The Future is Unreal — Part 2

0:00 Joseph Biden's inauguration in 2009 and Joseph Biden's inauguration in 2009. These are both, as I speak, possibilities, as these seem to be the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. We assume, however, that Clinton will be inaugurated. I mean, that's the official assumption for this paper. And that Biden will not be. If so, there is not now, and never will be, a concrete event correctly called Biden's inauguration in 2009. The lack of such a concrete event does not impede us in any way in describing the possibilities that there are at present, including the possibility that Biden wins and is inaugurated. Now, if Biden were to win the nomination and the election and be inaugurated, we would definitely feel the need for a concrete event, Biden's inauguration. The event in question would be visible, televised, consequential. It would have effects. Descriptions and abstract types don't do that. Only concrete events do. But we won't miss the concrete event of his inauguration if he does not win. By the same token, we will not need the concrete event of Hillary Clinton's inauguration until she wins the nomination and election and is inaugurated. Until then, descriptions of it and abstract types that characterize it will serve all of our needs in language and thought. I conclude that future the sense in which I mean the future is unreal, that they do not exist until they occur. Until that time, the concrete events are not after the other events. Until that time, the concrete events themselves are not after the other events that eventually will have occurred before them. It then says here, as Broad puts it, and I was supposed to have a nice quote from Broad to kind of give you the flavor that the abstract wasn't totally pie in the sky. But I didn't get it typed in. But he puts it quite well. So it seems to me ultimately the problem with fatalism and the problem with McTaggart's argument are the same. It's crucial to go from facts about what be true or what B is true, to the seemingly innocent thing that something that B is true is always true, which seems to imply that it's true at every time, which sounds a lot like it's been made true by that time.

2:30 If we avoid that, then I think we can avoid both fatalism and McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time. So, I think that as I speak, there are no concrete events at all that are referred to or denoted by inauguration in 2009 and Joseph Biden's inauguration in 2009. There are two event descriptions or two event types, two linguistic objects, two abstract objects, plenty of materials for describing the future, plenty of materials for modeling the future, but not actually future events. Someday, if things turn out the way I predicted, one of these linguistic objects will refer or describe a concrete event which will be of the type in question. So, as confident as I of her victory in inauguration, and I must say I think she'll be a pretty good president. At the present time, there is, in the strict and metaphysical sense, no event that fits the description Hillary Clinton's 2009 inauguration, any more there is an event that fits the description Joseph Biden's inauguration. Both are chronologically possible, which is to say it hasn't been ruled out that events meet these descriptions occur, that hasn't been ruled out, that events that will meet these descriptions occur in 2009. Now, the last section, which is short, does the B-series change? But does this not mean that the B-series change, and how can the B-series change if all of the changes are in the B-series? If the B-series is an actual succession of concrete events, it does change. It grows, and we see it do so when we observe change, for the B series is just our expanding universe. If the B series is an abstract object, say a sequence of propositions of the sort we have imagined, then it does not change, but its status may change. At the present time, when the results of the 2008 election are still slightly in doubt, there are a number of unchanging abstract objects, sequences of propositions that are possible B-series. That is, the propositions in them might all be made true in time. Some of them contain the proposition that in 2009 Hillary Clinton is inaugurated. Some of them contain the proposition

