What Is Time? | Emily Thomas

In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith and Emily Thomas tackle the timely yet timeless question: "What is time?" Is time an external, objective fact, or is the flow and tempo of the world internal to us—in some sense, all in our head? Could a robot have consciousness even if it didn't understand time? To help concretize these potent questions, Justin and Emily look back at the thought of a now mostly-obscure metaphysician by the name of J.M.E. McTaggart, who argued that time was unreal. In doing so, however, he proposed a framework for time that philosophers have taken up enthusiastically ever since: either one must believe that time is purely linear—occurring as a series of discrete moments in sequence, plotted out on a timeline, simply past or future—or that there is some special interval we might call the "present," in addition to the past and future. Since McTaggart's time, philosophers have been excitedly proclaiming themselves either A theorists (partisans of the present) or B theorists (team pure past and future). Listen in to find out which identity Justin and Emily claim for themselves! Throughout the hour, they also touch on Leibniz and Aristotle's notions of temporality, Adorno on the spatialization of time, and why the ancient Greeks could dream up many notions we'd now think of as sci-fi, but the one thing that seemed to exceed their imagination was time travel.

Transcript

Justin E.H. Smith  00:15
Hello, welcome to "What Is X?" for The Point magazine. I'm your host, Justin E.H. Smith. As regular listeners will know, on each episode I have on a guest and we talk about a given X, where that variable is replaced by some important and difficult-to-define concept. We discuss the concept somewhat in the matter of Plato's dialogues, where Socrates explores with interlocutors such questions as: What is beauty? What is justice? And so on. And by the end of the episode, we try to come around to a determination of any one of three possibilities—agreement, disagreement, or aporia, which is to say, dead end, where we don't know whether we agree or not, because we can't figure out what the thing is. So today, I'm going to be talking about time—What is time?—with my guest, Professor Emily Thomas, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in the U.K., and is the author of the book, Absolute Time from 2018. And more recently, a popular book, The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad, in 2020. And maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that a little bit, as well. Emily works broadly speaking on the history of philosophy, recovering women philosophers from, I think, the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, and more recently is working on nineteenth-century British philosophy and theories of time, therein. So welcome, Emily.

Emily Thomas  02:25
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Justin E.H. Smith  02:27
So, let's see, how to how to get started? I mean, sometimes we just jump right in and say, Okay, what is time? I feel like that would be too, too fast. Right?

Emily Thomas  02:42
It's a big question.

Justin E.H. Smith  02:43
So let's try to get different angles on it. Here's a here's a weird way to start. I was talking to a Google AI researcher just yesterday, who has been working with Lambda, the large language learning module. And he is, so he claims, close to determining, for himself—close to deciding or believing—that this artificial intelligence is conscious. But he says that this consciousness must be very, very strange, because strictly speaking, when you're talking to Lambda, Lambda is not experiencing temporality, right? All you have is alternating kind of turns—right?—as in a chess game. So you give Lambda your input. And then in a flash, Lambda gives you its input. So I remain skeptical of the possibility of AI consciousness. But you know—which is not our topic for today.

Emily Thomas  04:08
Another big topic.

Justin E.H. Smith  04:09
Yeah. I who remain skeptical about AI consciousness said, but what on earth would consciousness outside of time be like? I mean, how could you say that this system is conscious and yet it has no temporal experience? Right. And so I guess my first question is: Would you agree that there is something fundamentally temporal about the experience of consciousness and maybe kind of inversely, that temporality itself has something to do with conscious experience in a way that I think has been hinted at or was explored by a number of modern philosophers. Does this sound like a compelling idea? That, I mean, to put it maybe some somewhat more, kind of, bluntly: there's one idea of of time that it's, you know, an external container. Right? And another idea of time that it's the subjective internal flow of things. Right? And this discussion with this AI guy made me come around to greater sympathy to the latter view. So what do you think?

Emily Thomas  05:48
[Laughs.] This is a wonderful set of questions. I think this is just brilliant. Okay, so, first off, I'm not so sure I would characterize the range of answers in the way that you have them. So there's certainly a debate over whether time or temporality, whether they are something in the external world, or whether they are something that our brains, our minds impose on the world. And I find temporality—the feel of time moving past me, the flow, the passage—as so fundamental that I find it very difficult to imagine that it is just something my mind imposes. So for me, time is something out there in the world, and the idea that something can be conscious, and not experience time, I actually find really implausible.

