Since writing these two essays, and indeed even before that, I have been trying to formulate a metaphysical account of time that acknowledges the reality of past and future events without reducing them to what is actually present — a philosophical view known as presentism — but without losing the distinctive character of the past and future as compared to the present. In McTaggart’s well-worn terminology, this would amount to an A-theory of time that preserves the notion of ‘the present’ as being ontologically significant, as opposed to a B-theoretic account, which reduces the notions of past, present and future to the fixed and unchanging relations of before and after. In general, I am more attracted to the A-theory of time since as it seems to fit our everyday experience of and talk about time more closely, and accounts for the apparently profound asymmetry between temporality and the three dimensions of space. (The B-theorist envisages time to consist of fourth ‘temporal dimension’, and is reminiscent of four-dimensional accounts of spacetime, but without the bendiness.)

After having tried to describe the view that I’ve come up with so far to someone the other day and failing miserably, I thought I’ve have another go at it here to see whether it makes any more sense in print. The idea is essentially this. Past, present and future events co-exist in the sense that they are all part of what we might call ‘the world’ or reality. However, what makes past or future facts true is different to what makes present facts true. So far, so good, but this is where it starts to get weird. On my view, past and future events have a different mode of being (for want of a better expression), of which there are many, corresponding to something’s being in the far future, the near future, the immediate or distant past, and so on (those of you who have seen my essay on adverbialism about time may recognise the similarity). Accordingly, objects and events that exist ‘in the present’, so to speak — spot the spatial metaphor! — exist in a fairly straightforward way, and we are able to ‘read off’ the truth or falsity of facts concerning them in a more or less direct way. In other words, there is no epistemic gap between what exists and what we can know about it (assuming that we can know anything — previous posts notwithstanding!). With past and future events, however, things get a little more complex.

To explain how this works, imagine a circular jar (I was going to say a vat, but that might confuse things!) of some extremely syrupy and gelatinuous liquid. Now imagine a blob of coloured dye placed at some point around the edge of the liquid in the jar, such as a blob of ink, for example. Finally, imagine a rotating arm or blade that moves through the liquid such that each time it rotates, it moves slightly further up (or down) the container. The movement of the rotor would therefore ‘smear’ the ink throughout the gel, turning it (the ink) from a single point-like blob to a continuous thread that extends throughout the liquid. As the blade moves up or down, the ink would become distributed throughout the gel in a manner quite unlike the original blob, but in way that retains some continuity with its original form. Indeed, if the system were perfectly deterministic then reversing the direction of the rotor (i.e. the direction of time) would reassemble the original blob from its stretched out form, showing that no information had been lost, but rather merely distributed in a different fashion. In case you wonder where all of this is going, the ink blob is supposed to be analogous to an event within (present) reality, which corresponds to the entire volume of liquid. The effects of the rotor simulates the passage of time acting upon the blob, causing it to change form until it becomes virtually unrecognisable. The blob still exists, but it does so in a different manner, or ‘mode’, to use the above terminology, from its original form.

This (admittedly rather bizarre) example is actually taken from David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, although he uses it for a slightly different purpose. The thing that I think it illustrates rather nicely is the way that the form of an event changes through time as its effects become more widely distributed and ‘diffuse’ within reality. Up to a point, we can track the existence of the event as being identifiably the same event — i.e. that blob of ink — which still exists for us by way of its manifest effects (the ink trail). Once further transformations have occurred, it may become impossible to say exactly what the event looked like or from whence it originated, but we can still infer its existence from the discolouration of the gel, for example, i.e. by its effects upon present reality (which is not to say that it exists in the same form as a present event, but rather that its pastness is manifest in present reality). This state of affairs illustrates a more distantly past mode of being, and so on until all trace of the event is virtually eradicated. However, even then we would want to say that there is a fact of the matter about whether the event occurred or not. This is a problem for many purely presentist descriptions of temporal reality, since as soon as all traces of an occurrence are wiped out, or become so diffuse so as to be undetectable, then they can no longer be said to ‘exist’ in the present. On my view, however, even very distantly past (or future) events possess a modified form of existence such that it should be possible to construe them as exist indefinitely, not merely by way of their manifest effects but by their being partly constitutive of reality. In other words, the way things are now is entirely due to the way things have been such that the present is itself a manifestation of past and future events.

