Fighting The Zombie of The Growing Salami1

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Fighting the Zombie of the Growing Salami1

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Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 8
Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman
Print publication date: 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199682904
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Jan-14
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682904.001.0001
David Braddon-Mitchell
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682904.003.0010
Abstract and Keywords
This paper presents two ways in which one might try to evade the epistemic
objection to growing block models of time. These are offered, inter alia, as
interpretations of suggestions by Correia and Rosencranz in this volume. I
argue that the first attempt fails to avoid the epistemic objection because
even if there are no times at which me might take ourselves to be at which
are not now, there are plenty of locations we could take ourselves to be at
which are not on the bleeding edge of reality. The second objection splits
into two; on one reading it fail to evade the objection, on the second it loses
what is distinctive about the growing block and is otherwise implausible.
Keywords: Time, Presentism, Growing Block, Spacetime, Tense, Metaphysics, Correia,
Rozencranz, Braddon-Mitchell, Tooley, Broad, Block Universe
Correia and Rosenkranz (in this volume) offer a suggestive attempt to raise
the growing block model of time from the grave. The thought is something
like this: the opponents of the block use an epistemic argument that
mistakenly deploys an untensed notion of existence. The epistemic argument
assumes, they say, that if the block ends at, say, 2015, one can go back
mentally to 2013 and note that the benighted authors writing at that time
think that they are in the present but are mistaken. But this is not so, they
argue: for at every time it is the final slice of the block. At 2015, to think of
2013 is to think of the time when 2013 was the last slice of the block.
Before attempting to put a stake through the lumbering zombie of the
growing block theory (henceforth usually GBT), Ill clear up a couple of things
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which might be misunderstandings about my argument against it (Braddon-
Mitchell 2004).
1. Some Preliminary Clarifications
First, Correia and Rosenkranz (henceforth C&R) characterize my view as
an attempt to show that GBT is incoherent. That would be a tall order, and
I dont in fact attempt it. Instead the thought was that the model, while
coherent, divorces the indexical conception of nowNow
index
from the
objective one given by the metaphysics of the model, namely, the fact of
being located on the last sliceNow
ls.
This leaves us open to the unwelcome
likelihood that, Now
index
, it is not Now
ls
.
This is an undesirable outcome in my view, reason enough to reject
GBT; reason beyond the mere surprisingness of the view. (p.352) I think
it undermines the motivation for holding it in the first place. But it is
nevertheless far from rendering it incoherent. Committed growing blockers
sometimes accept the argument but embrace it as demonstrating surprising
evidence of our epistemic limitations, even if none have yet done so in print.
If the best metaphysical model of time tells us that we cant be sure that we
are in the present, and in fact are very likely to be in the past, then so be
it, runs the thought. However that view, while perhaps coherent, is pretty
unpalatable, hence perhaps the reluctance to swallow it publicly.
A second misunderstanding: C&R say that I adopt an untensed notion of
existence simpliciter in characterizing GBT. But this is also not right. While
there are entirely untensed ways of characterizing GBT
2
they are not really in
the spirit of GBT. Instead I think of it as a hybrid. The way I think of GBT is as
an A-series, and what exists at each A-time is a block universe. What exists
at every moment of true time or A-time is that block. At later times these
blocks are larger. At every A-time the present is, according to the theory,
the last slice. But equally at every A-time there is a volume of world-slices
which are at least quasi-B-related, and most of the slices are in the past at
that A-time. Quasi-B-relatedness is an ordering imposed by the geometry of
a spacetime; although it is a geometrical relation, one constraint on quasi-B-
relatedness should be that it puts the slices of spacetime in the same order
in which they were, successively, present. The idea is just that world-slices
are ordered, but it is left open whether there is a privileged direction, and
it is left equally open whether the ordering is genuinely temporal. In my
original paper I simply called this B-relatedness. I did so in part because,
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on some views about time to which I am sympathetic, all it takes to be
genuinely B-related is to be quasi-B-related.
