Time for Philosophers

Travelling to work on this particularly sunny spring morning, I faced the sudden realisation that I was a "Block Universe" theorist. I felt mostly the same; my jaw was still unshaven and belly not uncommonly empty, but now, in this short mater of seconds my ideas were no longer my own and I could be labelled as a a mere member of the eternalist cadre.

Such is the danger of the podcast in the modern age (given that podcasts in all previous ages were no problem whatsoever). One may wake up an honest man- ideas of his own making- and return to the very same bed, a non-reductive physico- Kuhnian -psychoexistentialist, with troublingly liberal, anti-historicist tendencies. I might dare to think that this is all just names, but then suddenly this makes me either a staunch logical positivist or belong to any number of post-modern genera, and I'm stuck in a universe factory.

Today's realisation came about because of a podcast on the nature of time, from the ABC's Philosophers Zone. The discussion took place with Dr David Braddon-Mitchell, who was a philosophy professor of mine at the University of Sydney.

Dr D. B-M: "...the block universe (view) says that all of space and time is one ginormous, eternal thing, and it has parts which are temporal parts, if you like. So the moment that we're in now, is one of the parts, there are lots of future parts, all of which exist, and lots of past parts, all of which exist. So this is the Yes, it's all there view, that's the eternalist view."

I like this view of everything existing as a timeless whole. When combined with ideas emerging from quantum physics suggesting that there is only one kind of stuff, we get a picture that is not unlike the views of some ancient monist philosophers. When one tries to add/reduce consciousness into the picture the ontological (simply, what is) picture gets really interesting.

At the close of the programme, the host, Alan Saunders, read beautifully from T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot

The full programme can be downloaded from the Philosophers Zone website for a short time.