Saturday, April 20, 2019

Time is not the measure of change or animals are not essentially temporal

Imagine that beings like us come into existence at the very first moment of time and they are the only contingent beings. To aid imagination, suppose we are these beings, and it is now the very first moment of time. Then, barring divine promises or other such divine moral considerations, it is possible that both (a) we won’t exist at any point of the future, and (b) it’s not the case that anything else will come into existence. Thus:

  1. It is possible that the only contingent beings there are are human-like beings and that contingent beings exist at one and only one moment.

But:

  1. Change requires at least two moments of time.

Putting all of the above together, we get:

  1. Either (a) human-like beings can exist without time or (b) time does not require change or (c) time cannot have a beginning or (d) time cannot have an end.

I think theists are likely to deny both 3c and 3d: God can create and terminate a timeline. That leaves the theist 3a and 3b. I think both 3a and 3b are plausible moves.

Aristotle famously held that time depends on change, but he thought that time couldn’t have a beginning or an end, and thus he accepted both 3c and 3d. The argument he actually gave for 3c and 3d doesn’t work (basically, it fails to distinguish “not was” from “was not” and “not will” from “will not”), but we can now see that there actually is a plausible Aristotelian reason to accept that time can’t have a beginning or an end if we think time is the measure of change.

Why am I talking of human-like beings rather than human beings? Well, maybe, “human being” is a biological kind, and biological kinds depend on evolutionary history, so maybe it is not possible for human beings to come into existence at the first moment of time, as they wouldn’t have an evolutionary history. But beings just like humans could.

9 comments:

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

What would it even mean for a human-like being (H) to "exist" for no duration at all? Obviously H cannot "do" anything at all.
If H could somehow "think", however, she would "experience" eternal existence because she would be changeless. There would, from her prespective, not be any beginning, nor would there be an end. The reason a hypothetical external observer (E)may conclude that there is a beginning and an end is because E does see a change. E "sees" an absence of H, followed by a moment at which H exists, followed by an absence of H. That is, from E's pov, a change.
The problem here is, I think, that if time is discrete, each moment of time is, in fact, changeless. H has a changeless state at t1, and, provided that she exists at t2, she has a different changeless state at t2.
So while it may be possible, in a very abstract way, to exist only at a timeless moment t1,
time does require change. So (3a) may be true, but (3b) isn't.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Well, if t is the first moment of time at which you (the real, not the hypothetical, you) exist, you could surely cease to exist right after t. This is surely logically possible. You probably wouldn't experience anything, since experience takes time.

Walter Van den Acker said...

If i wouldn't experience anything, how am I a "human-like" being?

Alexander R Pruss said...

Well, every human is a human-like being. And one is a human even while in a coma.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

But how does this matter? What would be the difference between a human-like being and a doll that looks like a human in the scenario you propose? There is no conscious experience in either case, so even if the human-like being has a "mind", the mind requires time to experience something, so it seems that, in order fro something to be really human-like, time is required.

Alexander R Pruss said...

They're the same kind of thing. If you were annihilated after the first moment of your existence, it still would have been you.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

But that seems to be question-begging. The question is: what in "the first moment of my existence" makes up "me" instaed of a doll that looks like me?

Alexander R Pruss said...

Are you thinking that in the first moment of your existence, your identity as yourself depended on the future?

Walter Van den Acker said...

No, I think my identity as myself depends on me being essentially temporal.