Time appears to flow. Our experience of change and our own being in time reveals a relentless motion or passage. This apparent time motion is a profound enigma for currently well-known conceptions of time. I argue that they can neither explain it nor explain it away. This book describes a new theory of time that renders temporal passage fully intelligible. It treats time motion seriously by building in motion as a metaphysically fundamental feature of the physical universe, whose principle form …
Read moreTime appears to flow. Our experience of change and our own being in time reveals a relentless motion or passage. This apparent time motion is a profound enigma for currently well-known conceptions of time. I argue that they can neither explain it nor explain it away. This book describes a new theory of time that renders temporal passage fully intelligible. It treats time motion seriously by building in motion as a metaphysically fundamental feature of the physical universe, whose principle form is through higher-dimensional space. This motion-first metaphysics then rejects the orthodox view that motion is explained in terms of space and time, but rather uses space and motion to define time. This approach requires rethinking the physicist’s 4D manifold M. The orthodox view is that M is space-time: a vast concrete 4D block locating all things whose 4th-dimension is time. According to the motion-first metaphysics I develop, M is not space-time but instead a pre-physical aspect of a fundamentally dynamic reality. Time is not M’s 4th dimension. Instead time is the ineluctable motion through the 4th-dimension that all persisting things undergo. I argue that my motion-first metaphysics solves puzzles of time, change, and persistence. It’s also consistent with special relativity—time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity—although it’s not consistent with the Minkowskian interpretation of M as spacetime.
