Catching up with the Present in Presentist Time?

Presentists hold that only one time exists. Obviously, since there are no other times, this time is the only one that can be correctly referred to as "the present", absolutely speaking. Previous times, however - "the past" - do not exist or at least are not real times in the same sense as the present.

Now consider the scientific fact that it takes time to perceive things. It takes time for light to bounce off a surface and enter into my eye, or for the signals from any one or more of my senses to travel along my neural pathways and make their way to my brain. It likely takes time for my brain to process any kind of input prior to it even becoming conscious. Conscious experience is likely itself spread across a period of time. What this means, then, is (at the least) that what is perceived (or at least those particular conditions or slices of life of whatever objects are perceived) is always in the past relative to your perception of it.

So if the past is unreal as the presentist claims, the world you perceive is also not real and hence your perception is, in a sense, illusory since it is presented as real and existing - the conditions of it presented as actually obtaining. The world you perceive has no real existence - your perceptions are of the ghosts of another world allowed to slip into the actual world, the present, and not of the actual world itself.

Perhaps you can try to infer what the real world is like from what is presented in experience, but this also takes time. Our perceptions and our mental faculties in general have difficulty in "keeping up" with what is real as everything we try to grasp is swiftly swept away into oblivion.

In the presentist's world, then, we are disconnected from reality in a much stronger way than one would have otherwise thought, contrary to many presentists' claims that presentism is somehow the "common sense" view (a claim I would reject for many reasons - see my dissertation, for examples). A real past, however, one that exists and is fully actualized in the actual world we live in (and I think this actually fits common sense a bit better), renders our perceptions true, with us really perceiving and in touch with reality as it is and exists. Including what we see when we gaze out into the stars...

A Divine Memorial to the Past? Memories in Presentist Truthmaking

An older, unpublished paper of mine I wrote in grad school, no longer quite up-to-date:

In A Treatise on Time and Space, J R Lucas suggests the theory that it is God's memories that ground purported truths about the past. More recently, Alan Rhoda has argued at length for this view, noting that it is common fair among process theists. There are some troubles for this theory, though, which show that such a theory needs to be radically restructured and restated if it is to be at all viable. In this paper, I explore these problems and, in doing so, the question of how exactly to formulate the divine memories theory in a plausible way. It turns out that producing a version of the theory that preserves all of its purported strengths and yet still avoids the problems of the other versions is much more difficult than it seems – and, indeed, we seem to have very good reason to be skeptical that such an ideal version will ever see the light of day.

Presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present. The past, in a very strong sense, is no longer and the future, correspondingly, is not yet. This creates a problem, however, with accounting for truths purportedly about the past. If only present things exist on the presentist view, in what are presentists supposed to ground past-tensed truths? This ‘Grounding Problem’, as it is sometimes called, has elicited numerous responses, almost all of them attempting to point out some present entities or facts that are supposed to be doing the grounding of past-tensed truths. Some appeal to primitive or brute past-tensed states of affairs or properties, others to arrangements of abstract maximal propositions, and still others to temporally distributional properties (among other things).[1]

Despite such varied responses, many of them have met a number of objections – that they are metaphysically ‘cheating’, that they do not really guarantee the truths they are meant to ground, that they have implausible logical consequences, and so on.[2] One view that might be put forward as an ideal solution to all of these problems is to suppose that all the grounding work for past-tensed truths is done by God’s memories – so that God’s remembering my past trip to Maui grounds the truth of the past-tensed statement that I went to Maui. J. R. Lucas (1973) has suggested such a view, as does Alan Rhoda (draft), who notes that this view is common fair among process theists such as Hartshorne (1984). Such a theory appears initially to have many advantages over the other theories. Among them, it seems to accord well with a general theistic perspective, particularly the general idea of a kind of ‘metaphysical supremacy’ for God. When in doubt about what grounds a certain fact or about whether to postulate additional entities to explain something, why not just turn to God for our full explanatory needs instead? And what more grand version of the dependence of the world on God than that where the very past itself exists only in and because of the divine mind?

At first blush, the statement of such a view appears rather straightforward:

GMem1: It was the case that p iff God remembers that it was the case that p.

But we quickly run into a problem here – is the content of God’s memories past-tensed or present-tensed? From ordinary memory statements like “God remembers that I went to Maui” or “God has a memory of me having gone to Maui” one might think that the contents of memories are in general past-tensed, or at least that they are so when dealing with wholly past objects or states of affairs. Indeed, Rhoda (draft) seems to write at times as if this was his view. If this is correct, we could put GMem1 more clearly as follows:

GMem2: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that it was the case that p.

I think, however, that we ought to reject GMem2 and instead assign the past-tense involved in ordinary memory-statements not to the content of the memory state itself but rather to the temporal perspective of the speaker on the content. So “Sam remembers that he hit the ball” tells us (at least) that (1) Sam has a memory whose content is normally expressed with the present-tensed “I am hitting the ball”; and (2) the content of that memory is ascribed to a time earlier than the memory. This situation is similar to that involving statements such as “At one time, Sam believed he was the tallest man in the Communist Party”, where the “was” does not indicate that Sam once believed some past-tensed statement about his comparative height in the Communist Party but rather indicates the speaker’s own current, shifted temporal perspective on the purported obtaining of that content. So the analysis of GMem1 should, perhaps, more exactly read as follows:

GMem3: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that p.

