Of Time and Lamentation by Professor Raymond Tallis

Author:Professor Raymond Tallis [Tallis, Professor Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781911116219
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Published: 2017-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

8.1.4 The reality of the future

I have come to discover, in philosophical discourse with those who are not professional philosophers, that it is very common for people to doubt the reality of the future, and it is very hard to convince them that the future is real.

Smart, “The Reality of the Future”, 141

The future (like the past and the present) has a precarious existence. It has to be other than itself: its contents have to be present in order to be at all and, at the same time, not-present in order to be future; to be present in order to be (of) the future but not in the way that the contents of the present are present. “Tomorrow” is a kind of “impending” tray. Its furniture, as we have discussed, is to some degree present in the present: its objects, ongoing processes, and the laws governing the unfolding of events are to a greater or lesser extent in place. Even so, the future is present only through its representation, its proxies: the anticipated future state of objects or events presented as expectations formulated at a general level. For example, for an object to be invested with a future, O at time t+1 has to be present in some fashion at time t. And for an event to be in the future, E occurring at time t+1 has to have some kind of being at time t. While we acknowledge the difference between the envisaged presence of “‘O at t+1’ at t” and “‘O at t’ at t”, and so are not too readily confused about the ontological status of the future time-slices of objects, we are more prone to be misled in the case of events. We are liable to think that E which occurs at t, already has a kind of existence as a future E at t-1. There is the idea of events “in the wings” as they lie in the future, waiting to strut their moments on the stage of the present, after which they repair to another lot of wings as they take residence in the past. This notion of events as tense tourists is mistaken, but profoundly and illuminatingly so, and it will be addressed in §§8.2.2.2 and 8.2.2.3.

In defending the reality of the future, I have focused on the present existence of its furniture – objects, etc. that are here today and will (almost certainly) not be gone tomorrow – and on the expectations, anticipations, and estimates of probability that discern the future in present furniture. Some would go further than I do in ascribing reality to the future, grounding it in (a) the present reality of future events; and (b) the objective reality of probabilities. A brief look at these is in order.

Smart has argued that future events are real along these lines.11 Imagine a twenty-first century soldier cold, miserable, and suffering from dysentery and being told that some twentieth-century philosophers and others had held that the future (including his suffering) was unreal. He might, Smart suggests, “have some choice things to say”.

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