God, time and space-time
Tom Blackburn
The Pre-philosophical view
Time is mysterious - before we do philosophy, we are inclined to think of it as some sort of strange substance, flowing beside space, and dragging all of space with it into the strange domain we call the
!
future
"
. In
!
low-standards
"
contexts, ie. everyday life, this conception does not seem to trouble many of us, but when scrutinized, this account begins to look remarkably unsubstantial. If time flows, we may ask, how fast does it flow? What marks what we call the
!
present
"
off as existentially more interesting than the past and the future? What happens to past and future objects when the cease to become present? And is time finite, or does it, perhaps like space, extend into infinity?Assuming time exists, these are all sensible yet profoundly deep questions about the very nature of reality itself, and are notoriously hard to answer easily. Consider the question
!
how fast does time flow?
"
. The answer we might give would be
!
1 second per second
"
- but this is a trivial response, and doesn
"
t tell us anything we didn
"
t already know. A rate of change or passage of a substance must be measured against something else; and to say that time passes at 1 second per second is simply stating the speed of time in terms of what we use to measure time! Yet it makes sense to ask, if something flows, what the speed of its flow is - a river flows, and we can easily measure its speed (i.e. how many cubic litres of water pass a particular point every second, for example). Time on the other hand is far less tangible than a river - and so resists measurement.We also tend to assume that the present exists
!
more than
"
the past and the future. But how can this be phrased coherently? We could deny that
nothing
exists except the present, a view known as
!
presentism
"
to philosophers. This view seems reasonable until we think about how objects and events could possibly emerge out of the non-existent future,
!
pop
"
into existence, and the disappear again instantly into the gloomy recess of the past. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Does it even make sense for real, physical objects to just jump into existence, remain in existence for a mere sliver of a second, and then vanish? After all, the present can surely be no longer in duration than an infinitely small instant of time. Most philosophers think that this is not the case, partly to do with what physics has to say about this, and partly due to the fact that it
"
s straightforwardly unintuitive. Objects persist - they
!
last
"
longer than a mere instant, it seems to us. If this is true, then it
"
s hard to see how presentism can be convincingly held.
McTaggart
!
s Paradox
Finally, given all the difficulties above, it is possible to conclude that time does not exist at all. Cambridge philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart attempted to show this by arguing that the very concept of time is self-contradictory
1
. First, McTaggart acknowledges that the fact that things
change
in the world suggests that time is dynamic - that it flows (as we mentioned above). However, this flow requires that we view objects as past, present or future. For example, the event of me writing this essay is present (to me now), but when you read the essay it will be in the past. Before I wrote this essay, the event of me writing it was in the future. We can make sense of objects beginning in the future, passing through the present,
1
1
McTaggart,
The Unreality of Time.
For a simplified version, see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ J._M._E._McTaggart
and then into the past on this conception. Indeed, this is how time is thought of before we do philosophy, as mentioned above.However, this leads us into difficulties. On reflection, it requires us to say of a single event (for example my writing of this essay) that it is both
past
,
present
and
future
. These are incompatible properties, in the same way that saying
!
a cat is fully black and fully white
"
is to make two incompatible statements about something. We cannot predicate an object or event of incompatible properties, because that would be incoherent. The obvious response is that there is nothing incompatible in the case of time - this is because the event of me writing this essay
was
future,
is
present (at the time of writing), and
will be
past. These do not appear to be incompatible - hence the difficulty is removed.However, McTaggart argues, this obvious move does nothing to solve the problem. For now we have another three properties -
past future
,
present present
and
future past
. However, all this move does is to construct a
second
time-series, using the same notions as before - and yielding another three incompatible properties. We can keep avoiding the contradiction by adding yet more properties (past past future etc) but this just pushes the problem up a level, failing to solve the contradiction. An infinite regress follows, from which McTaggart concludes that what we take to be time is contradictory, and hence time does not exist.The above reasoning may appear confusing, and that
"
s because it is - and no non-philosopher would come to such a conclusion regarding the nature of time. After all, most of us take time to be real, and there doesn
"
t appear anything contradictory about us describing events as past, present or future - we do it every day. However, McTaggart presents a valid argument. Most philosophers, whilst accepting that the argument is valid, challenge the assumptions McTaggart makes, in order to show that he has reached his conclusion falsely. There are a few ways to do this, but by far the most interesting is the following way. McTaggart assumes that time is dymanic and
flowing
, this being the only way to make sense of change in the world - but many now deny this, holding a view sometimes referred to as
!
static
"
time, or the
!
B-theory
"
.
The B-theory of time
2
The B-theory of time is a challenging and exciting notion that, if proven to be true, would cause us to radically change the way we think about time itself. The B-theory takes a departure from our widespread common-sense views about time and holds that time is not dynamic, but
static
; and in this way, time is strongly analogous to
space
. For the B-theorist, there is no mysterious moving present, and no sense in which present objects and events are any more special than past or future ones! Rather,
all events
, past present and future, exist equally, and there is nothing
!
in the world
"
that marks off the present time as significant. Rather, what we perceive to be the present isn
"
t something flowing
in the world
, but an illusion based on how we perceive the world.To make clearer this view, consider an analogy with space. We normally perceive objects
!
spread out
"
in space. Physical objects such as tables and chairs have what earlier philosophers such as Kant called
!
extension
"
- they take up a certain volume in the 3D space which we also reside in. Physical objects are extended in space. On the B-theory, physical objects (including ourselves) are also
extended in time
in much the same way.
2
2
I
"
m using this as a label here for one of a range of views, not all of which hold what I ascribe to them. I
"
m generalizing here.
The word
!
now
"
, denoting the present time, functions is the same way as the word
!
here
"
which denotes the present space. Rather than referring to a
!
special
"
time,
the present
, in which all objects exist,
!
now
"
just refers to whatever
point
in time one finds oneself in the same way that the word
!
here
"
denotes where I am currently standing (if uttered by me).
!
Here
"
does not denote a single, special place - it denotes wherever I happen to be standing. Similarly,
!
now
"
does not denote a single, special time (
!
the present
"
) - it denotes wherever I happen to be in time.
The Space-time Manifold
We can understand this strange and radical theory with the help of a conceptual diagram - a single
block
of reality, often referred to as the
!
space-time manifold
"
by B-theorists. But first, some background comments. In any diagram, dimensions must be suppressed. For example, take this cube:We can grasp that this is a 3-dimensional object - and yet it is represented as a 2-dimensional object on a 2-D piece of paper. We say that one of the dimensions has been
suppressed
- what is shown here isn
"
t
really
3D (we would have to have a model we could hold in our hands to truly represent a 3D cube), but we can grasp that it represents a 3D object.In the case of a B-theory representation of time, TWO dimensions must be suppressed on the diagram, as we add an extra dimension. This is because on this theory, time is like space; and thus a
fourth dimension
of reality. Objects are spread out in space just as they are spread out in time; time does not
!
flow
"
in the same way that space does not
!
flow
"
- both are static. A four-dimensional space-time diagram is notoriously hard to conceptualize or represent, due to its unfamiliarity and due to the fact that we can only easily conceptualize 3 dimensions. Here goes:
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