But why is GMem3 needed by the divine memory theorist as opposed to GMem2 in the first place? Well, consider what would happen if we regarded the content of a memory to be past-tensed as in GMem2. The right-hand side of the biconditional in GMem2 contains exactly what we needed to find grounding conditions for in the first place (that is, its having been the case that p). Because of this fact, GMem2 is simply not a successful statement of the grounding conditions for it having been the case that p – it is plainly circular, since whatever grounds the right side is a function of what does so for the left. The sentence ‘it was the case that p’, even though it is used all on its own on the left-hand side and, arguably, appears in an intensional context on the right, still appears on both sides in a manner objectionable enough to defeat the account. To put it in a different way – to give the right-hand side of the biconditional content requires that we are already independently able to give content to the left (since the content of the right incorporates – or at least is a function of – the content of the left). And doing this for the left-hand side will, among other things, require giving it grounding conditions. But this is just what we cannot do since it is precisely the right-hand side of the biconditional which is meant to do that job for the left-hand side in the first place. As a statement of grounding conditions, GMem2, then, simply fails. So the divine memories theorist should formulate their view as GMem3 has it, not as it is in GMem2. The content of God’s memory must be present-tensed (or even maybe tenseless), not past-tensed as GMem2 would have it.

Now that we have GMem3, do we have yet a perfect formulation of the divine memories view? Unfortunately not – we are instead faced with a brand new problem that needs solving. After all, what makes something a memory in the first place? What seems to make something a memory with the content that p – as opposed to some other attitude towards p – is, at least partly, that it is true that it was the case that p. Additionally, for episodic memory, we would also require both that one has a past (perhaps causal) acquaintance with its being the case that p and that this past acquaintance is the cause of the current memory. If Rhoda (draft) is right that God’s acquaintance with facts is direct and that his current memories are a result of these past acquaintances, this additional condition may be required on all of these divine memories which are meant to be doing the grounding of past truths.

But now there is trouble – as just mentioned, the fact that it was the case that p is one of the grounds for the fact that God has a memory with the content that p. And not just that, if we apply the conditions for episodic memory to God’s memories, then all sorts of past-tensed truths will be involved in grounding the fact that God has a memory with the content that p – including the fact that it was the case that p itself. But, on GMem3, the fact that God has a memory with the content that p is itself supposed to ground the fact that it was the case that p! We clearly have a vicious circle that we somehow must break out of. If we want to keep something like the divine memories view of presentism, I take it that the only option is to come up with some other way of picking out the appropriate mental states which are supposed to be doing the grounding work – that is, other than as memories – and in such a way that we do not already presuppose what we are supposed to be explaining – that is, the truth of things like its having been the case that p.

So, where we let ‘M’ designate some type of mental state of God’s which is supposed to meet these criteria just mentioned, the divine memories view should really be formulated something like as follows:

GM: It was the case that p iff God has a mental state of type M with the content that p.

But, having been forced into GM, the divine memories presentist is now faced with challenges they did not formerly seem to face. Many presentist accounts of the grounding of past truths, for instance, are susceptible to conceivability arguments against their proposed truthmakers. Consider a verificationist account, for instance, on which past truths are grounded in present evidence.[3] If this account were correct then, given the current evidence, it would necessarily follow that we have exactly the past truths we in fact have. But this does not seem right. It is certainly conceivable that our universe have the evidence it in fact has yet have a completely different past (say, because God decided to miraculously make it so at this particular point in time, with no taking into account anything that came before). So it seems false that evidence is what grounds past truths since the two seem to be only contingently related.

Now, one virtue of cashing out divine memories presentism in terms of memories (as it was done in GMem1-3) was that it logically guaranteed the truth that it was the case that p – no conceivability argument was possible against it.[4] But now that we cannot specify M in GM in terms of memories, it looks like the view is probably going to be susceptible to conceivability arguments after all – it seems likely that it will indeed be conceivable that God have a state M with the content that p and yet it fail to be true that it was the case that p. Indeed, it will be conceivable precisely because of this that M is not a memory at all, since (as was already mentioned) to be a memory is at least in part to have some content that p which was formerly the case.

But if one cannot already assume that M is a memory, it is not clear there is any other way of specifying M such that it will logically guarantee the truth that p was the case. M cannot be some kind of belief or knowledge since, unless p is still true, that would imply that God knows or believes something false, which is impossible given divine infallibility. Perhaps it is a kind of perceptual state; but if such a state is to account for cases where p is presently false, it cannot be of the sort that guarantees the veridicality of its content. We cannot appeal to causal facts either, since causal facts, on a presentist view, will be partly about the past and hence in need of the same grounding as the truth that it was the case that p. Rhoda (draft), in his argument for the divine memories view, puts it this way:

This dual reference—to a predecessor state and a successor state—naturally requires our analysis of “c caused e” to quantify over both c and e. The presentist, however, will insist on placing at least one of those quantifiers within the scope of a tense operator. Thus, if “c caused e” then either e exists and it was the case that c exists, or e existed and it was then the case that c had existed.

