--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote:
> Question for you: In the paragraph from "Philosophy Always > Buries Its Undertakers" that begins "We are also told that > physics mishandles time," what does the locution "abstracts > from" mean? And in the post "Why Do We Need Philosophy?" > what does "time is not exhausted by the B-series" mean? (I > understand what the B-series is, but I don't get "exhausted > by." Well I'll give it my best shot! What I think MavPhil (Maverick Philosopher) is doing is trying to preserve his patch. That's to say I think he sees the proper place of Physics as being "Nature" - the realm of space- time-matter. But the latter is not a complete description or understanding of Reality, which also includes consciousness (at least) and (maybe) other proper subjects of a rational metaphysics such as God, universals, and goodness knows what else. Rational metaphysics is the province of Philosophy. Physicists should *keep out!* (qua physicist). I think MavPhil is fully signed up to recognising our favourite, the "hard problem of consciousness". But I also think he rules out the possibilty of a naturalistic solution of that problem. It's not just that we haven't yet solved it (by science); we can never solve it. (Caveat: I have been dipping in and out of MavPhil's stuff a bit casually and may be getting him quite wrong!). In this context we can see him deploying this little locution of his - "abtracts from": "Physics cannot be said to fail to accommodate consciousness for the simple reason that that is not the job of physics to do any such thing. Physics abstracts from consciousness. Conscious beings such as me and my cats can be studied from the point of view of physics since we are physical objects, though not just physical objects". In other words Science can study our minds as brains (and bodies) only. But a complete description of a brain may well be true, and may well be of great value, but it is not a study of consciousness. Or, put it another way, physics can describe and theorise about the quantitative properties of the world, but is forever locked out of its qualitative nature. It "abstracts from" the non-quantitative. When he talks about time, I think he is doing exactly the same thing. Time is another "hard" problem (like the problem of consciousness). Just as with consciousness it is possible to reduce time to something that can be expressed objectively (the 'B-series' e.g. "the year before 2013"). This can only be done by "abstracting from", by removing the aspect of time that is observer-dependent (the A-series e.g. "last year"). So to say "time is not exhausted by the B-series" is to say that the B-series way of describing time is only a partial view of Time's real nature (just as brain activity is only a partial view of the reality of consciousness). It's not the full monty. Can you have an A-series without there being Nagelian entities viz. "things such that there is something that it is like to have a perspective on the world"?
