Dear Laurence,

Thank you for your insightful contemplation. If philosophy significantly involves the art of argument, then by way of compliment, I note that there are many ideas in your text that I'd like very much to argue. Alexey and I agree that it deserves the highest rating. I think also that your essay presents an example of questioning that can be applied to other ideas in philosophy, for example, mathematical Platonism or free will. What motivations and goals can we obtain from taking one or another position on these?

In a comment to us, you mentioned the connection of ethics and metaphysics. That is definitely an area of overlap between our essays. Since this area is especially fraught with problems, in that regard I'd like a pose a little criticism to your paper and ask a question.

Your text lacks a mention of the paradoxical worldview, which is very much at home in this debate. You are, no doubt, aware of the idea of a philosophical or dialectical contradiction, where mutually contradictory views are knowingly held. Likely you've also encountered entire worldviews that are contradictory in this special way. On the other hand, some philosophers, in striving to rid of any contradiction, go to extremes to declare things illusory, most famously Parmenides.

Some hold views where temporal and atemporal entities fundamentally coexist, with an understanding of a profound contradiction in this coexistence. Do you think there is a contradiction in such a worldview? Do you think that contradiction should be removed at all costs, a la Parmenides, or could it have a vital or at least tolerable role to play in metaphysics?

Thanks for your kind remarks on our page. You'll find a reply there, if you look.

Lev Burov

    "the passage or flow of time seems to be something that cannot be captured in a mathematical model."

    as a software engineer who has used a hybrid combination of mathematical models and discrete event-driven (time-based) simulations to model, for example, diesel trucks, it would appear that even just this one example would be a contradiction of what you say. i *would* however agree strongly that certain mathematical equations - particularly recursive ones - would often simply not have formal solutions, only analytical ones (or computer-based discrete solutions).

    i would be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

    hi laurence,

    at the beginning of your essay you say, "our investigation is concerned only with

    conscious future-directed aims and intentions."

    could i ask why?

      The reason for the delimitation of topic is the constraint on the length of the essay. Conscious aims and intentions, as contrasted with non-conscious ones, raise particular questions which require special discussion.

      Many aspects of time can be represented or modeled mathematically. In particular, the linear order of before and after can be represented mathematically. The question, however, is whether the sense of coming-to-be and passing-away can have a mathematical representation. People who deny the reality of temporal flow or passage would say that the B-series linear order is all that is needed for practical or scientific purposes. Therefore, according to these people, temporal flow needs no mathematical representation and might as well not exist. It is a short step from there to say that temporal flow can have no mathematical representation and does not exist. One way to frame the issue is to ask how one could distinguish a mathematical representation of only the B-series temporal properties from a mathematical representation of both the A-series and B-series properties. If there is no difference between the two representations, then either the A-series properties exist but elude mathematical representation or else the supposed A-series properties are unreal.

      Reply Sunday 5 March 2017, 11:40

      Dear Lev and Alexey,

      I agree that the questions I raise about the implications of ideas concerning the nature of time can and should be applied to other ideas. The ideas that merit such inquiry include many that have been part of philosophical discussions for centuries and also ideas that have originated in, or at least gained prominence, through reflections on more recent scientific hypotheses.

      In my view, there are both temporal and atemporal entities, and I do not think the reality of both together involves a contradiction.

      Beyond that, I am not familiar with the "paradoxical worldview," to which you refer. I tend to believe that self-contradiction is necessarily a sign of falsehood and that, therefore, contradictions are to be avoided. It is hard to understand how reality itself could be paradoxical or self-contradictory. However, you seem to be talking about contradictions inside worldviews, not inside the world itself, because you mention situations "where mutually contradictory views are knowingly held." That would mean that the best worldview available to a particular person at a particular time would be one that contains unresolved contradictions. That belief about worldviews, not about the world itself, I can understand. This certainly has been the actual epistemic situation of many people at many times. More speculatively, it might be an epistemic situation which will always be characteristic of human thinking.

      I intend to make some additional comments on the discussion page for your essay.

      Laurence Hitterdale

      Dear Laurence,

      Your essay makes for a good reading. I have downloaded it into my digital library. There are a couple of thoughts I have on this matter of subjective experience of time and objective time, which is as objective as we might be able to make it.

      The curious persistent illusion of there being a present moment that marches forwards probably has something to do with how the brain processes memories, This moment of time is around 1/20th of a second, which is why the old NTSC standard for TV was 30Hz picture sweeps. Our mental time frame is longer than the TV picture scan rate and so we do not readily observe the refresh rate. This time interval is probably involved with the time it requires the hippocampus to process short term memory. Since this little "delta time" is what we consciously experience we are then faced with this illusion of a moment marching forwards.

