A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time by Bardon Adrian

Author:Bardon, Adrian. [Bardon, Adrian.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-08-01T11:20:06.909000+00:00

A B R I E F H I S TO RY O F T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F T I M E

Figure 5.1. Ink diff using in water. Th is process could spontaneously occur in reverse without violating any natural laws.

randomly heading in that direction at the same time. Further, even

if something so unlikely should happen, we would not want to say

that the liquid was moving backward in time. It would just be a case

of a process working in an improbable manner.

Now suppose that, by wild happenstance, all processes similarly

trended in an orderly manner, such that the whole universe, over time,

became a more orderly place. * Would this constitute a reversal of time itself? It would only if we give up on the idea of a fi xed direction of time.

Giving up on this idea, it seems to me, is just to give up on a real direction of time. It would also seem arbitrary to say that time is reversed

if the whole universe becomes more orderly, but it isn’t reversed for

any particular subsystem that becomes more orderly. Identifying time

with the thermodynamic arrow thus would make the direction of time

a contingent, local, and potentially temporary phenomenon.

THE CAUSAL ANALYSIS

Finally, there is the causal arrow, which, like time, is asymmetric:

According to the ordinary notion of cause, causes always precede

* Notice that I said “ became a more orderly place,” which presumes a direction of time. Th is is

a consequence of lacking a convenient language that doesn’t include dynamic temporal ideas as part of its structure.

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T H E A R R O W O F T I M E

their eff ects. Leibniz was the fi rst to formally propose that time’s

arrow is to be understood in terms of causation. Leibniz, the reader

may recall, was a temporal relationist. He described time simply as

“the order of non-contemporaneous things.” Like Aristotle, he felt

that time was not something real in itself, but was rather our way of

representing or measuring change. Here is Leibniz explaining how

thinking in terms of time order is itself merely our way of representing causal dependency:

• If many states of things are assumed to exist, none of which involves its opposite, they are said to exist simultaneously . Th

us we deny

that the events of last year are simultaneous with those of this

year, for they involve opposite states of the same thing.

• If one of two states that are not simultaneous involves the reason for the other, the former is held to be earlier, the latt er to be later .

My earlier state involves the reason for the existence of my

later state. And since, because of the connection of all things,

my earlier state involves the earlier state of the other things

as well, it also involves the reason for the later state of those

other things, so that my earlier state is in fact earlier than their

later state too. And therefore whatever exists is either simultane-

ous with, earlier than, or later than some other given existent .

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