crocodile deathroll

The perception of a present "now" time flowing from the past to the future is an illusion. It is an illusion because it give you the impression that the universe is just a bubble of reality travelling form its source at the big bang to where ever it is going in its future.

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist. Thus, you and the Taj Mahal would be on the list, but neither Socrates nor any future Bases on Mars would be included And it's not just Socrates and future base on Mars, either -- the same goes for any other putative object that lacks the property of being contemporaneous to us. All such objects are unreal, according to Presentism.

One alternative to Presentism is Eternalism, which says that objects from both the past and the future exist just as much as presently observed objects. According to Eternalism, non-present objects like Socrates and future bases on Mars exist in block time, even though they are not currently present to our perceptions. We may not be able to see them at our perceived moment, on this view, and they may not be in the same space-time vicinity that we find ourselves on our own subjective "now time", but they should nevertheless be on the list of all existing things.

I like to use a "surfing carnival" analogy and if one is a presentist they believe that their lives are analogous riding on a board called "present" within a single wave called "reality", and when they a wiped out that is the end of their lives that is it and the wave just keeps rolling on without you. There would a strong ontological bias between the reality where you are dead and the reality where you are yet to be born as you only continue in the wave of reality where you are dead.

An eternalist like me believes that all the events during the carnival are equally real, and not merely a single surfer surfing on a single wave so when you are wiped out then all the other waves and surfers are equally real. In this case there is no ontological bias between the events before you are born and the events after you die. So you can say you are both equally yet to be born and dead in a the realm of the block universe, with no more bias to being dead that not being born.

xoc

Presentism seems to be a view born of normal perception. It appears to be true, or at least we can find nothing in everyday experience to consider it false.

Eternalism seems to be a view born of logical derivations or assumptions. Yet it actually is more compatable with modern scientific theory. Minkowski space models time as a dimension and measures it in the same way it measures spatial dimensions. The notion of block time provides for successful scientific theory.

The question is, if the first case appears to be true and cannot be invalidated by direct perception, and the other is(assuming it is) true, then why does presentism accord to the law of our experience yet the "true" theory find no accord at all in our experience? Why would "what is true" appear false and the "false" view actually drive the full form and content of our experience-framing our every experience? If the most apparently true and consistent element of our experience(the time that seems consistent with "Presentism") is only an illusion, what power do we have to ever "see" the truth, or Reality as is? If time as the fading of moment to moment is illusion, then on our own we can know nothing but illusion, because our whole experience correlates with this illusion. All except memory, which forms the possibility of "constancy" of the self despite changes, and the appearence of the "continuity of a consciousness". Memory does belie an "eternalist" belief yet we have no power to follow that belief backwards to prove it true.

If the eternalist view is true, why does it hide itself so well in our experience and instead "reality" as we see it suggests the opposite view?

crocodile deathroll

Then again if you were born 100 years earlier, how will you see the world given that a 100 year margin of error is insignificant up against the 15 billion year interval of time in the cosmos we are totally oblivious of?

Would you therefore be observing a world in 1903 in your own subjective "now time" and read that subjective reality into all the objective reality around you just like you do in 2003?

John Page

Crock:

I like the analogy - our individual existences surfing on the timeless sea of reality, so to speak.

Cheers, John

crocodile deathroll

Yes and when you die you also fall into the same see of timeless eternity.

tronvillain

As far as I can tell, "eternalism" makes exactly the same predictions about what we would percieve as does "presentism", so it is not apparent how what we percieve is supposed to support one view over the other xoc.

xoc

A valid point. I guess I am talking about an "argument from simplicity" here. Presentism works according to a simple judgment about our experience, and that "what you see is what you get" and follows the logic of the "simplest explanation being probably the correct one", etc.

An other extreme example of this could be one of standard evolutionairy theory against an extreme strain of YEC. This extreme strain of young earth creationism I am referring to is the one that claims "the devil put all those fossils in the Earth, etc. etc. etc. to deceive man about God." This theory works as well as the simpler theory that the mere "appearence" of age is suggestive of age itself (appearence is related to substance- aka the earth really is that old, dinosaurs really did exist objectively in the past etc.) in that any claim of consistency etc. can always be put down to just how clever the devil is. Presentism take the appearence of "the past and future" not really existing anymore and puts it down to fact (what you see is what you get) rather than mere appearence. It is simpler than the other- so why believe the more complicated notion that suggests "appearence is contrary to reality?" The fact that it works better for "objective science" maybe sufficient- but it still does not account for our inability to see all times objectively and standardly and instead be stuck(even against our will) in our personal prejudice of a "now" time of the present.

I find it hard to rule out either view completely... bizzare.

crocodile deathroll

There is a very big difference, presentism directly contradicts general relativity. Presentism implies there is one singular present "now time" for the whole universe that has been debunked by the Hafele Keating Experiment

xoc

This is good. There is no universal objective "now."

But why is there still that personal subjective "now" that we just can't mentally defeat?

Obviously a pretty important question- I only keep harping on it(in a rather annoying way perhaps) because it seems like a question that really can't be answered, just leaving lots of headaches after going :banghead: and proceeeding to all that other stuff

On a side note About Time by Paul Davies is a pretty good popular science book on the subject(for anyone perusing the thread). A quote:

I guess if Einstein couldn't figure it I shouldn't feel too bad about my failures here. Lastly,

crocodile said:
I gotta ask if you can elaborate on that a bit. This almost seems Buddhistic in philosophy to me- are you suggesting the consciousness (not personal) precedes and continues after the "lifetime" as it were? If so, would you consider this a necesary derivitive of "eternalism" or of the nature of consciousness, etc.?

Answerer

Hey guys, are you all equating eternalism with the theory of parallel universes?