Does time pass?
Samuel Lambert
If you asked someone what time was like, their response would probably be a shrug followed by various vague allusions to a ‘movement’ or passage of time. To most people, the concept of time is based on the assumption that it moves or passes. It is intuitive to feel as if timemoves or flows past us or that wemove through time, and this same argument has been used by many a philosopher in favour of the passage of time. ‘There is hardly an experience that seems more persistently, or immediately given to us than the relentless flow of time, ’ argues George Schlesinger for the seemingly obvious fact that time must flow. 1 However, one of the prevalent theories on the metaphysics of time, B theory , proclaims that time is analogous to space, and that none of the ‘dynamic’ features of time are real. What this means is that the apparent features of time can be analogous to space: there is no flow of space nor objective ‘ here’ of space and it is the same for time. This seems to pose a problem for our intuitions about time, namely that it flows (or passes), which is supported by the other prevalent theory(s) of time, A theory . Thus, we must distinguish between these two theories and discuss their potential merits, and pitfalls, to discover whether time really does pass. Firstly, A theory denotes an A series of time, which means that events are ordered future, present and past, with present being an objective, universal present while past and future are always relative properties of that specific present. These events on the A series ‘timeline’ are known as A properties and every event has the property of future, past or present to a different degree, for example the year 2016 has the property – at the time of writing – of being 3 years in the past. The most essential characteristic of the A series for our discussion is that A properties (events) undergo continual transformation from future, to present to past. For example, the event of you reading this essay will be in the future, is in the present and was in the past. This characteristic of the A theory is what denotes the existence of a flow of time, as events change their relative position to the present. For most people, the A series description of time is what feels the most natural. We can image a ‘timeline’ of events with the future ahead of us and the past behind us while we are at a single point in the present. On the other hand, the B theory rejects the flow of time. In a B series the relative position of events remains constant, the only distinction used is ‘ earlier than ’ or ‘ later than ’ to describe when events happen. Rather than there being ‘A properties’ to describe events, events are only ever relational and never change their relative positions in time, for example an A series would describe events as: ‘ an event is now present, which was future and will be past’ , while the relations in the B series are permanent: ‘If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. ’ 2 On this view, the passing of time is denied, as relations within the B series never change; they remain constant. However, for the passage of time to exist there must be change, as without change there is no time. This is what McTaggart argued was a reason to
1 Schlesinger 1991: 427-441. 2 McTaggart 1908: 457-474.
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