Philosophy of Time

I am working on a new version incorporating everything worth saving from my writings and researches about the philosophy of time. Meanwhile, everything I've done so far is gathered below. (Feb. 7, 2006).

My first piece on time

If time is unreal, then we, too, are unreal, and the reality of the world of physics is ultimately a transcendent reality, disconnected even from such essentially human things as metabolism. (This does not mean that human beings are exempt from the laws of physics, but that nothing specifically human, nothing living, can be described using the language of physics). Human concerns appear only when you start asking questions which are not a physicist's questions and when you accept the reality of entities which are not describable in the language of physics. Some physicists actually do identify with the Vedantist union / extinction of selfhood in the One, but they might just as well identify heat-death with the end-time Ragnorak of Norse mythology.

Summary version of the above

That's all I really want from Prigogine. It would be a bonus, though, if physicists were to use my example of a man ingesting waste and excreting carrots as their standard example of time reversal -- instead of gas molecules leaving the room, or a film run backward showing ripples converging to a center and disappearing. The possibility of the gas molecules leaving the room is very small (VS), though not zero, but the possibility of the metabolism-reversal is at least VS-squared, but probably much smaller than that. (To which the physicist's answer is : "But it's still not zero! It's still statistically possible!")

My first revision, after reading Zeh

It would seem more reasonable to describe physical reality, rather than as the fundamental reality, as the inventory of components required in order to produce the higher, emergent worlds within which there can exist mind, observations, science, time, and the like. In short, an ontology within which humans are not an embarrassing and defective loose end.
 

These words are indexicals: “here”, “there”, “now”, “then”, “this” and “that” -- and like “I”, and “you” – are defined from the point of view of the speaker, and have meaning only within a dialogue. Not only anyone who can make observations, but anyone who can join the scientific dialogue in order to report them, belongs to the perspectival, time-bound, indexical world of entropy – each with its “proper time”, each local and path-dependent.

Response to criticisms of Prigogine by Shalizi, Pagels, Bricmont, and John Maynard Smith

As I have said, I am not able to rebut technical scientific criticisms of Prigogine, and by and large I have taken them as given. However, I am at this point not sure that Bricmont has responded adequately to Prigogine even at the scientific level. In his defense of Laplace, Bricmont apparently denies that Laplace was just wrong, and does not admit that because of the three-body problem Laplace could not have predicted, even in principle, the movement of the planets. He cites Laplace’s studies of statistics, but does not acknowledge that chaotic or non-linear systems do not converge to an average, but produce erratic and unpredictable results – i.e., are unpredictable in theory, and not just in practice.  Bricmont talks about “deterministic but not predictable” systems, as does Prigogine, but does not admit (as Prigogine does) that this amounts to a revolutionary redefinition of determinism – and in fact, a tremendous renunciation.

Donald Davidson and "events as particulars"

The enforcement of work rules by the philosopher’s union is apparently very strict, because nothing Davidson writes about agency, events, or reasons ever even mentions any actual, non-hypothetical action, event, or reason (which are all presumably controlled by the psychologist’s union and historian’s union). Based on my understanding of the other sciences, while the development of purely formal concepts is often part of the work, the test of these concepts ultimately comes when they are applied to some kind of actuality, and often enough the new concepts were developed in the first place partly in response to a concrete problem. But apparently philosophy is a science of an entirely different sort.

Reichenbach on Time

As I understand, the conservative principles of the fundamental level of physics (cosmology and subatomic physics) do not apply to entities existing within the thermodynamic world. In other words, fundamental physics is fundamental in one sense, and not in another. All things are ultimately made up of subatomic particles, but none of the things of our experience can be described in terms of the fundamental laws of physics governing subatomic particles -- new laws operative only in the thermodynamic world are needed.

Citations and links on time and history

"Both Aristotle and Plato toyed with [the hypothesis that] once every few thousand years, the sun, moon, and planets returned to the same relative positions, and began to follow again the same cycle of configurations; and so perhaps the cycle of political fortunes also had its own definite period, keeping the recurring cycles of political change in step with the movement of the heavens. If that were so (Aristotle remarked) then he himself was living before the fall of Troy as much as after it; since, when the wheel of fortune had turned through another cycle, the Trojan war would be reenacted and Troy would fall again. (From Toulmin and Goodell, The Discovery of Time.)

Citations from Prigogine

One widely-studied example was the three-body problem, perhaps the most important problem in the history of dynamics. The moon's motion, influenced by both the earth and the sun, is one instance of this problem. Countless attempts were made to express it in the form of an integrable system until, at the end of the nineteenth century, Bruns and Poincare showed that this was impossible....Although this discovery was not clearly understood at the time, it implied the demise of the conviction that the dynamic world is homogeneous, reducible to the concept of integrable systems. Nature as an evolving, interactive multiplicity thus resists reduction to a timeless and universal scheme." p. 72

"What is remarkable that, despite their exceptional character, integrable systems dominated science until the 1950's, and they still constitute the main subject of most mechanics textbooks. Their great historical role and their undoubted pedagogical value are certainly a partial explanation of this paradoxical situation.

Addenda:

Something about Boltzmann and Eddington, which I don't understand

A more developed version of the above

Time Travel and the Open Future (pdf).

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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