Justin E.H. Smith  06:49
Yeah.

Emily Thomas  06:50
So, there is this famous passage in John Locke, that I'm sure you're familiar with, where he writes, in "The Essay Concerning Human Understanding" that it is part of what it is to be a person that they can perceive themselves in time and can imagine themselves at other times.

Justin E.H. Smith  07:10
Yeah.

Emily Thomas  07:10
And I, I just cannot imagine a conscious being that can't do that.

Justin E.H. Smith  07:15
Right.

Emily Thomas  07:16
Now, of course, lots of philosophers would disagree with me. So one obvious big exception to everything is timeless conceptions of God—lots of people think God is a conscious being that's not in time. That's fine. I'm happy to bracket that off. But I think God is, if He exists, is going to be so exceptional that I'm happy to have a different debate about that. But this idea that time might be something that that our minds or brains, it kind of impose, it often is traced to Kant, who thinks that space and time are forms of thought. And that it's just a kind of quirk of our minds that we have to see the world through space-time spectacles.

Justin E.H. Smith  08:03
Right.

Emily Thomas  08:04
And where I would differ with you maybe over how to characterize the debate. If we think that time is in the external world, I think there are a million different ways of understanding what that means. So the container view is absolutely one of them. But I think there are lots of others—that you might think that time has relations between things, you might think that time is some kind of primal force. Like through the history of philosophy, there are many wild and varied theories of time that have been advanced.

Justin E.H. Smith  08:36
Maybe, maybe, if you don't mind, you could give us like a really brief lesson. As if you were talking to Introduction to Philosophy students—not of all the possible theories of time.  I mean, we've already we've already talked about Kant a little bit, and he's the figure I was kind of signaling towards when I when I made that distinction myself, though I also think it applies to Leibniz. What maybe you could summarize for us and, you know, if you don't want to, that's fine—and this is something I myself don't know much about—which is the kind of standard distinction that we have deriving from the philosophy of McTaggart in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, where you have the A theory and the B theory—I don't think that language comes from him, but the truth is, I always get these confused. And I just I just nod along when people started talking about them. So time is your thing. So, you know, do you have a position regarding the these different options? And first of all, what is are they?

Emily Thomas  08:54
[Laughs.] That would be a lot. Just make sure I understand—there are two things I could give you. So at first, I thought you were after a kind of brief history of what people have thought time is. And/or I can talk about the McTaggart distinction.

Justin E.H. Smith  10:17
Yeah. Well, I just, I mean, the brief history might not be as brief as we would hope. And so, you know, if you have some other kind of paradigmatic moments in the history of the philosophy of time, I think that's great. But I'm particularly interested in in bringing it up to McTaggart just because he's the one who seems to come up most frequently when philosophy of time is the subject.

Emily Thomas  10:46
Okay, I can do that.

Justin E.H. Smith  10:48
Excellent.

Emily Thomas  10:50
Okay, so in 1908, this British philosopher called J.M.E. McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart…

Justin E.H. Smith  10:59
Oh, wow that name.

Emily Thomas  11:00
Brilliant name. He published a paper that has since become infamous in the philosophy of time, and it is simply called the unreality of time. McTaggart was a British idealist and he ultimately wanted to show that time is unreal, and he does so by introducing a framework that everybody else would pick up and run with. So people don't care about his conclusions very much. But they really like this framework. And the framework runs as follows. So McTaggart is asking how we should understand the relationship of the past, present and future to time. So McTaggart thinks, if you believe that time is real, you have to say that things occur before or after one another. I ate my breakfast before brushing my teeth. For what it's worth, I agree that I think if you are a realist about time, then you have to say things happen before or after. And McTaggart says also, everyone—all theorists about time are going to agree on that—but he thinks people are going to disagree over whether things are really past, present or future. So for the B theorist, as it has now become known, events simply happen before or after. We can think about events being spread out on a timeline, in the same way that places are spread out in space. Everything is ordered, that no place or moment in time is special, nothing is present, nothing is special. They're all just kind of there. And in contrast, what's become known as the A theorist says that things really happen with regards to past, present and future. So I'm talking to you right now, this is the present moment. I ate my breakfast in the past, I will eat my lunch in the future. And these are real properties of time.

