From: snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass)
Subject: invention of time
Date: 30 Aug 92 21:40:10 GMT



      Kenny Bell writes (somewhat earlier in this thread):


>       Compare 'Time does not exist' with 'My right hand does not
>exist'.  It seems  to me that--this is a technical philosophy
>thread isn't it?--arguments  about the unreality time derive
>whatever plausibility they might be thought  to possess by
>trading on a confusion between mathematical time and what A. C.
>Ewing calls 'the time of our psychological life'.

       Why should we credit either of these 'times'
in scientific analysis, while the existence of my right hand
seems patently obvious, and repeatedly verifiable. 'Time' is just
an abstract term we apply to the notion of comparing certain
repeating processes to other processes for reasons of prediction.
When we measure a process using a clock, we don't measure a time
interval, we measure how many ticks on the clock occur between
two events. And since the clock is a reliable predictive tool (or so
experience has taught us), this may provide us with useful
information. Beyond this, what is there? What use is mathematical
time, or psychological time? They seem to confuse, rather than
clarify the predictive process -- which may be the only valid
function of science.

>       When the new trendys  in physics say that time is unreal I
>suspect that what they have in mind is  the idea that time is
>causally inefficacious; which is, I think, roughly  the same idea
>of many philosophers of science who say that nomologicals
>contain no temporal words essentially).  But I would agree with
>Moore that  to say flatly that time does not exist is absurd,
>like saying 'My right hand  does not exist' is absurd, unless
>some backround context is assumed  that assigns it a sense.

       The context of this discussion is relativity.
The idea is: something called time, varying for whatever reason,
can affect the rate at which a clock ticks, or at which a particle
decays. The question is: can this 'time' be identified beyond the
effect which it is meant to explain? This is where accusations of
self-referential explanations in relativity enter the picture.

>       I don't know exactly what account of time the new physics
>requires. But if  it controvenes the idea of time as the
>dimension of change exemplified by  the ordering-relations of
>precedence, succession, and simultaneity in the  three modes of
>past, present, and future, I should personally be at a loss  to
>make any sense of it.

      Notions of past, present, and future become much more knotty
when one realizes that the past is remembered, the future only imagined,
and the present always changing. But even if we accept that
there is something happening which we would like to call
'time' (in the abstract) this does not justify assigning
it a causative role in analysing phenomena. We probably all, at
some level, acknowledge there must be something called God too, and we
probably all have some sense or other of His/Her/Its presence: but that
does not justify bringing God as a causative agent into scientific
hypotheses.


       >Kenny Bell

       John E. Snodgrass
       -----------------
       snodgras@crash.cts.com
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech