Reichenbach on Time

Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time threw quite a monkey wrench into my ongoing investigation, for two reasons. First, even though Reichenbach is counted as a logical positivist and thus is a member of my least favorite philosophical school, he came to approximately the same conclusions about time that I did. And second, why was Prigogine’s book such a revelation to me, when Reichenbach had essentially solved the problem? (Or as far as that goes, what about the three authors here who argue for “the unreality of time” -- long after the publication of Reichenbach’s book?)  

Reichenbach died in 1953 and the last chapter of his book was never written, but a conclusion has been patched in from another work, and it is consistent with what came earlier. His conclusion, roughly, is that “common sense is right” and consistent with physics (p.17). He sums up the common sense understanding of time roughly as follows: The past is determined and knowable and cannot be influenced by our actions now; the future is undetermined, imperfectly knowable, and can be influenced by our actions now. There are records of the past, but no records of the future. The present is “now” and is between the past and the future. The past never returns; we always move toward the future and away from the past. The present is “token-reflexive” (what have I called “indexical”) and is defined in reference to an observer or registering instrument -- for example, a human mind.  
 
"The present, which separates the future from the past, is the moment when that which was undetermined becomes determined, and ‘becoming’ has the same meaning as ‘becoming determined….The birth from an atomic chaos endows the statistical cosmos with a time of exactly those properties which common sense and everyday experience have always regarded as intrinsic characteristics of time flow." (pp. 269-70; note that “chaos” here does not have the technical meaning the word later acquired, though Reichenbach’s anticipation is tantalizing). 

Reichenbach also rejected determinism, for reasons coming partly from quantum theory and partly from thermodynamics.  Indeterminacy and the irreversibility of history were major philosophical themes around 1950 – Popper and Whitehead understood time much as Reichenbach did. My guess is that changes in the social sciences after 1950 or so tended to smuggle determinism back in, though the determinist claim was seldom explicitly made or systematically argued. Psychology, economics, and analytic philosophy, in particular, all strenuously tried to eliminate all signs of history to produce timeless universal truths like those of physics and mathematics. However, but historicity (or path-dependence) is an inevitable outcome of contingency and irreversibility.  (Mirowski has written about economics from this point of view). Thus, when Prigogine and Mandelbrot came along saying something not much different than what Reichenbach and Popper had said only two decades or so earlier, it seemed new.   

I also think that, compared to Popper and Reichenbach, Prigogine more fully drew out the philosophical or generalist consequences the historicity, contingency, and irreversibility resulting from quantum theory and thermodynamics. Prigogine has been sharply criticized for his (apparently unsuccessful) claim to have found historicity and time at the fundamental level of physics. The fundamental scientific principles Prigogine argues from had apparently already been established by Boltzman, Poincaré, and others, long before Prigogine came along. However, Prigogine interested me not as a scientist (which I am not) but as a philosopher. What Prigogine gave me was not thermodynamics but an interpretation of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics and Poincaré’s three-body problem had been around for decades when Prigogine (and Mandelbrot) began their work, but when scientific ideologies were constructed these areas (in contrast to quantum theory and relativity) tended to be neglected (put in the back of the book, as Prigogine said, or condemned as monsters, according to Mandelbrot). My guess is that this is because the philosophical interpretations quantum theory and relativity were exciting and made science seem even more powerful, whereas thermodynamics and fractals were confusing and seemed to put limits on what science could do.

As I understand, the conservative principles of the fundamental level of physics (cosmology and subatomic physics) do not apply to entities existing within the thermodynamic world. In other words, fundamental physics is fundamental in one sense, and not in another. All things are ultimately made up of subatomic particles, but none of the things of our experience can be described in terms of the fundamental laws of physics governing subatomic particles -- new laws operative only in the thermodynamic world are needed.

Appendix
 
Werner Heisenberg was a contemporary of Popper, Whitehead, and Reichenbach who came to somewhat the same conclusions.  
 
Interviewer: How does quantum mechanics deal with time flow or does it in fact say anything at all about it?

Heisenberg: ”I would have to repeat what C. von Weizsäcker said in his papers: that time is the precondition of quantum mechanics, because we want to go from one experiment to another, that is from one time to another. But this is too complicated to go into in detail. I would simply say that the concept of time is really a precondition of quantum theory.” [What I understand him to mean is that quantum physicists live and record their results within time, though the entities they study are timeless.] 

Interviewer: Is there a fundamental level of reality?

Heisenberg: ”That is just the point; I do not know what the words 'fundamental reality' mean. They are taken from our daily life situation where they have a good meaning, but when we use such terms we are usually extrapolating from our daily lives into an area very remote from it, where we cannot expect the words to have a meaning. This is perhaps one of the fundamental difficulties of philosophy: that our thinking hangs in the language. Anyway, we are forced to use the words so far as we can; we try to extend their use to the utmost, and then we get into situations in which they have no meaning.”

Turbulence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

| http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Heisenberg.html

 I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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