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

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Màster en Filosofia Analítica (APhil), Facultat Filosofía, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2023-2024, Director/Tutor: Manuel Jesús Martínez

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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.

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