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ABSTRACT
It is taken as obvious that there is a conflict between objective temporal passage and relativistic physics. The traditional formulation of temporal passage is the movement of a universe-wide set of simultaneous events known as the NOW; the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) implies that there is no NOW and therefore no temporal passage. The vast majority of those who accept the B-theory blockworld—the metaphysics of time most friendly to relativistic physics—deny that time passes. I argue that this denial is a mistake. Contrary to overwhelmingly popular opinion, temporal passage does not need a NOW. To show this, I defend a relational understanding of temporal becoming, that I call B-coming, in which an event y B-comes with respect to x iff Rxy. Temporal passage is then the difference in what has B-come at one point in a thing’s history with respect to what has B-come at an earlier point in that thing’s history. Appealing to this kind of relation is a strategy that is well-known but has been widely dismissed. This dismissal is premature; I show that the essential elements of temporal passage do not necessarily require a NOW. There can be passage without presentness.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Note that a third option is growing in popularity: namely, the option of denying that we even have an experience of time’s passage. See Hoerl [Citation2014] and Miller, Holcombe, and Latham [Citation2020] for proponents of this type of view.
2 Among the few who defend a combination of time’s passage and the B-theory blockworld are Mellor [Citation1998], Dieks [Citation2006], Maudlin [Citation2007], Mozersky [Citation2013, Citation2015], and Oaklander [Citation2015]. Mellor claims that passage can be understood as the change in the truth-value of tensed propositions. Dieks considers passage to be nothing more than the temporal ordering of events. Maudlin, in contrast, believes that the passage of time is primitive and unanalysable (and so he does not endorse a deflationary account). Mozersky encourages the B-theorist to understand passage as nothing more than ordinary change. Last, Oaklander believes in a robust account according to which the becoming relation is primitive and unanalysable. As is clear below, I argue that passage must be something more than all of these things. Savitt [Citation2002, Citation2006, Citation2009] and Dorato [Citation2006] argue for a view similar to Dieks’s, but they do not recognise a genuine ontological difference between the three-dimensional world and a four-dimensional one.
3 Included in the theory is the assumption that space is homogenous and isotropic—the same in all regions and all directions.
4 See Saunders [Citation2002] for a detailed discussion of this conflict between STR and A-theory.
5 For a strategy rejecting STR, see Monton [Citation2011]. For a strategy altering STR, see Tooley [Citation1997]. For a strategy augmenting STR, see Zimmerman [Citation2011]. The A-theorist option has been considered in detail elsewhere (see, for example, Pooley [Citation2013]), and so I refrain from wading into the debate here.
6 For an example of this strategy, see Paul [Citation2010].
7 There is good reason to believe that passage is not an illusion. As Dieks [Citation2006:157] remarks, ‘It is a central aspect of our ordinary concept of time that history unfolds and that events come into being. It is only natural to take this seriously.’ See also Maudlin [Citation2007] and Norton [Citation2010] for discussion of the rejection of passage as illusion. It is beyond the scope of this paper to properly consider this position.
8 In addition, there might be reasons why one might not even want the concept of a NOW involved in the formulation of passage. I, along with others, hold that the A-theory understanding of passage is incoherent. Thus, I consider the abandonment of the NOW in a theory of passage to be a feature, rather than a bug. This discussion, however, is outside the scope of the paper. See Mozersky [Citation2015].
9 Oaklander [Citation2015] makes a similar point that an A-theory ontology is not necessary for passage.
10 This first definition is called the reality-acquisition model of temporal becoming. It is more widely known as absolute becoming (see Broad [Citation1923]). The second definition of temporal becoming is labelled as the property-acquisition model of temporal becoming. Note that the unreality of future events is often taken as the central requirement for temporal becoming in order to preserve the intuition that the future is open. But the unreality of the future—or even the indeterminacy of the future—need not be a necessary condition for temporal becoming. This is supported by the fact that there are other versions of temporal becoming, such as the property-acquisition model in the moving spotlight view (see Skow [Citation2015] or Cameron [Citation2015]), that do not require the openness of the future.
11 This is essentially the same idea as Dieks’s [Citation2006] accepting that passage is the successive coming to being of events.
12 Note that this is why tenseless passage cannot merely be reduced to ‘ordinary change’ (as in Mozersky’s [Citation2013, Citation2015] view). It seems that the concepts of ordinary change and temporal change come apart in the traditional understanding of time and change, and the third essential element of the passage of time reflects this.
