thomaq

anyone here interested in the philosophy of time?
if so, is the A-theory of time correct (time flows in a direction from past to present to future)? or is the B-theory of time correct (temporality is purely subjective and mind-dependent)?
i am just beginning to study this area so forgive me if i stated the question too simply.

Demosthenes

Nobody knows for sure, temporal studies started with Einstein and we haven't really made that much progress other than reducing time to clock measurement in special relativity sense.

In my personal opinion, the B choice is more attractive because how does time "flow"? It's just a component that we use to describe changes that we see occuring everywhere.

Hawkingfan

I'm interested. And I believe that B is correct also.

sophie

My choice would be time flows with existence. Following this argument I would have to choose A & B. From my personal void of philosophy it is the continuity of existence which creates the appearance of past-present-future. We can ask what is the continuity of existence. We can also ask what would a discontinuous universe be like. We can ask if past is continuous or is only present continuous. Why ask about the future. We can also claim time(existence) bubbles out of now and flows out of our grasp (change). We can also ask how much of the future is extrapolation.

From what the universe currently provides growth is encouraged and the continuity the universe provides seems suited to growth. It seems like a circular argument. Is it?

sophie

hi Demosthenes,
what you were saying about time that
It's just a component that we use to describe changes that we see occuring everywhere,

seems true enough. When you connect determinism to those changes and cause and effect is intuited, continuity exists, time then becomes a burden to some of us.

thomaq

it seems to me that the past no longer exists, the present exists now, and the future does not exist at all. this (A-theory) seems right to me. the B-theorist believes that past, present and future all exist, just at different locations. its quite fascinating.

Dominus Paradoxum

thomaq,

The B theory doesn't say that time itself is subjective, just the 'now' aspect of it is. Past, present, and future still exist, it's just that they're relative to your position in the timeline. To most people, the past and present are real in a way that the future is not, in the B theory this isn't so, all times are on a par. The problem with the A theory is the notion of the "passing" of time. For how fast does time pass? At the rate of one second per second? To say so seems absurd, as it would force us to concieve an infinite regress of time series within time series. Furthermore, when we say that something moves or passes, we can usually specify what the motion is relative to. But with respect to what does time itself "pass"? Also, if the future doesn't exist in any sense, then what is the sense in saying it will occur?

sodium

The subjective-time theory comes partly out of philosophical considerations, and partly out of modern science. I'm going to try to explain the problem from the perspective of Special Relativity.

If you believe the A theory, then surely it makes sense to say that certain things exist, by which it is meant that they exist now. Such statements should not be merely a useful approximation for what is going on (like Newton's laws), but should always have a specific objective meaning.

The concept of "now" is clearly based on simultaneity. When I say, the vase exists, I am speaking about the state of reality simultaneous with my speech. But the theory of relativity puts simultaneity on a much weaker footing. What it claims is that whether events are simultaneous depends on who you ask. Events that are simultaneous from the perspective of the earth are not simultaneous with respect to a planet moving relative to the earth.

For this reason, physicists often see the idea of dividing space-time into slices of now, as more trouble than its worth. However, it is still possible to do so, if you choose one perspective as the true perspective, and claim that all others are false.

This possibility may seem enticing. Although, this would mean that on a planet, moving very fast relative to the true perspective, we would find aliens with a quite distorted picture of reality. They would be often wrong about what exists and what doesn't. Things they think exist, are actually gone, and vice versa. So, space-time is still cut in slices, but they aren't the slices they think. They would imagine slices of time as if they had the true perspective. Poor deluded aliens.

But wait! Whose to say that those "aliens" aren't us? We have no reason to believe the earth is the true perspective.

But that makes the A theory a lot less enticing. The whole point was that we were perceiving this flow of time, where things started and ceased to exist in the "now". But if this perception might be all askew, so that we're quite wrong not only about what is happening now, but just what slice of space-time is designated by now, then the theory becomes less palatable.

NearNihil Experience

I just finished a seminar class on a heavy dose of this subject. So forgive me if I don't prattle on about my own opinions on the subject. I can give you the names of the books I used for the class and some additional stuffs concerned.

