Abstract
There is little doubt that we perceive the world as tensed—that is, as consisting of a past, present and future each with a different ontological status—and transient—that is, as involving a passage of time. We also have the ability to execute precisely timed behaviors that appear to depend upon making correct temporal judgments about which changes are truly present and which are not. A common claim made by scientists and philosophers is that our experiences of entities enduring through transient changes are illusory and that our apparently accurately timed behaviors do not reflect dynamical time. We argue that our experiences of objects enduring through transient changes need not be thought of as illusory even if time is not dynamic at the fundamental level of reality. For, the dynamic properties we experience objects as having need not be fundamental properties. They could be weakly emergent from static, temporal properties. Temporal properties, on this view, are similar to ordinary properties like that of being solid, which are correctly experienced as properties of medium-sized material bodies even though they are not instantiated at the fundamental level of reality.
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Notes
Just to be clear, we are not arguing that the authors mentioned here are accepting this argument. We are merely suggesting a plausible argument that can be made in support of the claim that the passage of time is illusory if the B-theory is true.
Of course, an account of how these properties emerge from microphysics would be needed. However, due to space constraints, here we can only make some plausible suggestions.
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Brogaard, B., Gatzia, D.E. Time and Time Perception. Topoi 34, 257–263 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9243-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9243-x