During our study on the nature of time it has come to my attention that the four-dimensional ‘block’ view of space-time seems to be a very plausible model we have available to us to describe the world we find ourselves in. This is firmly grounded in its great compatibility with the findings of modern physics, but also seems to contradict many of the psychological intuitions of time I find both myself, and far more experienced academics, often mistakenly maintain. In this paper I seek to provide what I hope to be a reasonable description for this conception of space-time, with a special emphasis on the nature of time itself, under such a relativized view. I will examine a number of objections that arose to the views drafted by its historical predecessors, which seem to hold relevancy for similar types of misconceptions people are still apt to take as granted even today. Then I will consider objections which might be held against this modern view itself, and determine whether it stands up to these objections well enough to be upheld as the most adequate model we currently have available to us, and what problems for the nature of time, if any, still remain under this description of the world.
Under the Newtonian view, time is an absolute entity which flows on its own, without reference to any other thing in the world. This would at first seem to make some amount of sense, as what individual entity, or subsystem of entities, could time be said to manifest from? Rather, every object in the world seems instead to depend on this passage of time, but don’t seem to have any direct effects on it. On the other hand, this also entails that such a conception of real time is entirely unperceivable by standard observers. We don’t seem to share any direct relation with the flow of such time, and instead must rely on tracking the motions of correlated objects over durations of this background time, as in the case of the ticking of a periodic clock. This raises the question of why we should posit such an unverifiable view of time at all, rather than seeking to simply provide a valid explanation for the motions of these objects on their own, as is done by holding Newton’s mechanics without positing a directional, absolute time.
Such an alternative account is known as a relational view of time, which maintains time is in fact simply these very relations which hold between objects, or events, in the world. Leibniz was one of the first to attempt a serious description for relational time. For it, he offers two arguments, the first a direct historical predecessor for the modern principle of universal causation, which holds that every state of affairs has a cause, and that every cause logically precedes its effect. Under this assumption, we must wonder why absolute time should go on flowing even without any bodies in the world to denote its passing. Similarly, it draws into question how the world originally came to be at an individual moment in absolute time, when each is identical with another, and there is no other entity posited in the as yet non-existent world by which to cause its origin to happen at some specific moment. What would it even mean for something to cause the world to begin at one moment rather than another? Even the possibility of this taking place is strictly forbidden by the very definition for the remote nature of the absolute view, under which time is said to flow externally to any events or objects in the world. As each moment is identical, and there are no observable differences until there are entities in the world besides absolute time itself, it would seem that two worlds, each ‘created at different moments in time,’ are both really the same thing, and so follows by this principle of the identity of indiscernibles, there is no logical notion of time passing before the creation of the world. In this way, it avoids positing at all another class of improbable ontological entity in the way that absolute time entails, one which as defined can not even be observed, and rather simply provides an explanatory account for why it appears to us as though time passes, based on the motions of those objects already said to be present in the world under either view.
We should definitely question whether these are appropriate principles to hold given an atemporal perspective of the world, and noticeably the first out of the two seems to be severely contradictory, as it directly entails a succession of events taking place in one direction rather than another. What we originally sought to do was offer an explanation for physical processes without any sort of reference to a directional flow of absolute time, and yet this principle of universal causation directly entails just such a state of affairs. It was suggested rather, that each interval in time could be held to be determinately non-changing, and from this we might argue that there is a notion of something absolute taking place. Consider, if we could characterize the motion of entities, in terms of some static, background space as might be found in an absolutist conception of the world. However, due to the recent advance in the development of the theory of relativity, it seems absolute time has very little ground left to stand on. Rather than there being an absolute time which we may characterize by way of observing the motion of entities with one another, it is argued that these intervals in time are specifically determined by one’s own motion relative with other entities, and so there can be no underlying absolute time for us to even so much as logically approximate.
Not only will this relational account have to explain our psychological intuition of time, but it will also have to provide reason for the asymmetric temporal processes which some how arise from seemingly temporally symmetric physical laws, and without reference to any sort of absolute flow of background time, as often as though it might appear to be a convenient assumption to make in favor of such explanations. The deep problem here lies in the way we must attempt to think about these issues atemporally, or as Price calls it, “a view from nowhen,” even though our own psychology appears to be so deeply rooted on a notion of the asymmetric flow of time. This is so much the case that many influential academics have taken for granted asymmetric principles in attempting to provide adequate explanations for the apparent asymmetries which arise from what they believed to be solely the symmetric physical laws they believed themselves to have focused their attentions on.
Despite this, it seems plausible yet that we can provide just such an account for our intuition as to the asymmetric passing of time, by founding it on sufficiently atemporal explanations for the evolution of physical processes which take place in the world. Time itself can be explained by the changes observable in such processes, as described by the symmetric physical laws, but which appear to us to take place quite naturally in one direction, and never at all in the other. In this way, we observe a gas expanding to fill its chamber toward its equilibrium state, concentric circles radiating outward from a center point of a rock having been tossed in to a pool of water, and the universe itself seems to have a highly ordered structure at one end of its history which tends toward a less ordered state at the other. On the other hand, we never seem to observe the reverse phenomena, as in the case of concentric circles in a pond converging on a point, from which a rock leaps outward, but which can be equally characterized by the temporally symmetric physical laws, and hence should seem to occur just as often, rather than never at all.
If there were an absolute time to fall back on, such phenomena could be described by the flow of time passing in one direction, and not in the other. In this way, we can very easily show why asymmetric processes take place, the most obvious of which can be seen in the cycle of living things, as they undergo the natural process from birth to death. The biological processes we undergo are subject to this absolute time, and as it passes, so do we age. However, under the relational view, we must seek to provide atemporal descriptions for the appearances of such asymmetries in the nature of the world. There is no absolute time to direct the biology of life in one direction, rather than the other, and the same holds for each of the other asymmetric physical processes which are apparent in nature. As it turns out, it can be shown that our intuitions governing such phenomena are each founded on similar sorts of fallacious double standards being made against atemporal explanation, and as such rely on asymmetric principles being held intuitively, so as to result in our misconceptions as to the true nature of these physical processes. We can not begin to provide an atemporal description of these physical processes as long as a temporal direction is yet assumed as an underlying principle, but it seems we have come to make considerable progress in doing away with such admittedly strongly distracting intuitions.