Abstract
In this paper, an attempt is made to inject a little formal precision into the discussion of passage. Instead of focusing on the quality of temporal experience, we talk about the content, and we argue that a good many of the issues can be resolved with an examination of the logic of temporal perspectives.
Let us hug to us as closely as we like that there is real succession , that rivers flow and winds blow, that things burn and burst, that men strive and guess and die. All this is the concrete stuff of the manifold, the reality of serial happening, one event after another, in exactly the time spread which we have been at pains to diagram. What does the theory allege except what we find, and what do we find that is not accepted and asserted by the theory? Suppose a pure intelligence, bred outside of time, instructed in the nature of the manifold and the design of the human space-time worm, with its mnemic organization and the strands of world history which flank it, and suppose him incarnated among us: what could he have expected the temporal experience to be like except just about what he actually discovers it to be? How, in brief, could processes which endure and succeed each other along the time line appear as anything other than enduring and successive processes?
D.C. Williams, “The Myth of Passage”
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Notes
- 1.
It is not unlikely that significant departures are needed to attain a theory of quantum gravity. For the controversy about whether physical time is Parmenidean, see Bouton (Chap. 6, this volume), also Price (1996) and Markosian (2010). And for discussion of time in quantum gravity, see Butterfield (1999).
- 2.
By ‘experience’, I don’t just mean the raw sensory phenomenology. I mean the full evolving contents of consciousness, including the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that make up the everyday flux of mental life in both quality and content.
- 3.
The locus classicus of the view that the contents of perceptual states have temporal extension, see James (1890).
- 4.
There is also procedural memory and semantic memory, which are exercised respectively when you remember a learned skill like riding a bike and hen you consciously recall impersonal factual information as in studying for a test, again. These are heuristic divisions only and theyare not exhaustive. For something much more nuanced, see Sutton (1998) and also http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/members/profile.html?memberID = 237/
- 5.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. (Eliot, T. S. “Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton.” Poetry X. Ed. Jough Dempsey. 13 Jul 2003).
- 6.
To say that this structure is present in a more or less definite, more or less explicit form in every momentary part of the psychological life of a the life of a consciousness with autobiographical memory is (emphatically) not to say that it is fully present in an entirely explicit form in every waking moment of our conscious lives. The psychological presence of this sort of autobiographical content in day-to-day activity is rare and the degree to which it is present at all varies from one person to the next. Some people do carry a self-concept of Proustian complexity, but others have a relatively thin sense of the story of their lives. For strong claims, see Bruner (1987), Dennett (1988), Macintyre (1981). For critique of the strong claims, see Strawson (2004). The claim here is simply the weak and uncontroversial claim this structure is implicit in the ability to think about ourselves as autobiographical subjects and the representational forms we employ in practical deliberation.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
The remarks here are a generalization of Chap. 10 in Ismael (2007), integrating the A-series with the B-series by a transformation from a frame-dependent to a frame-independent one where the frame is defined as above; an evolving frame, or if you like a frame centered on the Moving Now, which is interpreted in four-dimensional terms as a fixed point in the mapping between the invariant representation and the various temporally embedded perspectives on time embodied in the different stages of the psychological history of a human being.
- 10.
From the point of view of the special theory of relativity , the common present of calendar time is local and inherently approximate notion, contingent on our being sufficiently close to one other and moving with relative velocities much less than that of light? The personal present of an individual human at any point along its world-line is the moment on which its representation of time is centered. It ‘changes’ in the sense that it has different values at different points along its world line .
- 11.
Before we can say whether quantum mechanics incorporates such an asymmetry, we need a solution to the measurement problem and an understanding of the ontology . Even if quantum mechanics does impart a temporal asymmetry to nature, it is likely to be washed out by decoherence at the level at which cognitive processes operate.
- 12.
There is lively dispute about the details, the bulk of the scientific community thinks that an explanation of this asymmetry based on the thermal gradient and additional contingent will be correct. See Albert (2000) and the review by Nick Huggett in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23401-time-and-chance/
- 13.
For a start at this part of the story, see Clark (2013).
- 14.
Except, of course, insofar as the systems that use those representations are themselves part of the landscape. They appear in the absolute structure of the world in a form that is explicitly relativized to the situation of their users.
- 15.
See Hartle (2005, p. 101). Hartle himself took the device from Murray Gell-Man, though it has become more closely associated with his own name.
- 16.
Notions of representational content invoked in the description of an IGUS is one that applies to robots and computers as surely as humans.
- 17.
The letters C and U are chosen to signal the corresponding unconscious and conscious processes in us.
- 18.
- 19.
It is sometimes alleged that the scientific vision of the world loses contact with what matters from a human perspective. There is some justification for this, but it is not quite accurate. What is true is that if we equate the scientific view of the world with fundamental physics, the fundamental structures are very far removed from anything that has immediate epistemic or practical significance for human beings. These appear at somewhat higher levels in the edifice of the scientific view of the world.
- 20.
In physical terms, space-time is more fundamental than either space or time, so that we should really be talking about the relationship between the Absolute structure of space-time and the view from a frame of reference that is moving relative to the fixed structure of Absolute space-time.
- 21.
On the status of these practical possibilities, see Ismael (2016). If anything flows in this picture, it is information, flowing in through perception, over the field of belief, and into the decision procedures and back out into the world in the form of action.
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Ismael, J. (2017). Passage, Flow, and the Logic of Temporal Perspectives. In: Bouton, C., Huneman, P. (eds) Time of Nature and the Nature of Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 326. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53725-2_2
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