5:00 that Joseph Biden is inaugurated. And I suppose still others contain the propositions of Condoleezza Rice or Jeb Bush or John McCain, or even, given the possibility of constitutional amendment, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are inaugurated. None of these sequences will ever contain different propositions than it does, and in that sense, the B series, whichever one it is, will never change. But most of them will change as time passes in losing the status of possible B series, and one of them will change in the sense of gaining all that is needed to be the B series. In concrete terms, our experience of change and of the passage of time existence and old possibilities being eliminated in abstract terms it is seeing propositions being made true and made false and sequences containing these propositions ceasing to be possible B series in the last sections called conclusion but I haven't written it yet I thought I wouldn't bother until I saw whether I survived the question period so thank you very much Okay, if there are some questions and somebody will hand you a mic so that everybody can hear your question. You don't have to ask questions. Unsolicited praise is also allowed. Okay. Thank you for this very interesting talk. If determinism would be true, then there would be no chronological possibilities in the sense of ontological possibilities but only epistemological or epistemic possibilities so if I understood you correctly you should also argue for indeterminism perhaps you could comment on that well what you say seems plausible but it's really not what I think is true. So even if events about the next inauguration are already settled, in that the laws of nature plus events up till now entail, or true propositions about these things entail that Hillary Clinton will be inaugurated, then it's settled that it should be inaugurated. But it hasn't happened yet. And my view is it isn't made true until the events happen. As my picture

7:30 is that propositions are abstract objects that incorporate truth conditions that are useful for two purposes, characterizing truth conditions for representations and characterizing actual courses of events, and it's the same property that allows them to do both. And so I think there's a difference between enough having happened in the world, together with the laws of nature, to entail her inauguration, then it's settled, but until it actually happens, it's not made true. Now, you might say, well, if determinism is true, that doesn't seem like a very important difference for human existence. Well, I still think it would probably be even if determinism were true, and even if hard determinism were true, it would still be important because it would help explain our illusion of freedom, that there's this gap between when things are settled and when we see them actually being made true. It's into that gap that the illusion of freedom fits. My own view, however, is that I'm a compatibilist. I think that even if determinism is true and even if it's settled, whether or not I'm going to drink this water in exactly seven seconds, I can still, even if it's settled that I am going to drink the water, I can still refrain from drinking the water. but that's a difficult issue. I do, however, hope that determinism isn't true, just because I think it's depressing. This is William James' point. This block universe is kind of depressing, and every time I hear John Ehrman talk, I'm kind of buoyed up because he makes it sound like it's pretty hard for determinism to be true. of his thinking, but you'll hear them soon maybe on that show. I have a question that connects a little bit to this question. So a comment about what you just said.

10:00 I think quite clearly determinism rules out that there are possibilities, so they undermine your whole analysis in terms of chronological possibilities, which you affirmed again by saying I still can refrain from drinking that water that can means that you want to assert the possibilities again so you can't hold determinism at the same time and that my actual question is about the connection between what's happening in fatalism and in McTaggart's argumentation it's of course true that the fatalist argument for me fatalism is just actualism. These are the people who say the only thing that's real is what is actual and there are no possibilities. In this sense there's a connection then possibly to McTaggart's argumentation. But does it go any further than that? That in both cases fatalism, McTaggart you assert in opposition just the fact of the existence of chronological of possibilities. That seems to me the only connection between the two. It doesn't go any further. And in that connection, just a question. I don't know whether McTaggart would say the events in the future are possible, or just they're given events, and then they moved into the present and into the past. Did he speak about possibilities at all? So, two points. First, it may be that if determinism is true, there's no possibility of my doing anything other than I do. But that doesn't mean that it's chronologically impossible. There's lots of ways for things to be impossible. Maybe as you get older and more feeble like me, you'll understand the very many ways in which something can be impossible. so something can be logically impossible I wake up every morning knowing that I will not square the circle or whatever it was trisect, I don't know, whatever many things are metaphysically impossible I know that I will not encounter something that is blue and red all over except for the Sunday newspaper Now, let me go on for a minute.