This is, of course, all very speculative, but I believe that there may be a way of working this out so that there is a definite fact of the matter about events with which we no longer have any epistemic access (e.g. the number of times I blinked yesterday). This is much more plausible than the alternative since, even for facts that are no longer decidable, we want to resist the idea that there is no longer any fact of the matter; i.e. it is neither true nor false that such-and-such an event occurred (I believe this was Michael Dummett’s position until a few years ago when he changed his mind — or so I’m told).

The upshot of all this metaphorical tomfoolery is a view of reality in which the pastness, presence and futurity of events is a constantly changing and shifting compound but without there being an existent ‘past’ or ‘future’ sitting out there in the fourth (i.e. temporal) dimension. Reality is all here right now — it’s just a matter of which events are currently ‘in focus’, as it were (another useful metaphor). This resists the urge to ‘spatialise’ time by treating times as if they were places since there are no ‘parts’ of reality that are exclusively assigned to the past or present. Strange as it may sound, this view of time is, I think, much more in tune with everyday experience, although perhaps not the way that we spatialise time by means of clocks, calendars, etc. More notably, it opens up the possibility of our having direct epistemic access to the past and future, since they exist right here in and amongst the present, which is not to say that they are present in the temporal sense. Rather, the past and future can, in a very important sense, be said to constitute the present, since present events are merely a manifestation of the past and future in their current state of temporal unfolding (to coin a phrase), all of which seems to sit rather well with the Heideggerian phenomenology of time, if you’re interested in that kind of thing (which I am).

Of course, there are many potential problems with this type of view, not least the issue of how to account for the possibility of events that have no causal effects, or whose effects cancel each other out such that present reality would be consistent with their never having happened. Does it make sense to say that such events really exist, or that they form part of the past when pastness is constituted in terms of its causal relation to the present? It all depends upon how you flesh out the details of what it means to be past, but perhaps there is a sense in which such events can be said to ‘drop out of’ reality — although that’s a somewhat awkward bullet for any view of time to have to bite, especially in the case of multiple events that cancel each other out. There may also be problems with giving causation such a prominent role, not least since it is notoriously difficult to define in its own right. Furthermore, it had better not turn out to be the case that causation is itself defined in terms of temporal order otherwise the whole thing starts to become dangerously circular. Again, it may be possible to avoid this by adopting a different account of what pastness consists in, or by making causation primitive and time secondary, rather than the other way around, but this will need some thinking about.

You may have noticed that the above view gives existence to both past and future events — the latter of which may be somewhat controversial given questions about free will and determinism. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be part of my view that the future is already fixed by the present state of affairs, and yet it does seem right to say that certain events, i.e. those that are more or less inevitable, already exist ‘in the future’, as it were. Ideally, I would want to develop the view in such a way that it is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism (although in light of the nature of quantum mechanics, as well as the whole free will debate, my money is on the latter option). Either way, the notion of future events being ‘in’ the present is not entirely without precedent, since there is a strong link between the notion of possibility and that of futurity such that we sometimes experience future events becoming more and more actual until they finally manifest themselves in the present. (I don’t mean when things are actually moving towards us, but rather the progression from possibility to actuality as an event becomes more fully ‘realised’ or manifest in the present, although many such examples do involve some form of spatial movement as well.)

As you can see, there are many aspects of the theory — if I can call it a theory — that still need to be worked out, but I think that the basic idea has potential and hope to be able to develop it further through the work I’m doing for my M.Litt. dissertation on the metaphysics and phenomenology of temporal passage. I very much suspect that others have already developed similar theories, perhaps in the guise of a modified form of presentism, in which case I’d very much like to hear about it as it would help me to refine my views. I’d also like to come up with a catchy name for the position — neutral realism? modal presentism? enfolded temporality? — which is always a nice way to promote a new idea. Superficialities aside, however, it does seem to fit with a lot of stuff I’ve read on time, both from a metaphysical and experiential point of view, as well as arguably fitting our pre-theoretical intuitions of time and temporal passage more closely than the traditional ‘dimensional’ model. In any case, it’s a view that I think could be developed in some interesting ways, and might even help to address some long standing philosophical questions concerning the nature and experience of time, but that’s an issue for another day.