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The Growing Block and What was Once Present

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Abstract

According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. The growing block is made attractive not just because of the attractiveness of its ontological basis for past-tensed truths, the past’s fixity, and future’s openness, but by underlying principles about the right way to fill in this sort of ontology. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing blockers incur an ontological commitment to an infinite number of temporal dimensions (“hypertime”). This commitment to hypertime generates a vicious explanatory regress. It also undermines the idea that the reality of the past is sufficient to explain why truths about the past are fixed. Both of these implications are highly unattractive; growing blockers would do well to clarify what other motivations they can offer for their view and how they can avoid these consequences.

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Notes

  1. Cf. Torrengo (2013), Forbes (2016), Miller (2018), among others.

  2. Here is Kristie Miller elucidating why fixity is a truth-value issue: “…in an eternalist world, the future is fixed: for any future-tensed claim uttered at t, that claim is either true at t, or false at t, and it is determinate, at t, which of those truth-values it has” (2013, p. 356).

  3. Thus growing blocker Diekemper (2005) argues against presentism: the past-future symmetry of the presentist’s ontology is insufficient to settle the metaphysical and semantic asymmetry between past and future. See also Broad (1923), Scientific Thought, pp. 53–84.

  4. Haecceities: Adams (1986) and Keller (2004), ersatz times: Bourne (2006), presently-instantiated global “Lucretian” properties: Bigelow (1996) and McDaniel (2014), brute facts: Kierland and Monton (2007) and Merricks (2007), denying the strict truth of past-tensed claims: Markosian (2004).

  5. There is disagreement, amidst worries over whether wholly past persons are conscious, over what it means for the growing block to provide a uniform truthmaking approach. I agree with Miller here, although see Forrest (2004, 2006) and Forbes (2016) for dissent. It should also be noted that, given Forrest’s already-“disunified” approach to truthmaking on the growing block, there is a potential way out of my arguments later in this paper—growing blockers might be able to simply adopt some primitive tensed facts. But if they do so, it is not obvious in what sense postulating a real (but dead, or merely-past) past would have a theoretical advantage over the presentist’s pastless ontology—why is one weird thing (a dead past, a disunified truthmaking strategy) better than another (e.g., Lucretian properties, maximal global properties)? (Cf. Cameron 2015: Chapter 1) Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

  6. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this dialectical point.

  7. Or think of it this way, if it’s still a little unclear. The ontology of hypertime looks very similar to the ontology of Lewisian modal realism, if there were a whole bunch of Lewisian possible worlds in one world, and they differed only with respect to their temporal extent.

  8. To my knowledge, only Hudson (2014a, b) does.

  9. There is a veritable surplus of discussion on this point. See, among many others, Skow (2011, 2012), Markosian (1993) and McCall (1998).

  10. Cf. Sider (2001, p. 22); Cameron (2015, p. 109).

  11. This problem for the growing blocker bears, of course, a certain resemblance to McTaggart’s (1908) well-known “paradox” for tensed temporal properties.

  12. Thanks to Graeme A. Forbes for raising this objection.

  13. Thus goes one way of reading Bertrand Russell’s famous “young-universe” skepticism, though without the invocation of it being God who creates the universe just as it is now.

  14. Thanks to Peter Lewis for helping formulate this reply.

  15. I think it’s misleading to think of proper initial segments of the block as temporal parts of the block. The four-dimensional block (i.e. the whole universe) is, after all, a great big concrete object. So proper initial segments of the block would be concrete parts of its currently-constituted state, in the same way that a proper initial segment of a tree at some particular time is a concrete part of that tree, constituted as it is at that time. Moreover, presumably, the temporal parts of (e.g.) me that do the truthmaking work for claims about how short I once was have no overlap with my current temporal part; but proper initial segments of the block necessarily overlap large portions of the current block. There are therefore two reasons to resist characterizing them as temporal parts. In fact, smaller hyperinstants are the analogue of temporal parts of the entire block: they are its smaller, “past versions”.

  16. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.

  17. Hudson (2014b).

  18. Some philosophers might find it helpful to rely here on a primitive “metaphysical grounding” relation to understand what ‘explains’ means, in metaphysical contexts. Others (Wilson 2014) may disagree. What I say here does not depend one way or the other on what you think about grounding.

  19. There is another way to fill in the details of this suggestion. So far, it should be clear that if hypertime is a static block universe, there’s no temporal passage either in hypertime or in the first-order temporal block, and no privileged present time. Another picture, however, is that all the hyperinstants there ever will be already exist, and there’s some additional property, being the privileged (hyper)present block, that switches between different hyperinstants. This would help guarantee that there really is a present time, and hence that there is temporal passage. But this sounds exactly like a “moving spotlight” picture of hypertime. If we accept a moving spotlight view of hypertime, what reason would there be to not also accept a moving spotlight view of time? Adopting this response seems like it would, for the growing blocker, be tantamount to giving up their view of time’s passage and adopting another, i.e., the moving spotlight. I thank an anonymous referee for discussion on this point.

  20. Or, in other words, time’s backwards passage is “ideally” conceivable, and in this case, that ideal conceivability implies its metaphysical possibility (cf. Chalmers 2002). Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion on this point.

  21. Compare this, for instance, to Hudson’s (2014a, b) “Morphing Block”, where not only can time pass backwards, but time can also shrink from the beginning of the past. It seems here that the growing blocker has independent reasons to deny that time can shrink from its beginning (the reason being that the past is fixed), but by contrast, there seem to be no independent reasons to stipulate that the forward passage of time is metaphysically necessary. Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this up.

  22. Some metaphysicians reject the viciousness of infinite explanatory regress, see Cameron (2008).

  23. Here is a rather prosaic passage from Hudson: “Although it does not now lie in anyone’s future, perhaps some hyperday, every tear may be brushed away in the most permanent of ways, with pain and suffering not merely being a thing of the past but instead belonging only to hyperhistory” (2014a, b, pp. 193, 194).

  24. Indeed, as an anonymous referee notes, one of Lebens and Goldschmidt’s (2017) most important conclusions is that presentism cannot guarantee that the past can be changed (which some philosophers might have theistic reasons to accept). But the hypertime-committed growing blocker, as I’ve argued, has nothing that guaranteeds that the past is fixed. If Lebens and Goldschmidt are right, then the growing block not only loses its advantage over presentism not just with respect to the truthmaking problem, it also entirely loses its fixity-of-the-past advantage over presentism, as well. If right, this is a very surprising turn of the tides towards presentism.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback in the development of this paper, I would like to thank two anonymous referees at this journal, two anonymous referees at a previous journal, as well as Jonathan Barker, Ross Cameron, Jim Darcy, Graeme A. Forbes, Dan Korman, Peter Lewis, Trenton Merricks, and an audience at the 2015 Society for Exact Philosophy.

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    Peter Tan

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Tan, P. The Growing Block and What was Once Present. Erkenn 87, 2779–2800 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00326-0

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