Time Theoretics Part II Redux

Theorists, theories, more theories, endless debates, a novel thought experiment. Let's read it again!

[MIXED WHIMSY & SERIOUSNESS]

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” -Augustine of Hippo

“Of this alone, even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.” -Agathon circa 440 BC

(N.B. this post was promised and should have been delivered to you long ago. But if some of the temporal theorists are correct then since the past is unreal then so too my promise! How can I break a promise that is unreal? The poet, Agathon’s, quote seems reasonable. But that statement, though reasonable sounding, isn't quite true is it? I can say, “There is a moose in the living room.” You are my guest, you look around and yes, indeed there is a moose sitting watching Animal Planet on the TV. However if I said, “there was a moose in my living room yesterday.” Then you have no way to verify my statement. And if I added, “It was the same moose.” then depending if you are an Endurantist, Perdurantist or Exdurantist, you will draw very different demands on the nature of that truth claim. The past and all its states of affairs, objects, fictionalisms, global relations in space are none of them verifiable in some theories of Time. There are both semantic/logical and epistemic problems. So how can we claim they cannot be undone? They certainly can. Needless to say the same issues crop up in the study of the future.)

This is all to say that in no subfield of Philosophy that I know of is there such a menagerie of active speculative theory-building and neo-scholastic precisionism. It is the closest to a free-for-all anarchic playground as Philosophy gets peopled with entities like Foffo the Cat and Zarbazan the dog, Schmeiffel Towers, Rolling Balls, Truthmakers, and Specious Presents. Perhaps that is so because with the study of Time we approach a glass ceiling, a reality limit of what our minds can grasp with no strange attractor of meaning to bail us out. It seems that many of the workers in this field are speaking at cross-purposes and there is considerable overlap in “opposing” positions with a lot of bridge building efforts and halfway houses. Untangling the strained relations of McTaggart and Broad's A-series and B-series orderings is particularly vexing (at least to me.)

That's the reason I dithered getting this promised post to you. The study of Time frankly intimidates me and few things do. I may have the cockiness of ignorance (the fools rush in syndrome) in most things but here even overconfident me knows he's in over his head. There are so many considerations at play! Fundamental issues of change, relationship, identity, persistence, perdurance, exdurance, properties, slices, hypertime regressions, events, stages, bundles, unrealities of different times, directionality, closed versus open timelines, tensed vs untensed propositions, tensed vs untensed emotions, O-times and Fourth Times…. How to do it justice? How to even give an extremely condensed executive summary in less than seventy five pages? Philosophers are welcome to stay in their armchairs and merrily theorize about Time-it does no harm, but perhaps best it is to kick the can over to the scientists and let them and General Relativity do the heavy lifting! And that is indeed what happened in the analytic camp for a while. But there was a resurgence of Metaphysics philosophical studies in the last thirty years and the field has been a fast growing one ever since.

So, perhaps cruelly, we asked Agathon to study the playpen of current time studies and render us a poem.. it's notable he displays a marked theoretical bias!

To Wise Diotima

“In the beginning there was the B-series of Time and the spirit of Kairos Demiurge was moving over the dark waters. Or perhaps were the waters flowing under stationary Kairos?”

“Only you know. Fair Diotima.”

“But later, the foolish created the A-series of Time and the hearts of men were troubled, and their philosophers were confounded.”

“Came then, Sages Albert and Minkowski and the people were delivered from perplexity and the philosophers were given the balm of general and special relativity.”

“And the false prophets of the growing block and the Presentists slunk off in shame and odium and the Eternalists and Perdurantists were crowned by Blessed Lewis with the laurels of Truth.”

“ In that early age the hearts of men were dark with confusion and wicked Theorists flourished- selling the wines of delusion. The thronging tribes of perdurance and grow-glow, of presentism and moving focus infested the fair land and Their disputes and rivalries offended the Demiurge. For is it not true there should be only one valid theory of Time, Wise Diotima?”

‘The tribe of Growing Block claimed that the future was unreal and that Reality grew in that direction. What perversity was theirs! And others called themselves Presentists in their overweening pride.”

On their devilish view, the passage of time consisted in the creation of new “slices” of reality, moment by moment and that past was always growing, yet the Future was shrinking! How wicked a teaching!. The portion of such madmen should be fetters and chains!”

“And in this tribe of the “Presentists” were those who said that only the momentary present is real and the past and future are entirely unreal. And the credulous believed their teachings”

“But all was not lost- from out of the B-stream emerged the “Eternalists,” blessed of the Demiurge, who taught that the universe is a 4-d entity, and past, present, and future are all equally real. And the sages of the Moving Spotlight gave wise counsel….”

“But, Sage Diotima, the Extensionalists contended with the Retentionalists and did experienced Time have duration? The Theorists so fought on but ignored the new Revelation of the C-series and Pure Becoming! O’ Diotima, did ever such chaotic…”

(Agathon seems to have broken off the poem here, but we have this fragment. He was last seen in the precincts of the ancient lit department, sitting on a park bench, sharing a bottle of Ouzo with Thespis.)

******

Here’s a novel (AFAIK) thought experiment supporting an idea that time could be inhomogeneous and anisotropic and a local phenomena:

The Aliens and their Disruptor Gun.

Aliens plan to conquer the Earth. But they have no technology using bombs, or lethal beam weapons or biowarfare. Their technology developed along different lines, with weapons of temporal warfare. They have a Disruptor Gun which at different settings can create different temporal regimes in the targeted planet.

At the lowest setting at time t° the Gun makes time on the planet move erratically forward in integral segments and also backward in integral segments back to t° but no earlier. So instead of advancing smoothly time is jerking forward and back to the starting point. The gun can be set to create wedges of disrupted time from one second to five minutes in duration. The zone of disrupted time moves jerkily forward, but unpredictably. Imagine a bar graph lying horizontally with erratic growth on the right side. An outside observor at first would notice very little change but as the chaotic zone slowly widened the planet’s clouds would start behaving oddly, the rotation would become increasingly erratic and at the street scale there would be increasing disorder as the temporal width of the zone increased and consequently, the state space.

Would anyone on the planet notice? All would be synchronized temporally so their clocks and wristwatches would all show the same time. Spatial relations would be preserved. But memories would be unaffected and solar positions and other stellar observations would give indications something was gravely amiss. All this from the low setting of the Gun.

From the next setting, the planet would not move forward and back randomly as a block.. All its constituent “assemblages,” however defined, would each follow their own script of temporal movement. And this regime would be indeed catastrophic.

The Gun would have six settings in all:

Block disruption future, past, and both past and future. The "present” being a zero-width Dedekind cut between future and past.

Assemblage disruption future, past, and both past and future. No Dedekind cut possible- the disruption zone a seething boil of temporal spikes at the extremal ends.

Both forms of disruption stochastic, a crucial point.

Outside observers looking at the planet at setting six would not see a planet but instead a toroid around the Sun of distortion. We have to assume that the gravitational force would remain invariant but it's unclear to me if other measures of entropy wouldn't be affected.

Of inhabitants, we can only guess they would become probabilistic wave functions- Time distortions thus resolve into statistical physics..