Imprints in time: towards a moderately robust past

Abstract

Presentism says that only present objects exist (timelessly). But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like "dinosaurs existed". Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the (timeless) existence of past objects-like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change-the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. By drawing from the resources of Einstein's General Relativity, I offer a novel theory of time that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The theory says that the past and present exist (in the timeless sense), but where the present exhibits mass--energy, the past only consists of curved empty regions of spacetime. We therefore avoid saying that there are dinosaurs, since there is no mass--energy in the past; but the curvature of the past gives us a way to ground the truth that "dinosaurs existed".