The division between the scientific image and the manifest image becomes even more obvious when one considers how time is grasped within each of them. A part of the qualitative features of human experience is the temporality of our experience. How we understand time within the manifest image and the scientific image is almost opposite. In the manifest image, we represent time divided between the past, the present, and the future, since we understand time as the becoming of a series of past, present and future events such that our actual experience reveals to us what is real. Events of the past passed out of existence because what they exist no longer, whereas the future is those events that have yet to become present. The scientific image, on the other hand, describes the world according to the theory of relativity to which there is no absolute now. One observer’s past may be another observer’s future. Philosophically, we stand with one position called presentism, where tensed descriptions have priority over tenseless descriptions, and another position called eternalism where it is just the opposite. I argue, however, that the experience of becoming is as relevant for our understanding of reality as the view we receive from relativity theory. I suggest that our experience of temporal becoming is a property of human experience brought to it as the awareness of changes in the external content of our perception as well as the internal change of our perception and thinking. Hence, it makes sense to say that all events are situated tenselessly at a certain moment in time, but similarly it makes sense to say that because events are the causal changes of objects, we also have an experience of objective becoming as a series of changing objects. Every possible observer will as part of his or her interaction with the world experience changes. However, the causally connected events have the same temporal order for all observers—even though events that are not causally connectable may have different order in time with respect to different observers.

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Time, Change, and Becoming

  • Jan Faye

摘要

The division between the scientific image and the manifest image becomes even more obvious when one considers how time is grasped within each of them. A part of the qualitative features of human experience is the temporality of our experience. How we understand time within the manifest image and the scientific image is almost opposite. In the manifest image, we represent time divided between the past, the present, and the future, since we understand time as the becoming of a series of past, present and future events such that our actual experience reveals to us what is real. Events of the past passed out of existence because what they exist no longer, whereas the future is those events that have yet to become present. The scientific image, on the other hand, describes the world according to the theory of relativity to which there is no absolute now. One observer’s past may be another observer’s future. Philosophically, we stand with one position called presentism, where tensed descriptions have priority over tenseless descriptions, and another position called eternalism where it is just the opposite. I argue, however, that the experience of becoming is as relevant for our understanding of reality as the view we receive from relativity theory. I suggest that our experience of temporal becoming is a property of human experience brought to it as the awareness of changes in the external content of our perception as well as the internal change of our perception and thinking. Hence, it makes sense to say that all events are situated tenselessly at a certain moment in time, but similarly it makes sense to say that because events are the causal changes of objects, we also have an experience of objective becoming as a series of changing objects. Every possible observer will as part of his or her interaction with the world experience changes. However, the causally connected events have the same temporal order for all observers—even though events that are not causally connectable may have different order in time with respect to different observers.