"About Time": Paul Davies
"The Nature of Time": ed. Raymond Flood and Michael Lockwood.
"Dreams of a Final Theory": Steven Weinberg
"Quantum Reality": Nick Herbert

Oh, I might be able to prattle. I just fould this. This is one of the papers I did for the class. Its okay...but not wonderful.

The River, The Block, or the Effect

Introduction:
Philosophy and the sciences appear to often agree, overlap, and relate in a manner befitting a reciprocal relationship. A give and take of information and ideas are in constant exchange between science and philosophy. Philosophy often provides a foundation or idea which then becomes available for scientific study, which produces empirical evidence in support of the philosophical basis for the scientific conclusion. Still often an empirical observation is made, then tested philosophically, given the rigors of rational thought, then experimented upon in the scientific manner. More often still, those ideas contrived, investigated, and reported upon receive fire from both philosophical and scientific sources. At the center of all the above cases; empirical evidences. Thought experiments are good as a start, but nothing produces proof and evidences for a case better than a repeatable observation or effect.

But, many things and ideas rest outside the bounds of what is available to empirical investigation. There is a foggy, mysterious place in our perception that pertains to the “going’s on” of the empirical universe, a blind spot so to say. Also, the inept tongue that takes away 90% of a thought’s full meaning as it attempts to use words to communicate images and feeling. There are nuances that exist in our minds that are difficult, if not impossible, to expressed in language. One of the most apparent, most undeniable forces available to our perceptions is the effect of time. Time is thought to be many things. A convenience of perception? Yes. A visible effect of the slow combustion of energy in, or by, the universe? Yes. A product of the manifestation of matter? Yes. A basic structure or process built into the universe? Yes. Something which without, nothing would be possible? (God is time?) Yes (and yes). Time is thought of as being many things. But which is the closest to what it actually is? And with so many other interpretations, how can one be sure? You can’t. But, philosophy and physics through history have continually come up with interesting and sometimes useful answers.

Passing Time: Time Waits for No Man
Western thought has done a lot for progress in the area of the sciences. Rational thought has helped express old ideas clearly and has helped contrive new ideas about our world. The typical “white man” view of time is linear. The universe began at some point, man appeared sometime later, and later still the universe will come to a screeching halt. This “line view” of time was almost wholly accepted in the era which Newton began his work and seemed to influence his thoughts and observations. What Newton did was to give us an arrow for time. A steady, ticking manifestation of action and change in the universe. This sort of linear time meshes well with our everyday perception of moments passing. It gives one a sense of the giant universal clock pushing (pulling?) everything along in a steady reliable manner. This creates a perceptual series of events, catalogued and ordered according to the present moment. What Newton was giving was an empirical “specialness” to the immediately observable time frame. For Newton, “the Now” had the special character of being “more real” than events and things in the past and future. “The Now” was a starting place for observations, thereby making past and future states and events reliably predictable

Newton may have provided a clean picture of the universes action, but he managed to also destroy any notion of free action within the universe. He in essence reduced man’s wants, desires, and actions to a predetermined set of mathematical variations within the constant stream of time. One event linked to the next by virtue of where they appear on the linear time scale. Cause and effect unseperated by perception. As Paul Davies puts it, “… Newton gave us rigid determinism, a world of inert particles and forces locked in the embrace of infinitely precise law-like principles.”

This universal Now forces the observer into a linear perspective of past, present, and future with the present having significance over past and future by virtue of being an empirically observable state. Again Davies,

“ Because the whole universe shares a common time and a common now, then every observer, everywhere,[], would concur with what is deemed to have passed and what is yet to be.”
For Newton there is a universal time flowing at a uniform rate, a recurrence of universal present moments. Reality as observed, is reality as is. Time stands alone and is affected by nothing and affects everything uniformly.

A quote by Laplance communicates this idea well.
“…in the Newtonian universe,[], if all motion is mathematically determined, then the present state of motion of the universe suffices to fix its future(and past) for all time. In this case, time becomes virtually redundant, for the future is already contained in the present, in the sense that all information needed to create the future states of the universe resides in the present state.”

