Volume One: Contributed Papers || Is Temporality Mind-Dependent?

Is Temporality Mind-Dependent?Author(s): Paul FitzgeraldSource: PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association,Vol. 1980, Volume One: Contributed Papers (1980), pp. 283-291Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192572 .

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Is Temporality Mind-Dependent?

Paul Fitzgerald

Fordham University

The question is oversimple. We are more likely to find the right set of answers if we focus sharply a distinction which is invariably blurred by those who discuss the issue, especially those who argue that "temporal becoming" is a mind-dependent feature of reality. We must distinguish the "indexicality theme" from the "elapsive theme". Failure to do so has bred some confusion, I think.

A bit of background first. Those who discuss the mind-dependence of temporal becoming think of that issue as analogous to the traditional one about the mind-dependence of secondary qualities. Do colors, felt hotness, and salty taste exist in the mind-independent world? Or only within experience? "Roses are red, just like some of our after-images." "No they aren't. Roses only have a property of selectively reflecting light in the 7200 A region. That makes them Zook red to us. But they aren't really red.' ' "You're both wrong. Of course roses are red. But to be red just is to be the sort of thing which would look red to normal observers under standard conditions. Similarly, to be soluble is simply to have the dispositional property of dissolving if placed in a solvent.'"

How about experienced temporality? Analogous questions arise for it. Our efforts to answer them are being hobbled by irrelevant issues twined around the essential one. The irrelevant issues have to do with nowness, pastness, futurity and other properties allegedly expressed by indexical expressions such as "is occurring now" and "happened yesterday". These properties are sometimes called "A-determinations", after McTaggart's A-series. I take the essential issue to be that of finding out to what extent the durational character, the "timeyness", "transiency", or "elapsive" quality of our experience, is found mind-independently in the physical world as well. This eZapsive theme has almost nothing to do with the indexicaZ theme, the question of whether nowness and other A- determinations are found outside of mind.

The indexicality theme runs this way. Temporal indexical expressions

PSA 1980, Volume 1, pp. 283-291 Copyright () 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association.



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express features essential to "temporal becoming". Events are first future. They become ever less future, approaching us in time, and ev- entually become present. That's temporal becoming. They shed futurity and acquire another distinctive property, presentness or nowness. (I call this idea of time a property acquisition modeZ.) This transient nowness is held briefly (how long?). Then events lose it, picking up pastness as a consolation prize. Futurity, presentness, and pastness are held to be irreducibly indexical determinations, in that they can not be expressed by such non-indexical predicates as the tenseless ocur at time t". Nor can statements attributing them be reductively

translated into non-indexical statements.

Several related ideas are at work here. There is the general question of universals, of course. Do any expressions, indexical or not, express properties? Are there such things as properties to be expressed? If there are, can the identity conditions of these properties be "read off" the meanings of the predicates which express them? Are two universals distinct iff the predicates expressing them differ in meaning? Such a view sometimes underlies belief in irreducibly indexical properties, and the property-acquisition model of time. For we sometimes see arguments for this model which run as follows (Gale 1968).

First, statements containing temporal indexicals, such as "Event E is occurring now", resist translation into statements lacking them, such as "Event E occur at time t ". Second, these indexical statements con- vey information which cannot be conveyed by any non-indexical means. To say that a battle occur at time t (fill in a proper name of the present time for "t"), is not to say that the battle is occurring now. For a person might know that the battle has that date without thereby having enough information to figure out that it is occurring now, and vice versa.

Third, temporal indexicals communicate their peculiar kind of information by predicating of their subjects irreducibly indexical properties. This step is the mistaken one, I think. Rather than predicating an irreducibly indexical property, indexical predicates, I have argued, play their peculiar role by a kind of linguistic pointing (Fitzgerald 1974a, 1974b). But let us continue the argument.

Fourth, since some statements predicating temporal indexical properties are true, the properties are genuinely instantiated. Fifth, these A-determinations are neither mental nor mind-dependent properties. For some statements predicating them report facts which would obtain even if there were no minds. For example, even if there were no minds the gal- axy would still be rotating on its axis right now.

Note that this argument is independent of the fact that the indexicals in question are temporaZ. If it works at all, it works for spatial and other "indexical determinations" as well. So all attempts, such as Nicholas Rescher's (1973, pps. 124-5) to argue that"full-blooded temporality" is mind-dependent would, if successful, show the same thing about "full-blooded spatiality". And attempts such as those of Wesley Salmon (1974) and Adolf Grunbaum (1971) to construe nowness as mind-dependent



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should be matched by attempts to do the same thing for hereness.

