|
The Philosophy of Time
The
Philosophy of Time
Poidevin and MacBeath, eds.
Oxford, 1993
The Philosophy of Time seems to be intended as a summary of the
state of the field for moderately advanced students, and it's a
fairly recent book put out by a major publisher. It's not just a
miscellaneous collection of essays, or a collection focussed on a
specific subtopic. Thus, I think that it's fair to take it as a bad
example of what contemporary philosophy has become.
The book takes McTaggart's century-old mystical-idealist
Sarvastivadin essay on the unreality of time as a starting point,
and develops various abstruse arguments in that general context.
Several different authors here ask whether "time" really "flows" (as
Newton says it does), and conclude that it doesn't. Likewise, it is
explained that historical events do not "recede into the past" --
events only happen once and don't go anywhere after that. It is
shown that time travel might be possible, but only in a world much
different than ours; that while we might think that something could
be in two places at once, it's impossible to imagine that something
could be in two times at once; that we cannot "bring about the
past"; that we can talk about "possible worlds", but not "possible
individuals"; and that undetectible changeless intervals could not
be part of a theory explaining observed facts. The technical
proficiency of the argumentation is higher than anything I could
come up with, but the questions chosen do not help the reader come
to a better understanding of the McTaggart paradox: that time seems
real to us even though it can be shown to be unreal.1
Only Sklar's article even touches on the most reasonable approach to
this question: Boltzman's hypothesis (developed by Eddington and
Reichenbach) that the "arrow of time" is operative only within the
world of entropy, and not at the level of fundamental physics --
Newtonian mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. Sklar doesn't
seem too happy with his own essay, and perhaps was assigned the
topic against his will. 'At this point my already very sketchy and
somewhat vague paper is going to become even less the presentation
of a polished, finished, account (p. 114); 'That question I hardly
intend to try and answer here' (p. 109); 'I don't pretend to
understand all that Eddington is saying here' (p. 116). His essay
also makes reference to an undocumented consensus and to the
opinions of unknown persons: To some it [the explanation of
irreversible time by entropy] seems obviously true in broad outline,
whatever details still need filling in. To others the very idea of
such a programme is prima facie absurd' (p. 99); 'I think we can all
agree that such an account is not yet available to us' (p.110); 'I
do not believe that I will be taken as disrespectful if I assert
here that they are, for many of us, far from conclusive' (p.110).
His conclusion (p. 116) is that 'it is very clear that our ultimate
view of the world will require a subtle and careful weaving together
of the naturalistic reduction of science [i.e., the explanation of
the arrow of time as a function of entropy] which proceeds by
theoretical identification with the conceptual reduction of
philosophy [i.e., what the authors of this book are doing] which
proceeds by epistemic analysis. Until we have such a systematic
overall account I think that the entropic theory of time order will
remain in doubt'.
A less haphazard and cavalier version of Sklar's paper might have
been a good starting point for an interesting and useful discussion
which would have left the reader with a reasonable understanding of
the state of the argument about the arrow of time. Instead, all the
other philosophers meticulously avoid this possible way out, and
Sklar hardly treats it fairly. Despite the meticulousness of the
methodology, the arbitrary frame imposed on the topic in this book (McTaggart's
paper) makes it likely that an uninitiated reader or
philosopher-in-training hoping to improve his understanding of the
philosophy of time will actually end up more confused than he was
when he started.
Sklar demands a better philosophical (epistemic) statement of the
scientific / common sense views, and seems to think that the absence
of such a statement is an argument against the
Boltzman-Eddington-Reichenbach view, but it seems more reasonable to
conclude that philosophy, here, is an unusable tool which only does
harm. Our philosophical concepts of time are systematized statements
of common-sense, intuitive, and mystical views of time from various
sources, and if they violate both our own common sense and our
scientific understanding, perhaps they should simply be dropped.
This is not to say that philosophers should not work to get their
philosophizing up to speed, but just that the ball is in their
court, and that the rest of us should proceed with the hybrid
common-sensical / scientific view (time is irreversible, and the
reason is entropy) until they've cleaned up their act. Philosophy
itself seems to be the problem here.
Scientists have reached a consensus on the topic: the arrow of time
is thermodynamic and not fundamental, and applies only to composite
entities composed of very large numbers of atoms. This is not
indentical to the common-sense view, which holds that the arrow of
time is everywhere, but the two can be roughly harmonized simply by
saying that comon sense is not adequate for the understanding of
fundamental physics (something we already knew) and that our
intuition of the passage of time is valid in the thermodynamic world
of entropy, but only there.
In discussions of time it's quite common to focus attention on
subjectivity, or consciousness, or The Mind, or even "emotion".