The philosophical problems Newton’s theory creates are perceptual and at the cognitive level. Philosophical criticisms of Newton’s Time are usually thought experiments in themselves; speculative notions taken personally as an insult being hurled at one’s reason by the universe. It gets even worse with Einstein. But Newton’s ideas present curious conundrums. If time is a series of universal present moments, what qualifies as a moment? On the line, how can one break the line into even segments? Well, by combining the constant of gravity, Plank’s constant(h), and the speed of light, one can come up with the shortest interval in which an event may take place. This ends up being about 10-^43 seconds. So after nearly three hundred years of Newton, the shortest meaningful “now” was discerned.

Slicing up a line, however, brings up a most ancient of enigma’s, Xeno’s paradox, or the paradox of arrow flight. If time is seen as linear, even if it is convenient in daily life, one must ask what half way between two of the “moving now’s” is. Then halfway between that, and so on. Thanks to the irrationality of fractions, linear time can not move, at least conceptually. It does move, however. Not only is it meaningless to ask what is halfway between the shortest segment (that segment which can not be reduced further), it is also a bit daft to expect time not to flow in our perceptions due to the irrationality of our thought. And though Plank time may give a answer to what is a “now”, it does not help to answer many of the questions produced by using Newtonian mathematics to determine the activity of stellar bodies or light motion. For these questions, Einstein developed a theory a few centuries later which still seems to be a personal insult against our senses presented by the universe.

Relative Time: Time Bends for All Men (Who Travel Fast Enough)
Time flows. That is obvious to our senses. The continual drag towards death we all experience is inescapable. Yet our minds create things which exist out of time. Through our imagination we envision an omniscient reference frame and all that it would entail. Yet we can not use that reference frame because of our inherent link to time. A reference frame blind to time is a reference frame that is useless in any universe but a static one, and nothing goes on there anyway. One can do, however, as Einstein did put aside our temporal link with the universe via the same imagination that creates the idea of an atemporal reference. To stretch one’s perceptions to include the idea that time may pass, but that which has past, and that which is yet to come holds the same import as the empirically observable “now”. This is because at the time in the past, things were in an empirically observable state, just like “now”. And the future state will come to be empirically observable. This atemporal “now” serves to show that the universe and all events, actions and bodies within are all of equal reality. Because if the past did not have the reality that the present does in its past time, then the present moment could not have come to be. The universe is solid and active at all times and all space. Our empirical access is simply limited to the immediate area and time of the effect.

Time and space are both restricted and affected by physical laws. What Einstein did was to take away the stricture imposed on observation by the necessity( and fleetingness) of the present moment. What Einstein tried to do was treat all moments within the universe as present moments. No matter of past or future is clouded by its place in time. When treated as a statistical whole, time is a “block” brute fact of the mechanism of the universe, statistically reliable and entirely observable. What all of this implies is that though we see time flow in the manner a river would, an arrow of time if you will, that flow only affects the one observing. Where one is and whether one is moving affects the actual passage of time for separate observers. The observable effect of this is time dilation. Time is relative to the observer and motion affects the temporal reference of the observer. Motion affects the passage of time relative to the affected individual and the observer. The famous Twins Paradox explains. It states that two persons of the same age engage in an experiment. One(A) sets off towards the stars at 80% light speed whilst the second(B) remains home. Upon arrival back on Earth, A finds he has aged only 60% of his partners aging. But how can this have occurred? Simply, whilst A increased his motion in relation to all things, B remained at his normal pace in relation to all things. The fact of motion, speed, an attempt to break free from inertia has increased the total energy present around A’s spatial \ temporal location. As observed photons have proven, the closer to light speed a body achieves, the less the effect of time. Newton’s arrow begins to stretch for that individual(A) when observed by another(B). Also, since time is relative, the static observer’s(B) time seems to speed up relatively to the observer in motion(A). Davies clears up a bit of off-the-cuff confusion as to the reality of time dilation:

“In the frame of reference of Earth, your life span of seventy-five years occupies billions of years Earth time[moving at incredible speeds]. In your own frame of reference, seventy-five years remains seventy-five years. From your perspective, it is the events on Earth that are slowed. One tick of the clock on Earth would correspond to three thousand of your years. Unfortunately, you can’t use relativistic time dilation to delay your own aging process relative to your own experience of time, only relative to someone else’s.”