The only way to save such attempts at typing M seems to be to regard the content of M not as p but as its having been the case that p. But once we do this, we are again faced with the same problem as that which plagued GMem2 since we are explaining its having been the case that p in terms of God having some mental state with the content of its having been the case that p. GMem2 is, in fact, just one particular instance of this class of doomed views. But if, as seems obvious now, such a way is blocked, it does not seem that any way of typing M can get out of the conceivability problem without either running into the problems faced by GMem2 or those faced by GMem3.

So once we properly formulate the divine memories view, one of the main virtues it had over other presentist views seems to evaporate. The divine memory view, as formulated in GM, seems to lack any resources to block conceivability arguments against it. It appears to be possible that God have such states and yet the past be different than it in fact was. But the only alternatives to this version seem to be versions like GMem2 and GMem3 which seem to be plainly unviable. So GM seems to be the only remaining version of the divine memories view left on the table, problems and all. But if the presence of such problems is taken to be good evidence against a version of presentism, as well it should, that means we have good reason to look elsewhere for an appropriate theory of time and persistence – either to a non-presentist view or to some presentist theory which can in fact do better. Despite whatever initial appeal it might have had, it seems then that the divine memories constitute little more than a divine memorial to the past and are simply not the presentist truthmakers some presentist-leaning theists may wish them to be. God may be ultimate or exalted and much may depend on him for its existence, but just not in this particular way in this particular case.

WORKS CITED

Bigelow, John (1996) “Presentism and Properties” in Tomberlin, James (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 35–52.

Bourne, Craig (2006) A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cameron, Ross (draft) “Truthmaking for Presentists”

Craig, William Lance (2000a) The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

_____ (2000b) The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Crisp, Thomas (2007) “Presentism and the Grounding Objection” Noûs 41.1: 90-109.

Hartshorne, Charles (1984) Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: SUNY Press.

Keller, Simon (2004) “Presentism and Truthmaking” in Zimmerman, Dean (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 83–104.

Lucas, J. R. (1973) A Treatise on Time and Space. London: Methuen & Co.

Ludlow, Peter (1999) Semantics, Tense, and Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parsons, Josh (2005) “Truthmakers, the Past, and the Future” in Beebee and Dodd (eds.), Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press,161-174.

Rhoda, Alan (draft) “Presentism, Truthmakers, and God”

Sider, Theodore (2003) Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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[1] See Bigelow 1996, Bourne 2006, Cameron draft, Craig 2000a and 2000b, Crisp 2007, Keller 2004, and Ludlow 1999 for various presentist options.

[2] For various criticisms see, for instance, Cameron draft, Sider 2003, and Rhoda draft.

[3] See, for some brief discussion, Parsons 2005.

[4] Rhoda draft says something similar in favor of the divine memories view over and against many other presentist views.

Why Some Presentists Should Believe that the Objects of Memories are not Past Tensed

Contrary to this previous post on the divine memories analysis of past-tensed statements, I think the defender of such a view actually ought to take the object of memory to be non-past tensed (and hence present-tensed or tenseless instead). The past-tense involved in ordinary memory-statements, I think, should be assigned not to the object of the memory state itself but rather to the perspective of the speaker. So "Sam remembers that he hit the ball" tells us (at least) that (1) Sam has a memory whose content is normally expressed with the present-tensed "I am hitting the ball"; (2) the content of that memory is ascribed to a time earlier than the memory. This is similar to statements such as "At one time, Sam believed he was the tallest man in the Communist Party", where the "was" does not indicate that Sam once believed something he would put in a past tense but rather indicates the speakers own current, shifted perspective on the purported obtaining of that content. So the analysis of the divine memories person should more exactly read: WAS(p) iff God has a memory with the content that p.

Why is this needed by the divine memory person? Well, consider what would happen if we regarded the content of a memory to be a past-tensed something or other. The analysis is supposed to be (where p is past-tensed) something like: p iff God has a memory with the content that p. But the right side contains exactly what we need to find truth conditions for, so this is not a successful statement of the truth conditions for p - it is plainly circular, since the semantics for the right side already presupposes we have semantics for the left. p, even though it is used normally on the left-hand and appears in an intensional context on the right, still appears on both sides in a manner vicious enough to defeat the account. So the divine memories person should state the view the way it is in the above paragraph, not as it is in this one and take the content of the memory to be the non-past-tensed core of the corresponding past-tensed statement rather than get caught in a vicious circle or similar trap.