(This also happens in discussions of quantum mechanics, e.g.,
Schroedinger's Cat). The perception of temporality is often regarded
as peculiar to consciousness, either as an illusion (because there
is no temporality in fundamental physics) or as a privileged access
to a transcendant non-material reality. This is erroneous, however.
From the scientist's point of view, temporality and the arrow of
time are objectively present in the whole thermodynamic, entropic
realm, not just in our consciousness of that realm. It is true that
we live in the world of entropy and that our minds and our lives
have their own time, but that does not mean that the world we see is
a timeless one into which we are projecting our own illusory
temporality. Everything that we can directly perceive, from the
smallest speck of dust to the stars in heaven, is ruled by entropy
and temporal in nature,.
From the point of view of metaphysics and pure science, of course,
it might be said that the timeless subatomic and cosmological
realities are "more real" than the transient entities ruled by
entropy, but there's a catch. All living things, all
consciousnesses, and all beings capable of doing science are
temporal, entropic beings, and even to record observations requires
a "before" and an "after". Thus fundamental physics is a weirdly
hybrid science, a thoroughly time-bound activity which primarily
describes the timeless, ontologically-prior fundamental entities of
which the scientists and their timebound apparatus are (in the last
analysis (but only then) made. How this might be does seem to be a
philosophically interesting question, as are the other questions
about the interfaces, contacts, and relationships between
fundamental timelessness and thermodynamic temporality, but these
questions seem to have been deliberately avoided by the authors of
this anthology.
Why was this anthology organized around McTaggart? Why did it almost
completely ignore the most interesting and most promising approach
to the question? My guess is this: first, McTaggart's essay is
highly amenable to the kind of virtuoso argumentation which is
analytic philosophy's whole raison d'etre. It's a bravura set-piece
which has been done many times before, and it gives a new generation
of performers a chance to show what they're capable of. Second,
McTaggart's thesis is counterintuitive enough that it allows the
performers and their audience to feel that they're really doing
something philosophical and deep. New Class professionals need vivid
colors with which to distinguish themselves from unspecialized,
unprofessional, non-expert, paradigm-starved commonsense dolts, and
questioning the reality of time is a pretty good identifying mark.
It really does make a difference. A lot of science and philosophy
still seems dedicated to an ahistorical, timeless concept of
unchanging eternal truths like those of mathematics, and thus
incapable of understanding the reality of historical or evolutionary
time. There's quite a large literature on this topic (bibliography
below) from the points of view of physics, evolutionary biology,
history, economics, political philosophy, history of science, and
philosophy, but the authors of this book refer to none of it. In my
opinion the distinction between the historical and the ahistorical
is one that everyone should be aware of and know how to make, but
philosophy seems to incapacitate people for doing so. The authors
violate the Hippocratic maxim: Primum non nocere (" First do no
harm") by leaving their readers stupider than they began.2
NOTES
1. I
would except W.H. Newton-Smith's article "The Beginning of Time"
from the criticisms I'm making here. It seems to be a reasonable
treatment of a real, non-hypothetical question.
2. I will leave this for another time, but the fundamental
indexicality and temporality of every possible observer and every
possible observed object tells us something about why the
timeless-objective-universal view is difficult to reach, and why
universality can be a deceptive ideal, and why claims to
universality are often mistaken or fraudulent. I have sketched my
understanding of indexicality here:
http://www.idiocentrism.com/wittgenstein2.htm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Donald, "Evolutionary Epistomology", in
The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, Open Court, 1974,
pp.415-463.
Campbell, Donald, "Variation and Selective Retention in
Socio-cultural Evolution", in Social Change in Developing Areas,
ed. Barringer, Schenkman, 1965, pp. 19-49.
Eddington, Arthur, The Nature of the Physical World, Gifford
Lectures, 1928
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process, Harvard, 1971.
Gould, Stephen Jay, Time's Cycle, Time's Arrow, Harvard,
1987.
Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life, Norton, 1989.
Gunnell, John, Political Philosophy and Time, Chicago, 1987.
Hartshorne, Charles, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers,
SUNY, 1983.
Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, Bantam 1988.
Hexter, J. H., The History Primer, Basic Books, 1971.
Mirowski, Philip, "From Mandelbrot to chaos in economic theory" and
"Mandelbrot's economics after a quarter-century" in The
Effortless Economy of Science, 2004, Duke.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Stengers, Isabelle, Order out of Chaos,
Bantam, 1984.
Reichenbach, Hans, The Direction of Time, (California, 1956)
Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield, June, The Discovery of Time,
Penguin, 1965.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_arrow
I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
Return to
Idiocentrism
jjmrsnx
|