A reversed adverbial account of temporary intrinsics

It seems that I am bent and straight. Minutes earlier, when I was standing up, I was straight. Right now, however, I am sitting and writing this post, bent at an ergonomic 135 degrees. But no one can be both bent and straight. The presentist has no problem here: I am bent, but I was straight. Eternalists, however, have to work harder to remove the appearance of contradiction. One of the stock solutions is adverbial:

• I am straight at t₁ and I am bent at t₂.

I am not fond of the adverbial solution. After all, just as it is a contradiction to be standing still and running, it is a contradiction to be standing still patiently and running calmly. It is not clear why adding adverbs to contradictory predicates should remove a contradiction, unless the adverbs are truth-canceling or alienans ("I am bent and straight" is contradiction, but if I qualify "bent" with the truth-canceling adverb "apparently", the contradiction disappears). And positing truth-canceling adverbs all over the place is unattractive.

But there is a reversed adverbial account. Rather than taking the temporal qualification as the adverb, one can turn it into a predicate and turn the apparent predicate into an adverb. Thus:

• I exist at t₁ straightly and I exist at t₂ bently.

All appearance of contradiction disappears. There is no more contradiction here than in thinking quickly and running slowly, or eating elegantly and writing sloppily.

An ontology that naturally corresponds to this resolution is a nested mode ontology. I have a mode of presence at t for every time t at which I exist. (This mode might be directly an accident of me, though I prefer the view that it is a mode of my human nature.) Each of my temporary intrinsics then corresponds to a mode of the mode of presence at t.