Physics, Philosophy, and Time

These days the primary experts on the topic of Time are taken, especially after Einstein, to be Physicists. No doubt that their brilliant mathematical contortions of the past century or so have yielded concrete practical results. But quantitative Time is not Time itself, a topic still in the purview of Philosphers. Probably the most innovative thinker concerning the nature of Time has been Kant, who developed an alternative to two traditional standard notions of it. Those two are, first, that Time exists independently of humans, either as an ingredient in the objects of the world, or, as in many mythologies, a general feature of reality. Second, is the position that Time does not exist at all, that it is a subjective misunderstanding, or even an illusion. Kant's alternative is that Time is a 'Form' of our experience, namely a condition of how we process what we perceive and do. The inner structure of that Form is successiveness--that our experience is one-after-another. This means that Time is neither something independent of an experiencer, nor a mere illusion of the latter. Furthermore, it challenges the common conception that Time is a collection of unrelated moments, by binding them one to another. Perhaps, to dispel the lingering possibility that even these linked moments are in themselves static, Bergson later insists that the succession is a flux. However, the notion of a continuous flux can easily suggest that the only dimension of Time is the ongoing Present. Thus would be lost the insight that the earlier moment is ingredient in its successor, just as a flux is only a present point unless there is retention of an earlier phase. Hence, Time is cumulative, like a tree and its rings, as discussed in a previous posting. This conception of Time refutes those that, while admitting the reality of the Present, assert that the Past does not exist, since it proposes that the Past exists as part of the Present. (The nature of the Future has been previously considered.) In any case, Physicists would do well to consult Kant, who has something valuable to teach them about their theories regarding the 'beginning of Time', not to mention about their efforts to concoct a unified theory of existence.