SHADOW TRANSIT shadows since McTaggart is the detective and since Philosopher McTaggart makes an appearance

[Mark Kohut]

What about this next book, *Real Time* *2* by Hugh Mellor?

This is a great book. Real Time 2 is the second version of the book, which
he published in (1998?). It’s a treatise on the nature of time which made
an enormous impression on me when I first read it. It presents a vision of
the world in metaphysical categories. It tells you about the nature of
time, the nature of space, things, objects, events, in a way that is
connected, but not the same as the physics of time and space. The
relationship between the philosophy of time and the physics of time is much
closer than what I said earlier about the relationship between the question
of change and the question of chemical change, because there’s nothing in
science that really tells you about what change is as such. But there are
physicists who talk about the nature of time and space.  Hugh Mellor is
someone who is very informed by those views, and knows the physics of space
and time very well. He uses his knowledge of those, and his philosophical
arguments, to defend a view of time, where time is rather like space. I
think the simplest way to put it is to say that there’s no such thing in
reality as now, there’s nothing that marks out in fundamental reality,
which time is now, anymore than there’s something that marks out in the
fundamental reality of space which place is here. Here is just where I am,
and now is just the point in time which we’re thinking or uttering those
words, so Hugh Mellor’s view has been called a block universe view of space
and time.

In what sense?

Block universe in the sense that time is just one of the dimensions of
space time. It’s a view that is common in physics, that we should think of
space time as a whole, like a four dimensional block. If you imagine things
occurring within space time are just regions of that block, four
dimensional regions of it, or what sometimes people call space time worms.
I don’t know why they say worms really. So, it’s called the block universe
because time and space have the same ontological standing, that is to say
they exist in exactly the same way.

But tense doesn’t?

In the first version of Hugh’s book, he called that way of thinking that we
have of time — in terms of the past and present and the future — ‘tense.’
In the later version of the book, the book that’s now out and the one that
you can get, Real Time 2, he changed his terminology. He changed the
terminology back to the very boring terminology of the Cambridge
philosopher McTaggart, where the way of thinking in terms of past, present,
and future is called the A-series, and the way of thinking of time in terms
of events being earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with is called
the B-series. This is a typically dreary, boring philosophical label. Hugh
changed to that label just because that was the way everyone else in the
time community was talking.

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What I like about this book is its painting of a metaphysical picture. So
one way to express Hugh Mellor’s view is that the A-series, what he called
tense, that is the way of thinking of time in terms of past and present and
future, is not real. Past and present and future are not features of
reality, any more than here and there are features, here-ness and
there-ness are features of reality.

So, they are features of our relation to reality, rather than things
independently of the particular subjective viewpoint on the world?

That’s right, they’re products of a particular subjective viewpoint, so
when I say that this time is the present, I mean this is the time at which
I’m thinking that thought, that’s Hugh Mellor’s view basically.