Here I describe and defend a version of space-time substantivalism. My
account is meant partly as a reply to an argument against a particular
substantivalist position that can be found both in John Earman and John
Norton's “What price spacetime substantivalism? The hole story”, and
Earman's World Enough and Spacetime. Their
argument, the Hole Argument, purports to show that substantivalism leads to
a radical form of indeterminism within a class of theories that includes our
best theory of spacetime, namely, General Relativity (GTR). The hole
argument contends that the substantivalist must view diffeomorphic models of
a spacetime theory as representing genuinely distinct physical situations.
It is this contention I argue against.
The version of substantivalism I present, although not a traditional
account, incorporates the important features of traditional substantivalist
views.
Time is an essential dimension of our environment that allows us to extract meaningful information about speed of movement, speech, motor actions and fine motor control. Traditionally, models of time have tried to quantify how the brain might process the duration of an event. The most commonly cited are the pacemaker-accumulator model and the beat frequency model of interval timing, which explain how duration is perceived, represented and encoded. Here we posit such models as providing a powerful tool for simultaneously extracting, representing and encoding stimulus rate information. That is, any model that can process duration has all the information needed to code stimulus rate. We explore different processing strategies which would enable rate to be read off from both the pacemaker-accumulator and beat frequency model of interval timing. Finally we explore open questions that, when answered, will shed light upon potential mechanisms for duration and rate estimation.
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