Why isn't a timeless being evanescent?

I think God is timeless. For a long time I’ve been vaguely worried by the thought that on a B-theory of time, a timeless being is like a being that exists at only one instant of time. But the latter being is really evanescent, while a timeless being is the opposite of evanescent. What’s the difference?

We can say: well, a being that exists at only one instant will cease to be when a new instant comes, but a timeless being won’t cease to be. But now imagine a being that exists at only one instant, but that instant is the very last instant of time. It’s no longer true that that being will cease to be, because to cease to be there has to be a future time at which one does not exist, and at the last instant of time there is no future at all. Yet the being that exists at the last instant of time is still evanescent.

If one believes in a “flow of time”, one can say that a timeless being is like a being at an instant of “time” in a “time” sequence that doesn’t flow (so it’s not really time, but only “time”). But a “flow of time” is hard to make sense of.

Here are two alternative stories. First, we might suppose that instants of time can have a “duration weight”. Thus, while one might think that the duration of n instants of time is always (in the most natural units) precisely n, one might think that instants have a duration which measures how long they endure. It’s not that they are exactly intervals. It’s still going to be the case that no change is possible during an instant. But perhaps duration is possible. Then on a discrete theory of time, a sequence of instants has a duration equal to the sum of the durations of the instants. And on a continuous theory of time, the temporal length of a segment of intervals is equal to the integral of the durations.

We can then say that a timeless being is like one that exists on an instant of infinite duration, an instant that has nothing before it or after it. On a discrete theory, this is straightforwardly just an infinite duration. On a continuous theory, it would be like a Dirac delta.

Second, we might hypothesize that what yields the subjective experience of “moving on” from one instant to another is the poverty of our experiences contained in the instant. But mystics talks of being caught up to eternity in their experiences of the infinite: time appears to slow down for them. But the experiences of mystics do not, after all, comprehend the infinite. However, perhaps, an experience that did comprehend the infinite would slow one down to the point that an instant would literally last subjectively for eternity. And this subjective time could then be an accurate reflection of the internal time of the being. If so, then only a being that comprehends the infinite, like an infinite God contemplating himself, could be timeless.

(Note that there may be some difficulty in fitting the above to the common observation that time flies when you’re having fun. But it has been hypothesized that the latter is due to the fact that when you’re having fun, you fail to notice every tick of your internal clock. Thus the fact that time flies when you’re having fun isn’t merely due to the richness of the experience when you’re having fun. It may be that what we have is a kind of phenomenon where modest finite fun makes subjective time go by faster, but then once we transcend fun into a mystical experience, the opposite happens.)

What's ahead for me?

Consider facts like:

1. Soon you will be in pain.
2. Eventually, you'll forget.
3. That sad experience is already behind you.

What is needed for making these facts true? Well, someone needs to be in pain, someone needs to forget, someone needs a sad experience. And that someone needs to be you. This identity condition generates all of the familiar questions about personal identity. But there is a third thing needed: the pain and forgetting need to be ahead, with the pain ahead by a little and the forgetting perhaps not a little, and the sad experience needs to be behind. But what does that mean?

The simplest account is just that "ahead" means in the future and "behind" means in the past. But if time travel is possible, this will not do. "Soon you will be in pain" can be true even though the pain is millions of years in the past, as long as what you're about to do is to go into a time machine, quickly go back millions of years, and then experience the pain. Likewise, the sad experience that is already behind you may be one that you experienced a hundred years in the future, traveling to the future and back.

We can, of course, say that "ahead" means in the subjective future and "behind" means in the subjective past. But that is just to give a name to the problem—the problem of what constitutes subjective time for a given person, or, perhaps more generally, what constitutes inner time for a given substance.

The problem of subjective time is related to, but not the same as, the problem of personal identity. Suppose I accept a memory theory of personal identity. Then it is natural to say that some experience E is in the subjective future provided that E is conjoined with a set of quasi-memories that form a chain back to my present state. One might also say this even if one does not accept a memory theory of personal identity. Note that this account of the subjective future, even if accepted apart from the memory theory of personal identity, has some of the counterintuitive consequences of the memory theory. Suppose that in five minutes you will suffer total amnesia immediately followed by horrible pain. Then it seems quite right to say that soon you will be in pain—the pain is in your subjective future. But not if this memory theory of subjective time is correct.

David Lewis in his famous piece on time travel handles this by means of causal connections. What makes person-stage y a subjectively future person-stage with respect to person-stage x is that there is the right kind of chain of causal connections leading from x to y. (Put that way, the memory theory is a special case.) But what sorts of causal connections will do the job? We can imagine here fun time-travel scenarios involving swapping brains, or parts of brains, or memories, with your past self, and we're probably going to get some cases that are at least somewhat problematic for any particular causal connection account.

Note that dualist theories have a much easier time with the various puzzles about personal identity than non-dualist theories. Swinburne shows this: Dualist theories can always make indeterminacies be merely epistemic, and doing so fits very well with our intuitions. But it's much less clear that dualist theories have any easier time with the problem of subjective time.

On the other hand, non-realist or conventionalist accounts, while deeply implausible for personal identity, may be rather more plausible as answers to the problem of subjective time. While it really does matter much whether someone who does some horrible deed or experiences something wonderful is really me, maybe it does not matter much whether the deed or experience is ahead or behind, except insofar as I am causally connected to it. So one could accept a theory on which subjective time is constituted by causal connections, and not worry about the more outlandish counterexamples with mind-swapping, etc., because what matters are the causal connections, not the subjective time relations. One might hold that there can be vagueness in or degrees of aheadness/behindness that is more plausible (to me!) than vagueness in or degrees of identity .

There is a further option. It may be that it is a basic fact about substances in time that they are continuants and come with an internal clock.

A final question is what the relationship between objective and subjective time is. My present view is that external or objective time is constructed out of the inner or subjective times of things. In our universe this can be done because most inner times run in the same direction. There may, however, be universes without much coherence between inner times, and in such universes there will be no objective time, only inner or subjective time.

Perception of time

The perception of time continues to be empirically investigated. Here is something interesting.

Is eternal suffering in hell infinite?

The damned will be in hell suffering forever. Does it follow that their overall sufferings will be infinite? I will argue in the negative. (I am not claiming that the suffering sin hell are finite, just that infinity of suffering does not follow from everlastingness.)

Argument 1: Suppose that the amount of suffering decreases exponentially to zero as time goes on. Then, it seems, the total suffering (the integral of momentary suffering) is finite, even though the suffering goes on forever.

This argument has some weaknesses. One of them is that total suffering is not just the sum of momentary sufferings. Such phenomena as boredom, dread of the future and hopelessness also have to be factored in.

Argument 2: What determines how much total suffering one has gone through is not the objective length of time that the sufferings have taken, but the subjective length of time. If one had a painful operation that in fact lasted an hour, but neurological manipulation made that hour seem subjectively like ten seconds, then one really had only ten seconds' worth of suffering. Now imagine that the internal clock of one of the damned is continually slowed down. During her first year of objective time in hell, she undergoes a year's subjective time of suffering. During her second year of objective time in hell, she undergoes half a year's worth subjective time of suffering. During her third objective year, she has a quarter of a year's worth of suffering. And so on. Even though she suffers for eternity, her total subjective time of suffering is two years. So, assuming that the intensity of her sufferings doesn't go up with time, her total suffering is finite.

An oddity about this scenario. If her future is subjectively finite, does that mean that her life feels like it is cut short early? But in fact she objectively lives forever. This is weird.