That's not my understanding of the deal with the archefossil. My understanding is that it is supposed to demonstrate that we can think in non-phenomenological terms. Highlighting a distinction between the manifest, and scientific image. Brassier's criticism was that the archefossil grants far more than it should to phenomenology, in that it implies a special status, or significance to pre-phenomenological states, as if science doesn't offer equally phenomonologically problematic descriptions of current events.

So, I don't think that an idealist, or phenomenologist has to actually suggest that past events, or pre-perceiving/thinking things events never occurred at all, they must simply hold that the possibility of their thought, comprehension, inference lies in analogy to our experienced events, and world.

Hey, welcome back.

I won't commit to defending everything Schopenhauer says, but I think he's basically right.

I'd answer yes to both questions, and then add 'but it only became true that they were that old at some point in time.' In other words there wasn't always a linear timeline -- that's a temporal development.

This kind of talk does violence to ordinary language notions of tense -- it doesn't make much sense to say that only at a certain point in time did something in the past come to have occurred at that point in time. Natural language seems to view time as quasi-linear and viewable from an 'eternal' perspective. But that's okay -- I think you have to invent technical concepts to do interesting philosophy.

Yeah, I won't ask you to hew to the Schopenhaueran letter.

I don't think any violence is done to common sense by saying e.g. "it was only at some point in time that it became true that Alice was ten years old." Most people would agree. They'd say that the point in time at which it became true that Alice was ten years old was a point ten years after she was born.

So I'm assuming your later characterization is more what you're aiming at: Not that something presently becomes a certain age, but presently comes to have occurred at a certain time in the past.

Is that fair?

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966?

Much of what you say, I agree with. Some of it I don't. For the sake of this thread, I'm not interested in Brassier's criticisms. I'd rather just follow this path where it goes.

So I'm assuming your later characterization is more what you're aiming at: Not that something presently becomes a certain age, but presently comes to have occurred at a certain time in the past. — csalisbury

Yeah, so the right formulation would be 'it was only at some point in time that Alice came to have become ten years old in 1987,' or something like that. That doesn't make much sense if the timeline is fixed.

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966? — csalisbury

When time became linear and quantifiable. Schopenhauer seems to treat it as an all at once thing, once presentation exists it has its necessary forms which includes time. But I doubt there is any non-human animal that experiences time linearly in the appropriate way, and certainly there are none that can quantify it (in fact, some humans cannot even really quantify in the way we think of it, or so the anthropological reports seem to suggest).

A realist is going to say time was quantifiable all along, it just took us a while to gain the skills to do it. That's probably the crux of the debate.

Did time become linear and quantifiable before or after 1966?

Before, since there were already calendars by then. The retrospective structure makes it so that once time became quantifiable, in retrospect that event had to have happened at a certain point in linear time (this is basically just what Schop says).

When exactly? I don't know, at some point near the end of evolutionary history -- linear roughly when you can think in tense, and quantifiable roughly when you have numeral terms and apply them to a cycle.

It would follow, then, that the time at which it became true that the artifact came into being in 1966 was a time well before 1966. Do you agree?

Good question, but I don't think any particular answer follows from what I've said. If you think the future is always genuinely open, even if you don't have these Schopenhauer-like positions, then the answer will be 'no' no matter what. If you think the future is determined, then the answer would be 'yes' no matter what. Other people think that temporal evaluation is relative in this sense that prior to 1966, there would have been no fact of the matter, but post-1966 (as it is now), the answer is yes. In other words it seems orthogonal to this position.

Also, to get the tense right, you'd have to say 'the time at which it became true that the artifact would come into being in 1966.'

(I'm sincerely glad you're not taking an eternalist position. That would've bummed me out to no end.) I think what I said follows exactly from what you've said. I asked at what point in time it became true that the artifact came into being in 1966. You said "when time became linear and quantifiable." I asked whether time became linear and quantifiable before or after 1966 and you answered well before. Where am I going wrong?

Well, you're switching the tenses. Now that it's past 1966, asking:

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966? — csalisbury

Is fine, assuming we don't go back before 1966. But once you do, you need to change the past tense to a past-future with would. So it would be:

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact would come into being in 1966?

