We believe in the passage of time, even though we cannot perceive time’s passage, and our belief in time is so confident that we then go on to assign the objects we encounter at various points along time’s passage.
Our friend hands us two objects: one is a fossil and the other a fragment of terracotta, freshly baked from the kiln.
When we first look at these two items there is nothing about them that reveals their age. They are just two pieces of matter, albeit different in colour and constitution. The only way we can age them is to first recall our belief in time’s passage and then assume that the objects are of different age – in this case we assume that the fossil is older than the terracotta. But there is never any justification for this: we only ever perceive things in the present; the fossil in our hand is, at this point, still as fresh or as ancient as the terracotta.
But, for no reason, we do go ahead and assume the fossil as ‘old’, and then we analyse it and discover certain attributes about it – for example we might notice varying proportions of chemical isotopes. These proportions are then also assumed to be characteristic of age, because they are associated with the ‘old thing’ – the fossil.
And henceforward, each time we encounter an object whose chemical constitution is similar to the fossil, we call that thing ‘old’ also, forgetting that the fossil’s antiquity was only ever assumed in the most arbitrary fashion.
All this is delusion.
We only perceive things in the present. The fossil in our hand is as timeless as the terracotta – both of them exist only in the here-and-now that completely transcends our arbitrary designations of age.
The age of the fossil is a story we tell…in the present. At what other time can such a story be told?
Actually, if you can't prove that the present exists, then you argument is delusory as well.
ReplyDeleteWanna have a go at it?
Experience can be understood as occuring both in and out of time, with equal validity. My argument was just showing the other side of the conventional, temporal view. I used the term present, but unwillingly, because it only makes sense within a temporal framework.
ReplyDeleteIt just seems to me that things appear temporal and atemporal subjectively, in the same way that something can be funny one day but not the next. Funniness isn't intrinsic to experienced events, and neither is time.