So Many Pages of Nonsense

Here is the culmination of many weeks of work:

Time, Again and Again

The problem with time is that it is hard to define what time is. To most people, relative time is the only thing that matters to them. What a clock shows is all they perceive time as. This is an interesting thought as what a clock shows has almost nothing to do with time. All it really does is give a frame of reference for the movement of the earth around the sun and the rotation of the earth. The real question has to do with time as a reference point for the past, present and future. What arises is this: is this the case that time exists? Can we be sure if the past actually existed? I feel that approaching this problem carefully that it is not about a yes or no answer, it is about how you phrase the question you ask. Many different people have their own opinion on the matter that I will go over but I don’t agree with them. At the end of this paper I culminate everything into a theory that I agree with. So, I will first give some background on opinions about time’s existence.

Borges approaches the idea of time’s existence through “A New Refutation of Time.” He starts off the story by saying that time is a delusion. Borges explains that time does not exist and that the only thing that exists is experiences and through experience and its recollection.[1] According to Borges, the negations of idealism can be extended to time. Borges uses the Humean ideal that there is not anything that exists past the human recollection of senses, experience and recollection. Hume states that man is nothing but knowledge and a collection of sensations and that any shared perception proves time is nonexistent since the repetition would destroy its linear sequence.[2]

With all this in mind, can time truly exist? I feel the way Borges approaches this topic is flawed. While I do believe that experiences are the key to understanding time, I feel that basing the nonexistence of time on the idea that we are nothing but experiences is not applicable. The human brain can create experiences that feel real (Q memories; mentioned later in this paper) so, the fact that can create sensations that can be the same as someone else. This does not disprove time, it just further negates the validity of human memory; once again negating the usefulness of witness testimony in trials.

Another way of questioning the existence of time, as according to J.J.C. Smart, is the question of whether or not time flows or passes[3]. To say that time passes means that you need to have a kind of “supertime” (referred to by Smart as “hyper-time-flow”) for time to flow inside of. And then this “supertime” would need another “super-supertime” to flow in which creates a regression that does not truly answer the question.[4] This regression can be used to prove that time does not exist. If time cannot pass, how can there be time in the first place? What this regress does is try to prove that explaining time through measurement is not valid. Our consciousness cannot advance into the future since you cannot tell how far it advances.

The problem with this theory is that the idea of time flowing is simply a metaphor and should not be considered to be exactly how time passes. The question that this brings up is does time even move? If it does, how does it pass? One theory on this idea is shown through J. M. E. McTaggart’s “A” and “B” series.

The “A” series asserts that things move from the future to the present to the past; time acting as a river, with us being pulled along by the passage of the “A” series of time. The “B” series states that things are either “earlier than,” “simultaneous with” or “later than.” McTaggart states that the “B” series is completely dependent upon the “A” series to exist. The “A” series provides an event relative to the now for the “B” series to relate those particular events to. The problem with the “A” series is that it is self-contradictory because things are never everything at the same time, so time is unreal. And, if the “A” series is nonexistent, the “B” series does not exist.[5] With this in mind, Horwich finds a hole in McTaggart’s theory.

Horwich brings up a counter argument for the nonexistence of the “B” series. He implies that the “B” series exists because time in it does not need the genuine change that the “A” series to exist. This is true because Horwich states that time can pass without change. [6] This brings up yet another theory on time that Shoemaker talks about on the idea of time without change.

Shoemaker states that there can be time passing without change with say, a temporal time freeze. There are opposing views on whether or not time passes in a time freeze. If the world were to freeze for a million years, we would not experience a second of it because we would be frozen in time. The only way that one could feasibly know about the time freeze is if there was an outside party. Is this even true? It makes sense that there would need to be an outside party to see a time freeze, but isn’t describing it as a “million year time freeze” give it an amount of time? This is where problems and counter arguments come from.

Can you have time without change? If this is true, how do you know that the time passed at all? Shoemaker’s view on time without change is presented in an example that involves a “local freeze.” The example he gives is a world where there are areas that freeze and nothing else in the world freezes. The only way the people in the frozen area know that they froze is when the people in the unfrozen area tell them. Shoemaker theorizes that because there were people watching and know that the freeze happened that time froze for the people inside of the freeze.[7] This is how Shoemaker explains time without change. Sure time passes when those people were frozen! We were moving weren’t we? They simply didn’t experience the time passing but it did! The only problem arises when Shoemaker extends his example to creating a universe where there are three regions that encompass the entire world that, though some means of keeping time, they know freeze at intervals of every three, four and five years for a year’s time. During each freeze, which they know when it is going to happen, the other two regions are unaffecting but are aware of the freeze so we can say that time passes when they were frozen because there were outside observers. The only problem comes from when sixty years pass[8]. In sixty years, the freezes with sync up and all three regions, encompassing the entire world, freeze all at once for one year. What happens then is everyone in the world is unaware if there was a freeze or not. You can say that there was because of the evidence shown, but without an outside observer, you can’t know for sure. This is the most important part of Shoemaker’s example. It is outside observers that make these things real. Without one, you can’t be sure of anything. This connects with time with the idea that people and references make time real. How does one know time exists? Well, you were reading the last sentence a few seconds before this one. That is now in the past and now this sentence is in the present until you continue with the next one where this one will be in the past. I feel, using Shoemaker’s example, that time is relative to a person noticing it.