Going into the back-block is not going back in A-time. But it's the existence
of the back-block at every A-time which is what gives rise to the epistemic
challenge. For whatever objective A-time it is, if the back-block exists at
that time, then there are agents in the back-block mistaken about what
time is truly now. Of course for (p.353) the GBT so construed there is a
difference at every spatiotemporal location between the true timethe slice
which is the present, and which marks where the A-series has got up to, and
which is given by the last slice in a B-series at that A-timeand where that
spatiotemporal location is to be found within what exists simpliciter (within
what EXISTS, in C&A's terminology and henceforth) at that A-time.
Finally, one desideratum for a GBT: it would count as a real advantage if
objective nowness could be reductively explained in terms of which slice is
the final slice of being. If the location of nowness and the cutting edge of
the block were merely correlated, then much of the motivation for having a
growing block view in the first place would be undermined.
2. The First Stake
What I take to be the misunderstanding of my objection provides the nub
of one reply to C&R. So to make this reply Ill first state how one might take
C&R's own view about what's wrong with the epistemic argument.
The epistemic argument requires that from the standpoint of a given
moment, you can look back on an earlier moment and see that, at that
moment, being extends beyond it. So from our current perspective we
can look back at the time at which Prior was writing The Syntax of Time
Distinctions and see that at that moment in time he would think that he
was in the present but be mistaken, and in fact be in the past. But, C&R say,
this is a mistake, because it is part of the most charitable formulation of
GBT that at every moment in time that moment is on the edge of being. At
every moment, and a fortiori at all the moments when Prior wrote, the past
exists but not the future. This they say is guaranteed by the tensed notion of
existence that they work with.
It seems to me that I can accept all of that, with some terminological
clarification, while leaving the sting of the epistemic argument unchanged.
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Consider the sense in which existence, and moments, are tensed on my
reading of the GBT. There is an A-series, which is of course fully tensed. Call
positions in the A-series moments for maximum (p.354) consistency with
C&A's terminology. At every moment in the A-series, the spatiotemporal
hyperplane
3
that is the latest in the block is objectively now.
So existence is entirely tensed. If I look back in the A-series to the time when
Prior was writing, I find a block which terminates at the hyperplane where he
writes, and so at that time he is in the present. What exists at each moment
is a block with a different last hyperplane from any distinct moment. That
last hyperplane is what grounds the facts about what is true at the present,
and the back-block which exists at that moment grounds truths about the
past at that moment.
So far, perhaps, no disagreement with C&R. But C&R say something else.
When we are quantifying over times, we only ever quantify over moments.
But I can accept that too. The time 1900 is that moment in time when a
certain hyperplanethe 1900 onewas last. The hyperplane in the block
which exists as at 1900 which makes true the claim that at 1900 certain
things were true in 1800, is not a moment in the relevant sense and thus not
a time; it's a location in the back-block of the moment 1900.
We can, if they exist, quantify over the hyperplanes in the back-block
which exists at any time. When quantifying over times, however, I quantify
over momentswhen I talk of 1900 as a time Im talking about the last
hyperplane of the 1900 block. So it's always now, in the sense that at every
location in the block that moment is present, since the present moment is
the last slice of the block.
But this still allows us to formulate the epistemic argument. For although I
cannot quantify over a moment or a time when that time is not on the edge
of being, I can quantify over hyperplanes which arent the last hyperplane
at that time. So now I can talk about the hyperplane in which Prior is writing,
a hyperplane which exists in spacetime (understood as a physical notion)
located in one spatiotemporal direction (i.e. in the direction of one of the
quasi-B-relations, (p.355) equally understood as a physical notion, and not as
going back in time).
I could equally have said here that we are talking about slices that are earlier
in the B-series which exists at that point in the A-series. But that would,
because of the associations of slices earlier and later in the B-series with
times, make it sound as though the hyperplanes are times. However, nothing
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hangs on calling them times. I am allowing that the tensed part of the theory
exhausts times. The physical hypothesis about the existence of a back-block
at every time can be neutrally described as a hypothesis about the existence
of hyperplanes in physical spacetime that are merely quasi-B-related to one
another and to the present slice.
Assuming that consciousness supervenes on physical structures in
spacetime, there's something back there (I think it's Prior, but that isnt
germane) who thinks he's Prior, and who thinks that the present is the
hyperplane which is part of what he calls 1954 and in which he is located.