13 Note that this is the way in which Dorato [Citation2006] understands his concept of ‘relational becoming’.
14 This formulation is from Bigaj [Citation2008: 230].
15 Clifton and Hogarth [Citation1995] extend Stein’s result and show that R could also be the relation of chronological connectability—events located inside an event’s light cone (i.e. excluding the events to which it is timelike-related).
16 For Stein, the notion of temporal becoming is identified with becoming definite in order for him to be able to divide the world into the open future and the settled past. But this characterisation of temporal becoming can be dropped once the commitment to an open future is abandoned. Thus, one can accept R as temporal becoming without imbuing it with any flavour of definiteness.
17 Keep in mind that this special metaphysical status is not reducible to a special epistemic or perceptual status. The events that have B-come with respect to x are metaphysically privileged with respect to x even if x is not capable of knowledge or experience. The metaphysical privilege conferred by the causal connectability of the B-coming relation does explain why an observer can have knowledge of or experience events that have B-come (but not of events that have not B-come).
18 This first type of option is proposed by Maudlin [Citation2007]. The second type of option is similar to how Oaklander [Citation2015] understands his R-relation.
19 Earman [Citation2008: 159] makes this complaint about the passage offered by Dieks [Citation2006], and would probably make the same complaint about B-coming.
20 Thus, it seems clear that the direction of time is playing a crucial role in the passage of time. But this is why it is one of the three essential elements of temporal passage as outlined above. Compare this view to Maudlin’s seeming to think that having an intrinsic direction of time is equivalent to temporal passage: ‘The passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world’ [Citation2007: 108]. On the other hand, the direction of time (either intrinsic or extrinsic) is necessary for temporal passage on my account, but it is not sufficient for establishing the passage of time. This seems to accord with our intuitions that temporal passage is something more than having a temporal direction; it also involves temporal becoming and change.
21 I assume that I can address objects, observers, and temporally extended events equally without any impact on the conclusion of my argument. I refer to these together, loosely under the not-altogether-accurate label ‘things’, although the label is good enough for my purposes.
22 Notice that I go from t0 to t3 to t6. This is merely to show clearly the difference in the points of view between the times. The change technically goes from t0 to t1 to t2 to t3, and so on. If the diagrams showed the light cones from t1, t2, and t3 stacked on top of each other, it would merely look as if the edge of the light cone became thicker.
23 In addition, I maintain that this tenseless passage is phenomenologically adequate, although I do not have the space here to fully defend this claim. The causal nature of the B-coming relation makes the account particularly amenable to a theory of accumulating memories in the style similar to Mellor’s [Citation1998: ch. 11] proposal. In general, change in what has B-come along a worldline causes the accumulation of memories of what has B-come, thus taking us into what we consider the future, thereby laying the grounds for the experience of the transience of time.
24 This is the same kind of objection against B-coming outlined above, but instead as applied to the concept of tenseless passage.
25 This is the complaint against Dieks’s [Citation2006] temporal ordering account of the passage of time that is self-admittedly deflationary. Specifically, Dieks [ibid.: 171] asserts that temporal ‘becoming is nothing but the happening of events, in their temporal order.’ Because part of what it means to be an event—for an event to exist—is for it to occur or happen, the ‘occurrence’ or ‘happening’ of an event is equivalent to an event merely existing. This existence of events as temporally ordered is then what gets us the ‘successive occurrence of events’ that defines our traditional conception of temporal passage.
26 This is similar to a complaint raised by (but not endorsed by) Deng [Citation2017: 240]. She states that one could understand an adequate account of passage in terms of ‘metaphysical privilege’ being transferred from time to time.
27 See Savitt [Citation2009] as someone who offers an account of passage by appealing to a tenseless analog of the succession of NOWs. More specifically, Savitt appeals to the ‘specious present’ which is the is the duration of time of which we are immediately aware. Savitt calls this the ‘Alexandroff present’. This is defined as the set of events between the intersection of the future light cone of event a, and the past light cone of event b, where the interval from a to b forms a worldline segment (from past to future). The succession of these Alexandroff presents along a worldline then comprises the passage of time, on Savitt’s view. I consider this succession of Alexandroff presents as compatible with my account, but in my attempt to reject the centrality that the concept of the NOW plays in passage, I would not frame tenseless passage in this way. In addition, in dropping the Alexandroff present from the picture, I avoid the common complaint that the Alexandroff interval is of arbitrary length and thus the Alexandroff present is itself arbitrary.
28 I thank the anonymous referees for their careful (and generous!) comments on previous iterations of this article.