Thesis: It is possible for an object to be acting while it does not exist.
Argument:
Imagine a rattlesnake that is ten light-years long, all stretched out. For all one hundred years of life it has been deliberately rattling its rattle. And then at the end of its hundred years, its head is destroyed, and I assume that the destruction of the head of a snake is sufficient for its death.
Rattling continues for at least about ten years even after the snake is dead, since the nerve signals the brain had sent while the snake was alive are continuing to rattle.
If this post-mortem rattle counts as the snake’s activity, the Thesis is established. But it is not clear that this ten years of post-mortem rattle is the snake’s activity.
But now consider the last year of pre-mortem rattling, call it R99 (since it starts in year 99 of the snake’s life). Whatever one says of the post-mortem rattling, clearly R99 is the snake’s activity. However, there is a reference frame—the way I set the length of the snake and the times in the story guarantees this—in which R99 occurs after the snake’s head has been destroyed, and hence occurs after the death of the snake. But R99 is the snake’s activity. Hence, there is a reference frame where an activity of the snake occurs after the snake is dead.
Scholium:
Obviously, only existent things can act. But while existence simpliciter is important for activity, existence-at-a-time does not have the same kind of significance. Obviously, often an actor’s action has a relationship R to some thing x that the actor itself does not have. For instance, an agent’s action may be known by me without the agent being known by me (here, R is being known and x is me).
Now, when we say that Elizabeth II exists as Queen of Canada, that is just an awkward way of saying that she has a monarchic relationship to Canada, rather than being a claim about that mysterious thing deep ontology studies: existence. I think we should think of existing-at-a-time as not really existence but simply as a particular kind of relationship—an occupation or presence relationship. It is not surprising in general that activities can stand in relationships that the agents do not. So, why can’t an activity stand in an occupation relationship to a time that the agent does not?
I think much confusion in philosophy comes from thinking of existence-at-a-time and existence-in-a-place as something special, somehow deeply ontologically different from other relations.