He's wrong about that. He's not located in the past in the A-theoretic sense
he's located in that part of the back-block of 2013.
Now this formulation has certain advantages. It allows it to be the case that,
at every moment, being the last slice plays a role in marking or constituting
(take your pick) the present. It has the advantage of taking on a standard
interpretation of part of the scientific story about what exists at any time: a
partial block universe account. And it does indeed have the feature that C&R
say my reading doesnt have. It's genuinely dynamicthe universe grows as
we move forward in the A-seriesas time passes. But all this is at the price
of there being two ways to gloss ordinary talk about past moments. Strictly
past moments (when the block was smaller), and parts of the universe in the
backwards direction in the back-block which are not in the true past (in the
A-series), but just distant parts of the blocks that exist at each time.
4
This is
in part why it remains vulnerable to the epistemological argument.
So the idea behind the epistemological objection I am pressing is that
the indexical use of now does not pick out a moment or a time, but
rather a location in spacetime construed as a physical entity. (p.356) Thus
using moment or time in the A-theoretic way, the issue is not that this
moment is not now but rather that this location in spacetime is likely not
at the present. If you think this is an objectionable use of the expression
now because that should be tensed, Im happy to replace it with here in
spacetime. The slogan for the objection would then become how do we
know that here in spacetime the events are present. This would, I trust, just
be a terminological variant of what I said in my original paper, where I was
using moment to mean something like a hyperplane in spacetime and
objective present to mean the last such moment, but one which makes it
plain that my view can obey the constraints that C&R offer, while leaving the
epistemological objection alive.
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3. A Second Stab
This first formulation of the GBT has benefits, and is consistent with C&R's
stipulations. The way it accepts a fully tensed version of the growing block
is that there are in effect different blocks of varying size at each A-time, but
the locations in the back-block are not A-times. If the objective A-time is,
say, 2013, then the back-block contains many locations spatiotemporally
connected to 2013 which are not themselves A-times. At what one might call
the 2010 location, the true time is not 2010, it is 2013. The real 2010 was
when 2010 was the last slice. It's a different A-time, which has associated
with it a smaller back-block.
What some growing blockers might not like about this view (though perhaps
that just is an inevitable result of accommodating blocks and growing) is
that if, for expositional reasons, we allow ourselves to consider a God's-eye
perspective from outside time, intrinsic duplicates of times
5
will appear over
and again. First, as the last slice of a blockwhen they are the time as it
wereand again embedded as locations in the back-block of later times.
My second stab (which will matter only for those who prefer the second view
which is so stabbedif you think the view criticized in the first stab is the
best understanding of the growing block, then (p.357) you can stop now
without loss) removes this feature. It has genuinely temporal, not merely
physical, relations between the locations in the blocks. The 2010 location in
the back-block of 2013 is the time which is 2010. It is unqualifiedly identical
to the location which is on the bleeding edge of 2010. If you could move from
the 2013 location of the block at 2013 to the (at 2013) existing 2010 you
would arrive when it was 2010, and your place of origin (2013) would not
exist.
So, on this interpretation of GBT, what exists simpliciter (what EXISTS) is
not utterly unqualified. EXISTENCE is not confined to what exists in a time
it's about what exists in every time; however, EXISTENCE is relativized to
different times, because at different times, different other times EXIST. At
2013, 2010 EXISTS; but at 2010, 2013 does not.
Ill call a version of the growing block that has these features the purely
tensed growing block (PTGB) since it features no untensed quasi-B-relations.
Understanding things this way perhaps makes it easier to reply to my
epistemic objection, but doesnt come without its own costs. Here's the plan:
first Ill explain why it might fare better against the objection. Then Ill briefly
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argue that, for all this, my objection still works. Then I will make two remarks
about unattractive features of PTGB independently of whether the objection
alone is fatal to it.
So let's consider Julius Caesar again. It's now 2013. It's true that Julius
Caesar EXISTS
2013
even though he does not exist in 2013. Does he falsely
believe that he is in the present? No, because the content and truth of beliefs
should be assessed at the location of the beliefs themselves. At 60 bc, 2013
doesnt exist. So the fact that 2013 does not EXIST
60 bc
is what is relevant to
assessing the content of Caesar's belief that he is present. His belief that he
is present is true just if he is in a time-slice (60 bc) such that, at that time-
slice, no later ones EXIST
60 bc
.
