Cosmological and Psychological Time by Yuval Dolev & Michael Roubach

Author:Yuval Dolev & Michael Roubach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

(vi)Flow: at any given moment, the world seems to be changing, or in flux;

(vii)Passage: when we look back over our histories, we see that what was once future is now present, and what was once present is now past;

(viii)Openness: at any given moment, there is one possible past and many possible futures.6

Giving explicit, non-metaphorical content to each of these properties is no easy matter. For historical reasons centering on the reduction of thermodynamics to the underlying microscopic theory, asymmetry became the focus of concerted attention in the foundations of physics. The topic remains one of the most active areas in foundational research. While there are many open questions, there has been a good deal of progress in finding a physical basis for the asymmetries that characterize the behavior of macroscopic systems. Passage and flow, by contrast, remain shrouded in darkness. They are usually introduced with vague and poetic language. Openness rarely even warrants mention as something to which a sensible content can be assigned. Together, these aspects of temporal experience capture the Heraclitian vision of a universe in process, undergoing an absolute and irreversible process of coming into Being.

To many working in the foundations of physics, discussion of our experience of time is too imprecise and ill-defined to support real research. The most common reaction among those who are committed to physics as the source of ontological belief has been to dismiss the impression of passage, flow or openness as either nonsense or illusion: nonsense, because they are difficult to give non-metaphorical expression to; illusion, because there is nothing in physics that they would seem to describe.7 But since experience is supposed to provide the evidence for our physical theories, physics can’t ultimately avoid the need to connect itself to experience. The relationship between the flowing time of everyday sense and the static manifold of relativistic physics is one of the great, outstanding questions in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe.

In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday experience and the time of physics which treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and, finally, whether this strategy takes passage seriously.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.