Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

The C-theory of time asks if time really has a direction (philosophy of science)

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/the-c-theory-of-t...-direction

EXCERPT (Matt Farr): . . . There are many different ways in which time might be thought to ‘have a direction’ but, to keep things simple, let’s work with the following idea: if time has a direction, then presumably it could have had the opposite direction; a universe just like this one but with the opposite direction of time would constitute a different universe to our own. Perhaps it is even possible that, contrary to our beliefs, our world actually runs from future to past. [...] This is exactly what my preferred theory of time – what I call the ‘C-theory’ – rejects. According to the C-theory of time, it is not possible for this Universe to have run in the opposite direction of time, for there is no such thing as ‘the direction of time’ that could be reversed. This is the theory of time that I think fits best with our scientific understanding of the world. But before I can convince you, let’s first go through the ABCs of the philosophy of time.

It is common to think that time is special in a way that space is not. Though space is fixed, time is often said to ‘flow’ or ‘pass’. And though we don’t think there’s anything inherently special about where we are in space, we do think there is something special about the ‘now’, where we are located in time. As the now moves forwards in time, once-future things undergo a process of ‘becoming’ present and then past. In philosophy-of-time jargon, this set of views is known as the ‘A-theory of time’, based on the distinction made in 1908 by J M E McTaggart, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge.

McTaggart was interested in two different ways in which we standardly represent time. First, the ‘A series’ represents time as carved up into a growing past, a moving, flowing present, and a shrinking future. Secondly, the ‘B series’ represents time as a bunch of moments spread out in a fixed, unchanging series from earlier to later. [...] Accordingly, the B-theory of time holds, contrary to the A-theory, that time does not flow or pass, preferring the so-called ‘block universe’ model of time, where the universe is a four-dimensional entity, with events and entire lives strung out along the time dimension, with no points in time distinguished as past, present or future, much like our wall-mounted calendars, only with all of time on an equal footing, not just this month.

Many, including McTaggart, have rejected the B-theory as too impoverished to account for time; it fails to represent, they say, the special and dynamic nature of the present moment. [...] But there are good reasons to pass up the A-theory’s extra structure here, chief among them being the fact that physical theories afford no special place for the passage of time. The equations of classical and quantum physics contain no variable corresponding to which time is ‘now’, nor is there an equation describing how such a thing ‘moves’ in time, and no one thinks that there’s a serious question about how fast it does so. As such, philosophers and physicists have, for the most part, embraced the block universe: the German mathematician Hermann Weyl in 1949 remarked that ‘[t]he objective world simply is, it does not happen’. Meanwhile, Albert Einstein in 1955 consoled the bereaved family of his friend Michele Besso with the observation that, for those ‘who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’.

If one wishes to hold that time really passes, one has to accept the awkward fact that physics has done pretty well without making use of such a concept. Instead, the B-theory takes our beliefs about the passage of time to be compatible with the absence of such a thing from the basic furniture of reality. For the B-theorist, though it might appear to you as though your birthday underwent some process of ‘happening’, this is due to something about how we experience and represent our own trajectory through time, rather than some objective process that the birthday itself underwent.

The C-theory of time goes a significant step further even than the B-theory: not only does it reject the passage of time, it also rejects the directionality of time. Though McTaggart’s B series lacks a distinction between past, present and future, it is directed in that times are ordered from ‘earlier’ to ‘later’. In contrast, McTaggart’s lesser-known C series, on which the C-theory is based, ‘determines the order’ but ‘does not determine the direction’ of moments of time. According to the C-theory, when we describe a process as ‘going’ or ‘running’ or ‘evolving’ from earlier to later, we are not making contact with some deep temporal arrow that could have pointed the opposite way.