12:30 And I know that it's impossible for me to go back and decide, say, not to go to Stanford in 1974, but stay at UCLA. That's chronologically impossible. Many kinds of possibility, and they're worth distinguishing, even if many things, or if determinism is true, virtually everything, are impossible for more than one reason. Now, the compatibilist is usually interested in what you can't do because you don't have the ability in the sense that you can't make the movements that will, in the circumstances, lead to the result or refrain from leading to the result, whereas the hard determinist usually has a stronger concept of possibility. All these concepts of possibility are needed. I think chronological possibility is an important one, even if it gets superseded in practical life by other problems. Now, it seems like kind of a half-empty, half-full kind of thing. You say the only connection I show between McTaggart and fatalism is chronological possibility, but that's the only connection I wanted to show. I think there's a fallacy in fatalism connected with chronological impossibility, and I think there's a fallacy in McTaggart connected with chronological impossibility. It's not a work of scholarship. I don't really care if McTaggart ever talked about possibility. He wrote a big book called The Nature of Existence, and then Broad, which was two big volumes, and then Broad wrote three big volumes examining McTaggart's two big volumes. And the effect of five volumes being the cost of McTaggart's scholarship killed off interest in everything McTaggart wrote except this little essay on time. Rather sad, really. There's a lesson there for all of us. Don't inspire someone as hardworking as Broad to write an examination of your philosophy Owen will ever take it seriously. So I hope that's a little responsive. Excuse me, thank you. Erwin?

15:00 Becoming true is of course a change in propositions. Maybe there's also a change in what the propositions are about maybe. Hold it closer to your lips. Okay. Becoming true is of course a change in propositions. You talk about taking place, maybe there's also a change in fact or what you want. So you have a change in addition to the things you have a change from not being true to being true, or from being possible to being actual. So you have another B-series, and maybe there's a continuation of it. Well, consider the abstract object that we could call the weight, oh, I should put it in kilos, I suppose, but I won't, being an ignorant American, consider the weight 210 pounds. That's an abstract object that we use to classify things. Now, probably by the time I spend one more day in Austria, I will weigh 210 pounds. Now, does that mean that this abstract object, 210 pounds, has changed? Well, it's come to characterize a new object, namely me. And 209 pounds and 208 pounds, not to mention 182 pounds, which is the chart, what the chart says I should weigh, they have long since ceased to characterize me. Are those changes in those abstract objects? they're not changes in what we might call the essential or intrinsic properties of the abstract objects. Nor are they, in the usual sense in which we're talking about concrete objects, are they really relationships. In a broader sense, they are relationships. So that's the kind of change I see in a series of propositions, or in a particular proposition, when events in the world reach a point at which those propositions properly characterize that world.

17:30 So that's why I say, in a way, yes, the B series does change. There is this series, and at some point, all the conditions have been fulfilled for it to be a B series. But it doesn't change in that the propositions that the propositions encapsulate do not change. So I don't think that requires a second B-series. I could be wrong. This is complicated stuff, and I'm pretty old and feeble. I never was all that quick. But, you know, I think you don't need another B-series if you look at it this way. I kind of have the order. Well, would you consider this collapse of possibilities, so to say, as corresponding to the impression of a now advocate of a tense theory often put forward? I take your first personal political recollection as an example. As you narrated it to us today, you clearly gave us the impression that there was one very moment where perhaps after one state was declared by ABC in favor of Truman where many, many possibilities just collapsed. So your parents having a job in the White House administration, you perhaps becoming an apprentice to a Republican White House, et cetera, et cetera. Or perhaps your political view had already drastically changed by that experience, et cetera, et cetera. So you told us very much about an experience of nowness. Yes. Well, my view is that you have to keep four things separate in your mind. There's reality. Then there's representations, language and thought. Maybe it's just three things.

20:00 And, well, then there's models, which are really not quite the same as representation in the sense in which philosophers and logicians use models, they're abstract objects that have to themselves be accessed through representations. And then finally there's abstract objects out of which models are built. Now, tense is a feature of representation, and I don't understand its use in any of these other categories. It may be that I'm inclined to think that all thought and language is eventually has a broad feature of which tense is an instance. That is, it's tied to the situation of the thinker or utterer. Those in part determine the truth conditions. For some purposes, well, here's a joke that expresses my entire philosophy. I can tell the politically incorrect version, I hope, here in Austria. So a boy and a girl are at a party, or a man and a woman. And the man is quite infatuated with the woman who he's met for the first time. And they've danced and they've talked and he's really interested in her. And the party is breaking up and he says, You know, I've really enjoyed this evening. can I have your phone number and call you? And she says, it's in the book. And he says, well, you know, you never told me your name. And she says, it's in the book too. Now, the phone book, let's suppose it's here in this lovely town of Kierkegaard.

