Presentism vs eternalism

For thousands of years, time was perceived as something we had. With the invention of clocks, humans began to “spend” their time. It became a finite commodity, something that you can now give away to an employer in exchange for a piece of paper that promised you something in return. However, we can’t buy more time. Once it is up, it’s done. Sometimes that time is cut short and it really is the catalyst of so much of our decision making.

The human experience is the same for all of us. We interact with the present, right here and now. We learn cause and effect. I pick up a glass cup, I drop the glass cup, and the glass cup shatters. What the glass shards don’t do, however, is form back together into a cup and the cup doesn’t defy the laws of gravity and back into my hand. We can’t manipulate the past no matter how we try. The present is gone from us the moment it passes into the past where we can no longer interact with it. The future is not something we can interact with. However, oddly enough, we can access memories about the past and imagine a future that hasn’t yet. This is called presentism where everything occurs in the present. Think of it as the arrow of time pointed in one direction.

However, the most accepted view of scientists and philosophers is that time is eternal. Externalism is stating that things are happening in the past, present, and future at the same time. Human beings perceive three dimensions—height, length, and width. We move through space by moving forwards or backward, up or down, left or right. This is the 3D world that evolutionary speaking we constructed, in other words, our perception of reality. Scientists have created mathematical models that fuses these three dimension while adding a fourth dimension called space-time to construct what is known as, “The Block Universe.” In this model of the Block Universe, it assumes that space-time is constant and that all three forms of time—the past, present, and future—are all equally real. That there is no objective form of time. No arrow pointing in one direction. Another way to think of this is “Here is to space, as now is to time.” Meaning that if space is infinite and time is infinite then where we are and when we are is all arbitrary. It’s paradoxical in nature since human beings perceive time that we can act on and affect the future or what we call “Cause and effect.” It is one of the fundamental building blocks that humans at a very young age realize that they can act upon the world to change it. It’s just weird to think about another version of me in the past and future. There are other versions of this theory and model such as the Growing Block Universe that assumes the future is not yet determined but that the past and present are assumed. Different types of scientific models are constantly being tested trying to better understand time and our perception of it. In fact, evolutionary biologists are even involved as to why humans perceive time the way they do. Is there some sort of advantage?

Regardless, externalism is the most accepted view of what time is in the scientific community. The reason is that scientists can use the laws of physics and run equations in the future or the past with the same results and in addition these same equations show there is nothing special about the present. Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking work on the Theory of Relativity demonstrates this. It assumes that the present isn’t special at all. 12:00 pm here on Earth is nothing on another planet. In fact, the General Theory of Relativity equations demonstrates that the past, present, and future all have equal footing and that time travel is theoretically possible and supports externalism.

This is the heart of the contradiction of being human. There are things that are totally true and cannot be proven. The paradoxical nature of our existence. We can show with equations what and how things work that directly contradicts how we perceive the world around us.