Philosophy of Time Needed for Objectivist Causation?

Past/present/future iterations of time change. (2010 is now the future, but will eventually change to the present, then again to the past.) Before/after iterations of time do not change. (2010 is always before 2009.) The relationship and individual efficacy of these iterations is largely what gives rise to the a-series/b-series quandaries and are what time philosophers spend much time (many times?) investigating.

Jordan

Post 21

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 1:58pm

All interesting, but reminds me that I can't really say I know the explanation for relativity theory. Can someone offer a layman friendly explanation?

jt

Post 22

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 6:16pm

Merlin, I said time was the dimension, not a dimension, of change, because it is the only dimension manifest in all changes.

I am largely interested in the genetic epistemology of the concept of time. Kant, as we all know, said there was no way to perceive time or space, and that we therefore supply those structures to everything we perceive. One can argue, on the contrary, that just by perceiving change, which is all about us in the world, one can conceptualize time as the dimension common to all changes.

Mindy

Post 23

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 7:49pm

Mindy,

You said, "...time was the dimension, not a dimension, of change, because it is the only dimension manifest in all changes."

Maybe it depends upon the meaning of "dimension" but, technically speaking, there is that which changes - an attribute or aspect of an existent. All change includes an attribute that changes while the entity exhibiting the change retains its identity.
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Peikoff, in the Objectivist Lectures said, "Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship. Time applies only within the universe, when you define a standard�such as the motion of the earth around the sun. If you take that as a unit, you can say: �This person has a certain relationship to that motion; he has existed for three revolutions; he is three years old.� But when you get to the universe as a whole, obviously no standard is applicable. You cannot get outside the universe. The universe is eternal in the literal sense: non-temporal, out of time."

In one way time doesn't exist without a consciousness to perceive it. The portion that is a dimension of change exists, and it exists in a relation to all existents, but it takes a consciousness to create the measurement relationship between any two existents, e.g., "He is three rotations of the earth old."

Post 24

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:06pm

Steve,

Ask yourself what do all changes, of character, of place, of any sort whatsoever, what all changes have in common. They do not have in common what objects are involved. They do not have in common that change of place ("motion" in the usual sense) is involved. They do not have in common that chemical change takes place, etc. They do not all involve any one characteristic. A change is an alteration in an entity, and that means in a thing with characteristics, yes, but beyond that, the only thing that all changes involve is the dimension of a before and an after.

{"Motion" can be taken to include not only change of place, but change in character, this is particularly true in ancient texts. I prefer the term "change" because it escapes that particular confusion.}

Post 25

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:13pm

To answer Mindy, the relations and attributes of entities change over time. Time is the common dimension of all change.

All awareness occurs in time. There is no perception of the unchanging. Stimuli which do not change become imperceptible, like background color or the water through which swims the fish. Time is most definitely a dimension of common experience. Not an object, but a dimension of common experience.

Post 26

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:29pm

Mindy,

I put the Peikoff quote in there for discussion not as something I would have said. I found the idea of time as a "relationship" as interesting and worth discussing. After all, it is a bit tricky saying that "change" has a dimension. It isn't a thing - it is a relationship between a before and after, or its a thing in motion, and a reference to the motion that only exists a thing.
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You said, "They do not have in common what objects are involved." We agree. I never intended that meaning or the meaning that the same characteristic is what changes.

You said, "A change is an alteration in an entity, and that means in a thing with characteristics, yes, but beyond that, the only thing that all changes involve is the dimension of a before and an after." Agreed. I was just pointing out that all change involves a thing that changes and it is part of an entity that retains it's identity. (I was thinking of Heraclitus, "We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.")

Post 27

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 9:34pm

JT,

That's an awfully tall order. The short answer is that, in special relativity, speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter *their* speed. And the physics is same for all non-accelerating observers.

This is weird because if I'm driving at you at 50mph, and you at me at 50mph, then my speed relative to you is 100mph. If you are driving at 50mph, and I'm driving away from you at 50mph, then my speed relative to you is 0mph. Not so with lightspeed. That always zooms toward or away at 299,792,458 meters per second, no matter my speed. And it does this for everybody (who is not accelerating)!

A new thread might be in order if you want more.

Jordan

Post 28

Friday, February 13, 2009 - 3:32am

Jordon, I should have something worthwhile to say on A-time / B-time in a couple of weeks.

Steve, in #23 you remarked that �it takes a consciousness to create the measurement relationship between any two existents, e.g., �He is three rotations of the earth old�.� But consider a tree with its rings of annual growth. The rings provide a measure of the trees age as surely as if a human had made a mark each year of the trees� life. It seems too strong to say that it takes a consciousness to create the measurement relationship between any two existents. Nature is making records of those relationships, but without the powerful analytical apparatus, partly conventional, that we lay over the magnitude relations given in nature and its records.