Justin E.H. Smith  13:10
So interesting. Do you have sympathies as regards to A or B? Do you want to share with us all that right away, or do you want that to come out slowly?

Emily Thomas  13:21
I'm happy to share. I have huge sympathy with the A theory. And I think for the same reasons that most A theorists do, which is simply that I find that my experience really feels like there is a moving present. Now feels present to me in a way that my breakfast or my lunch doesn't.

Justin E.H. Smith  13:46
Here's a—there's a weird asymmetry, isn't there? Because if I had to rank the times, yes, the present feels more real. But then after that, in second place, I would rank the past, right? Because, you know, I ate my breakfast, and that is now a fact about the universe. Right? It's not yet a fact about the universe on some understandings that I will have eaten my breakfast tomorrow. Right? Is there any consideration of that hierarchy in McTaggart?

Emily Thomas  14:29
Actually, in McTaggart, I don't think that there is. That's a great question. No, no. So McTaggart publishes this paper; it's largely ignored. There's a few responses in the next few years. And then in the 1920s, some really big philosophers go back to the question of time and then they begin picking up his framework. So in my own view, this particular question—is the present  moment privileged?—was not a topic of debate in Western philosophy before McTaggart.

Justin E.H. Smith  15:06
Interesting.

Emily Thomas  15:07
I think that you find earlier philosophers, they adopt positions that sound very much like they're an A theorist or a B theorist. But I don't think it was ever debated. I actually think that McTaggart articulated this question clearly for the first time. What happens in the Twenties is that people like C. D. Broad, and various other British, American philosophers around then, really pick it up and begin positioning themselves explicitly with regards to this debate. They describe themselves, you know, as A theorists or B theorists, and then you're off to the races. That's why McTaggart's paper has now been cited several thousand times.

Justin E.H. Smith  15:50
Right.

Emily Thomas  15:50
Yeah. So that's how I think it went. So he is not interested in what you're describing as a kind of asymmetry between the way we regard the past and the future. That's not present in McTaggart, I don't think, but it's very much present in later thinkers. So what happens is that people are thinking, "Well, why is it that this feels present, as opposed to being past or future? Why does this moment feel special?" And then they're coming up with theories to explain that. And one theory, famously, as this Cambridge philosopher Broad argued, is that the past is real and the future is unreal.

Justin E.H. Smith  16:33
Right, yeah, that's—

Emily Thomas  16:34
And the present moment moves. Yeah, so that explains this moving passage of the present.

Justin E.H. Smith  16:41
So McTaggart is very original, he introduces a new problem, or he makes explicit an eternal problem, you might say.

Emily Thomas  16:51
Yeah, I think that's right.

Justin E.H. Smith  16:53
But there's also as long ago as Aristotle and a preoccupation with the problem of the specious present, right? So you can also find reason to doubt the reality not just the past and the future, but also the present. Right? So we're really in trouble now, if none of those are real. And if I understand Aristotle correctly, the problem is that time is a continuum, and therefore, that you cannot isolate a discrete moment that deserves to be called the present. And if you try, you just, you just find, you know, sequence of moments slipping into the past. Right. And so the present feels real, but on further examination, it's not even there. Right?

Emily Thomas  17:52
Yes, yes.

Justin E.H. Smith  17:53
So isn't, isn't that a problem, too?

Emily Thomas  17:57
Yes, absolutely, it is. I mean, if you think that there is no such thing as the present moment, which seems to be what Aristotle is pointing us towards, yeah, then that is a real issue for anyone who wants to say that there's something special about the present. What you mentioned there, the specious present, so that term is is usually given today, to our experience of the present moment when it's understood to have duration. So we usually think that the like the metaphysical present, if you like, is a kind of mathematical point. But but in my experience, that the present seems longer than that. And then you might think, "Well, what I'm experiencing must be fake or specious. In a sense. I'm not just experiencing the present. I'm also experiencing a tiny bit of the recent past."

Justin E.H. Smith  18:53
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emily Thomas  18:54
So it raises this question, are we even experiencing what we think we're experiencing?

