The Passage of Time

The experience of temporal flow is, for many, the central—if not the only—reason for believing an A-theory of time. Recently, however, B-theorists have argued that experience does not, in fact, favor the A-theory. Call such an argument: a debunking argument. The goal of the present paper is to defend the A-theory against two prominent versions of the debunking argument.

Peirce nurtured a lifelong interest in the mathematics, metaphysics, and logic of time. For him, time was the primal form of continuum, and he studied it as such. That study is fundamentally connected to Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical exploration of the continuum of consciousness. In this paper I will use two successive approaches to answer the question “To what extent does the flow of time regulate the flow of signs and the flow of signs influence or determine the flow of (...) time?” I will first examine Peirce’s views concerning the connection between time, the flow of perception, and the emergence of perceptual judgments. I will then apply several resulting distinctions to show how they illuminate the mutual determination of time and semiosis in Peirce’s mature semiotic theory. I will finish with considerations about how Peirce ended up viewing the genealogy of both time and logic in relation to the birth of a semiotic universe. (shrink)

This thesis is a study of the notion of time in modern physics, consisting of two parts. Part I takes seriously the doctrine that modern physics should be treated as the primary guide to the nature of time. To this end, it offers an analysis of the various conceptions of time that emerge in the context of various physical theories and, furthermore, an analysis of the relation between these conceptions of time and the more orthodox philosophical views on the nature (...) of time. In Part II I explore the interpretation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics in light of the suggestion that an overly Newtonian conception of time might be contributing to some of the difficulties that we face in interpreting the quantum mechanical formalism. In particular, I argue in favour of introducing backwards-in-time causal influences as part of an alternative conception of time that is consistent with the picture of reality that arises in the context of the quantum formalism. Moreover, I demonstrate that this conception of time can already be found in a particular formulation of classical mechanics. One might see that one of the central themes of Part II originates from a failure to heed properly the doctrine of Part I: study into the nature of time should be guided by modern physics and thus we should be careful not to insert a preconceived Newtonian conception of time unwittingly into our interpretation of the quantum mechanical formalism. Thus, whereas Part I is intended as a demonstration of methodology with respect to the study of time, Part II in a sense explores a confusion that can be seen as arising in the absence of this methodology. (shrink)

Linguists and philosophers examine the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between facts, events, states, propositions, and utterances. They link this to current research in psychology and anthropology.

_Real Time II_ extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time,_Real Time._ This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His _Real Time_ dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. _Real TIme II_ will do the same for the next twenty. GET /english/edu/Studying_at_SU/History_of_Literature.html HTTP/1.0.

This book brings together an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.

Quentin Smith offers powerful arguments against the New Theory of Reference propounded by leading thhinkers in the philosophy of language. Smith defends the tensed theory of time and argues that the simultaneity is absoltue, basing this position on the theory that all propositions exist in time. Using detailed propostitions and a theory of cognitive significance, he introduces an alternative interpretation of reference that will be relevant to metaphysicians, philosophers of science and philosophers of language and may come to be recognised (...) as the definitive statement on the tensed theory of time. (shrink)

The main thesis of the paper is that change and time depend existentially on a specific property of being, described by the author as the Heraclitean unstability (i.e. a kind ofsusceptibility to non-existence). Change and time are, in substance, quite different aspects of being; but they are mutually connected: time cannot exist without occurence of changes; and vice versa. All these intuitions are logically reconstructed by the author.

Introduction and acknowledgments -- What is happening to us? and why? -- So much information is changing how we think -- Communication, entertainment, and over-stimulation -- Work : how it changes and how it changes us -- New behaviors and changes in manners -- Faster and faster time -- Families, women, and sex -- Making sense of contradictory social trends -- Conclusion.

First the Branching Space-time and Branching Continuations mod-els are briefly presented. We compare their properties with the traditional definition of a Flow of Time from physics and we point out the difficulties of it in relativistic time. A solution of a Flow of Time in the given models is then proposed.