Is Tense Common Sense? (Plattitudes, Attitudes, and Experiences)

Tensed theorists often claim that their theories are common sense. Growing block theorists claim their theory is the common sense view, moving spotlight folks claim theirs is the common sense view, presentist claim theirs is the common sense view, etc. And this is somehow supposed to provide evidence or at least a presumption in favor of their pet version of the tensed time. But what on earth makes them think this in the first place? I suppose it must involve things like fitting various common platitudes and asymmetric attitudes about time or our experience of time or agency. But I'm skeptical about their claims, to say the least. Note first that it's pretty implausible that each of these views is the common sense one or general common sense. And I think that it's a fair piece of evidence against the identification of, say, a view like presentism with common sense that many people find the debate between it and an opposing view like eternalism to be simply vacuous at best. If common sense is indeterminate enough to leave up in the air an issue such as that between eternalism and presentism, I think that's pretty good reason to say that presentism is not the common sense view. It seems to me in general that common sense is either indeterminate between or vacillates between tensed and tenseless views of time. My money would be that common sense doesn't on it's own go either way, though individuals may take it a step farther in one direction or another. Ordinary thought simply does not deal in such high powered metaphysics to a great enough extent in this area to go either way.

But what about all those platitudes, attitudes, and experiences? Well, tenseless theorists can accept and explain all of these too! It is not contrary to the tenseless theory to say, in ordinary speech, that, for instance, time flows or that "time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future". Or even that "the future is not yet and the past is no more". What I think tensed theorists are latching onto isn't the plausibility of their own theories but the apparent implausibility of tenseless ones as accurate accounts of what's behind such platitudes, attitudes, and experiences. Sometimes when one looks at tenseless theories of time, it can seem that something is missing in accounting for such things. Tensed theorists, I take it, think they can give us what they think are the things are felt to be missed. But, I contend, they actually fail precisely in this regard in almost the same ways and in general at least as bad as (as sometimes worse than) tenseless theorists. (See Alan's post here and our discussion following for a possible example of the sort of stuff I'm talking about in this post)

This last fact - that the apparent gap between our attitudes, platitudes, and experiences, on one hand, and tenseless views, on the other, is just as bad if not worse between our attitudes, platitudes and experiences and tensed views - usually goes unnoticed (though not always - many people have pointed this out in particular cases of these gaps). This is at least partly because of tensed theorists' misleading terminology and (mis?)appropriation of 'common sense talk' as well as intricate ontologies and metaphysics hidden (or put aside to avoid committing to any particular view) behind the soothing, ordinary speech. It all lends an air of authority and authenticity and faithfulness not possessed by most tenseless theorists' talk, largely because tenseless theorists often eschew common talk and often seem to be denying its worth (sometimes this is precisely because, unfortunately, they are!). This is also due to the prevalence and entrechedness of the common misperceptions of what tenseless eternalists believe (see my earlier post on this).

No theory, however, can fill in the gaps I've mentioned - something will always seem missing from any account. Tensed theorists think that because tenseless theorists "fail" in this regard that they therefore succeed, but that is simply not so. In my dissertation, I am arguing that this is true, show that the most plausible account of our mind's access to, uses of, and representations of time explain where these gaps come from - and do so in a way that is in itself neutral between the two big camps. And that this is just one piece in a larger fabric of our conscious, perspectival access to the world and all the associated perspectival/nonperspectival gaps that arise because of it. Tensed theorists in time - as well as other folks in other areas - make a peculiar mistake relating to our representations' relation to the world, one that is widespread in areas from metaphysics to ethics. Or so I argue. So there is absolutely no support for tensed theories from common sense - not even from our plattitudes, attitudes, and experiences.

Truthmakers and Conceivability Arguments

In my last post, I discussed Lucas's presentist account of what grounds truths about the past. The upshot was that Lucas and his ilk must find someway of specifying those mental states of God which are supposed to be doing the grounding in their theory but without already presupposing that these states are memories (since that in turn already presupposes the very truths about the past which are supposed to be explained). But this gets us into a further problem.

Many presentist accounts of the grounding of past truths are susceptible to conceivability arguments against their proposed truthmakers. Consider a verificationist account, for instance, on which past truths are grounded in present evidence. If this account were correct, given the current evidence it would necessarily follow that we have exactly the past truths we in fact have. But this doesn't seem right. It is certainly conceivable that our universe have the evidence it in fact has yet have a completely different past (say, because God decided to miraculously make it so at this particular point in time, with no taking into account anything that came before). Russell seems right about this sort of thing. So it seems false that evidence is what grounds past truths since they seem to be only contingently related.

So a version of Lucas's view, reformed to take into account my last post, is going to say that there is some mental state S of God's such that it has the content p and that this is what makes it true that p (or that WAS(p), depending on how this gets spelled out). Now, one virtue of cashing this out in terms of memories was that it guaranteed the truth of p - no conceivability argument was possible against it. But now that we cannot specify S in terms of memories, it looks like this view is going to be susceptible to conceivability arguments perhaps after all - it seems likely that it will indeed be conceivable that God bear S to p and yet p not be true of the past. Indeed, it will be conceivable that S is not a memory at all.