Another point of view on the existence is another viewpoint on the theory of time’s nonexistence. According to Borges’ “Avatars of the Tortoise,” time and motion is logically impossible. Borges shows this though Zeno’s paradoxes relating to the race between Achilles and the tortoise. In a pure logical sense, Achilles cannot catch the tortoise because he is always catching up. The only problem with this is that when you look at it from a practical sense, of course he can catch the tortoise. It is just when you look at the situation from a mathematical viewpoint does this contradiction occur. What Zeno tries to do is negate our understanding of space-time with problems that supposedly contradict it.

In actuality, it is in the way the problem is set up is where Zeno gets his argument from. When Achilles’ speed is directly dependent on the tortoise’s speed, this is true, but a person’s speed is usually not dependant on the speed someone else. If I race someone slower than me, I do not run any slower when I measure my speed in miles per hour rather than based upon the speed of my opponent. If I can run fifteen miles per hour, I can still run that if I am racing someone that runs fourteen miles per hour or if I race a car that can go fifty miles per hour. When the measured speed of Achilles is based on the speed of the tortoise, Zeon’s paradox seems to be true but when it is measured in a way that is separate from the race, it becomes obvious that Achilles can catch the tortoise. So, this story does not do much in disproving time’s existence.

I feel the best way to figuring out whether or not time exists is to find out if time travel is actually possible. If time travel is possible, you can say time exists because what else would you be traveling through if you are a time traveler. By harnessing the power of the fourth dimension, you can prove that time exists just like you can prove that depth (the third dimension) exists by having two objects at different intervals and knowing which one is closer.

Through books and movies, the idea of time travel has been a popular one of science fiction. The idea of zapping back to a previous time and seeing what color the dinosaurs were or seeing pivotal points in history and then zapping back to their original time to tell everyone what they saw is something that many people dream about doing. The truth is, if it is possible, that time travel is much more complicated than that. It has been theorized by Martin Gardner that universes may be a plentiful as blackberries.[9] Gardner states that there might be an infinite amount of universes where every decision a person could make in a situation is made and any nuances that are possible have happened. It is this idea that allows time travel to be possible. If a person would go back in time, be it though a wormhole, black hole or plutonium-powered De Lorean[10], they would go back to a different timeline rather than their own. The reasoning for this is it prevents certain paradoxes from happening. The most classic example for the reasoning of this theory is called the “grandfather paradox.[11]” If you were able to go back in time of your own timeline and shoot your grandfather, you would cease to exist as your father would not have the chance to conceive you. The problem with this is if you cease to exist, how would you shoot your own grandfather? This paradox is the reason for the “grandfather paradox” to exist.

So, time travel is possible in theory thanks to the “grandfather paradox” so our insipid time traveler cannot ruin his own existence. When he reaches eighty-eight miles per hour[12] he will be transported to another point in another time line, most likely not able to return to his own time line as the infinite number of time lines/universes would prevent him from finding his own one. It is this theory that prevents the idea that time travel is not possible because people would have come back in time by now. In reality, (based on the Many Worlds and Grandfather paradox theories) any time traveler would be in one of the infinite time lines, missing ours due to the many different time lines that they could hit other than ours.

Another way to think of time is rethinking how we think about the word time itself. J. J. C. Smart approached this idea with introducing the tenseless verb. This is a verb that is best described as existing in the fourth dimension. It is neither in the past, present or future. It is in the now. The now is simply something that we know exists, existed in the past and we predict will exist in the future. What J.J.C. Smart is trying to say with his tenseless verbs is simply this: the world is a four-dimensional system of entities in space-time and “past” and “future” are anthropocentric as they are based simply on human experience. The “now” explains the existence of tenseless verbs and that the world is of a space-time manifold.[13]

So, with all this in mind, questioning whether or not time exists is a question that cannot be answered from a human perspective. When we look at time, we can’t help but look at it in an epistemological sense. We define time three ways (past, present, future) and we quest to put time in these three holes. What Smart does for the theories of time is basically state that we have been looking at theories of time completely wrong. It is not if there is a past, present or future, it is if there is a now, was a now or if there is going to be a now. When looked at in this fashion, everything I said up above has absolutely no meaning. But, that is the nature of philosophy and well, J.J.C. Smart could just be wrong. So, either way, we still can’t tell if any one of these philosophers is correct. All we know is that they might be on the right track but it is hard to say when every explanation seems to contradict the other.

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[1] A New Refutation of Time(Labyrinths) : Jorge Luis Borges, pg. 221

[2] A New Refutation of Time (Labyrinths) : Jorge Luis Borges, pg. 222

[3] The Space-Time World: J. J. C. Smart, pg. 499-500

[4] The Space-Time World: J. J. C. Smart, pg. 499

[5] The Nature of Existence: J. M. E. McTaggart, pg. 459

[6] Asymmetries in Time: Paul Horwitch, pg. 477

[7] Time without Change: Sydney Shoemaker, pgs. 68-69

[8] Time without Change: Sydney Shoemaker, pg. 70

[9] Multiverses and Blackberries: Martin Gardner, pg. 1

[10] The time-traveling car from Back to the Future: http://imdb.com/title/tt0088763/

[11] Grandfather Paradox: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/grandfather_paradox.html

[12] The speed that the De Lorean time machine needed to reach to travel back in time

[13] The Space-Time World: J. J. C. Smart, pg. 508-509