Asked this way, answering 'before 1966, of course' is perfectly intelligible, assuming you've just got a standard deterministic position about time once linearized. So yeah, I'd say it follows, but if you don't keep the tenses straight you might think there's a problem with the philosophical position that really arises from weird grammar.

Just to make sure I'm clear: you take a standard deterministic position about time once linearized?

I think the question is orthogonal, but if you wanted to make things as simple as possible you could assume a deterministic position, with one linear timeline. So it was true in 1955 that the artifact would come into existence in 1966 (even though we might not have been able to know this in 1955 because we can't tell the future), and so on.

For the realist, it is not the quantifiable time at stake, but rather the moment of the past. The states of the world, which we sometimes talk about, which were present before any quantified them or experienced anything about them.

What's at stake in the case of a fossil is the moment when it when its creature lived, not that's been quantified (that's done entirely in the present).

Schop doesn't take the argument far enough. It's not just our present which has no beginning or end. That's true of every moment, including the lives of fossilised creatures, the formation of planets or the presence of mountains. Realism is concerned about the existence of things without the presence of experience (which we sometimes know of in our present) not whether they are quantified or not. You and Schop are still stuck treating these lived moments as if they are points on a linear time.

I don't think it's orthogonal. If you don't take the deterministic position, then, tenses aside, the question of when it became true that the artifact would/did come into being in 1966 is *not* the moment time became linear

Why not? You mean because if you're not a determinist, it might not be true until 1966 itself? But why does that matter? Schop talks about retrojection into the past, which is fixed whether you're a determinist or not. Maybe talking about the future is confusing things?

It's xxx x b.c. there may or not be an artifact x that comes about in 1966. It could go either way. How can a statement in xxxx bc about x's date of creation be true? or false?

TGW is smuggling in the future perspective there: he knows the artifact came into being in 1966, so he is aware that in 1955 it was true the artifact would come to exist in 1966.

There is one truth here: is the artifact come into being, there was a moment when it was there, in 1966. Our knowledge of the event or what happened prior doesn't matter to this truth. Logically, it was that moment defines the presence of the artifact in1966. The presence of the artifact can't be cited as necessary (inevitable, going to happen in the future) be any prior state or moment on a linear timeline.

That depends -- a determinist will say it was true even then that it would come about in 1966 -- the fact that you didn't (or maybe couldn't) know that doesn't change the fact that it was true.

A non-determinist might say that at that point, it was neither true nor false that it would come about in 1966.

But these issues have to be resolved regardless of whether you talk about Schopenhauer's retrojection of the past.

Ok drop Schop for now. Do you side with the determinist or the non-determinist?

I'm inclined to believe the determinist. It's plausible that something like 'It will rain' means 'at a future time, it rains [tenseless],' and if such a thing is neither true or false when we say it, it boggles the mind why we would ever say, or argue about, such things. Yet we talk about the future and can be wrong about it now -- how could we be, if there is no determinate future to be wrong about? You can try to get around all this with some fancy formal tricks, but I'm not clear on why that's necessary.

In other words, the indeterminist seems to be committed to the felicity of things like 'It will rain, but that's not true, of course.'

It's a complex question and tbh one that I think is more a linguistic matter about how tense functions in language and not that interesting metaphysically.

However, treating the future as determinate is only an artifact of the present linearization of time, which itself will eventually be undone. So there is a deeper sense in which the future is indeterminate -- it is (or is treated as being) determinate only for the present. Schop. would say it's just part of the way we cognize, to enforce a linear form on it -- but this is just representative of our cognitive faculties (in my case, of our present temporal conventions, themselves subject to temporal change).

As stated here, I side with neither (or both), for they are both wrong (and right).

The determinist is right because what ever happens in the future will happen. There is always a truth of what is going to happen. We just don't know it most of the time. Yet, the form of determinism you seem to be discussing here is also wrong, because those future events are not an inevitable outcome of what happened before. At any time, anything may or may not happen. The future which will happen is only defined in the moment of its occurrence.