Presentism, Divine Memories, and Circularity

In A Treatise on Time and Space, J R Lucas - a (sometime) presentist and theist - posits the theory that it is God's memories that ground purported truths about the past (I think Alan Rhoda also subscribes to this view and has a paper on the subject but I haven't read through it carefully yet). There's a bit of trouble for this theory, though, that means such a theory needs to be restated.

First, let's take a step back - when we remember something, what do we remember? I take it that we remember something having occurred or having been the case - that is, that memory presents its contents as obtaining in the past. If we represent the situation as this: 'Memory(p)' the complete content of the memory will be 'it was the case that p'. We can cut out the tech-speak by simply saying 'I remember that such-and-such happened' or something similar, where the sentence falling under the that-clause is in the past-tense.

So if God remembers that p, 'p' is going to be past-tensed. But since it is past-tensed, it is in need of a truth-maker if presentism is true. This is what Lucas's account supplies: What makes it true that p is that God has a memory that p. But now we are in trouble. What makes something a memory in the first place? What makes something a memory that p - as opposed to some other attitude towards p - is that p is true and p's occurrence is responsible for that very memory. Leave aside the second, 'responsibility', clause - it offers its own problems, but I won't go into them here since the problems offered by the first are enough for now. The fact that p is one of the grounds for the fact that God has a memory that p. But, on Lucas's view, the fact that God has a memory that p is itself supposed to ground the fact that p. We clearly have a vicious circle that we somehow must break out of. If we want to keep something like Lucas's view, I take it that the only option is to come up with some other way of picking out the appropriate mental states which are supposed to be doing the grounding work - that is, other than as memories - and in such a way that we do not already presuppose what we are supposed to be explaining - that is, the truth of things like p. I don't know if that's going to be a difficult job or not - but if this sort of view is to be tenable, I think it must be done.

Can a Presentist Believe in Incompatibilist Freedom?

In my last post, I argued that the following was true:

Fatalist Contradiction (FC): ~((Incompatibilism & DF) & FP)

Since then, I noticed that this has certain other consequences for presentism (and growing block views too). Notice first that the following seems true (straightforwardly, via the principle that Truth Supervenes on Being):

Presentism and Indeterminacy (PI): If Presentism and Incompatibilism then FP.

A Molinist may deny this, but in doing so they run afoul of TSB or either DF or Incompatibilism (depending on how its spelled out). So it follows from FC and PI that

Incompatibility (I): If DF, then ~Presentism or ~Incompatibilism.

So if libertarianism is true, presentism is not. And if presentism is true, either we have no free will or we do but it is of a compatibilist nature.

EDIT (4/18/08): PI should probably be restricted in such a way that it is true only of future truths - that is, as far as facts about the future are concerned, if Presentism and Incompatibilism, then if these future things are determinate they are necessary.

Fatalism, Indeterminacy, and Power

Here's an interesting argument I came up with:

Many people (i.e., many (but not all) growing block theorists and presentists) don't believe in a real, concrete and determinate future because they think it leads to fatalism and hence a lack of freedom on our part. Here are some assumed (incompatibilist) assumptions:

Freedom Implies Power (FIP): If I am free to make it the case that p then I have the power to make it the case that p and I have the power not to make it the case that p.

and

Power Implies Possibility (PIP): If I have the power to make it the case that p then possibly (I make it the case that p).

These seem to be fairly straightforward incompatibilist beliefs - incompatibilists will accept them, even if others do not. Here's another principle:

Power Produces Determinacy (PPD): I have the power to make it the case that p iff I have the power to make it the case that determinately p.

This is pretty straightforward - it makes no sense to say that someone has the power to bring something about if they do not also have the power to make it determinately the case (and vice versa). So far none of this gives us fatalism when conjoined to a determinate, real future. But then, some no-future folks will also hold to the following controversial principle:

Fatalistic Principle (FP): If it is the case that determinately p then necessarily p.

FP in conjunction with FIP and PIP entails the relevant belief in no determinate future:

Openness Principle (OP): If I am free to make it the case that p then it is not the case that determinately p.

And so these folks will take it that there are instances where I am free to do something and hence where my doing it in the future is indeterminate. And, of course, I am not only free to do certain things, but I am determinately so (since really robust freedom requires us to be determinately free, not merely for it to be indeterminate whether we are so):

Determinate Freedom (DF): I am determinately free to make it the case that p.

From OP and DF, we can reasonably infer,

Determinate Indeterminacy (DI): It is determinate that it is not the case that determinately p.

Now here's where my real argument starts to get going: From DI and FP, we get:

Necessary Indeterminacy (NI): It is not possible that determinately p.

From NI and PIP, we get:

Power Failure for Determinacy (PFD): It is not the case that I have the power to make it the case that determinately p.

And now we finally get to use PPD which I mentioned earlier. From PFD and PPD we get:

General Power Failure (GPF): It is not the case that I have the power to make it the case that p.

So from GPF and FIP we get:

Unfree (U): I am not free to make it the case that p.

