What Makes Time Special?

Abstract

As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish the conflict’s existence; but it also argues that the claim that physics “spatializes” time is overstated. Rather, even relativity theory makes time special in deep and significant ways. The second half turns to psychology, biology, and more, seeking to understand why creatures like us develop manifest time. The novel picture that results is that manifest time is a natural reaction to the many cognitive and evolutionary challenges that we face. For subjects embedded in our circumstances, it makes sense to develop—even if fundamentally wrong.

Two miracles of general relativity

“…That said, it is straightforward to show that such minimally coupled dynamical equations in GR take a Poincaré invariant form-but not necessarily a form in which terms containing the Riemann tensor or its contractions vanish-at any p ∈ M . 12 In this way, one can consider (minimal) coupling to matter to restrict the local symmetry group of the dynamical equations of GR to the Poincaré group.…”

“…For example, why (with the programme of Callender in mind-cf. [12]) should the lobes of the lightcone structure designated as timelike by (a) the primordial metric field, and (b) the metric field which codifies the symmetries of the local dynamical laws, coincide? Our thanks to an anonymous referee for useful comments on this point.…”

Determinism, Physical Possibility, and Laws of Nature

“…Instead of governing the laws merely describe certain aspects of patterns that obtain in the mosaic of events. One of the most prevalent Non-Governing views is the Best System account associated with Callender [5], Cohen and Callender [10], Earman [12], Lewis [22][23][24][25], Mill [29], Loewer [26] and Ramsey [36]. According to the Best System account the distinguishing feature of laws is that they are highly informative about the world in a simple way: they are propositions of a deductive system which best balances informativeness and simplicity.…”

“…Determinism of a theory is known to be sensitive to assumptions (1)-(4) due to leeways in our choices of mathematical representation; an extensive discussion can be found in Earman [14] and in Gyenis [21] (see also [18] for a general, abstract approach to differential equations). Many physicists would be surprised to learn that, despite an effort to settle with representational choices for (1)-(4) that give best running chance for determinism, (5) typically fails for many if not for most of our best physical theories. As a consequence determinism fails according to many of our best physical theories, which is a common wisdom in the foundations of physics literature.…”

Super-Humeanism: A starving ontology

“…Esfeld et al, 2014, Esfeld, 2014, Miller, 2014, Callender 2015, Bhogdal and Perry, 2017, and even geometric structures describing an absolute space or spacetime (Huggett, 2006, Vassallo and. This is to say that the Humean can defend a relationalist conception of space (and time), without providing a relational reformulation of the physical laws, by maintaining that the absolute background space, presupposed by theories such as Newtonian mechanics or General Relativity, is merely a descriptive tool, allowing for a more efficient summary of the relational history of matter.…”