Abstract
The experience of temporal flow is, for many, the central—if not the only—reason for believing an A-theory of time. Recently, however, B-theorists have argued that experience does not, in fact, favor the A-theory. Call such an argument: a debunking argument. The goal of the present paper is to defend the A-theory against two prominent versions of the debunking argument.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See Paul (2010) for a precise formulation of, and sustained attack upon, the argument from experience for the A-theory.
Skow (2011) provides an argument that, if successful, would debunk the evidential weight of the experience of flow. For reasons of space, I cannot consider that argument here.
Prosser takes it to be sufficient for showing that the A-theory makes no physical difference to the universe that the flow of time plays no role in physics, as opposed to science more generally. This could be denied: one might seek to demonstrate that the flow of time plays a role in, say, chemistry but not in physics and so makes a physical difference that way. I take it, however, that because time is the subject matter of physics, the thought is that any physical difference made by the flow of time documented by another science should show up, in some way, in physics, and so if the flow of time plays no role in physics, then it won’t play a role in any other science either. At any rate, I will assume in what follows that it is physics that we should focus on. Nothing hangs on this, however: all of my arguments can be easily reframed in terms of science more generally.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
What would be required to debunk the astronomer’s experiences? Presumably compelling evidence to the effect that their telescopes are all broken, or that they are all hallucinating, or that human brains tend to throw up images of planet Sigma in telescope-involving-situations.
Observation as I am using it here is a success term: to say that the flow of time has been observed is to say that one has an experience of the flow of time that has a positive evidential status with respect to the same and is thus evidentially weighty. Later on I talk of ‘observational data’. This is just the sum total of observational evidence we have in favor of something.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for issuing this challenge.
References
Alfaro, J., Morales-Técotl, H. A., & Urrutia, L. F. (2000). Quantum gravity corrections to neutrino propagation. Physical Review Letters, 84, 2318–2321. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.2318.
Bigelow, J. (1996). Presentism and properties. Philosophical Perspectives, 10, 35–52.
Bourne, C. (2006). A future for presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Button, T. (2007). Every now and then, no-futurism faces no sceptical problems. Analysis, 67, 325–332.
Callender, C. (2011). Time’s ontic voltage. In A. Bardon (Ed.), The future of the philosophy of time (pp. 73–98). London: Routledge.
Cameron, R. (2011). Truthmaking for presentists. In K. Bennett & D. Zimmerman (Eds.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 6). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Collins, J., Perez, A., Sudarsky, D., Urrutia, L., & Vucetich, H. (2004). Lorentz invariance and quantum gravity: An additional fine-tuning problem? Physical Review Letters, 93, 191301. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.191301.
Craig, W. L. (2000). The tensed theory of time: A critical examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Crisp, T. M. (2007). Presentism and the grounding objection. Noûs, 41, 90–109.
Dainton, B. (2011). Time, passage, and immediate experience. In A. Bardon (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of time (pp. 381–418). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davies, P. (1995). About time: Einstein’s unfinished revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Dowker, F. (2014). The birth of spacetime atoms as the passage of time. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1326, 18–25.
Ellis, J., Farakos, K., Mavromatos, N. E., Mitsou, V. A., & Nanopoulos, D. V. (2000). A search in gamma-ray burst data for nonconstancy of the velocity of light. The Astrophysical Journal, 535, 139, http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/535/i=1/a=139.
Ellis, J., Mavromatos, N. E., & Nanopoulos, D. V. (2002). Noncritical liouville string escapes constraints on generic models of quantum gravity. Physical Review D, 65, 064007. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.65.064007.
Falk, A. (2003). Time plus the whoosh and whiz. In A. Jokić & Q. Smith (Eds.), Time, tense, and reference (pp. 211–250). London: MIT Press.
Gambini, R., & Pullin, J. (1999). Nonstandard optics from quantum space-time. Physical Review D, 59, 124021. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.59.124021.
Hoerl, C. (2014). Do we (seem to) perceive passage? Philosophical Explorations, 17, 188–202.
Le Poidevin, R. (2007). The images of time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Markosian, N. (2004). A defense of presentism. In D. W. Zimmerman (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics (Vol. 1, pp. 47–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maudlin, T. (2002). Remarks on the passing of time. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 102, 237–252.
Maudlin, T. (2007). The metaphysics within physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McTaggart, J. E. (1908). The unreality of time. Mind, 17, 454–474.
Mellor, D. H. (1998). Real time II. London: Routledge.
Monton, B. (2006). Presentism and quantum gravity. In D. Dieks (Ed.), The ontology of spacetime (pp. 263–280). Boston: Elsevier.
Paul, L. A. (2010). Temporal experience. Journal of Philosophy, 107, 333–359.
Price, H. (1996). Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ point: New directions for the physics of time. New York: Oxford University Press.
Price, H. (2011). The flow of time. In C. Callender (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of time (pp. 276–311). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prosser, S. (2000). A new problem for the A-theory of time. Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 494–498.
Prosser, S. (2007). Could we experience the passage of time? Ratio, 20, 75–90.
Prosser, S. (2012). Why does time seem to pass? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85, 92–116.
Prosser, S. (2013). Passage and perception. Noûs, 47, 69–84.
Skow, B. (2011). Experience and the passage of time. Philosophical Perspectives, 25, 359–387.
Sorkin, R. (2007). Relativity theory does not imply that the future already exists: A counterexample. In V. Petkov (Ed.), Relativity and the dimensionality of the world. Fundamental theories of physics (pp. 153–162). Chicago: Springer.
Sorkin, R., & Rideout, D. (1999). A classical sequential growth dynamics for causal sets. Physical Review D, 61, 024002.
Sudarsky, D., Urrutia, L., & Vucetich, H. (2003). Bounds on stringy quantum gravity from low energy existing data. Physical Review D, 68, 024010. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.68.024010.
Tallant, J. (2012). (Existence) presentism and the A-theory. Analysis, 72.
Tooley, M. (1997). Time, tense, and causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Will, C. M. (2005). Was Einstein right? Testing relativity at the centenary. In A. Ashtekar (Ed.), 100 Years of relativity; space-time structure: Einstein and beyond (pp. 205–227). Singapore: World Scientific.
Williams, D. C. (1951). The myth of passage. Journal of Philosophy, 48, 457–472.
Zimmerman, D. (2005). The A-theory of time, the B-theory of time, and ‘taking tense seriously’. Dialectica, 59, 401–457.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank David Braddon-Mitchell, Kristie Miller and the audience at the 2015 “From Here to Eternity” conference at the University of Sydney for useful discussion of an earlier version of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Baron, S. Feel the flow. Synthese 194, 609–630 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0964-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0964-1