And so we have a contradiction, which means at least one major assumption must be false. The only real substantive premises that might be candidates for rejection, I would contend, are FIP, PIP, FP, or DF. Since FIP and PIP just follow from incompatibilism and DF is just a way of saying that we are free, we can put things this way: What this argument shows is that either incompatibilism is false, the Fatalistic Principle is false, or we have no free will. Contra the no-future folks who hold to all three of these, we must choose one of these options. In my opinion, a rejection of the Fatalistic Principle is the obvious choice.

BSD 2008

I just got back from the 2008 Berkeley-Standford-Davis Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy and it was a lot of fun (we here at Davis were the hosts this year). Unfortunately, I only got to go to talks in the morning sessions, but I did get to hang out at dinner and 'talk shop'. During the first session I commented on Patrick Todd's paper "Freedom, Presentism, and Truth Supervenes on Being". His paper was showing how the principle of the open future (OF) for the presentist was incompatible with the conjunction of truth supervening on being (TSB) and future semantic settledness (FSS). In my comments I argued that, as formulated, OF was directly incompatible with TSB. During discussion time, Patrick and I talked a little about how to amend the formulation of OF so that he wouldn't get that result. I think we came up with relatively similar strategies for how the revision would go. It was a good paper and Patrick's a cool guy - it was nice talking with him. It's nice to be around people who like both metaphysics and philosophy of religion stuff! (Not too many of those hereabouts)

During the second session, our own Jonathan Dorsey argued that our conception of the physical should not include a constraint against fundamental mentality (hence the title of the paper, 'Against the No Fundamental Mentality Constraint'). I was a bit weary at first, but the argument's growing on me.

Overall, it was a pretty good time.

Presentism, Passage, and Time Density

Here's a quick argument I thought up. I don't really know whether it is a good one or not, so I hope if there's something wrong, someone who reads this will point it out to me. So here's the argument:

1. If time is dense, for any distinct given moments m1 and m3, there is a further distinct moment m2 that is between m1 and m3.
2. If a moment m3 is the next moment after a moment m1 then there is no further distinct moment m2 between them.
3. So, if time is dense, for any moment m1 there is no next moment.
4. If presentism is true, time irreducibly tensedly passes only if either first some moment m1 is present and then the next moment m2 is present or temporal passage proceeds in a non-continuous manner.
5. So if time is dense and presentism is true then either time does not irreducibly tensedly pass or temporal passage proceeds in a non-continuous manner.
6. Presentism is true only if time irreducibly tensedly passes.
7. So if presentism is true, time is not dense or temporal passage proceeds in a non-continuous manner.

I'm not sure of the mathematics, but I think if time isn't in fact dense, temporal passage will have to be non-continuous here too - in which case, it would follow that if presentism is true, temporal passage proceeds in a non-continuous manner. That is, there are going to have to be something like chronons for the presentist - smallest units of temporal passage with non-zero duration (that is, if the duration of the time segment which is present stays constant - otherwise we might have strange things like first one duration of 5 hours being present, then 1 minute, then 3 years, etc., which would be highly strange and hard to motivate). So the presentist is then, perhaps, committed to a temporally thick present which may be troublesome for some of the motivations that have been offered in its favor. In addition, we would need to come up with some non-arbitrary way of specifying the exact length of said interval, which may or may not cause trouble.

Yet More Outside Discussions

Two more discussions going on with Alan Rhoda over at his blog:

Click here for our discussion over whether God is timeless - I say yea and he says nay.

Click here for a discussion of this recent post of mine where I argued that many kinds of presentism can't deal with explaining why this time is the present one.

Why is this time the present?

Alright! Back to blogging after a couple weeks of grading of papers...

Here's a problem for most forms of presentism - on most versions, there's no good answer to the question of why this time is the present one. That is, why does the stuff at this time (and in its current arrangement) exist rather than that of some other? Why isn't some other time the present one?

The presentist needs some answer here since intuitively there is indeed an explanation for why (at least a lot of) what exists now does exist and why it (mostly) is the way it is. It can't just be random which time is present and not just because it doesn't conform to how we think present things are explained. We simply don't have random times popping up as present and then another one as the next one - time simply doesn't work that way, even on a spooky tensed view like presentism.

Any plausible answer, if it is to explain why present stuff exists and exists the way it in fact does, must obviously be explanatorily prior to the existence of that stuff and its current arrangement. So on many versions of presentism, to follow William Lane Craig and say that the present time's presentness is explained by the past presentness of past times just won't cut it. This due to the fact that on many versions of presentism, such facts are themselves reducible to or grounded in things that are explanatorily posterior (or at least not prior) to the existence of present things and their current arrangement. Present dispositions, current evidence, or properties of things, hence, cannot do the job since they presuppose this time being the present rather than explaining it.

What about ersatzism a la Craig Bourne and others? This won't work either, for there is no reason for one ersatz time be realized as present rather than another. Having the realized time be the last ersatz time in a terminating series of ersatz time won't help matters either since it still leaves open the question of why this is the last ersatz time (and why the last one should be realized as opposed to some other in the first place).