Jay, I have told the story of Special Relativity here.
In this website format, after the section VII. Galilean Invariance,
you will need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and work your way up, in the proper order:
VIII. Amp�re
IX. Faraday
X. Maxwell
XI. Einstein � Special Relativity � Kinematics
XII. Einstein � Special Relativity � Dynamics
Some results in the kinematics of SR are pertinent to the topics Jordan has proposed.

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 2/13, 4:08am)

Post 29

Friday, February 13, 2009 - 5:19am

Jay, relativity theory is a broad and difficult subject, but I guess you are asking what it says about time, which is that time is not absolute. I am far from an expert, but maybe an illustration will help. Imagine the following. There are two flashes of light from identical sources S1 and S2 which are far apart. Observer O1 is equidistant from S1 and S2, e.g. midway between them, and sees the flashes simultaneously. Observer O2 is much closer to S2 than S1. Then O2 will see the flash from S2 before the flash from S1. So O1 and O2 report the timing of the two flashes differently. In other words, and barring other unpalatable explanations, time is relative to the observer or frame of reference. There is a mathematical way -- the Lorentz transform -- to reconcile these two perspectives and it is part of relativity theory.

Mindy, I now understand why you used "the" rather than "a". To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends on your meaning of "the". :-)

Post 30

Friday, February 13, 2009 - 7:07am

Jordan, Steve B., Merlin,

Thanks. Hadn't really thought about it for some time, and realized I didn't have a real understanding of the "why".

jt

Post 31

Friday, February 13, 2009 - 8:45am

For those interested in space, time, and relativity, I highly recommend a book entitled "Space, Time and Einstein" by J. B. Kennedy. His discussions are excellent, and he relegates the mathematics to appendices. It is an enjoyable mix of physics and philosophy. I especially appreciate the fact that he discusses what he calls the "minority interpretation" of relativity. This is a resurrection (by Bohm and others) of the ether theory, in which the relativistic effects (like length contraction and time dilation) are due to motion through the ether.

My favorite quote: "One task that philosophers perform is the conceptual interpretation of theories in physics. ... Despite their technical skills, as soon as physicists stop calculating they are sadly quite mortal."

Thanks,
Glenn

Post 32

Friday, February 13, 2009 - 9:53am

Stephen,

Thanks for the example. Tree trunk rings - that's a good one :-)

I said, "In one way time doesn't exist without a consciousness to perceive it. The portion that is a dimension of change exists, and it exists in a relation to all existents, but it takes a consciousness to create the measurement relationship between any two existents, e.g., "He is three rotations of the earth old." I don't think I was saying anything beyond what is fairly obvious... That the trees could be growing and the earth moves around the sun, but that the relationship between these (one tree trunk ring per trip around the sun) as a measurement can not happen without a consciousness. And if there is any importance to that it is just that much of how we use the concept of time is in measurement.

Maybe it makes more sense to talk about two different but tightly related concepts of time. One is the actual metaphysical component of change. The other is our measurement of the first. The first exists independent of consciousness, the second is a concept of consciousness that arises out of awareness of the first, and is always some relationship between observed changes.

Post 33

Sunday, April 19, 2009 - 6:46am

I continue to be unable to return to sustained philosophical investigations with you, as we are in a long process of relocation. Meanwhile, there are these:

Thoroughly Modern McTaggart
Or What McTaggart Would Have Said If He Had Read the General Theory of Relativity
by John Earman
Philosophers� Imprint
V2N3 (August 2002)

Thoroughly Muddled McTaggart
Or How to Abuse Gauge Freedom to Generate Metaphysical Monstrosities
by Tim Maudlin (with a Response by John Earman)
Philosophers� Imprint
V2N4 (August 2002)

Post 34

Sunday, April 19, 2009 - 8:53am

Very interesting reads... thanks...

Post 35

Sunday, April 19, 2009 - 10:35am

I have a question about Earman's depiction of McTaggart's argument for neo-Parmenideanism:

[P1] There must be real change if there is to be time.

[P2] There must be temporal passage (continual change in events of the nonrelational properties of presentness, pastness, and futurity) if there is to be real change.

[P3] Temporal passage is incoherent.
************
[C] Therefore, time is unreal.

Earman goes on to say that most philosophers agree with [P3] -- that going from having the property of futurity, to having the property of presentness (or now-ness), to having the property of pastness; i.e., that taking on these properties in that order, is incoherent. This sounds like Zeno's paradox where the shot arrow is taken to be still at moments in time -- while actually in flight. To be clear, Zeno's paradox'es where epistemological, not metaphysical, problems (i.e., they stem from thinking wrong).