Justin E.H. Smith  18:59
Right, yeah. And I guess more recently, there has been psychological research in this matter, like: How long does the present endure? And I don't know what the what the answer is, but I wouldn't be surprised to go back and check that it's, you know, three seconds, five seconds, something like that. So by no means an infinitesimal time slice. Something that is kind of, let's say, phenomenally processable by a human consciousness, right. Yeah, absolutely. And so there have been lots of experiments conducted that I find particularly interesting on the shortest duration that humans can perceive. Yeah, this is what I'm talking about, yeah.

Emily Thomas  19:50
Exactly, which is, as you would imagine, within the realm of milliseconds, but there very much is a lower limit beyond which we can't perceive things. I've actually done some research very recently arguing—so usually people think that experiments on this stuff began in the 1850s. And then I found that a couple of people were experimenting on it in 1780. So a lot, lot earlier. And so William Herschel was a big astronomer and scientist, he was conducting experiments with William Watson, a guy who would later become mayor of Bath.

Justin E.H. Smith  20:31
Okay!

Emily Thomas  20:32
Yeah, they published it, but I don't think anyone has read the book, besides me, for a long.

Justin E.H. Smith  20:39
Interesting. This is well before the emergence of psychology as a proper discipline.

Emily Thomas  20:45
Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Justin E.H. Smith  20:46
Yeah. So interesting.

Emily Thomas  20:48
It seems like they were interested in this stuff it because of astronomy. So within astronomy, the way that telescope observations worked is that they are trying to see how quickly bodies pass across a telescope. And different people's perceptions differ by as much as a tenth of a second. Yeah, this is the infamous tenth of a second—the idea that this notion actually came into existence, because we never needed to measure times that small before.

Justin E.H. Smith  21:22
So interesting. Yeah. And that seems somehow to reinforce this idea that time is the measure of change, right. That time is—and this is a view that I broadly, though I can't isolate in the passages, but a view that I would associate with Leibniz,  right—that that time is not something that would it would even make sense to talk about without talking about the time in which such and such events elapse. Right?

Emily Thomas  22:00
Yeah, actually, I think that idea, although it's extremely prominent in Leibniz, that probably goes back to Aristotle.

Justin E.H. Smith  22:08
Yeah, yeah.

Emily Thomas  22:09
And you remember, he has that tale of how if people fall asleep for a very long time in a cave, when they wake up, they will not know that time has passed?

Justin E.H. Smith  22:20
Yeah.

Emily Thomas  22:21
Because you can only measure the passage of time by change.

Justin E.H. Smith  22:25
Right, right. Oh, that's so fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So okay, so you're sympathetic to the A theory, the B theory, makes me think somewhat of this idea that I feel like saying, I've read in Adorno of all people, that in the modern period, we undergo a spatialization of time, that time becomes conceptualized as a line. And lines are borrowed from geometry, and geometry is the measure of space. And this is weird, and deviant in the history of human experience of temporality. And so, on the face of it, I mean, I haven't thought so much about this. And the truth is, talking to you is the first time I've ever really understood the distinction between the A theory and B theory. But on the face of it, it would seem that the B theory is kind of an artifact of our modern preoccupation with measuring and plotting, right? Does that does that make sense?

Emily Thomas  23:40
Yeah, it does. And I agree. So, this idea of time as a line can actually be traced directly to Joseph Priestley. And his invention of the timeline. I believe that he published—I think that was in 1760, 70, 80... Yeah, his very first timeline, which I think was called a "chart of biography." And in it, he plots human lives using a measured line. And this had never happened before. Which I find incredible. Previously, when people used to plot time they did so using it tables, or circles. And he came up with this very simple, intuitive way—make time into a measured line. And it just took off. There were other people around him who had related ideas, but Priestley was the one who made it famous. And I absolutely think that this has sort of infected our idea of time and then it has a huge amount to do with the spatialization of time if that's what Adorno was talking about.

Justin E.H. Smith  24:55
I could be wrong in that. But I feel like I got it from him. There's a wonderful book—I don't know if you've seen this—by Tony Grafton and another author whose name I'm blanking on called a Timeline of Timelines.

Emily Thomas  25:09
I have seen that, but yes it's beautiful.

Justin E.H. Smith  25:11
Yeah. It's just a beautiful title. And it's also beautifully illustrated.

