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February 2019 |
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Is Time Tensed
Or Tenseless? |
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A strange question but it matters. One way and you are immortal, the other and you might not be. Here "tense" is used in its grammatical sense - having past, present and future. Tensed time has an objective present moment which moves from the past into the future. Only the present moment exists. A possible future becomes real in the present then becomes past. Tensed time looks very like our ordinary experience of time. Tenseless time has no present moment and thus neither past nor future. All moments coexist. There is no "becoming". Scientists seem to favour tenseless time - their models generally have no moving present. Philosophers of science are divided, perhaps favouring tensed time? How can we decide this? Well here is a useful question. How does anything exist? A thoughtful friend once responded to that with “Well, you’re not allowed to ask that question”, and I think that would be a fairly common reply, but let’s look a bit closer. How does anything exist? For simplicity let's do away with all the physical matter in the universe, the planets, suns, our galaxy and the billions of other galaxies, and let us have standing in for it all, a medium-sized boulder hanging in the void. As above. How did it come to exist? First there is nothing and then there is the boulder. How did it get there? Where did it come from? It’s a complete stopper, unanswerable, unless you invoke God. Often when a question can’t be answered it is because it has a false premise. The premise here is that time is tensed, and it is precisely that that makes it unanswerable. In tenseless time, the question simply does not arise. There is no present moment. Nothing comes to pass, the boulder did not come into existence. It just exists. And so for everything. This seems to me to be a good reason to accept that time is tenseless. Why then do we seem to experience it as tensed? See here. |
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All contents ©Copyright Colin McArthur, 2004-2019 |
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