Accordingly, “it is our perception that alters,” says John Gribbin, “not the underlying reality. Because we are locked into a steady moving viewing slot, we see a positron moving forward in time rather than an electron moving backward in time, but both interpretations are equally real.” The block of time, God’s eye view, the B-theory, whatever one calls it can be stated that, “everything in the universe, past, present, and future is connected to everything else by a web of electromagnetic radiation that “sees” everything at once.” This is what it is to “leave time behind” or to see events “out of time”. This is to mark every action and event as individual and absolute. If events are related, they are still to be seen as individual occurrences relative to all other occurrences.

The speed of light is important to these ideas in that it is the rational and physical maximum a thing may travel through the universe. This affects the speed at which the effect of an event can travel, and thereby be observed. In other words, the universe’s information transfer system to the observer is limited by the speed of light. Impressions of events, even if traveling at light speed are still not instantaneous. This adds a small factor of time distortion to the already extra-intuitive idea of time dilation. Time dilation is not the effect of the maximum travel velocity in the universe, but they are related. One of Einstein’s greatest accomplishments was the realization that light was the maximum velocity for an object, no matter the size. What Einstein was trying to do was to see the events in the universe from light’s perspective. Atemporal perception, however, seems impossible in Einstein’s opinion since time is relative no matter the size of speed one is moving in comparison to any other thing. Even if one were to achieve the speed of light, only those outside observers would see “time move backward” around you. Whereas, you would see “time stand still” around those static observers. Unless relativity breaks down at light speed, and that is where super-symmetry comes in. But that is for theoretical physicists to work out, not I.

Conlusion: Gone With a Whimper and Not a Bang
Combining a Newtonian A-Theory and an Einstenian B-theory creates many problems. Reconciliation seems impossible because both answer different questions and relate to different markers in our world. They may attempt to answer the question, “what is time”, but both seem to create new questions and accidentally answer lurking problems from other areas. All related, of course.

Einstein could correct for certain fluctuations in light measurement and stellar motion statistically, but still could never give an intelligible and concise explanation of what time is, not how it works. For an answer to “what time is”, one can combine a few ideas from a few branches of science. Firstly, thermodynamics presents the undeniable arrow of time. One may never step into the same stream twice, or you can burn a log, but you can’t make ashes back into a log. The thermodynamic theory of the origin(and possibly end) of the universe states that the static state of singularity existed without motion or action. Motion / action began, however mysteriously, its exhaustible drive towards a state of equilibrium. The energy contained within that primary static state will be used to stretch the singularity, through motion created by heat exchange. Time, as viewed by Einstein and filtered through thermodynamics gives one the impression that time (not our perception of change) is the observable effect of expansive motion created through the conversion of energy(from the singularity) into matter(the expanding universe). Entropy introduces into the world an undeniable arrow of time. Time seems to be a complimentary process of measuring the disintegration of the energy \ matter process and its seeming interconnectedness. As Gribbin says, “The nature of time as we see it may be intimately linked with the nature of the expanding universe.”

Time is the slow fizzle of a fuse burning to ignite nothing. As we see it, time provides some constancy in an already chaotic world. “Like clockwork” time progresses one second at a time in our daily lives. But underneath that steady tick lies inconsistency, irrationality, and unusual behavior of objects. As our perceptions are filtered out, time ceases to have personal meaning and instead becomes a universal reference. If something happened in the location of the universe, if it “took up” space, if matter or energy were converted, it was “in” and “took up” time. Time is the visible, yet mysterious effect caused by spatial expansion, which is itself an effect of the energy \ matter transfer.



yeah cut and paste.

John Page

Hi Thomaq:
Neither. R-Theory . Units of time are objective measures of relative change.

A-Theory. Changes that appear difficult or impossible to reverse give the impression of time flowing. Time is a perception of relative change, though, so it is thought that flows (as a result of our minds mimicking the changes in reality).
B-Theory. Without a reference point in external reality, i.e. with the passing of time viewed subjectively, time does become mind-dependent.