Time's arrow is not an illusion

Hegel and the reality of time

According to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that reality is a fixed block. And philosophers from Augustine to McTaggart have found the idea of time’s passage to be incoherent. However, argues James Sares, the idea that time’s flow is an illusion is itself incoherent. He uses Hegel’s dialectical logic to prove that time is real, since any denial of its reality must fall into self-contradiction.

 

1. The denial of time’s passing

From Zeno to McTaggart, the history of philosophy contains a number of arguments against the reality of time. Even philosophers who think time is real have admitted the difficulty of making sense of it. Augustine asks how time exists if past and future do not, while the present takes no time. Kant asks how time can have a beginning if a beginning implies a change, hence a prior time. And yet how can time have no beginning – hence be actually infinite – if particular, finite moments of time’s passing can never add up to this infinity?

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You might think your experience is the authority on the truth of the world, but you might be too trapped in it to see it for the illusion it is.

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 Today, many scientists and philosophers of time accept the “B-theory” of time, the view that time is just a static series of tenseless moments and relations, against the view that time actually flows from past to future, especially given problems introduced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. In science and philosophy alike, the denial of time’s passing remains a popular position to do away with the conceptual difficulties it implies.

 

2. Our experience of time’s passing

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Bud Rapanault 31 January 2025

The only scientifically meaningful question regarding time concerns whether it is a substantival entity or merely a relational concept. Some scientists (and philosophers) treat time (and space) as substantival entities while others see them as being merely relational in nature. To clarify the distinction, a substantival entity can be directly observed, measured, detected and experimented on; a lump of coal and a beam of electromagnetic radiation are both substantival entities. Substantival entities, and events involving the interaction of substantival entities, comprise the phenomenological world of our experience; they constitute physical reality.

Relational concepts arise in the consideration of substantival entities and events. Distance and temperature are relational concepts, they describe the relationship between observable things but they they are not things in themselves and they do not causally interact with physical reality. Distance doesn't cause Paris to be in a different location than London. Similarly, temperature doesn't cause a stove to be hot or cold, it is just a way of describing two different states of a stove. Distance and temperature are not causal actors in physical reality; they are descriptive of the relationships between observable things, and only in that sense are they meaningful and real.

In that context then the scientific question regarding time and space is whether there is any evidence that they are substantival in nature, like rocks and cats or relational like distance and temperature. The answer to that question is straightforward - there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a substantival space, time, or spacetime. No one can examine space or time on a laboratory bench independent of the physical entities and events whose relationship they describe. You cannot observe the flow of time, only the flow of physical processes.

The concept of empty space is as meaningless as the concept of empty distance. Space is simply the aggregate of all the distances separating one body from all the others in the observed Cosmos. By observation that relational space is not empty. It is suffused with all the electromagnetic radiation emitted by all the radiant bodies within the observed Cosmos. Time and space are not things in themselves, they only describe the relationships between the entities and events that comprise the phenomenological world. In that sense and only in that sense are time and space real.

The belief that time and space are substantival has no scientific basis despite its presence in common interpretations of Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory. That belief, adopted in the mid 20th century, is one of numerous unforced errors that have reduced modern theoretical physics to a compendium of unscientific gibberish.

Themis Matsoukas 27 January 2025

It is quite remarkable that the “I think therefore I am” has evolved through the laws of pure reason to “I think therefore I am an illusion”.