This book is a synthesis of more than three decades of research into the concept of time and its semiotic nature. If traditional philosophy – and philosophy of time should be no exception – in the shadow of advancing biology can be said to have reached an impasse, one important reason for this, in harmony with Wittgenstein’s vision, appears to have been its lack of appropriate tools for explicating language. The present theory of time proceeds, accordingly, from the exploration of (...) temporal expressions in language as an evolutionary fact. It derives in a hypothetical, coherent feedback process of hierarchically ordered distinctions the semantics of time from its biologically dictated perceptual and cognitive-pragmatic origins. The corresponding abductive-regulative model is anchored in the assumption of biological rhythmization as the very foundation of perception and mental/physical action. Understood to originate in space and spatial perspective, time reveals itself as an instrument for temporal perspective on motion in a process of analysis, i.e., discontinuation of chaos made divisible and continuous by the rhythmical screen. Whereas traditional philosophy of time paid attention almost exclusively to the temporal category of tense, the biopragmatic model sees strong evidence in the perspectival nature of time for ascribing the decisive, and probably universal, role in temporal analysis to the linguistic category of aspect. Aspect may, according to the present findings, be assumed to partake already of change-of-state and cause-effect analysis without which man’s adaptation to new situations – and precondition for survival – would be inconceivable. The proposed model of space/time cognition, inspired by Hegelian dialectics, Heidegger-Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle and Peircean logic, makes Kantian a priori superfluous and liberates time from its enigmatic appearance. For the first time in temporal studies it thus appears possible to derive hypothetically linguistic expressions of time all the way from pretemporal, homogeneous continuity effected by biological rhythmization, via pretemporal metonymic, chunk-wise partitioning – as a general precondition for the perception and, based on primary metaphorization, the cognition of things, space and motion – to temporal analysis/discontinuation proper, primarily by aspectual perspective, and the subsequent synthesized, heterogeneous continuity of temporally ordered events. The conception of time, so disastrous for modern temporal logic, i.e., as moving object assigned extension, divisible continuity and direction, can be shown to have emerged as a result of secondary metaphorization. (shrink)

Temporal interpretation of modal logic consists in replacing possible worlds with temporal states of the world or any time determinates and the accessibility relation with a relation of passage of time. That issue has been raised by A. N. Prior, who was thinking of propositions as things which could change their truth-values (could become true or become false) with the passage of time. Under such interpretation Prior was reading a formula as: it (is and) will always be the case that (...) or: it (is and) has always been the case that . The formula should be read respectively. In the present paper the interpretation in question is examined. Its sources are presented and its consequences are analysed. It is claimed, the interpretation to be highly disputable because of its disagreement with physical meaning of temporal statements, established in the special relativity theory. (shrink)

The principle of Information Conservation or Determinism is a governing assumption of physical theory. Determinism has counterfactual consequences. It entails that if the present were different, then the future would be different. But determinism is temporally symmetric: it entails that if the present were different, the past would also have to be different. This runs contrary to our commonsense intuition that what has happened in the future depends on the past in a way the past does not depend on the (...) future. To understand how this can be so we observe that while the truth of some counterfactuals is guaranteed by the laws of logic or the laws of nature, some are not. It is among the latter contingent, counterfactuals that we find temporal asymmetry. It is this asymmetry that gives causation a temporal direction. The temporal asymmetry of these counterfactuals is explained by the fact that the dynamical laws of nature are logically irreversible functions from partial states of the world onto other partial states. (Logical reversibility is not to be confused, though it too often is, with time-reversal invariance). Though these irreversible laws are locally indeterministic, they can sum to give a globally deterministic description of the world. This combination of global determinism and local indeterminism gives rise to contingent counterfactual dependence and gives that dependence a direction. That direction is independent of the direction of entropy. The direction of contingent counterfactual dependence is time's arrow. (shrink)

I show to be unsuccessful several attempts to demonstrate the possibility of time without change. Consideration of the most prominent of these arguments (by Sydney Shoemaker) then leads to the formulation of a general argument: evidence which justifies a claim that a certain amount of time has elapsed also justifies a claim that continuous change has occurred during the period. Hence there is a sound basis for the relationist claim that there is no time without events.