Emily Thomas  25:15
Yes. It's called A Cartography of Time. But somewhere online they definitely have "a timeline of timelines.

Justin E.H. Smith  25:18
Right. Right. Right. Wonderful. But yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. You're right, A Cartography of Time. So, yeah, I mean, this, then—what it sounds like, so far, first of all, is that we're, we're agreeing with one another, but also that we're agreeing with one another in virtue of the fact that we are both historians of philosophy. And we are therefore primed to understand theories of such broad and abstract and seemingly intractable problems as time as in part, conditioned by history, right. And the way your historical era imposes certain models or representations on you. Is that fair to say? Yes, absolutely. One hundred percent. I think that a lot of our ideas about big things are just historical accidents. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so this brings up a really interesting question. I don't know if you've thought about this, but… I forget where I first came across this thesis, but I've certainly been able to confirm it in my own readings since then. So if you look at, say, ancient Greece, and the variety of proto-scifi problems that classical authors were capable of imagining for themselves, you've got most of them already. You've got tele-transportation, and you've got mind reading, and you've got interstellar travel, and all of that good stuff.

Emily Thomas  27:17
That's wonderful.

Justin E.H. Smith  27:18
There's one thing you don't have: time travel. And time travel—I could be wrong here, someone might correct me—but time travel seems to emerge towards the end of the eighteenth century, which is to say, in the period in which we start to have timelines, right, in which we start to represent time as space. Right.  Yes. And—well, there's, I mean, it depends how you define time travel, because you do have Rip Van Winkle-style tales already in Antiquity—people who go to sleep for a long time and wake up. In a sense, that's time travel, but it's not scifi time travel. Right. So it seems to me that the possibility, that the historical conditions for the imagination of time travel, already give us reason to think that when we're imagining time travel, it's implicitly presupposing a certain model of time, which is itself a historical artifact. Does that—are you inclined to agree with that?

Emily Thomas  28:45
I am. Very much. So. My understanding is, though they were the odd time travel story, from the late eighteenth century onwards, they really, really got going with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in the late nineteenth century. And what makes Wells distinctive is two things. So one is that he is proposing a machine to time travel in, which makes it much more scifi-like kind of just falling asleep. But also that he wraps a theoretical idea around it, and Wells claims that it time is just the fourth dimension of space. Now, where do we get this time as a fourth dimension idea from? Well, that is very much I think, a product of the earliest spatialization of time that we take from Priestley: time is a line. But it's kind of solidified in the 1880s by a mathematician called Charles Hinton. And Hinton argues that there are more than three dimensions of space—so not just length, breadth, depth, there are more—and this idea had been floating around for a little while. So Hinton didn't invent that. But he very much made it popular. He even attempted to draw four dimensional cubes. But what Hinton does that was so unusual is that he strongly hints that the fourth dimension is time. And this idea was picked up by various people. But Wells was by far the biggest, and he ran with it. And then of course, as soon as you think that time is a kind of space, you can travel through it. Because just like space, all the parts of time exist, there's no implicit direction, you can run backwards as well as forwards. And then you have proper time travel of the kind that we think of now.

Justin E.H. Smith  30:43
Right, right. Do you think time travel is, in principle, possible?

Emily Thomas  30:51
Yeah. I suspect to get a really detailed answer to this, you'd have to ask a physicist. As far as I understand—so there's a couple of ways that physics seems to suggest it's straightforwardly possible, but you might think it's kind of cheating. So, you know, according to relativity, if I go off on a spaceship really fast, then time is going to pass differently for me than people on earth. There's also this phenomenon of closed time-like loops, where they think it might be possible to have a little bit of the fabric of space-time that kind of loops around and then you walk around it and you can turn back to where you started that way. Whether or not more Wellsian time travel is possible, I honestly don't know that. As far as I understand, there's no reasons in physics that say it's definitely not.

Justin E.H. Smith  31:44
Right. Right. Right.

Emily Thomas  31:46
There is this very funny argument, which I like, from a philosopher who argues: the best argument against the possibility of time travel is the fact that we are not yet besieged by time-traveling tourists.

Justin E.H. Smith  32:00
Right. Right. Yeah. That seems fairly compelling.

Emily Thomas  32:04
It's true.

