""Time flies," "time waits for no one," "as time goes on": The way we speak about time tends to strongly imply that the passage of time is some sort of real process that happens out there in the world. We inhabit the present moment and move through time, even as events come and go, fading into the past. But go ahead and try to actually verbalize just what is meant by the flow or passage of time."
"A flow of what? Rivers flow because water is in motion. What does it mean to say that time flows? Events are more like happenings than things, yet we talk as though they have ever-changing locations in the future, present or past. But if some events are future, and moving toward you, and some past, moving away, then where are they? The future and past don't seem to have any physical location."
"Human beings have been thinking about time for as long as we have records of humans thinking about anything at all. The concept of time inescapably permeates every single thought you have about yourself and the world around you. That's why, as a philosopher, philosophical and scientific developments in our understanding of time have always seemed especially important to me."
Everyday language treats time as a flowing process, implying movement through present, past, and future. 'Flow' ordinarily denotes motion of a medium, but time lacks a moving substance. Events are occurrences, not objects, yet language places them at changing positions labeled future, present, or past, which lack physical locations. If future events 'move toward' and past events 'move away,' their whereabouts are unclear. Ancient thinkers expressed skepticism: Parmenides argued that if only the present is real, the future cannot become present without something arising from nothing. Similar paradoxes appear in later classical thought.
Read at The Conversation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]