On 4/22/2015 2:59 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 April 2015 at 08:08, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On 4/22/2015 2:21 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 22 April 2015 at 10:49, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
In an evolving block universe how do we know that we are now
standing in the
present anticipating the evolving future rather than in the past
anticipating an already set, but later, past?
On a mailing list that puts so much weight on consciousness I think
it would
be obvious that "We're conscious of the present."
I may have misunderstood the idea of an evolving block universe. I
thought it meant that the past is, as it were, existent in the block,
but the future is not - until it becomes the present.
Yes, that's Ellis'es concept.
But if the past
is existent in the block, how do we know that we are conscious in the
present and not in the past?
Isn't whatever time of which we're conscious "the present", by definition?
Exactly. The original question is badly phrased, it assumes some (hard-to-imagine)
"evolving block universe" - but in fact the present is just where your consciousness is.
King Harold's presents were in and before 1066, (so to speak) - I have to use "were" in
that statement because of the indexical nature of our perception of time. A
block-universe version might phrase it more neutrally so as not to assume some "folk"
idea of an "evolving present". Of course, our language is structured around the "folk
notion" of time "passing" (sorry about all the quotes but I have to distinguish that
these are special and/or invalid usages). Saying something like "World War 2 is still,
and always will be, being declared - 1939 is still there in the space-time continuum"
sounds odd. However if one had a time machine and used it to visit 1939, and saw Neville
Chamberlain with his piece of paper (and tried and failed to assassinate Hitler, which
is of course mandatory for all time travellers), one would automatically start treating
that as the present. (SF has already explored the linguistic changes necessary for time
travel, and in doing so has incidentally pointed out why it's hard to talk about the
space-time continuum as a block universe.)
PS Why is it that we can see that the past is a block universe, and relativity (and
common sense) tell us the present and future must be the same, yet we - or some of us -
kick against the idea so much?
Well, for one thing, if it's a */block multiverse/* then is the past as uncertain as the
future? That's part of Ellis'es point, that both the past and future are uncertain, even
if the past is fixed.
Brent
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