      I tend to think the irreversible nature of time is also wrapped into quantum state reduction. The shifting of entanglement phase in a diffusive fashion, or apparently so for times far shorter than the quantum Poincare recurrence time, means the illusion of a moment in time may be equivalent to the illusion of a quantum mechanical outcome in a measurement. At least in a Many World Interpretation perspective this might be so. BTW I am rather agnostic on MWI and other interpretations. My moment in time is on a spatial surface of simultaneity that has regions in the past and future of somebody driving by me in the opposite direction. This is standard special relativity. We then have a funny sense of what a moment actually consists of by relativity. This may also be the case with quantum mechanics.

      Cheers LC

      Dear Laurence,

      I greatly enjoyed you essay as I always do in these contests. It struck me while reading it that maybe there are 2 forms of time. The first form would derive from the way the universe evolves from the laws. That overall evolution is deterministic and cannot be changed so that the distinction between past and future doesn't really exist within what they describe- if you know the past you know the future and vise-versa.

      The second form would be related to consciousness which acts as a sort of clock. The more clocks- the more consciousness- the more time exists. It's an idea I got from a blurb in The Economists which I wrote about thus:

      "It pointed out that with the milestone of 7 billion people in 2011 the aggregate age of everyone alive rose to 220 billion years. By the end of the 21st century:

      The world's population will have stabilized at just over 10 billion and those people will have accumulated 430 billion years of human experience between them.

      The philosophical implications of this were not explored by the Economist, but think about it for a second. The number of subjective years lived today by the only fully sentient creature we know of- ourselves- is already more than ten times the chronological age of the physical universe! By the end of the century those subjective years will have grown to be around 30 times larger than the age of the Universe. In this sense life is not only older, but much older than the cosmos in which it swims and collectively might already be said to possess time on the scale of what any individual would consider eternity."

      And can be found here:

      https://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/01/31/life-is-already-eternal-sort-of/

      Please check out my own essay in the current contest entitled "From Athena to AI" when you get the chance.

      Best of luck,

      Rick Searle

      • [deleted]

      • Post #19

      Hi, Laurence, thanks for the good read! I think you made an excellent exposition of how our search for the objective nature of time somehow challenges our dy-to-day thoughts and actions, distabilizing the intuitive base upon which we make future plans.

      I just hope we soon see solid progress about the nature of time, I'm terribly curious about it, and I'm running out of time, at least, of the one that seems to flow. thanks again!

      inés.

        Dear Laurence,

        I thought a little about your answer, and I have one more question for you. You say that it is hard to understand how reality itself can be paradoxical. It is, I agree, however, it would be hard to deny the fact paradoxes do exist, thus being part of reality. Wouldn't that mean that parts of reality itself are intrinsically paradoxical?

        Now, you may reply that paradoxes only exist in thought. But, if we're trying to understand the connection between mathematics, which is possibly the epitome of atemporality, and thought with its goals and intentions, the epitome of time flow, paradoxes begin to play a major role in this contemplation. Can you see a way around this difficulty that is not Parmenidean, or are you ready to embrace the paradox, as, for example, Penrose does?

        "There is, finally, a further mystery concerning Fig. 1.3, which I have left to the last. I have deliberately drawn the figure so as to illustrate a paradox. How can it be that, in accordance with my own prejudices, each world appears to encompass the next one in its entirety? I do not regard this issue as a reason for abandoning my prejudices, but merely for demonstrating the presence of an even deeper mystery that transcends those which I have been pointing to above. There may be a sense in which the three worlds are not separate at all, but merely reflect, individually, aspects of a deeper truth about the world as a whole of which we have little conception at the present time." -- from Road to Reality

        Lev

        Sorry, I am inés samengo - I seem to have been logged out at some point.

        Dear Laurence Hitterdale

        I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.

        How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.

        1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

        2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

        3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

        4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

        5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....

        6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.

        7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

        8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

        9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

        11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".

        12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

        I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

        Héctor

        Dear Laurence,

        I very much enjoyed your well-written and highly readable essay. Indeed, if the passage of time is not real, how ought we to conduct ourselves? Undoubtedly a fascinating question. But I am not sure if you chose to give an answer?

        In my essay I argue that time itself is not real, in quantum theory. Rather, time is an emergent concept of the classical world.

        My best wishes,

        Tejinder

          Dear Tejinder,

          Thank you for your kind words.

          You ask what answer I would give to the question whether the passage of time is unreal. You are correct to say that I do not explicitly answer the question in the essay. At present I would guess that the passage of time is real. I base this judgment on two premises. First, there is the fact that passage is a characteristic of time as we experience it. Second, it is difficult to see how experience could invent this characteristic or have such a characteristic imposed on experience from without, unless passage or something like it exists in time as it really is. I recognize that the position you take in your essay complicates the picture I just presented. If I understand your essay correctly, you contend that in objective reality (i.e., reality independent of consciousness), already there exist at least two different levels of time. I am prepared to argue only that the objective temporal level which impinges on human consciousness probably contains passage. The forms of time which are more remote from consciousness might be different. In the view that you present, the more remote level or levels would appear to be more fundamental than the kind of time which presents itself immediately to human consciousness.