The issue whether there is any necessary connection between time and change turns, I argue, on the problem of what constitutes an accurate measurement of how much time passes. Given a plausible hypothesis about how time is measured, Shoemaker’s well known argument that time can pass without change can be seen to be unsound. But Shoemaker’s conclusion is not therefore false. The same hypothesis about time measurement supports a revised version of Shoemaker’s argument, and the revised argument does establish that (...) the passage of a quantity of time does not require that change occur during that time. Though Shoemaker’s conclusion is vindicated, it does not follow that there is no necessary connection at all between time and change. On the contrary, there is a connection which is simply of a different kind from the one Shoemaker had in mind. (shrink)

The essay revisits the puzzle of the ‘passage’ of time in relation to EPR-type measurements and asks what philosophical consequences can be drawn from them. Some argue that the lack of invariance of temporal order in the measurement of a space-like related EPR pair, under relativistic motion, casts serious doubts on the ‘reality’ of the lapse of time. Others argue thatcertain features of quantum mechanics establisha tensed theory of time – understood here as Possibilism or the growing block universe. The (...) paper analyzes the employment of frame-invariant entropic clocks in a relativistic setting and argues that tenselessness does not imply timelessness. But this conclusion does not support a tensed theory of time, which requires a preferred foliation. It is argued that the only reliable inference from the EPR example and the use of entropic clocks is an inference not just to a Leibnizian order of the succession of events but a frame-invariant order according to some selected clocks. (shrink)

Advocates of the A-Theory of time argue that pastness, presentness and futurity are mind-independent properties of events on the grounds that tensed and tenseless sentences are not semantically equivalent. However, their arguments for semantic nonequivalence do not entail state of affairs nonequivalence, and this latter nonequivalence must also obtain in order for the A-Theory to be true. The situation is like arguing that hereness and thisness are extra, mind-independent properties of places and objects on the grounds that sentences in which (...) "here" and "this" are used do not mean the same as their referential counterparts. Since we are not tempted to say that hereness is an extra property of places because of this semantic nonequivalence, we should not be tempted to say that presentness is an extra property of events because of the semantic nonequivalence of tensed and tenseless sentences. (shrink)

Supporters of the A-theory of time sometimes refer to an alleged experience of the passage of time in support of their theory. In this paper I argue that it is an illusion that we experience the passage of time, for such an experience is impossible. My argument relies on the general assertion that experience is contingent, in the sense that if it is possible to experience the passage of time, it is also possible to experience that time does not pass. (...) Having established this claim, I argue that it is impossible to experience that time does not pass, and hence that it is impossible to experience the passage of time. (shrink)

A set of axioms implicitly defining the standard, though not instant-based but interval-based, time topology is used as a basis to build a temporal modal logic of events. The whole apparatus contains neither past, present, and future operators nor indexicals, but only B-series relations and modal operators interpreted in the standard way. Determinism and indeterminism are then introduced into the logic of events via corresponding axioms. It is shown that, if determinism and indeterminism are understood in accordance with their core (...) meaning, the way in which they are formally introduced here represents the only right way to do this, given that we restrict ourselves to one real world and make no use of the many real worlds assumption. But then the result is that the very truth conditions for sentences about indeterministic events imply the existence of tensed truths, in spite of the fact that these conditions are formulated (in the indeterministic axiom) in terms of tenseless language. The tenseless theory of time implies determinism, while indeterminism requires the flow of time assumption. (shrink)

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space-time are equal: one special region of space-time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed picture of (...) reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal. (shrink)

The last century has seen enormous progress in our understanding of time. This volume features original essays by the foremost philosophers of time discussing the goals and methodology of the philosophy of time, and examining the best way to move forward with regard to the field's core issues. The collection is unique in combining cutting edge work on time with a focus on the big picture of time studies as a discipline. The major questions asked include: What are the implications (...) of relativity and quantum physics on our understanding of time? Is the passage of time real, or just a subjective phenomenon? Are the past and future real, or is the present all that exists? If the future is real and unchanging, how is free will possible? Since only the present moment is perceived, how does the experience as we know it come about? How does experience take on its character of a continuous flow of moments or events? What explains the apparent one-way direction of time? Is time travel a logical/metaphysical possibility? (shrink)