To repeat, McTaggart's argument, like Zeno's paradox, are uninformative thinking mistakes.

C.D. Broad got around the apparent incoherency with the claim that the future doesn't exist (there's only the ever-growing past and present). On that view, you don't have to go from having futurity to having presentness (to having pastness).

To repeat, McTaggart's argument, like Zeno's paradox, has now been rebutted, if not, refuted.

My question is:
If Broad demolished McTaggart's argument for neo-Parmedideanism -- and he did -- then why focus on McTaggart's error as applied to things?

I'm assuming that applying error to the world is completely arbitrary or absurd, just like measuring length with colors would be, or measuring weight by length. Once something's wrong -- what good is applying it to other things?

I realize that Earman goes on to link McTaggart to Einstein's GTR. I admit to not reading the whole paper. In order to be able to read something, I have got to understand that it's not riddled with contradiction or non sequitor. Rand said something about responding to literature like that (i.e., stopping at the first non sequitor or contradiction -- rather than reading on after that).

Can those who may know or understand more about this fill me in? Did Earman use (McTaggart's) error to try to say something about reality? Or am I wrong?

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 4/19, 8:32pm)

Post 36

Monday, April 20, 2009 - 7:24am

What do you make of P1 and P2? It is implausible that there can be no real change unless nonrelational properties of presentness, pastness, and futurity are changing. What are the defenses for this restrictive conception of real change?

Rand�s conceptions of action and causality require that there are nonrelational properties of presentness, pastness, and futurity? Rather, to the contrary, I would think.

I would like to try to defend the position that the presentness of present things is real and that the pastness of past things is real. Some present things are real, and they are fully determinate. All past real things are fully determinate. Some future things are real and already fully determinate, but not so many such things as in the present and past. That some future things are real and already fully determinate is enough to count the futurity of future things as real. Existence will exist tomorrow.

Post 37

Monday, April 20, 2009 - 8:28am

I quite agree - indeed, that almost seems an obviousness...;-)

Post 38

Monday, April 20, 2009 - 11:12pm

Hi Ed,

McTaggart's P1 (AKA his "A-series") is not exactly like Zeno's paradox. The A-series is an order of time positions entailing positions of past, present, and future. McTaggart argues that *each* time position in the A-series possesses *all* of these entailed positions. Most philosophers agree that being both past and present *at the same time* is contradictory. Responding that a time position is only past and present at *different* times won't help since those "different times" are subject to the same problem, which in turn pose the same problem, and so on.

As I see it, this is a legit infinite regress problem. It is similar to Parmenides' pointing out that Plato's forms would need forms, and those forms would need forms, and so on.

Zeno points out different infinite regression, but those have been reconciled mathematically, as you correctly point out. They are solvable, I think, because they always regress between two points. McTaggart's time regress and Parmenides' forms regressions have no end-point.

**

I don't yet see how The Growing Universe Theory (Board's and Tooley's theory) appropriately resolves McTaggart's A-series contentions. Saying there are no future objects poses additional problems as well. If there are no future objects, then it's unclear what we are talking about when we refer to, say, Earth in the year 2500. That "object" doesn't exist under the Growing Universe Theory. Moreover, it's unclear how to assign truth values to propositions dealing with the future and similarly unclear how to compare future to present and past.

Personally, at the moment I find the C-series and Eternalism most persuasive. The C-series (which Earman appears to adopt although I think he says otherwise) is just a fixed order of points in time, much like a mathematical permutation. McTaggart argues that that the C-series won't salvage time since "fixedness" is antithetical to "change," and change is necessary (in McTaggart's view) for time to be real. To avoid McTaggart's argument, I simply re-frame what counts as "change." Under the C-series, change can be viewed as the difference between any two points.

Eternalism seems to jive best with the C-series, *and GRT*, and appears to resolve most philosophical objections posed against the Growing Universe Theory (and Presentist Theory for that matter). Eternalism also salvages the language (but not so much the "substance") of the A-series (e.g., "past," "present," and "future") and B-series (e.g., "two days later", "a minute before"). Ironically, language can be a real barrier to accepting Eternalism, especially since our common notion of "existence" is often situated in the present, e.g., RoR "exists" but 2025 doesn't right? It's just a matter of being very careful with terms when talking inside this tricky field.

I'm still not sure how my view squares with Objectivism.

Jordan

(Edited by Jordan on 4/21, 10:02am)

Post 39

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 7:49am