Comment on Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 17:54:46 GMT

I personally can say that I had a very strong belief that if I awake and the last day I remember is Tuesday it should be Wednesday and not Monday. It was quite a shock to learn that isn't true.

Yes, it can be very distressing to have a strong intuition challenged. It would be very distressing to learn that arithmetic for large integers didn't work the way I assumed it did.

But in math, the intuition precedes the emotional significance. I don't start out being emotionally attached to a certain answer. Rather, I start out emotionally neutral about the question, I form an intuition about the answer, and then I am emotionally attached to being right.

So, the emotional significance can't be used to explain where the intuition came from. In the case of math, the universality of the intuitions can be explained by our common biological and cultural heritage, and by our common experience with how the enumeration of things works.

In the case of time, we have the same biological and cultural heritage, and we have the same experience with time itself, but we arrive at different intuitions about the relationship between time and ontology. This is what I find puzzling.

Different perception can easily lead to different intuitions.

What are the different perceptions that would explain the different intuitions about whether the future exists?

Discuss