Justin E.H. Smith  32:05
Yeah, yeah. And I suppose also the famous paradoxes that emerge. But I mean, I'm inclined to think that it's impossible. Even though in general, my view of the history of technology is that whatever is conceptualized is at some point realized. And that's a bold claim. But—

Emily Thomas  32:38
Yeah, it is!

Justin E.H. Smith  32:41
It seems—I'm inclined to think that the one exception might be time travel. And again, this is because I'm inclined to think that our idea of time travel implicitly presupposes a particular metaphysics of time that is a historical artifact, right?

Emily Thomas  33:06
I understand, yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  33:07
And that, you know, you need to you need to spatialize time before you can talk about moving back and forth it, right? Whereas for most of human history, time has been conceptualized as something other than a line. In particular, and here's—maybe this is getting too much into, say, the anthropology of time. But you know, the word for "year" in Romance languages, it shares the same root as the word for "ring," right? An, ano—it's the same word. And this seems to be the default experience of time in most human cultures—it can't be a line because it keeps going back around. Right? And, in a sense, what we've done in the modern period is broken the ring and straightened it out.

Emily Thomas  34:10
[Laughs.] Yes.

Justin E.H. Smith  34:10
Right? And I'm not sure that that is that that is the true model of time, just because it's the one that we have innovated over the past few centuries. Does that sound—?

Emily Thomas  34:29
Yes, I completely see—I completely see that line of reasoning. And I have sympathy with it. What I will say is that the advent of relativity arguably puts a spanner in the works—simply because most, but not all, interpretations of general relativity conceive time as being part of the space-time manifold. And then, you know, kind of like a blanket extended and multiple dimensions. And once you have that idea, then I think time is spatialized to a certain degree. You might well reject that—there are people that do. But nonetheless, that seems to be the most common reading.

Justin E.H. Smith  35:15
Right. Right, right. Yeah. I suppose in the case of a question like time when it comes to, say, weighing, let's say, crosscultural, anthropological testimonia against contemporary physics, I concede you do have to weight contemporary physics somewhat more strongly.

Emily Thomas  35:40
That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. What I find happening all the time, is contemporary physics, they take relativity to then prove what seemed to me to be really quite unrelated, huge metaphysical claims. So things like, they say, oh, past, present or future definitely exist. And I I'm not so sure that relativity necessitates that. I definitely think there's many missing links in the chain or certainly links that needs to be made explicit. What's happening there—I think we are in agreement—that it's this overwhelming historical spatialization of time bringing pressure to bear.

Justin E.H. Smith  36:22
Right, right, right, right, incidentally, the late-eighteenth-century time-travel novel that I was thinking about, and it's often invoked as the beginning of the genre, it's by a French author named Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and it's called The Year 2440. And it's lovely because the title page has a quote from Leibniz on it— Oh, that's wonderful. "Le Tems présent est gros de l'Avenir…" But actually, that's not Leibniz. It goes back—this goes back to St. Augustine, you'll probably know it: “The present is pregnant with the future.” Right? And this is the whole idea of seminal reasons. So it's misattributed to Leibniz, even though Leibniz takes it back up again. And indeed that whole Augustinian notion—and of course, Augustine is one of the main philosophers of time in Western history—that whole the whole notion of seminal reasons, seems to be a way of making the future real, but also seems to strongly imply determinism, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If the future is real, it seems like it seems like everything about the future is already settled. Right?

Emily Thomas  37:52
Yes. Yeah. And is that something that Mercier deals with in the time travel story?

Justin E.H. Smith  37:58
I mean, no, not really. It's a wild story. Because, you know, it's, again, 1772, just before the French revolution, and very, you know, very contemporary. But in the year 2440, he travels forward and discovers that in the 25th century, France is, in many respects, very futuristic and utopian. But also the Industrial Revolution hasn't happened. And everyone's—you know, they have very streamlined agriculture, but it's still basically a rural society, right? So this is a wonderful example of how you really can never predict the future.

Emily Thomas  38:46
I have not read this book, but I will be absolutely looking it up. That sounds wonderful.

