The Open Universe: Totality, Self-reference and Time
Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past and future present themselves so differently in our experience one of the central challenges of physics. The last two centuries have seen a great deal of progress in understanding various of the so-called arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, the cosmological arrow, the arrow of knowledge or information. There remains an outstanding piece of this puzzle that has seen little progress, one that Roger Penrose described in his beautiful paper Singularities and Time-Asymmetry in 1979 as: “The arrow most difficult to comprehend… namely the feeling of relentless forward temporal progression, according to which potentialities seem to be transformed into actualities.” I will propose that the insight needed to resolve the problem involves taking into account that we are part of the universe and that any attempt to model it as a totality involves self-reference. I will argue specifically that self-reference, against the background of a thermodynamic gradient, creates an instability in an embedded agent’s ability to know the future or even treat it as a potential object of knowledge. That instability captures the sense in which the future remains for her perpetually open and the passage of time resolves openness into the fixity of fact.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24740500.2022.2153069?src=recsys
This is the lead article in a volume that included commentaries (see below, with responses).
Commentaries on "The Open Universe: Totality, Self-Reference and Time", with my response
These are responses to commentaries mostly written in 2023. Click to see commentaries by
David Braddon Mitchell & Kristie Miller,
Commentaries by Emily Adlam, Peter Evans, Natalja Deng, and Zhu, are still forthcoming.
Time and the Visual Imagination: from physics to philosophy
Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, vol. 2, edited by Uriah Kriegel, Oxford University Press.
The visual imagination plays an especially prominent role in spacetime physics. Spacetime diagrams and other visualizations play a role conveying the content of the theory and guide the imagination in computation. I believe it is also behind some of the most trenchant misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time. In this paper I discuss the images of time coming out of physics and the philosophical confusions to which they give rise.
Passage, Flow, and the Logic of Temporal Perspectives
In The Nature of Time, The Time of Nature, edited by Christophe Bouton and Phillippe Hunemann, University of Chicago Press.
I try to inject a little formal precision into the discussion of passage. Instead of talking about the quality of temporal experience, I’m going to talk about the content. And I argue that we can resolve a good many of the issues with an examination of the logic of temporal perspectives.
From Physical Time to Human Time
Edited by Yuval Abrams, in Cosmological and Psychological Time, Springer.
Temporal Experience
In Oxford Handbook on Time, edited by Craig Callender, Oxford University Press.
The experience of time has been a mainstay of discussion in the phenomenological tradition. This is my first foray into the discussion of the quality and content of temporal experience.
Remembrances, Mementos, and Time Capsules
In Time, Reality, and Experience, edited by Craig Callender. Cambridge University Press.