Thus it looks like the epistemic worry is defeated. For there is no Julius
Caesar in the past who mistakenly thinks that he is in the present. For at the
time in which he exists he is right to think that he is in the present.
Im not convinced that this does evade the worry. This is because it's not
clear how to justify the principle of content attribution on which the evasion
depends. From the perspective of 2013, there are things I can say about
60 bc that are indexed to 2013. That is, after (p.358) all, how I get to say
that Caesar exists: he EXISTS
2013
. Saying that the content of his beliefs and
so forth have to be evaluated at his location is equivalent to saying that
what's relevant is what he BELIEVES
60 bc
; specifically that he BELIEVES
60
bc
that he is PRESENT
60 bc
. It's the fact that he does BELIEVE
60 BC
that he
is PRESENT
60 bc
, and that that is true, which is what appears to defuse the
problem. But Im allowed to say that he EXISTS
2013
in 60 bc. So why cant I
ask whether he BELIEVES
2013
that he is PRESENT
2013
in 60 bc? That would
be a false belief. To deny that, at 2013, Caesar BELIEVES
2013
anything would
be to treat existence very differently from other attributions when we look
back at the past: at 2013 Caesar EXISTS
2013
in 60 bc, but Caesar does not
BELIEVE
2013
that he is PRESENT
2013
6
at 2013, and this starts to look close to
various solutions that Ive argued against elsewheresolutions that make
the past very different from the present, in that the contents of beliefs are
different, or the past is populated by philosophical zombies.
7
I think this likely settles the matter. But if you are not persuaded, there
are a couple of independent strikes against PTGP that might make it not
worth adopting. The first is that it seems hard to say how this view differs
from presentism with a fixed past and open future. EXISTS
t
amounts to
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existence in t or earlier than t. It's certainly isomorphic to a presentist
account according to which there is an important notion of what is fixed at
tthat which exists or did exist. So the relativized notion of EXISTENCE
t
behaves very much like the presentist's notion of what is fixed (about
existence) at t. What distinguishes my version of the GBT from presentism
is the genuine existence, from the perspective of each time, of multiple
hyperplanes that timelessly and tenselessly exist in the way that presentists
cant countenance.
How does PTGB differ from presentism? There is an incantation we can
chant. According to PTGB it's now the case that Julius Caesar and indeed 60
bc exist in the most unrestricted sense of quantification. So Julius Caesar
EXISTS. According to presentism, on the (p.359) other hand, 60 bc does not
exist in the most unrestricted sense of quantification.
The worry which often arises in disputes like this is that there is quantifier
variance at work. How do we know that it's the same quantifier being used
in both statements? As Ive intimated, the presentist certainly accepts that
60 bc did exist. And given that the PTGB behaves in a way remarkably like
presentism with respect to what it says about past times, there is even more
reason than usual to doubt that there is a real distinctionreason to doubt
that what PTGB means when it says, 60 bc EXISTS
2013
, and at it there are
no slices past 60 bc, and what presentism means when it says, The facts
about what existed at 60 bc are fixed, and when it did exist there were no
times after it, are the same. It boils down to difficult issues about fixing
the meaning of the quantifier in such a way as to be sure that each theorist
means the same thing when they say unrestrictedly quantify.
Of course this issue bedevils more than just the growing block. Some think
(Meyer forthcoming) that the distinction between presentism and other views
is hard to make out for these kinds of reasons. But the striking isomorphisms
between PTGB and presentism make them a very likely candidate for such
treatment if anything ever was.