22:30 There's a phone book that has everybody's name and everybody's number, and maybe he's got that phone book right in his pocket. So he's got the information, but he doesn't have it in the form in which it will do him some good. That is, he cannot connect any of the names in the book with his current perceptions. What you want, what he wants, is something that's very indexical. He wants her to say something of the form, my number is so-and-so, or my name is, you know, Gretchen Schwarzenegger or something. And then he can associate the information with his perception and get it into a form that's useful to him to do what he wants. On the other hand, the phone book is an extremely useful way of presenting information for a much different situation, namely the situation in which the user of the information's relation to the things information is about cannot be predicted, except that they're likely to know the name. Name is much different than I or you. It's not connected with perceptions. So a phone book is kind of a divide-and-conquer strategy. We'll give you the information, but you'll have to connect it. You'll have to connect the information we give you in terms of names to your own life, to the roles that these people play in your own life. We won't, we won't, the phone book does, I don't, the phone book, I mean, maybe a computerized, hyperlinked phone book someday They will make it possible for this young man to just type in, what's the number of the girl that I was dancing with last night? And, you know, maybe because of the Patriot Act, there will be a database that shows who he was dancing with. But anyway, so information is held in different ways, and indexicals, tents are really an important... I mean, take daylight savings time. Why don't we just get up an hour earlier? Because we want to keep our actions connected with linguistic formulas, right? We want to say, it's six, time for dinner, right? That's all there is to it, just preserving links between linguistic formulas and perceptions and actions. But the only linguistic formulas that can be connected with perceptions and actions

25:00 are ones that are heavily indexical or tense. tense. I love tense. Everything I say is tensed except when I talk about propositions being true. But tense belongs with representations. It's not a feature of reality or a feature of models of reality or a feature of, you could have a model that was useful for giving the semantics of tense or of abstract. That's the way I look at it. So when somebody says, of intense facts, I roll my eyes. Yes, sir. Let me just first say I'm English and I don't believe time exists. I'm also a physicist, I would say, rather than First of all, that's two strikes. You're an Englishman and a physicist. The chances that you're not going to believe in time are just overwhelming. Let me first of all question why you have such trust in what you see and what you experience. There is now, I'm not a brain scientist at all, but I certainly read about education and it now seems very plausible that the brain is not really giving you necessarily what is out there, but it is giving you the result of a hypothesis that the brain has arrived at on the basis of often very meager information. And this is then why one sees when one looks at a cube, a representation of a cube on a page, the brain can't work out which hypothesis to present you, and that's why it flips backwards and forwards like that. So I would have thought there is an a priori very serious reason be very cautious about arguing from what one experiences to what's really how the world should be described. That's the first point I make. The second one is I'd like to ask you what role, if any, the results, the most fundamental results in science, in physics in particular, would play in your thinking and persuade you perhaps that you might need to change your ideas. because I arrive at my conviction that time doesn't exist because of certain very, very basic facts

27:30 about what we know about science at the moment from Einstein's general theory of relativity and the quantum theory. And let me just say, I mean, would you back in Galileo's time have said the Earth doesn't move? And also, what do you say about Einstein's demonstration that it's very difficult to maintain the notion of absolute simultaneity? Does that not impinge on things? Okay, a number of questions. So first, I accept everything true that science tells us. Second, there are an enormous number of very bright, very learned, very brilliant people, including Einstein and maybe Gödel and Minkowski and Kant and Leibniz and McTaggart. who, to some degree or another, think that time is unreal. And there are many people who think that Einstein's theory of special relativity really has that consequence. Not that time is unreal, but, I mean, some people would say that time is unreal. Others would say, well, they just show that you should accept the view that change in time is simply an instance of change along a dimension of a parameter. Do I find this intimidating? Yes. Still, there are bright people like Alfred North Whitehead or Samuel Alexander, who seemed to fully understand Einstein's theory of relativity and thought that there was still room for a process they called becoming, right? which is that there is this change, or CD Broad for that matter, there is a kind of change that is not just change along a dimension, but is new events occurring. I'm inclined to think that it hasn't been shown clearly to me,