How about, per Ross Cameron's suggestion, we let the entire world have a single distributional property which grounds all tensed facts and which gives the world its current state? No, that won't work either since this still leaves open why only one state - that is, this particular present one - which is governed by the distributional property should be the one to be realized as present rather than another (see more in my comments on Cameron's post linked at the top of this paragraph).

So most versions of presentism simply fail to explain why this time is the present one and, like I've said before, this is due to the simple problem that presentists in general get things backwards and try to explain the past by the present instead of the other way around.

Recent Discussions Outside This Blog

Here are a few of the discussions I've recently been in that have (a) occurred outside this blog, and (b) taken up the blogging time I would normally use on this blog:

In comments on this post at Alanyzer, I offer some worries and objections relating to an argument by Alan Rhoda against mind-body physicalism. While not convinced by physicalism myself, I thought there were some serious worries about the argument as well as some probable mistakes. Alan was gracious enough to respond to one or two of the worries but left the majority of the criticisms untouched.

For some older stuff from that same blog, see this post where I get into a discussion about the nature of philosophical reduction. See also this post where I critique the arguments in that post that are supposed to be in favor of a tensed theory of time.

Most recently, I've been having a discussion about this post at metaphysical values over whether a certain kind of distributional property could serve as a good presentist truthmaker for past-tensed claims.

Presentism and the Direction of Groundings

Presentism (or any other theory that's antirealist about the past), at least in many versions, does not seem to be able to make a distinction between an old universe and a new one which just recently popped into existence with all the appropriate evidence for the past already there. Consider, for instance, a view according to which current dispositions or the state of the universe plus laws of nature provide the truth makers for past-tensed statements. Now take some statement S about the distant past and the presentist's candidate for the truth-maker of S, D (some disposition or state plus laws). It seems perfectly possible that D might be part of the present time and yet S be false - that is, that D might be there and yet the universe could have been very different than it had been or at least that it had not actually existed until very recently. For instance, God could have just created the universe ten minutes ago complete with all the dispositions, laws, et cetra which the presentist takes to make true statements about what the universe was like, say, ten years ago. But of course, if God did in fact just create the universe all such statements will fail to be true. So any such proposal for the truth-maker of a claim like S is going to fail since it seems possible for the truth-maker to be there without in fact making S true.

Of course, now that I've mentioned God here, it might be suggested that God himself could provide a way out of this - God is sort of supposed to be the ultimate ground of reality anyway, so why not let some state or decision of God ground claims like S? But for almost any candidate, it seems hard to see why it would be that kind of state that does the grounding and even once we have that kind narrowed down we may still wonder why this particular state grounds the truth of some statements and not others or why God has some particular contingent grounding-states and not others. If it is something under God's control or subject to his decision then it seems we have an extreme kind of super-Calvinistic view that even many Calvinists would cringe at (though perhaps not all - even though even the staunchest probably should) and certainly it would not leave any room for moral responsibility.

The best candidate, then, appears to be God's memories. That is, God's memory that p grounds its having been the case that p. But this clearly won't work. After all, a state's being a memory that p is itself at least partially grounded in its having been the case that p. And this is incompatible with what was just said about memories grounding it having been the case that such and such. So if we do appeal to memories of God, we cannot appeal to them as memories - they must be some more basic state which, because they ground the past facts, are therefore memories since the past facts ground their even being memories. But now we are left with the same question as before as to how we are to identify such states and why God even has them. And suddenly using states of God no longer looks so much different from using any other piece of reality which we are supposed to hook up in a systematic way with the truth and falsity of past-tensed sentences.

In general, presentism and its ilk is weird because of all the required dependencies of the past on the present rather than vice versa as is most plausible. Indeed, this failing of presentism - which seems to be required since presentism only allows present things to do any grounding in the first place - is what seems to give rise to all the problems I just mentioned above. And it seems crucially connected to the problem I've noticed in this earlier post about how presentists and the like cannot allow for moral responsibility for the past.

Moral Responsibility and the Unreality of the Past

It is a necessary condition for freedom or moral responsibility concerning some action A that I am the ultimate explanation for A - A ultimately depends on me for its existence. So to be responsible for something, I must be the metaphysical ground for it. But not only that, it is also necessary that I have some sort of control over A, that the fact that A is my action rather than something else is also dependent on me and explained by me. It is my contention that views of time - such as Presentism - which do not acknowledge the reality of the past cannot allow that anyone is morally responsible for their past actions. And if they are not morally responsible for such, then they cannot justifiably be punished or praised (or whatever) for them either.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that if the past does not exist then neither do my past actions. But if I have no past actions, then there are no actions for me to be held responsible for. Anti-realists about the past must, then, make revisionary adjustments to our views about responsibility and insist that we can be "responsible for our past actions" only in the sense that we are responsible for the past-tensed fact that we committed such past actions. Already, this is in conflict with the natural idea that in order for me to be responsible for something there must be some action which is directly ascribable to me as mine - instead, we must have something else that I am responsible for or which is ascribable to me. But let's put that aside for now.