Just as the non-determinist argues, what happens is always in the process of becoming. They are, however, wrong there is no truth about what will happen in the future. In a world where an artifact is created in 1966, the truth of that moment remains even in previous years, for it is about what happens at that point in 1966 rather than anything that's true about a past year.

When I say it won't rain tomorrow and it rains tomorrow, was I really already wrong at the moment I said it wouldn't rain? That's not clear to me. I can look back, knowing it will rain and say I was wrong then . In any case future events fall along a probabilistic spectrum. At xxxx bc, X's coming into being in 1966 is at the far end of that spectrum.Do you think the precise way in which linear time ends is implicit in the conditions at its birth?

Such analysis is doomed to failure becasue you are treating moments as if they all together in one moment of a linear timeline.

To this question there is no "when." You are either wrong or right. In the moment of tomorrow, it either rains or it doesn't. There is no point where you change form being possibility right, to possibly wrong, to right, or to wrong.

At any time, you are both possibility right and possibly wrong (as it may or may not rain tomorrow) and either right (if it rains) or wrong (if it does not).

When I say it won't rain tomorrow and it rains tomorrow was I really already wrong at the moment I said it wouldn't rain? — csalisbury

It seems to me yes. A lot of philosophers dispute this, so maybe people don't have robust intuitions on this issue. But yes, I'd say clearly you were wrong then -- you said it would rain, and it didn't. In fact I can contest you at the prediction time and tell you you're wrong. If we all knew that future statements could never be true or false at the time of utterance, such a dispute would be literally nonsensical, and we'd all have to be massively ignorant abut how our own language works. It makes the ability to talk about the future, and the point of it, a sort of mystery. If the indeterminist were right it seems to me we'd never make future claims or argue about the future, but just wait around til things happened and only then dare to talk about them.

That's not clear to me. I can look back, knowing it will rain and say I was wrong then . — csalisbury

There is some recent work by a guy named John MacFarlane that takes this stance about future claims, and essentially says that when uttered, they have no truth value, but when assessed from after the time the event happens, they retrospectivey become 'true all along.' Very wild stuff -- I'm just not sure how accurately it tracks actual linguistic behavior.

Surely without doing some sort of weird logic, to say you were wrong then is the same thing as to say 'you're wrong now' at the time of utterance. Otheriwse, you're saying you were wrong then, but weren't wrong then (!) Not that this can't be reconciled with formal tricks, but the question is, do you want to.

In any case future events fall along a probabilistic spectrum. At xxxx bc, X coming into being in 1966 is at the far end of that spectrum. — csalisbury

A determinist is just going to deny that, though. It either will happen or it won't. You might assign subjective probabilities based on your information, but that only reflects your ignorance, not a metaphysical indeterminacy.

Do you think the end of linear time is totallu enfolded in its birth? — csalisbury

Sort of, yeah. The way we're forced to think about time in our present temporal conventions makes us see it as linear and determined, because of the way we have to think about cause and effect. But again, I think these are only present conventions that will disappear, and so will the linear timeline. And even in the present, I tend to think of these things as just conventions, of a sort -- if you like they're dictated by the logic of our language and customs, but don't have any interesting 'reality' outside of that. They're like maxims or rules for how to think about things -- if you place yourself within those rules, you have to follow them.

I'm gonna be a total dick right now bc I don't care. If you have any questions related to this thread, please start another thread and post them there.

Think I'm done for the night. Posts are getting more intricate and i'm (1) posting on my phone from a bar and (2) drinking. Down to take it from here tomorrow though

I'm not dealing in questions. I'm commenting on what both your accounts are missing and why you keep stumbling over questions of determinism and indeterminism.

TGW's approach to determinism in their last post is pretty good. Though, I don't think it will satisfy you becasue it doesn't go into the metaphysical indeterminism which accounts for the possibility of any logically coherent existing state at anytime. Your aversion to TGW's analysis seems to be the idea determinism eliminates possibility.


Anyway, if you just want to keep going in circles with TGW, I'll leave you to it.

Throw me to the circles!