Step three is questionable. There are no A-determinations, within or outside of mind. Temporal indexical statements do not play their peculiar linguistic role by predicating irreducibly indexical properties but by a kind of linguistic pointing, analogous to literal pointing ges- tures. When we say that something is occurring now we simply mean that it is occurring at this time. To say that is to predicate the relational non-indexical property of occurring at a time, and, by means of "this", to point ZinguisticaZZy at the time in question. We don't predicate thisness in addition. Similarly, when we say that something is occurring here we mean that it is occurring at this place. We predicate occurrence at a place, and point to the place. We don't predicate thisness of the place. There is no need to raise questions about whether some supposed hereness is mind-independently instantiated or only mind-dependently so, or whether "full-blooded spatiality" is found only in the mind.

Some might claim that arguments from translatability, functioning of indexicals, and the like, are beside the point, because we directly experience nowness. Lynn Rudder Baker, for instance, says:

A better reason for claiming, as Grunbaum does, that "E is occurring now" (said at t) and "E occurs at t" predicate different properties is that the becoming present of an event, unlike its occurrence at a clock time, is not a physical property. But failing to be a mind-independent property of events, nowness can adequately be construed as a mind-dependent property. The reason to take nowness to be a mind-dependent attribute of events is that transiency plays an undeniably significant role in our experience. Thus ... in order to ''save the pheno- menaa", an account of becoming should allow for the ongoing and transient quality of experience:... . (Baker 1979, p.356).

Transiency, yes; indexicality or nowness, NO! That is the conflation against which I have been protesting. I find no irreducibly indexical herenesses and nownesses, thisnesses and thatnesses, within my experience. Nor is there you-ness, vous-te, itness, that-away-ness nor down-yonder- ness. But some will claim that though these last are suspect, we surely have to acknowledge presentness within experience. Isn't there a kind of felt transition from futurity to presentness to pastness which is an immediate datum? So aren't there A-determinations within experience?

No, there are not. But we must do justice to the facts which lead people to think there are. There is felt temporality within experience, a directly experienced transient or elapsive character. But it is not essentially indexical. Phenomenal temporal features of experience are fully expressible in tenseless language, as in "my feelings of nausea surge up quickly and pass as suddenly,"or "The after-image on the left Zasts longer than the jumpy green one to its right." (Cumbersome references to times have been omitted for brevity.) The dawdle and whoosh of experienced time is perfectly well expressed by tenseless talk. To think otherwise is like thinking that you can't correctly translate



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"I love you" into Arabic because Arabic doesn't sound like a loving language (compare: tenseless locutions suggest timelessness, not transiency). It is a serious question whether these phenomenal temporal features found within experience characterize the physical world mind-independently. That question is the analogue for time of the issue concerning the objec- tivity or subjectivity of secondary qualities.

Why do people think there is an irreducibly indexical transiency within experience, that is, an irreducibly indexical property of presentness? The reason, I suggest, is this. When you say that some particular event is "happening now", that use of words is only temporarily appropriate for that event. People think this is because the words predicate a property, nowness, which is only temporarily possessed. Not so, however. "Is happening now" is only temporari ly predicable not because the particular of which it's predicated has an evanescent property of nowness, but because it is evanescent. Later acts of predication are too late to be simultaneous with the short-lived particular.

To firm up my claim, let's take the analogous case of hereness. Someone might say that it is an undeniable fact that his green after- image is here (mental pointing), and the red one is there. The beating of my heart is here (hand over heart); the beating of your heart is there (I point my finger to your chest). The wrong step would be to infer that the entities in question are thereby shown to have spatial indexical properties. "Here" and "there" pick out places in an indexical way. They are not used to predicate indexical properties of those places -- samefor "now" and "then".

Several thinkers, such as Adolf Gr'u'nbaum (1971), Nicholas Rescher (1973), Wesley Salmon (1974), and Lynn Rudder Baker (1974-5, 1979) have held that there is an irreducibly indexical kind of nowness within experience which is essentially mind-dependent or at least mind-related. They differ from one another in their analyses of this nowness and, to a lesser degree, in their arguments for its mind-dependence. Salmon, for instance, criticizes details of Gr'unbaum's account and gives a different analysis of nowness. Lynn Rudder Baker partly defends GrZu'nbaum against Salmon and partly offers reasons for modifying Gru'nbaum's account. Baker's thesis could better be described as asserting the "mind- centricity" of temporal becoming, and the same may hold for Rescher's. On Baker's view an event acquires nowness at the time of its occurrence even if no minds exist then. The meaning of this nowness-acquisition, however, is cashed in terms of what would be experienced by an observer who met certain requirements, if there were such an observer.

I have distinguished indexical nowness from non-indexical felt transiency. Felt transiency provides a closer analogue to the standard secondary qualities than does nowness, in that considerations relevant to deciding if felt transiency is mind-dependent are more like those which bear on secondary qualities. We should be asking whether non-indexical transiency, elapsiveness, is mind-dependent.

