Time & Reality
Does the present have a privileged place?
Eternalism, simultaneity, identity through time, and the difference between a model and the world.
Subjects
Eternalism
A reality in which past, present, and future events have equal standing. The argument, its physical motivation, and its consequences.
Alternatives to eternalism
Presentism, the growing block, and proposals in which becoming belongs to reality itself.
Agency & the fixed future
Deliberation, determinism, possibility, and the disputed meaning of freedom within a complete history.
Spacetime & temporal experience
Worldlines, proper time, simultaneity, and the relation between physical time and experienced succession.
All entries
A choice without an alternative
The experience of considering several actions can be real even if only one future is actual. The remaining dispute concerns what freedom requires.
A life in spacetime
A worldline places events in a temporal geometry. It helps us think beyond an isolated present without supplying a theory of the observer.
A present that belongs to the world
Presentism and the growing block preserve objective becoming. Their strongest motivation is also the source of their hardest physical problem.
Chance and the existing future
Unpredictability, indeterminism, and an unwritten future are separate claims. Quantum uncertainty does not settle the ontology of time by itself.
Clocks and lived duration
Relativistic time dilation makes elapsed time depend on a path through spacetime. It challenges a universal clock without proving an ontology.
Destiny and deliberation
A future that exists cannot be replaced with another actual future. That leaves a harder question about what our reasoning contributes to the history we inhabit.
The future as part of reality
Eternalism gives future events the same ontological standing as the past. Taking that proposition seriously changes what it means to inhabit a life.
The present and the limits of simultaneity
Relativity changes the physical meaning of a shared present. The metaphysical conclusions require a further argument.