30:00 possibly because of my finite and limited intelligence, But, you know, thank God for small favors. It has not been shown to me that science shows that time is unreal. It has been shown that there are some very illusory things about time, including our strong sense of absolute simultaneity, it seems to me. I guess it's possible to hold on to a theory of absolute simultaneity, but it's not very pretty. but I don't think I think everything that I say can be fit into time thought of as in kind of a Minkowski type diagram where there isn't a real clear present but I don't claim to have shown that I do think we experience change by experiencing change we may not mean that there is a simple unbrain mediated relation between change and what we experience, but I think we experience change, and I think physicists assume that, I mean, special relativity is based on observations, some of which are extremely brain-mediated about stars, bending time around the sun, and so forth and so on. So I don't think I have to be any more naive about the fact that we experience change than anyone else does. But yeah, is there a possibility that, I mean, so my goal today was to show what was wrong with McTaggart's argument. But, you know, McTaggart is not the be-all and end-all of investigations of time in the 20th century. It's probably just a relatively small footnote that interests philosophers. so it's certainly possible that I'm completely right about what's wrong with McTaggart's argument but completely wrong about time it's even possible that he's completely right about time and I'm completely wrong about time but I'm completely right about what's wrong with his argument for his true conclusion I think is there a question on this side? microphone

32:30 In my view, there are maybe different ways to escape fatalism. I concentrate only on this point. So consider the following move from, you speak of definite truth values only, definite. brackets P or not P from this to definitely true P or definitely true not P. This move was already doubted by Aristotle in the long chapter on tertium on dator in the metaphysics, but many people who talk about the sea battle, they read only perihermeneas. They don't look at the long chapter in the metaphysics. So this is, in my view, a first So if you don't specify the proposition, then this move is problematic. But a second way out, in my view, is that you specify exactly what kind of proposition this is, the future proposition. So if you say, for instance, definitely true brackets, contingent P or contingent not P, or contingent P and not contingent P, for instance. then the move is not problematic at all because we have already accurately said that the proposition is contingent. So it can be definitely true that P is contingent. These are only two possibilities. I think there are more. So this will be only a suggestion. Thank you. Well, it's my version of fatalism kind of went through this metaphysics or way of looking at things that involve propositions, because I thought that way of getting at what seemed to be wrong with a fatalistic argument that would be useful for McTaggart. I don't know that that's the only, I'm sure it's not the only way of getting at what's wrong with fatalism, and it may not at all be the best, just considering fatalism. Now, Aristotle has a view that seems to me quite plausible

35:00 if you think of being true as amounting to having been made true. and if you assume that the necessary truths and the logical truths are made true at the beginning of time or something like that. So you say, well, it's been made true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there won't be a sea battle tomorrow, but it hasn't been made true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow and it hasn't been made true that there won't be a sea battle tomorrow. That's more or less what Aristotle says at one point. Aristotle scholar either, and it seems to me quite reasonable if you think about it that way. Then you seem to require sort of a three-valued logic, and I think the logic of being made true is a three-valued logic. Does that mean that logic isn't two-valued? No. We also have this on their concept, the concept where we have, so to speak, a finished world, a finished sequence, and we ask, and we have a concept, a proposition that is suitable for that subject matter, and then we say everything in that sequence is, every proposition is made true are false by the events in that sequence. I think the two are quite compatible given the general mathematical notion of persistence, that is propositions, a truth of a proposition is a property that persists through larger and larger sequences or sets of events. If you've got your metaphysics right and your abstract objects right and your language right, I think that should all work. I agree with you. Probably just looking at the logic of the Sea Battle case might be a better way of seeing what's wrong with the actual classical arguments given for fatalism as opposed to the one I made up. I think the next question was on the left, sort of in the back. Is there, no, okay, oh, yes.

