Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?

The dispute between the A-theory and the B-theory is not a dispute about whether, say, "A-series" talk is valid. Everyone agrees that A-series talk (past, present, future) and B-series talk (before, during, after) are both valid.

The dispute is about which kind of talk is more "fundamental". In particular, if A-series talk is fundamental, then, it seems, there must be an objective fact about which time is "present", and this fact is independent of the time at which the question is asked. If the A-theory is true, then asking which time is "present" is like asking "Who is torekp" rather than "Who am I", because the answer to the first question doesn't depend on who is asking.

To the make the analogy tighter, asking which time is "present" is like asking "Who is torekp?" in a world where the name "torekp" rotates through the population in a systematic way. Yes, the answer is different at different times, but the answer changes without regard to who is doing the asking. Similarly (on the A-theory), the answer to which time is present changes (in some elusive sense), but the change happens without regard to when the question is asked.

Does the argument over interpretations of QM also seem like just semantics to you?

For example, when Eliezer advocates for MWI over Copenhagen, is he mistaken in thinking that he is engaged in a substantive argument rather than a merely semantic one?

However, I still think that it is an argument about semantics

You mean the original distinction, or your computationalist reconstruction? (Which is not at all accurate in my view)

That is trueish, but the point of introducing a distinction between relative facts (before and after) and absolute facts (past and future) is to get a handle in change/becoming,

Note also that presentism is not exactly equivalent to A series.

Do these differnt ontologys have consequences for how we understand physics? For example, suppose society generated a quantum random bit and if it was 1 we allocated all future social resources to pushing Mercury into the sun. If under B theory the future allready exists, then there is a fact of the matter as to whether Mercury is still there. Which then implies that there is a determic result that will happen we we generate the quantum random bit used to make this decision.

I'm no expert on quantum mechanics, but whether or not the result of quantum randomness is in fact determined based on a variable allready in the universe but hidden from us seems like something physics may say something about

The A-theorists are thinking in terms of a linear space, that is an oriented vector space. To them time is splayed out on a real number line, which has an origin (the present) and an orientation (a preferred future direction).

I think that this analogy is accurate and reveals that A-theorists are attributing additional structure to time, and therefore that they take a hit from Occam's razor.

However, to be fair, I think that an A-theorist would dispute your analogy. They would deny that time "is" splayed out on a number line, because there is no standpoint from which all of time is anything. Parts of time were one way, and other parts of time will be other ways, but the only part of time that is anything is the present moment.

(I'm again using A-theorist as code from presentist.)

By the way, off-topic, but:

The only defined operation is the taking of differences, and the notion of affine line relies on a previously defined notion of real line.

This is true if affine space is defined as a torsor for the reals as an additive group, but you can also axiomatize the affine line without reference to the reals. It's not clear to me whether this means that you can construct the affine line in some reasonable sense without reference to the reals. Do you know?

I sense that you do not know much modern mathematics

... from what do you get this impression, and in what way is it relevant? Yes, there are many parts of modern mathematics I am not familiar with. However, nothing that had come up up to this point was defined in the last 100 years, let alone the last 50.

I have a PhD in physics. I know what an affine space is. If you were thrown off by my uses of basis changes to effect translations, which would signal ignorance since vector addition is not equivalent to change of basis... I did clarify that I was in a function space defined over time, and in the case of function spaces defined over vector fields, translations of the argument of the function are indeed changes of basis.

In physics, we set the origin to be whatever. All the time. This is because we need to do actual arithmetic with actual numbers, and number systems with no 0 are needlessly cumbersome to use. Moving 0 around all the time in context-dependent and arbitrary ways completely defuses the 'harm' of A-theory, as far as I can tell.

What do you claim to know, and how do you claim to know it?

Fair question.

In the framework of Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy (PP) there's a qualia called "feeling of existence/being".

It took me roughly a year to get a handle around that concept and identify it for myself. I went from a state where I didn't know what a person giving a lecture about PP meant with "feeling of existence/being" as opposed to "feeling present" to having an my own phenomenological references sorted (there's also a related qualia of "globality" and one of "depth" in the PP-framework).