But we might ask the same question about the alleged property of



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indexical nowness. Is it essentially mind-dependent? You know that I think there is no such property in any conceivable world. But let's pretend that there is such a property, and that its identity conditions are given by the meaning of such predicates as "is occurring now'' and "exists now". Is that property genuinely instantiated? If so, is it instantiated independently of minds? Does its analysis make essential reference to mind? We can examine which of the arguments for its mind- dependence would also, mutatis mutandis, be effective arguments for the mind-dependence of non-indexical transiency. Both nowness-acquisition and felt elapsiveness have often been regarded as essential to "temporal becoming". So we can use "temporal becoming" to speak in a general way about either or both phenomena.

The first argument for the mind-dependence of temporal becoming is that physics finds no need to posit nowness to explain happenings in the mind-independent world (Grtuanbaum 1967, Smart 1963). Simi larly, we have no reason to believe that colors are found in the mind-independent world, since we can account for all the appearances without positing colors in things. Properties of selectively reflecting light will do instead.

The analogy creaks a bit. It is at best a conceptually contingent fact that colors aren't in things. We know what evidence would drive us to attribute to the mind-independent world colors like those found within experience. Suppose light didn't come in different wavelengths, and that the only way to account for why we see different objects as having different colors is that they are differently colored, independently of minds. But no one has ever successfully explained what it would be like for physics to require A-determinations and their spatial analogues, if it doesn't require them as things stand. (I think that Grunbaum ( 1967, 1969) has refuted the arguments of Hans Reichenbach (1956) and H.A.C. Dobbs (1969)that today's physics requires positing an indexical nowness.) But if I believed that indexical expressions expressed indexical properties with semantic identity conditions, I would argue that they are ac- tually instantiated, and mind-independently, even though physics has no need of them. Physics focusses on those properties required to differ- entiate the actual world from other conceivable spatio-temporal worlds. But presentness, pastness and futurity are found in any conceivable temporal world. That's why physics need not mention them. Similarly, it does not bother to mention such properties as being seZf-identicaZ.

Attackers of mind-independent nowness say that this move trivial- izes temporal indexical properties (GrUnbaum 1971). So it does, in the sense of rendering them impotent to explain traits which are (conceptually) contingently associated with time in our world. But how could it conceivably be otherwise? No one has ever explained that. Moreover, psychology does not require indexical properties to explain felt transiency, or anything else in our experience. So if the argument from physics showed that indexical properties are absent from the mind-independent world, a parallel argument from psychology would show that they are not instantiated within consciousness either.

Will the argument from physics work against the mind-independence



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of felt transiency? Not without much more labor. For physics does find it necessary to attribute to physical things a mind-independent temporal extension which we call duration. Is this kind of duration the same that we find instantiated within consciousness, by after-images, for example? Act-object analyses of after-imaging, and sensation, with sense-data as objects, have been powerfully defended by Jackson (1977, see also Fitzgerald 1979). These wi ll introduce further subtleties into the analysis of experiential time.

Here we meet the analogues of the classical questions about secondary qualities. To explain directly experienced duration are we required to posit the same quality in the mind-independent world? This is harder to answer than the analogous questions for standard secondary qualities, because so little is known about time perception. That's partly because we can't ordinarily block it out of consciousness, as we can close our eyes and stop seeing colors. But there are abnormal mystical-type experiences of which subjects say that during a certain period of clock time they were in a state of awareness in which time seemed to stand still, or be absent. Perhaps what was absent was some kind of felt transiency, though physical duration was present. And perhaps the conditions for the presence, ab- sence, and variation of this kind of transiency would show that it is mind-dependent. These are just hints.

A second argument for the mind-dependence of temporal becoming would suggest that such mind-dependence is an a priori truth, insensitive to empirical findings. Here's a quotation which sums up the argument.

We turn now to presentness, the second key aspect of full- blooded time. As observed above, A-series time requires the specifying of a particular 'now' to supplement the general machinery of B-series precedence. ... The 'now-of-the-present' requires an explicit act of awareness for its identification. ... The presentness of the now is of its very nature an exper- ientiaZ presentness, and this fact renders it overtly mind- involving. ... Full-blooded time (unlike bare temporality) is not merely conceptually mind-invoking, but is outright mind- dependent, because the essential factor of presentness intro- duces an overt reference to the experiencing mind into an analysis of what is at issue . (Rescher 1973, pps.124-5).

The argument can be summarized, I hope without caricature, this way. 1) No (full-blooded) time without a now. 2) No now without an act of specifying one. 3) No act of specifying a now, without a mind, and therefore 4) No (full-blooded) time without a mind.

