This paper argues that the growing block theory of time (GBT) and others like it seed doubts about their motivations. According to GBT, always, present things begin to exist on the edge of being, the latest part of reality, and then recede into the past, remaining otherwise unchanged. This view is motivated by the idea that positing this edge of being thereby privileges the present over the past. But several lines of reasoning—via recombination of unchanging present things, a higher-dimensional …
Read moreThis paper argues that the growing block theory of time (GBT) and others like it seed doubts about their motivations. According to GBT, always, present things begin to exist on the edge of being, the latest part of reality, and then recede into the past, remaining otherwise unchanged. This view is motivated by the idea that positing this edge of being thereby privileges the present over the past. But several lines of reasoning—via recombination of unchanging present things, a higher-dimensional growing block that embeds GBT’s ontology, and non-standard growing blocks that cannot be divided into past and present—converge on the conclusion that, apparently, a presentist ontology can duplicate GBT’s, including its edge of being. Is this apparently presentist ontology in fact the same as GBT’s? Either answer, I argue, ultimately yields the same result: supposing GBT’s ontology is ours, we should doubt that the present is the edge of being, rather than the entirety of our growing block. That undercuts the idea that positing an edge of being privileges the present over the past, undermining GBT’s motivations. And because this argument promises to generalize, theories similar to GBT seem likewise threatened.
