Real Time II

"This is a great book. Real Time 2 is the second version of the book, which he published in (1998?). It’s a treatise on the nature of time which made an enormous impression on me when I first read it. It presents a vision of the world in metaphysical categories. It tells you about the nature of time, the nature of space, things, objects, events, in a way that is connected, but not the same as the physics of time and space. The relationship between the philosophy of time and the physics of time is much closer than what I said earlier about the relationship between the question of change and the question of chemical change, because there’s nothing in science that really tells you about what change is as such. But there are physicists who talk about the nature of time and space. Hugh Mellor is someone who is very informed by those views, and knows the physics of space and time very well. He uses his knowledge of those, and his philosophical arguments, to defend a view of time, where time is rather like space. I think the simplest way to put it is to say that there’s no such thing in reality as now, there’s nothing that marks out in fundamental reality, which time is now, anymore than there’s something that marks out in the fundamental reality of space which place is here. Here is just where I am, and now is just the point in time which we’re thinking or uttering those words, so Hugh Mellor’s view has been called a block universe view of space and time. Block universe in the sense that time is just one of the dimensions of space time. It’s a view that is common in physics, that we should think of space time as a whole, like a four dimensional block. If you imagine things occurring within space time are just regions of that block, four dimensional regions of it, or what sometimes people call space time worms. I don’t know why they say worms really. So, it’s called the block universe because time and space have the same ontological standing, that is to say they exist in exactly the same way. In the first version of Hugh’s book, he called that way of thinking that we have of time — in terms of the past and present and the future — ‘tense.’ In the later version of the book, the book that’s now out and the one that you can get, Real Time 2, he changed his terminology. He changed the terminology back to the very boring terminology of the Cambridge philosopher McTaggart, where the way of thinking in terms of past, present, and future is called the A-series, and the way of thinking of time in terms of events being earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with is called the B-series. This is a typically dreary, boring philosophical label. Hugh changed to that label just because that was the way everyone else in the time community was talking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What I like about this book is its painting of a metaphysical picture. So one way to express Hugh Mellor’s view is that the A-series, what he called tense, that is the way of thinking of time in terms of past and present and future, is not real. Past and present and future are not features of reality, any more than here and there are features, here-ness and there-ness are features of reality. That’s right, they’re products of a particular subjective viewpoint, so when I say that this time is the present, I mean this is the time at which I’m thinking that thought, that’s Hugh Mellor’s view basically. That’s a really good question. In a way it ought to but, in this case, it doesn’t. Some philosophers do think that metaphysics should have that kind of impact on the way you think about yourself actually in the world, and in some areas of metaphysics I think it does. The metaphysics of the mind, which is my main subject, definitely affects the way you think about yourself and your own interaction with the world. I think the metaphysics of time doesn’t. Put it this way, Hugh Mellor’s view of time and the view that many people have, that people who are dead exist timelessly, that they’re still, in some sense, real, that they’re just not in the part of space time that we’re in — for me, that’s no consolation. It’s no consolation that people that I’ve loved who are dead exist in the ultimate block universe sense. I think so, yes, depending on what God was of course. I mean if God is that Christian God, then that ought to affect your life. If God is something ineffable, indescribable that lies behind the phenomena, or something that is the object of mystical contemplation but not the God who loves us as a father loves his children, then I don’t think that does necessarily have any impact. If God is what Tillich called ‘the ground of all our being,’ then I don’t see what the ground of all our being would have to do with the way I live my life. Exactly, Spinoza’s God is the one fundamental substance, the one fundamental reality, which he also called nature."