A defender of mind-independent nowness would simply reject premiss 2. A now is simply a time which has nowness. Every time has nowness when it is the present time. To be sure, picking out a now requires a mind, because picking out anything is a mental act. But the entity thereby selected, a time, and the nowness of that time, are not shown by this argument to be in any way mind-dependent. Needless to say, the argument



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has no relevance to the status of non-indexical transiency. Yet some such directly experienced elapsiveness might well be taken to be what differentiates "full-blooded temporality" from bare physical duration or clock time. Not that there's any need to quibble about "full-blooded".

A third argument for the mind-dependence of temporal becoming has been advanced by Adolf Gr'unbaum (1967, pp.45-56). This says that temporal becoming, and subjective time itself, comes in successive nows of an atomic kind. But the instants of the physical world are dense and continuous. Therefore the "atomic-now" structure of temporal becoming is not found in the physical world.

I would deny that the durations present in our experience come as atomic, individual beads of duration, one after the other. The nows which we sometimes set ourselves to select deliberately are another matter. Acts of now-selection necessarily come one after the other, bead- like. No matter how quickly we pick out successive nows, each has fin- ite duration and an immediate successor. But this shows more about acts of now-selection than about the phenomenal temporality of ordinary experience sliding by when we're tying our shoes and not indulging in the artificial exercise of (sheepishly) counting nows.

But an argument like this one may show that phenomenal temporal duration is distinct from physical duration. Take an after-image, for example. It doesn't seem to be composed of instantaneous temporal stages having the structure of the continuum, especially if, as seems probable, it is not literally in physical spacetime (Fitzgerald 1979). So its phenomenal temporal structure would seem to be different from that which physics attributes to matter. That doesn't mean that its phenomenal duration has an atomic character. Maybe it does, but I'm not convinced. Its phenomenal duration might instead have some indefinite potential divisib- ility, as Aristotle thought physical time did.

A fourth argument for the mind-dependence of temporal becoming is de- rived from relativity theory. Say event E is occurring now. "Now" means "at this time". But what frame-time, exactly? Relativity of simultaneity entails that even instantaneous events occur not just at one time, but at an infinity of frame-times. When we say something's occurring now, is this so riddled with false implications of frame-time uniqueness that it is necessarily false? Are all nowness-attributions to physical events false, for this reason? Is the uniqueness condition satisfied only for intramental events? If so, that's a reason to regard nowness as mental.

If we regard ordinary tensed attributions of present occurrence as false on these relativistic grounds, we'll have to say the same thing about their usual tenseless substitutes. "Event E occur on Oct. 16, 1980" equally fails to pick out a single time, through failing to specify a frame. I would suggest that neither ordinary tensed nor tenseless claims that things are happening now should be regarded as so fatally flawed by failure to specify a frame as to be automatically false. Why not see them as vague enough to be true? If so, relativity provides no ground to regard nowness as mind-dependent. Its implications for non-indexical transiency must be discussed another time.



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References

Baker, Lynn Rudder. (1974-5). "Temporal Becoming: The Argument from Physics." The Philosophical Forum 6: 218-236.

------------------. (1979). "On the Mind-Dependence of Temporal Becoming." PhilosoDhy and Phenomenological Research 39: 341-357.

Cohen, R.S. and Schaffner, K.E. (eds.). (1974). PSA 1972. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 20.) Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co.

Dobbs, H.A.C. (1969). "The 'Present' in Physics." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19: 317-324 .

Fitzgerald, Paul. (1974a). "Nowness and the Understanding of Time." In Cohen and Schaffner (1974). Pages 259-281.

----------------. (1 974b). "Critical Study of The Language of Time by Richard M. Gale." The Philosophical Forum 5: 424-440.

----------------. (1979). "Feature Book Review: Perception by Frank Jackson." International Philosophical Quarterly 19: 103-113.

Freeman, E. and Sellars, W. (eds.). (1971). The Meaning of Time. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

Gale, Richard. (1968). The Language of Time. New York: The Humanities Press.

Griunbaum, Adolf. (1967). Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

---------------. (1969). "Are Physical Events Themselves Transiently Past, Present and Future? A Reply to H.A.C. Dobbs." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20: 148-153.

---------------. (1971). "The Meaning of Time.?" In Freeman and Sellars (1971). Pages 195-228.

Jackson, Frank. (1977). Perception: A Regresentative Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nakhnikian, George. (ed.). (1974). Bertrand Russell's Philosophy. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co.

Reichenbach, Hans. (1956). The Direction of Time. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rescher, Nicholas. (1973). Concegtual Idealism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Salmon, Wesley. (1974 ). "Memory and Perception in Human Knowledge."



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In Nakhnikian (1974). Pages 139-167.

Smart, J.C.C. (1963). Philosophy and Scientific Realism. New York: The Humanities Press.



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