After talking about the mind/body problem for a while, we switched to the nature of time. As you'll recall from an earlier blog post, I've been torn between the static and dynamic views of time, and ChatGPT kept challenging me on everything I said. In the process of this challenging, ChatGPT said something that gave me an idea. I was wrestling with the tension beween our undeniable perception of the flow of time on the one hand, and the implication of special relativity on the other, namely that there being no absolute simultaneity seems to imply a static view of time.
ChatGPT said, "Could consciousness itself generate the impression of temporal passage, even if physically, all events exist statically?"
ChatGPT may have been hinting at the idea that the flow of time was just an illusion, which I had already expressed doubt about on the basis that dismissing data as illusory means your theory isn't accounting for all the evidence. A good theory should make sense of all the data rather than dismissing some of it as illusory.
But it got me to thinking. What if the block universe is real, and there's no physical reason for why we should experience time as if it flowed. In that case, couldn't our conscious experience of the flow of time serve as evidence for substance dualism? Maybe our minds do flow through the block, and that's the explanation for why we experience time as being dynamic. If so, that could serve as an argument for substance dualism because it would mean our mind is doing something the physical world is not doing.
This would be an interesting take because it would mean the opposite of what most substance dualists seem to think. Most I've read think of time is something that's part of the physical world, but the non-physical world is a-temporal. In my view, it would be just the opposite. Time flows in the non--physical realm, but not in the physical realm.
Where does that leave God, though? If God is neither created nor destroyed, and God experiences time dynamically, then there would have to be infinite duration for God. If you accept the arguments against infinite time, then that won't work at all.
If I accepted this new view I just came up with, I would probably be inclined to think created beings were very different from God in how they experience time. I would suspect that God directly experiences the whole spectrum of physical time as if it were all the present for him, but we all experience it one moment at a time. So while time would flow for us, it would be static for him. That's an old view I used to have about God. Although I was inconsistent, as I explained here, I used to think of time as a block that's completely open to God's experience.
It still raises questions about the future, though. If spacetime is a block, does time have an end? And if not, is it infinite in the future direction? If so, doesn't that undermine all the arguments against an infinite past since there's a future/past symmetry?
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But maybe it's a growing block!" I can't make sense of a growing block unless there's a time above time. Time would have to be static within the block but dynamic outside of the block. Otherwise, how could the block grow?
Maybe there's some way to make that fit into my new theory. I mean if souls experience a flow of time apart from the physical world, then maybe there is a time outside of the physical spacetime block.
When I say, "new theory," I mean it's new to me. For all I know, somebody else has already come up with it.
To summarize the main point of this post, I'm wondering if our undeniable perception of the flow of time vs. the static nature of time implied by special relativity (particularly there being no absolute simultaneity) can be used as an argument for substance dualism. That's something I'll have to think about some more. What do you think?