I can say whether I feel that qualia of "feeling of existence/being" more or less, in a quite similar way than I can say whether something looks more or less red. In addition to teaching PP Danis Bois also went to a French university and become something like visiting professor of philosophy. In that role he gave lectures about phenomenologically and existentialism and according to him it's next to impossible to get across to his audience what he means when he speaks about "sense of being".

I would guess that as far as "becoming" goes, things are similar. The semantics that the OP quotes that talk about "particular basic experience of "becoming" is the immediate reason for their attachment to the A-theory" suggest this. "Basic experience" is what people say when they mean qualia.

Unfortunately I'm not good at distinguishing change qualia. When reading Feldenkrais and going to his list of perception test I can do the things that most people can't do according to Feldenkrais. Then Feldenkrais lists things that can be perceived and among them is Rhythm. I have never really thought of rhythm as something that can be perceived of a basic level as a qualia. It triggers I'm me my "notice confusion trigger".

Rhythm might be in the same box of strange time qualia as "becoming", but it's something where I have to speculate at the moment. In a year my thoughts on the matter might be more clear.

That's basically my thoughts from a PP perspective.

I also have experience with time perception within NLP's timeline therapy. If you tell people to remember something, you can ask them where those that they remember come from. Some people perceive the past as something behind them. Others as something right to them, others in the front.

You can mess around with that representation and produce psychological effects with it. It can be quite intensive work and I have multiple reference experiences with it. Those experiences and a bit of theory about timeline therapy lead to intuitions about how things are. It's however not easy to summarize which specific experiences lead to which specific beliefs. Unfortunately NLP is also no subject with well structured theory.

There's an unfortunate paradox. Things in which I'm confident are usually hard to argue. I believe them because the are consistent with a wide array of observations I made in different contexts. They are not condensable to a short text.

I know the effort it took me to get a handle around "feeling to be/exist" from my own experience and I know about the research on phenomenological primitives and how hard it is to learn new ones.

A theory of time which models time as changing will use entities to represent 'now' and 'change'-events, whereas a static-time theory will designate entities to points in time. The former is better suited to answer questions about now (and implementations built upon that will be faster on this kind of query) whereas the latter is better suited to answer questions about fixed points in time or compare these (and implementations based on this will be faster on these operations).

I dunno, are we talking about A-theory, or presentism, and which version? I'm ready to agree that there are at least some ways of formulating A-theory that don't have a B-equivalent.

Part of my dissertation was about understanding the experience of time direction (in particular, the fact that cognitive systems record memories in one temporal direction and intervene in the opposite temporal direction) in statistical mechanical terms. I'd be happy to summarize the argument if you'd like, when I have the time.

Drool - I would very much like to get a copy of this part of your dissertation, or the whole thing, or a summary, whatever and whenever is convenient to you. I think I sorta get it on an intuitive level, but to fill in more of the physics would be wonderful.

Well, I guess I sort of agree that "B-theory" is not as constraining, even if both use the term "exist" in a way I disagree with. In any case, they seem to be more of an inspirational value, like the Mach principle (wrong if quantified) was for Einstein.

I am not clear on how one can use stat.mech to explain our time perception, feel free to elaborate some time. Maybe in a separate post, if the argument is long. I agree that humans only experiencing the present is not an argument against "static" block spacetime.

Anyway, I get frustrated by these discussions online, too much is left unsaid, the back-and-forth is slow and selective, only bits and pieces of the argument and motivation get expressed. Could be just my lack of communication skills, of course. If you are ever in Vancouver and feel like meeting up, lunch/dinner/drinks are on me.

Even if passimgness is not an objective reality, it is a subjecrive illusion, and that is no easier to explain.

An eternalist theory can't explain why we process dynamically, since it is exclusive of dynamism.

Eternalism can account for an arrow of time , and therefore why I don't have memories of time T4 at moment T3. What it can't account for is why I don't have simultaneous direct awareness of T2 and T3 and T4. Saying that that is because they are different times answer the question easily under the A series theory, because T4 does not exist at T3. But if all times co exist, why don't I have consciousness of all of them? If I am a 4D entity, why don't I have a 4D consciousness ?