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The Growing Block Theory (GBT) of Time


A fine review. Is it rational for me to feel a sense of loss at the fact that the NDPR has said au revoir?

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/nothing-tome-a-defence-of-the-growing-block-theory-of-time/ 

I believe I've described it before. The "growing block" theory of reality, also a theory of time, is that which postulates that the present and past are real. The future is not yet real. So reality is growing, and the present moment is the edge of its growth. 

This is an attractive theory in that it sets out how the world seems to work. We should not depart from such a persistent seeming without reason. I wake up in the morning and find that a variety of changes that I made to my apartment are still here. The book shelf I put up yesterday is still here.  Unless I'm a bad carpenter and it fell overnight. In which case there is a mess of books and wood on the floor. Even in that case, though, reality has grown by the addition of a new shelf, and then by the further addition of the fall of that shelf. 

There is surely a sense in which it will always be the case that I put the shelf up, and it is not YET the case that I gave up on my do-it-yourself commitment and called a professional. That phone call is not yet a part of the same reality that the fallen shelf is. The 31st century Galactic Empire is not part of the same reality that extinct dinosaurs are. 

The chief alternative to this view, IMHO, is the completed block theory, as expounded for example in the novel SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. 

The completed block theory has the epochal support of Albert Einstein. It is a feature of the general theory of relativity. So anyone who believes that the growing block theory of time is the more complete truth has a daunting task. I choose not to assert that Einstein was wrong, but rather than he was provisionally right. Given a pragmatic understanding of knowledge there is a lot of room for being provisionally right. 

Is there an argument that one or the other of these two must be wrong, that there is a strict inconsistency between them that makes the above paragraph a shuffling evasion? 

There is: at the heart of relativity one finds the idea that simultaneity is relative to the observer. Yet this seems to mean that ideas like "now" and "the present" are also relative to the observer. It isn't clear how one can talk of the now as the growing edge of the block of reality while acknowledging this.

You have to do a rather deep dive into the review to which I've linked you to get any sense that Correia and Rosenkrantz have responded to this. Once you do that diving, you find that they responded in chapter 9, appendix 2. That's it. No further explanation of what their response is. I guess I'll have to get the book. 
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