37:30 Is that Jeremy Butterfield? Yes, Jeremy Butterfield. Oh, good, you're Jeremy Butterfield, aren't you? Last time I saw you, I think you were about 18 or something. no change no change at all thank God And regardless of the group, the main group, and central group, as a person who will come as a person who will come, I mean, lead to business, I want to reconcile what you do So, that is what you said in my background here. It seems to me that it would be possible to have one of the old human forms in a textbook in which there is a human form of human, but through every third, one of the human branches is selected as being negative. Now, of course, it's true that, in that sense, the entire creation will be painted with the furious pain to act you out of it. So, I don't know if you care, since it's very good, it doesn't seem to be an act of the future. But you also want to wonder if you can, perhaps, exactly, because it is a subpar, but here earlier, it should be an act of the future. But nevertheless, I think what's about the next one is a place to a strategy in which there could be the need to prove now on the quality of the human being, so not made, not set, but it's a vital part of the technology, not death.

40:00 Yes, it seems to me that that's the sort of tense logic we would want. Of course, I'm in favor of all logics, all sorts of logics, At Stanford, we train logicians, and I like to see them all employed. So four-valued, five-valued, for all of them. But the question is, what do the branches mean philosophically? And everything I said up until the last section is consistent with quite different metaphysics than the one I adopted, saying the future is not real. It could be a metaphysics of branching universes so that the future and all the possible futures are now not unreal, as I think, but equally real now. And then, you know, the futures branch off. I find that excessive, but that's okay. Am I a bee theorist? Well, I think I'm a bee theorist with regard to the past. And I'm a B theorist with regard to any model of what has and will happen up to any point in the future. And I'm a B theorist, I think, in not being an A theorist, since A theorists require, usually form of metaphysics based on the idea of McTaggart's A-Series, which I think was just a red herring. Like you, I'm kind of raised to be a B-theorist, and I don't think I'm totally apostate, but I I do think most of the insights of B-theory are compatible with this kind of vague but metaphysically potent idea that, well, the universe is changing in the sense that new things happen, which doesn't seem like it ought to be all that controversial.

42:30 It should be the last question, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I got you. However, today, this morning, from 9.15 up to now, there were, I think, much of future. All of us heard and saw them. So a question arises. What is a distance between now and future, between what is real and what is unreal? a small detail you know I think I'm not sure there is such a thing as the present I mean there's just the leading edge of the past and it creates more of itself right I mean And the connection is the one you see. Things happen. And there's more and more things that have happened. There's more and more universe. And we can, how do we manage to say true things about the future? Well, oh dear, I've run out of time. I'll have to fill in those details later. I don't think I've done an adequate job there. I guess it's just one last question. What I'm going to say has very much to do with what Professor Weingarten and Jeremy Butterfield already said. I have an additional point. Historically speaking, it's very important and characteristic that manual logic was invented in 1920 when Lukasiewicz discussed just C-Battle case and he thought this is the only solution for the problem. Well, it's perhaps because

45:00 he couldn't know or simply didn't exist in those days what are the possible world semantics. Now we can use that and as I see you are more prone to take this direction or that direction because you didn't want to get up So in this case, if you have two propositions, you are P and non-P, then you can say well one is true in an accessible possible world and another is true in another accessible possible world, but what is necessary to say that neither of the two is actual, I mean P is true in W1 and non-P is true in W2. But both must be actualizable at the time when we speak about it. I think that – well, that's now my point. Thank you.