The fate of presentism in modern physics: A matter of perspectives and contingencies

Abstract

Within the philosophy of time, there is an ancient debate between eternalists who defend the unreality of time and presentists who want to reify the time of our experience. Contemporary debate has clarified and crystallised the strongest arguments for these two disparate ontologies of time, drawing from modern physics in the case of eternalism and from common-sense intuitions relating directly to our experience of time in the case of presentism. Recent attempts at resolving this ontological dispute purport to be able to reconstruct the time of our experience from our physical conception of time as a perspectival phenomenon, thus integrating both approaches to ontology. This paper argues that a principled investigation of mental representations of time will serve to further motivate such a reconciliatory project but also does important explanatory work alongside the considerations from physics seen in existing accounts such as Jenann Ismael’s. Specifically, an analysis of mental representations of time through the teleosemantic framework reveals our sense of time as domain specific and rhythmic, undermining presentists’ justificatory basis for drawing inferences regarding absolute simultaneity from our perception of simultaneity as well as exposing our perception of temporal flow as an artifice of cognitive processing. Similarly, considerations from teleosemantic theory regarding the faithfulness of our mental representations seem to refute eternalists’ justification for discarding our experience of time as illusory. Finally, I briefly suggest an avenue for further investigation into understanding the emergence of the various properties of subjective time from physical time through the observation that we are not simply subjects in time, but, in some sense, embedded and embodied participants in time.