Suppose that Jones made a decision that he would wake up early in the morning. However, some seconds later, his decision does not exist. This scenario is based on presentism. — quine
Presentism will delete your every experience occurred in the past. — quine
Presentism is the view that only present time exists. — quine
If presentism were right, then mental events in the past time did not exist. — quine
Presentism will delete your every experience occurred in the past. — quine
No, your tense is wrong. Do, not did. What I did yesterday existed, it impacted the present, but it no longer exists. The effects are still felt. — Hanover
Presentism is dumb because it wants to make everything happen at this very moment, but things don't happen at a moment. (When's the present? the current planck whatever? the current nanosecond? second? minute? doesn't experience itself happen over time? How long does it take neurons to fire?) — csalisbury
Do any of the options (including the 'growing block') make any difference to how we act? They seem to me like unsolvable word games. — mcdoodle
You can't get time in the abstract, you have to look to your experience. And if you actually do that (instead of mining your experience to support a thesis, examining it through a premeditated lens) its all there, very simple. The past is past, the present is present, the future is future. It's not mystical - its common sense. — csalisbury
But maybe there is a way of interpreting relativistic time frames that doesn't support block theory of time? — Marchesk
The problem here is that GR would seem to support some form of eternalism. — Marchesk
Today obviously is a thick present. If what is present is whatever can be synthesized in experience for purpose of empirical investigation or practical reasoning (e.g. assessment of present opportunities for action) then there is no a priori limit to how thick the present can be as it might be conceived to appear in the middle of some essentially subjective A-Series.
So are you suggesting the B series is theoretically collapsible into the A series, probably no, but then where is the measure, how thick can a moment be before it is history? What separates the flow of time from its chronology. I don't think the experience of a moment can be separated into present, past and future, they stab too much into each other. — Cavacava
Do you think that time's flow requires an individual self that can experience that flow. Seems as though there would have to be some point of reference to experience time as a flow if time's flowing is not an illusion or a physical limitation.
In other words, the mathematical apparatus of a physical theory can be couched entirely in the vocabulary of B Series alone
So then the concept of time is not needed for what mathematicians do, it becomes a question of frequency and repetition for them, not time. For the mathematician it is the manipulation of mathematical expressions in space? They don't try to capture the richness of the experience of a moment, only its basic abstraction. — Cavacava
The other conception of the B series is historical, what happened in a chronological or some other type of order, say cyclic, it seems to be more about time as we more commonly understand it.
This is not quite what I was arguing. I wasn't contrasting the language of pure mathematics with the language of ordinary experience. I was rather contrasting the language of mathematical physics, and of other so-called exact sciences, with the language that one must make use of in order to bring to bear physical laws (couched in terms of B Series -- universal law statements) to the results gathered from actual experimental setups (couched in terms of A Series -- actualizations of real powers). There has to occur a translation from claims reliant on a metaphysics of isolated 'event' (magnitudes of physical values at space-time locations) and Humean causation to claims reliant on a metaphysics of 'substances' (or 'continuants') and their powers in order that the former claims may become empirically meaningful (and hence objective).
It is a point of view that abstracts away from the identity relatons that hold between the temporal 'stages' of the powerful actors, and which seek to externalize or reduce their specific powers to universal laws of causation that hold between structureless events. It's a vain attempt to achieve a God's eye view on the empirical world.
Suppose that Jones made a decision that he would wake up early in the morning. However, some seconds later, his decision does not exist. — quine
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