The final independent (and to my mind greatest) worry for PTGB is simply the
oddity of the relativization that it requires. The relativization produces a kind
of asymmetry of existence. Let's suppose that it is now 2013, and the past
we are talking about is 59 bc (time to move a little further along in Caesar's
biography). Let's now introduce some events at these times: the crossing of
the Rubicon (at 59 bc) and the publication of Prior's Wellington Address (at
1954). Henceforth Ill call them Publication and Crossing. Now at Publication
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it's true that amongst what other events EXIST
2013
is Crossing. But at
Crossingfrom its perspective, so to speakit's the case that Publication
does not EXIST
60 BC
. Unlike the growing block of the first stab, where there is
no asymmetry of existence (at Publication, Crossing exists, but at the back-
block Crossing that exists, Publication exists too), there is a real asymmetry.
It can be the case that if B exists at A, A need not exist at B.
Now if this is equivalent to the thought that at Publication it's true that
Crossing existed (but not that it EXISTS), but that when it did, Publication had
not yet come into existence, it's fine and there isnt the relevant asymmetry.
But here's the dilemma: either PTGB is so (p.360) equivalent, in which case
it is not distinct from presentism, or it is somehow distinct from presentism
but committed to asymmetries of existence between different parts of being.
It's possible for things to exist from the perspective of one part of being
2013although, from the perspective of some of those existing things,
2013 does not exist. Of course the idea that there might be two such events
such that at one of them they both exist, but at the other only one of them
does can be made technically coherent with the appropriate handling of
accessibility relations in a logic. But understanding the metaphysics so
described is another matter. Those asymmetries of existence are not just
odd. They take out the block from the growing blockwe have gone far from
the idea of trying to add dynamism to a block universe. It's a strange volume
of spacetime that has locations at which other locations exist, but at those
locations the first location doesnt! The thought would be that there is at
each A-time a block universe of different sizes, where each of these whole
blocks exists only from the perspective of its last slice. It's true of the blocks
that exist at every A-time that from the perspective of almost all of its parts
the entire block doesnt exist. That's a strange mereology indeed: strange
enough to suggest that this is not a view which really has block universes in
it at all.
4. Conclusion
Two stabs, and I think the growing block can return to its grave. The
interpretation that I gave of the growing block in my first stab preserves the
point of a growing block account, and also possesses the features C&R take
to be crucial for an adequate account of it. Ive made it more explicit that
on this interpretation of GBT existence simpliciterEXISTENCEis wholly
dynamic, tensed, and A-theoretic. Nevertheless the epistemic objection still
survives.
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Another understanding of GBTthe one I call PTGBmight at first look
as though it fares better against the epistemic objection. But on closer
inspection this is not at all clear. And there is a final worry: the view
countenances a strange asymmetry of existence, one which can be removed
only by understanding it in a way which may not make it distinct from
presentism.
University of Sydney
(p.361) References
Bibliography references:
Braddon-Mitchell, David (2004) How Do We Know it is Now Now?, Analysis
64: 199203.
Meyer, Ulrich (forthcoming) The Triviality of Presentism. In Roberto Ciuni,
Kristie Miller, and Giuliano Torrengo (eds), New Papers on the PresentFocus
on Presentism. Munich: Philosophia Verlag.
Notes:
(
1
) Im greatly indebted to a series of comments on earlier drafts of this
paper from Dean Zimmerman.
(
2
) For example, as a series of increasingly larger worlds all of which exist,
and which are ordered externally by the B-relations of the last slices, and
internally by the B-relations amongst them.
(
3
) I set aside considerations that are nevertheless important: talk of the last
hyperplane implies objective facts about simultaneity that are additions to
physics. Some might think that the growing block actually helps, because
the fact that being has an edge might be used to define that hyperplane of
simultaneity. But of course that edge is only a boundary, and being has other
boundaries, so perhaps the GBT may still require extra resources to stipulate
what the right simultaneity relations are.
(
4
) I leave out here considerations of whether the early components of the
block are identical in successive larger blocks.
(
5
) I leave it open here if they are identicali.e. if they are the same thing
persisting over time, but losing certain temporal properties. In second stab I
foreclose that openness.
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(
6
) A related worry is that if we are allowed to index presentness in this way,
it will become a triviality that one is present
t
at t, and the view will be in
danger of looking like a more cumbersome way of expressing the indexical
view of presentness.
(
7
) This last way of putting things was suggested by Dean Zimmerman, who
charitably expressed it as a reading of an earlier draft of this reply.

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