I recently encountered, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a review of a book called THE OPEN FUTURE. It argues for a proposition that, I believe, is broadly correct. Time is real and creative. The future is something that does not yet exist.
In fact, as regular readers of this blog may remember, I believe in a "growing block" theory of reality-in-time. The past and present are both real. The present is the forward surface of a growing block, and the future is everything that the block has NOT yet reached.
The book in question is written by a fellow named Patrick Todd and it costs $80 (which discourages me from purchase.)
The reviewer, Mitch Green, is a professor at the University of Connecticut. I have a great deal of fondness for that institution: the flagship public university of one of the three states in which I have resided throughout all of my life, and the one in which I have spent more of it even than in NY or Massachusetts. So ... yeah Huskies!
Green describes the book at some length, but never actually evaluates it. One must presume that he thinks it has some merits in order to be worth so detailed a precis.
Regardless: there is one BIG PROBLEM with denying the reality of the future, whether as a presentist or as a growing blockhead. The BIG PROBLEM IMHO is the relativity problem. When I read the book I wondered whether Todd had addressed the theory of relativity in this context. Green didn't say, despite the elaborateness of his review.
So I wrote him an email. Not the author. I wrote Green, the UConn reviewer. It read in relevant part:
I am always curious about the relativity problem in such contexts. We can say that future contingent propositions are false as a categorical matter if and only if we have a clear idea of when the future is -- that is, only if we have a firm grasp on what is the present.
Todd does not address open future issues in the context of relativity. Doing so would add some further complications, which I think would be interesting but wouldn’t obviate the issue of future contingents so far as I can tell. Tom Muller has done work on the open future in relativistic terms (for instance here), but it’s pretty technical stuff.
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Follow that link. read the abstract. You'll get the idea, as I did, that it is more than "pretty technical." It is head-spinningly technical.
What I gather is that some philosophers believe it is possible to construe relativistic physics in a way consistent with an "open future" (consistent, that is, with either presentism or the growing edge) by invoking a "differential-geometrical version of branching space-times."
I'll have to give some thought to that.
ON EDIT: Here is something pertinent from last year.
You have to get two-thirds of the way down into THAT review before you get to an explicit discussion of "relativism-friendly indeterminism." I don't understand it, but obviously there are fine minds working on it.
Christopher, what do you mean by your assertion in the second paragraph that the past is real? The way I see it is that it was real, and its effects are real (if a person died, then his absence is real), but how can it be real? Or consider that, as I type this comment, immediately after I type each letter, my act of typing it is past, yet its presence on the screen (the effect of my typing) is real.
ReplyDeleteYou can see what I mean if you think of "really" in its common use as a one-word question. "A stegosaurus once stood on this very spot!" "Really?" "Yes, really. The fossil discovered here yesterday proves it." The real dinosaur left a fossil, which exists in the present. But the fossil isn't the reality of the dinosaur, it is evidence of that reality. When we ask the child-like question "really" we are asking about the live beast! Safely dead, but quite real. You might also think of the English-language term "realty" for land and buildings. Why does that seem to be the most REAL sort of property? Two reasons, IMHO, permanence and fecundity. Land is not as evanescent as your act of striking a particular key. Like the past, it stays in place long enough for fossils to be dug up out of it. Also, land is fecund -- the future is growing up out of it in front of us. Land is real both because it reaches back into the past and because it promises (though never will it quite have delivered) the future-- next month's harvest (I am writing as September approaches).
ReplyDeleteI think that we agree. The live beast, as you acknowledge, is not there; only its effect -- the fossil -- is. I think that you'd agree with the words I've inserted here: "Safely dead, but [it was] quite real."
ReplyDeleteWhat you write about real property may explain the derivation of the term -- why it seems more real to us than personal property or than actions such as typing a character on a keyboard. Ontologically, however, a bubble, during the second that it exists, is as real as a piece of land, as is typing a character on a keyboard.
I'm afraid I don't agree that we agree. My view is that reality is not a binary choice, with both bubbles and land on one side, leprechauns and Middle Earth on the other. Reality is what our sense of reality tells us it is, and this is a continuum. The present is more real than the past, but both are real, and in that respect both are in contrast with the future and any 35th-century leprechauns we might posit there.
DeleteI think that we agree as to what "present" and "past" means, and that's all that is important. It is unimportant whether you call the past real, but less real than the present, or I call the past unreal when it is no longer present. Our difference is semantic.
ReplyDeleteI acknowledge a difficulty with my approach, but I don't see that it refutes it. Suppose that I'm singing a song. By my approach, when I finish each note, it becomes past and no longer real. The difficulty is that a song does not consist of isolated notes; it consists of a series of notes. The impact of the note that I am singing at present depends upon the notes that have preceded it. Does that make them real, or is it only that their effect on the present note is real? Does the answer matter?
Singing a song is just one example of an activity that we view as ongoing in the present. Eating a meal, riding a bike, and typing a blog comment are other examples. When we're eating the second bite of a meal, we don't say that the first bite is in the past and the second in the present. But we could say that, and it would be true. The fact that we don't say it is a matter of semantic convention; it doesn't change what is real and what is not.
DeleteNot only activities may be viewed as ongoing in the present. I am now sitting at my desktop typing, and next to me is my printer sitting on a file cabinet. It has been sitting there for years. Its position has not changed; it has sat there in the past and is sitting there in the present, which continuously becomes the past. I don't know whether this observation is relevant to the matter at hand.
DeleteNow you have developed an intriguing lie of thought -- one that stands behind the Jamesian notion of the "specious present." The NOW has to have some duration, James thought, in order to exist at all. Euclidean points are unreal abstractions, and if the present is just a point between past and future it is likewise. So perhaps you might think of your most immediate memories and your most immediate expectations as within the scope of your "now." "I've been through the desert on a HORSE with no name." When I am saying HORSE I may be experiencing a present that includes the whole line. This is why we seldom make mistakes along the lines of "I've been through the desert on a horse of course of course." Does this mean anything for the growing block theory? Maybe not, except that the growing edge of the block has some depth. Or, if you insist on saying only the present exists, IT has to have some depth.
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