Philosophy of Time, Where (Rather When) to Start?
(2016) Clinical, Translational & Theoretical Aspects of Neuroscience — Location: Taipei Medical University, Taiwan (13.July.2016)
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- There are two opposing yet mutually dependent trends in the philosophy of time. Genuine time requires becoming and is founded upon the subjective experience of duration. Among other things, the first trend gave us impossibility arguments such as those of Parmenides and McTaggart. If becoming is metaphysically or logically impossible, then time and change cannot exist outside our mind. Even without accepting these arguments, we have to admit that this tradition has serious difficulties to explain what scientists are talking about when they speak about objective time, for example the time of clocks. The second trend, objective time, is as old as philosophy. From the symmetrical co-dependence of time and change in Aristotle’s Physics to the unidirectional necessity of time for change in Newton’s Principia to Einstein’s dynamical space-time, time and change seem irremediably connected. In this tradition, subjective time is understood as deriving from the objective time implemented by changes in the brain, a physical entity submitted to the laws of physics. Until now, an important result of the research program committed to produce an unification between quantum physics (our best theory about matter) and general relativity (our best theory about space-time) incites us to reconsider Einstein’s contribution to the physics of time and, in particular, to discard the dependence between time and change. Change is what is needed for evolution, but change does not need time. In the words of the physicists Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto: “This does not mean that there is no evolution in the world or that there is no change. It means that evolution and change in the real world are too complicated to be well represented as evolution of a single variable”. This result has far reaching consequences since it blocks all apparent possibility to explain subjective time, that involves becoming, on the base of objective time. In the last part of the talk, I will discuss some of the options still available to relate subjective time to objective time.
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Guay, A. (2016). Philosophy of Time, Where (Rather When) to Start? Clinical, Translational & Theoretical Aspects of Neuroscience, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/174617