          However that may be, my main concern in this essay is not to take a stand on whether temporal passage is or is not real. Instead I want to look at some of the implications of the question for our understanding of the human condition. If passage is unreal, then we ought to conduct ourselves differently than we now do. More to the point, our attitudes toward our own lives and toward our conduct should be different from what those attitudes now are. However, I doubt that we could make those changes. The sense of temporal passage appears to be so deeply rooted in human consciousness that we probably could not do much to change it or to change the approach to the future which takes temporal passage for granted. Thus, if we became convinced that there is no such thing as the flow of time, we could not incorporate that conviction into our living or into our attitudes toward living. Such a failure of convictions would be awkward.

          The final point is that we are at the present time in a different situation, but a situation which is nonetheless awkward in a related but different way. Right now we do not know whether the flow of time is real. As I stated earlier, I think it is, but I do not believe that anybody knows for sure. So, the current situation is awkward, because judgment has to be suspended on the issue whether the normal attitudes toward time are or are not in order. The essay ends by calling attention to this uncertainty.

          I appreciate your asking the questions which provide the opportunity for this clarification.

          Laurence Hitterdale

          Hi Inés,

          I much appreciate your comment, because you have stated the key idea more clearly and concisely than I did.

          I have also read your essay, and my comment about it is on the Web page for your essay.

          Laurence Hitterdale

          7 days later

          Laurence,

          A very interesting essay and resume of possibilities, though as you say we have no choice anyway but to do what we do.

          In Astronomy and Cosmology I'm used to the past being 'real'. Indeed the distant past is ALL we deal with as it's all we can observe. Of course we must also come to terms with infinity which maybe most still can't do. But then also is not the near future as instantaneously real at every instant? Can we not only act in the future as by the time we decide to act it surely IS the future!

          I hope you may read my essay, where I identify that our minds continually imagine futures and 'run scenario's to find outcomes, even triggering motor neurone responses and biochemical releases, which outcomes feed back to help us set aims and make decisions. So does that mean the future really does have a causal link to the present?

          Thanks for some fresh views and an interesting glimpse of another future.

          Peter

          Dear Laurence Hitterdale,

          Thank you very much for your intersting essay with a strong emphasis on the perceived notion of the flow of time. When you write "The great problem, according to many thinkers, is our supposition that time flows. We are wrong when we believe in a moving Now. There is no such thing as the passage of time.", to me is a true statement depending on your vantage point. If we consider the full history of the universe, we can effectively treat our present point in space-time as a single point. A few thousand years in time from "now" or a few thousand light-years in any direction will not change what we can observe in cosmological terms. Having said that, I do believe George Ellis makes a strong argument for the case of an Evolving Block Universe and does challenge our thinking in that regard. I would be interested to know if you have had an opportunity to look at that closely?

          In any event, I wanted to thank you for your essay and let you know I have rated it too in the meantime.

          Regards,

          Robert

          Dear Laurence,

          Congratulations for another great essay. You took the interesting approach of framing the question of aims and intention with respect to the flow of time, and I agree with you that "if there is something wrong with our ordinary conception of time (...) then perhaps the mistake pervades what we think we are doing when we set goals and attempt to implement them." At the most fundamental level, I believe that the "totality of existence" is an atemporal, unchanging "given"(great Hermann Weyl and John Bigelow quotes, by the way), and in such a context, the notions of aims and intention can only have, at best, a localized, limited application. That's why I think it was quite a challenge to address this year's FQXi essay contest question, but you did so admirably.

          I just rated your essay. Good luck in the contest --- so many essays, so little time!

          Marc

          7 days later

          Hi, Laurence, I just write to apologize because it took me a long time to reply my comment in my forum, I have now finally managed to engage in these discussions again. I left my reply there (nothing truly illuminating!), and let you know here, because after my long silence you are unlikely to see by your own initiative. Best! inés.

          Laurence,

          Of thinking too precisely on th' event--

          A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom

          And ever three parts coward Hamlet

          I would say rather four parts wisdom.

          Your pearls of wisdom flow, unlike time. "The present moment slips away into the irretrievable past" I like that.

          I can't help thinking that the past is accessible with our telescopic views into space, something the observer can share with the world. It is retrievable as an observer but as a data point.

          Many mysteries.

          Hope you get a chance to comment on my essay, for which I displayed an iota of precise thinking.

          Jim Hoover