- 17.
For the best, recent, book-length discussion of the nature of these asymmetries and their physical basis, see Albert (2000).
- 18.
The difference here is subtle but important. Think of the difference between a news report that simply describes the events of a battle, and one that reports on its reporting of the events.
- 19.
It needn’t have been that way. We might have simply been aware of patterns of light and color. That wouldn’t have been awareness of the world as such. There is little question that our spatial and temporal concepts have this much articulation.
- 20.
On the idea of an explicitly articulated temporal dimension, see Ismael (2007).
- 21.
And from a relativistic perspective, of course, space and time are united in the Block Universe and perspective is conceived as the here-now of located experience.
- 22.
Closing the circle, in Shimony (1993).
- 23.
See Canales (Chap. 4, this volume).
- 24.
McTaggart (1908).
- 25.
See Bratman (1987) on time, planning and agency.
- 26.
In other moods, Einstein took it quite seriously. Carnap reports that: “Once Einstein said that the problem of Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter for painful but inevitable resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively can be described in science; on the one hand the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and on the other hand, the peculiarities of man’s experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude towards past, present and future, can be described and (in principle) explained in psychology. But Einstein thought that these scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science” (1963, p.37).
- 27.
- 28.
Sometimes people speak as though the defenders of passage are just making the mistake that if they see a world line written down on a piece of paper, it doesn’t look like it is changing, so they reject the view that change is just having different properties at different times. Of course, that is a mistake. We can represent change by stringing representations of moments together in a temporal sequence, but we can also represent it by arranging representations of moments lengthwise along a page with the temporal parameter represented by the horizontal dimension along the page, or by writing down a mathematical function that represents evolution with respect to time. But to think that is the mistake that is always in play underestimates the problem. The problem is that we need to get flow and passage and openness into the content of experience without reifying them in the absolute fabric of the world.
- 29.
The logic of the relationship is a little complicated, because time is both what is being represented in the content and defining the frame from which it is represented, so we get the impression of the events of History being ordered and reordered by their relations to an object—the now-moving through time. For more on this see Chap. 10, Ismael (2007). The technical resolution is that the now is not an object, but the fixed point in a series of frame-dependent representations of time that has different values for different elements in the series.
- 30.
It may be an artifact of the tangled history of coordinate systems in physics. ‘Perspectival’ came to be associated with ‘coordinate-dependent’ which is used to identify aspects of mathematical representations of space-time that have no physical significance. There are many excellent accounts of that history. See especially Friedman (1983). Or perhaps it was because perspectival means implicitly relational, and hence neither absolute nor fundamental. But the ‘real’ is surely not coextensive with either the absolute or the fundamental.
- 31.
I recognize, of course, that the line between carrying around a mental picture and elevating it to the status of a metaphysical view is a very fine one, and whether there really are any philosophical innocents is a real question. Whether my pre-philosophical man—my man on the Clapham omnibus—is a mythic figure or a real one doesn’t matter for our purposes here, but I think that philosophers are overly inclined to think that everyone is a metaphysician. I think that many of the people I know best never asked the question “What is time?” in a form that demands a metaphysical answer. And I think the pre-philosophical phase is a fine one to remain in.
- 32.
Pooley (2013).
- 33.
Nor does it seem to have anything to do with the Block Universe. It is not, for example, that a Block Universe is incompatible with the existence of a global present. The Block Universe is just a generic framework that can support any absolute structure that can be defined on a four-dimensional manifold. Smolin associates the Block Universe with the reality of the future and is concerned to deny that the future is real. But again, here, one feels that there is some talking past one another. Surely events that are future now will be present later, and so questions of what is real have to be relativized along with the distinction between past and future, and the Block Universe is entirely compatible with that.
- 34.
See Maudlin (2007).
- 35.
Huggett and Wüthrich (2013).
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Ismael, J. (2016). From Physical Time to Human Time. In: Dolev, Y., Roubach, M. (eds) Cosmological and Psychological Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_6
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