A consequence of this is that if we were to describe the world in reverse, we would not be getting anything about time wrong. As the cosmologist Thomas Gold put it in 1966, when we describe our world in the unfamiliar future-to-past direction, we are ‘not describing another universe, or how [this Universe] might be but isn’t, but [are] describing the very same thing’. [...] So while the B- and C-theories agree that we live in a block universe, the C-theory goes further in holding that this block doesn’t come equipped with a temporal arrow. Whereas the block universe has become very much the default way to understand the physical world, the C-theory’s adirectional universe remains highly contentious. On the one hand, the fundamental physical theories are symmetric with respect to time. The laws of classical and quantum mechanics and of relativity theory are time-reversal invariant – this means that, if we were to describe the world purely in terms of classical or quantum particles, the laws of physics tell us that any process that could happen in one direction of time could also happen in the other direction, meaning that processes in such a description are reversible.

The kinds of processes we ordinarily think of as irreversible, such as breaking wine glasses or the existence of Phil Collins’s music, turn out to be reversible if looked at in fine enough detail, in molecular terms. Moreover, the laws of physics are characterised by equations that allow us to predict the future and ‘retrodict’ (the past-directed analogue of ‘predict’) the past in equal measure, meaning that there is no sense that the laws of physics describe or govern the world from past to future any more than from future to past. So far, so good for the C-theory.

But on the other hand, physics standardly makes use of a wealth of time-directed ways of representing the world. Physical processes are pictured as running in a particular direction, and this affects the way we talk about the properties of such processes. [...] If the world is not directed in time, why is it so useful to talk as if things run in a preferred direction?[...] It seems that we take for granted that the very world physics aims to describe is past-to-future directed. So here lies a puzzle. Regardless of whether the physics is insensitive to the direction of time, our past-to-future ways of representing the world are so familiar and ubiquitous that one might think that only a pedantic, tiresome philosopher would bother trying to insist that such a picture doesn’t ‘really’ correspond to reality.

[...] As the English astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington remarked in 1927: ‘If you genuinely believe that a contra-evolutionary theory is just as true and as significant as an evolutionary theory, surely it is time that a protest should be made against the entirely one-sided version currently taught.’ In other words, if the world is not directed in time, then why is it so useful to talk as though things run in a preferred direction in time? What we want from the C-theory is the best of both worlds: an adirectional theory of time that respects the underlying lack of time-direction in physics, but one that makes sense of our ordinary preference for describing things from past to future. Can the C-theory solve our puzzle? (MORE - details, elaboration)


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/TskiKNpLSmM
Reply
#2
Quantum Quack Offline
Could it be stated that time itself is nothing more than "things" changing on the spot. Like drawing a vertical line instead of a horizontal line, clearly stating that the only moment that "exists" is the present moment, the past and future being no more than temporal illusions of change experienced or anticipated.
Or alternatively in more depth, a zero point that constantly evolves with out going no where...

Not able to edit due to new member limitations: but wanted to add that at t=0 and that t=0 is all there actually is , all there ever has been and all there ever will be. ( and even that is debatable )
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article "Science does not describe reality" (philosophy of science) C C 2 104 Feb 1, 2024 02:30 AM
Last Post: confused2
  Article Faith-based beliefs are inescapable in science (philosophy of science) C C 3 117 Jul 1, 2023 12:44 AM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Bayesianism + Philosophy of space and time + Intro to philosophy of race C C 0 75 Aug 7, 2022 03:45 PM
Last Post: C C
  "Theory Wars" never really ended in the '90s (roots of Woke's "nonsense", BS jargon) C C 0 121 Dec 27, 2020 10:00 PM
Last Post: C C
  Religion vs Philosophy in 3 Minutes + Philosophy of Science with Hilary Putnam C C 2 614 Oct 16, 2019 05:26 PM
Last Post: C C
  Bring back science & philosophy as natural philosophy C C 0 492 May 15, 2019 02:21 AM
Last Post: C C
  Time for a robust defence of truth in science? (philosophy of science) C C 0 448 Mar 18, 2019 08:15 AM
Last Post: C C
  Blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience (philosophy of science) C C 4 1,148 Jan 14, 2019 04:11 PM
Last Post: Secular Sanity
  The return of Aristotelian views in philosophy & philosophy of science: Goodbye Hume? C C 1 667 Aug 17, 2018 02:01 PM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  Pragmatic theory of truth + The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy (review) C C 0 369 Aug 7, 2018 08:55 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)