Different views will cash out these past-tensed which we are responsible for in different ways. One way is simply to assert that past-tensed facts are primitive facts, unanalyzable and irreducible to anything more basic (or that these facts involve primitive tensed properties like having performed action A). But why should I or anyone care about such primitive facts or think they have anything to do with whether I ought to punished or praised? After all, if facts about what I could have done are also primitive in the same way and such facts do not justify praise or blame, how could these other facts do the same? What's the difference? In neither case is the fact explained by me or is it something that I am responsible for in any sense. These facts are simply there, free-floating with no input from me as to what they are or how they are and with no relevant dependence on me that could make any difference as to my responsibility for anything. In neither case is there any control over what these things are like. If there was, then I would now have control over the past, which I simply do not - at least not in any significant enough way.

But let's say these past facts aren't primitive facts after all. This is hardly any better. Why should we be held responsible for physical states of the world or states of God or whatever? After all, that things are this way is not in any way up to us or explained by us or relevantly dependent on us. So either way the Anti-Realist goes, there's no getting around the fact that without a real past, there can be no moral responsibility for our past actions. Elsewhere, I've argued that freedom or moral responsibility also requires a real future. So, all in all, friends of moral responsibility ought to be eternalists about time and accept the reality of past, present, and future.

Replies ad infinitum

Here is a reply to my reply to a reply to my reply to a paper. And my reply to that reply to...wait, where was I?

Cockburn and Dummett on Understanding Statements About the Past

So I've been reading David Cockburn's (boy, I bet with a name like that he got made fun of as a kid) book Other Times. It's very different from anything else I've read on time since it takes a weird Wittgensteinian behavioristically anti-realist "No, I'm not an anti-realist" stand that threatens to collapse into either a strong anti-realism or a confused realism. A few comments on some stuff I've read:

Cockburn's take on Dummett is that Dummett thinks that it is wrong to think that there is a common core, "A is F", which, when one understands that and also has a general understanding of the past and future tenses, one can then understand "A was F" or "A will be F". Cockburn's Dummet (CD hereafter) thinks that, instead, to understand "A was F" is to know, for instance, what counts as present evidence for that - which will depend on the kind of event in question. On CD's view, it's not enough to have the general understanding of the tenses plus an understanding of the present-tensed version of the sentence. But isn't it? If one knows what being A and being F are, one knows the kinds of causes and effects associated with them to some degree. If one (perhaps expertly) deeply understands "A is F", one needs to understand what being A and being F are. But that, combined with a general understanding of the past tense, will also yield knowledge of what counts as present evidence for the past tense claim that A was F.

On pg. 61, Cockburn says that a 'fundamental aspect of our use of a sentence' is 'the ways in which it may feature in the justification of actions and emotions. This feature...is not one we should expect to be able to derive from other feature of its use... We cannot even characterise those supposed 'other' features of the use of a sentence independently of the actions and emotions with which it is characteristically linked.' I'm not sure there's sufficient evidence for this sort of claim. It's not clear how justification can be fundamental unless we become some sort of behaviorist or something close to it. Even then, I'm not sure what justification would even mean. If the entire meaning of a sentence is captured in its inferential role and we leave no room for reference or reality or correspondence to external facts, this is an extreme anti-realism. Otherwise, either the facts expressed will themselves determine the sentences' inferential role or, more in line with Cockburn's ideas, the inferential role of a sentence will determine the facts. That is, if p justifies q then, given that facts are "chosen" from the world that match the given inferential role, the fact expressed by p will be the sort to ground such a justification or be a reason - not just any old facts, but the ones that actually fit the role. Either way, we still can ask about what in reality is playing that role. Cockburn doesn't seem to allow this - his whole focus is on sentences and our behavior but he fails to deal with what those sentences correspond to.

BSD Conference

Saturday I attended the annual Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy which was held this year on the Berkeley campus. It was nice to see my alma mater again. Anyway, I attended a few interesting talks. One of them, of course, was my own. :)

The title of my paper was "The Modal and Temporal Problems from Concern". The basic idea was that certain theories of modality (necessity and possibility) as well as certain theories of time and persistence across time all have a similar problem in that they interpret the modal and temporal facts of reality in such a way that we would have no good reason to care for such facts and such facts could give us no good reasons to act in the ways we ordinarily think such facts justify us in doing so. So for instance, the theory of presentism says that the past and future do not exist - they are not real. So in order to give future tensed or past tensed statements the right truth-values, they have to interpret "past" facts or "future" facts as really facts about the present time. Ordinarily, we would take the past fact that, say, I committed some heinous act as a giving us good reason to punish me or blame me, etc. But, (I will leave the specific details of the paper aside) the sorts of facts the presentist identifies with such a past fact cannot do that - it cannot give us any reason at all for punishing me or otherwise holding me responsible for my past action. After all, on the presentist view, there is no such thing as my past heinous action to blame me for in the first place.

I got some good feedback from others at the conference. Mostly what came out was that I had forgotten to make explicit a few things in the paper, which I will soon remedy (that's what conferences are for, after all!). All in all, it was a good time.