The Real Truth about the Unreal Future*

Abstract

Recent times have been very much focussed on the future. The election of Barack Obama in America was accompanied by a wave of optimism. The Global Financial Crisis and the challenge of Climate Change cause many to descend into pessimism. It is not whether our glass is half-empty or half-full that we worry about, but whether it will be empty or full. As philosophers, naturally, we want to illuminate such concerns, so that we might understand them better and subject them to rational scrutiny.According to the Growing-Block view of time, most famously put forward by C.D. Broad [1923], the flow of time consists in events coming into existence, so that past things and events are real, while future things and events are not. While the Growing-Block view is often considered intuitively appealing, some are concerned it has little to say about the future it denies the existence of. We show how Growing-Block theorists can assign meaningful, mind-independent truth conditions to sentences about the future. Introducing the Growing Block TheoryAsymmetries between past and future abound. The past, many of us think, is fixed and determinate; the future is open and indeterminate. The arrows of time and causation point from past to future, not from future to past.The Growing-Block view explains the difference between the fixed past and the open future in terms of ontological commitment: the view is committed to the (tenseless) existence of past objects and events, but not to the (tenseless) existence of future objects or events. It treats the present like the past, not like the future: present things are the last things the Growing-Block theory takes seriously.The commitments of the Growing-Block theory change-or more precisely, increase-as time passes. Though the Growing-Block theory takes only the past and present seriously, it holds that in time, there will be more to the past and present, because more will have happened, even though the events

I Tensed the Laws and the Laws Won: Non-Eternalist Humeanism

“…We have seen that tensing the laws can solve these problems. First and foremost we can solve the no-laws-problem: By adding a temporal operator, we do not have to wait until a possible end of 35 Briggs and Forbes (2012) time where the laws suddenly pop into existence. With these laws, we have a means to distinguish between physically possible and physically impossible courses of events while still retaining the genuine openness of the future, which is one of the main motivations behind proposing OFH in the first place.…”

“…18 For recent developments of GBT, see e.g. Briggs and Forbes (2012), Forbes (2016), and Correia and Rosenkranz (2013). Manuscrito -Rev.…”

The future, and what might have been

“…We claim that on the Growing-Block view, what is possible undergoes a fundamental change as well. We will rely on the version of the view we developed in Briggs and Forbes (2012).…”

Transparency, Photography, and the A-Theory of Time

“…Only present objects exist -past and future objects simply lack the property of being present (Markosian 2004). the growing-block view of time, which is another type of the A-theory of time, grants the flow of time such that both the present and past objects are real but the future objects are not (Briggs and Forbes 2012;Correia and Rosenkranz 2013). Because of its admission of the existence of the past objects, the proponents of the growing-block view have difficulty in explaining the difference between the past and the present (Braddon-Mitchell 2004, 2013Forbes 2016), leading to the famous claim by Braddon-Mitchell that "the current time is probably not the present" (Braddon-Mitchell 2004: 199).…”