Justin E.H. Smith  38:50
Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty incredible. Though one other point about Mercier, though, is that he represents this travel—I mean, there are different mechanisms of time travel, and he represents it as a dream. Right? And that is, arguably, very different from the H. G. Wells and things that come later, and places it more in continuity with, say, prophecy or oracular vision, right? It's not really time travel. It's just it's just seeing, right? Yes, yeah. Yes, of course. Yes. It's not it's not that he himself is traveling there bodily. But he has a window onto how the future would look. Well, that's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, have a look at that. It will really interest you, I think.

Emily Thomas  39:48
I will, yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  39:50
I wanted to get back to something we talked about towards the beginning, which is the question of eternity, right? And you said, "Okay, Maybe God, if God exists is so special that that we would have to place God outside of time." Now, when I think about the prospect of an afterlife, or eternal life, and maybe those two should be distinguished, sitting around forever in heaven sounds boring and impossible, right? Like, anything that lasts forever, looks like a bad deal, right?

Emily Thomas  40:26
Yeah.

Justin E.H. Smith  40:27
But I have sometimes taken that to be a relatively unsophisticated way of articulating a deeper idea, which is that human beings, or their souls, are eternal, right, which is to say that at the end of this life, you move into a form of being that doesn't elapse in time. Right? And that sounds kind of, somewhat, more attractive to me. But have we lost this important distinction in recent reflections? This distinction that religious traditions or theological traditions seem somewhat better at preserving—between the eternal and the infinite? Or do they collapse into one another in your view? You see, you understand the question?

Emily Thomas  41:33
How are you characterizing eternal and how you characterizing infinite?

Justin E.H. Smith  41:38
Being outside of time.

Emily Thomas  41:40
Is the eternal one.

Justin E.H. Smith  41:43
Yeah, yeah, that's how that's how I've understood it. Even if we run the two together in, let's say, our secular post theological reflections on the nature of time.

Emily Thomas  41:55
That makes sense. So, historically, because of this deep link between time and change, people have not wanted to conceive God as a being that changes. And then a way to make sense of that is to say, "Well, God is outside of time." And so the classic way of understanding divine eternity is this timeless model, which is exactly as you describe. And somehow, God is just kind of there, but he can't get bored. Presumably, that would be the same for human souls in the afterlife as well.

Justin E.H. Smith  42:41
Yeah.

Emily Thomas  42:43
The problem with these timeless conceptions of eternity is that many theologians also want to say that God is involved in the world. You know, so God creates miracles or God steps in at various points. And then that seems as though, well, God's mind has changing thoughts. And God actually is involved with the changing thing the world doesn't that mean that God is changing along with the world? So this has led to time-full accounts of eternity. In which God is kind of existing in everlasting life, but alongside us in time.

Justin E.H. Smith  43:28
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I guess—go ahead, yeah.

Emily Thomas  43:30
Yeah. I think that leads to the view that you were raising about, like if our afterlife were like that, couldn't that get really boring? Yeah. I don't know whether you've seen the final season of The Good Place, but—I will say spoiler alert, but that is a big theme. Okay. Yeah, I have that worry as well, I assure you, that everlasting life understood in that way, you're gonna hit a limit where that's not fun anymore.

Justin E.H. Smith  43:59
Yeah, you know, I'm just now rethinking this very familiar, Talking Heads lyric that you probably know, from “Heaven,” “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” And, you know, I always interpreted that to mean, heaven is boring, because you just sit around, but you could interpret it differently: heaven is outside of time, because nothing ever happens. Right? And you need things happening in order for there to be any temporal flow, right?

Emily Thomas  44:37
Absolutely, yes.

Justin E.H. Smith  44:39
But I guess you know, this is the crux of the difference between say Aristotle's unmoved mover and the Christian God, right? Aristotle has to keep God out of the affairs of the world, right? Because God can't change because God is already perfect. And so God doesn't—not only does God not love us, God doesn't even know we exist, for Aristotle. And once you get a loving God, like the Christians would insist God is, it's almost as if ipso facto, you've got a God who is mixed up in time. Right?

Emily Thomas  45:23
Absolutely. And what is the particular issue for the Christian God is the idea that God is a creator. Because that implies that there was a point where there was no creation and there was a point where God had the creative act, and then the world came into being. And that seems very much like God is acting and changing in some way. He had a desire, and then the desire was fulfilled. And that worry about God being unchanging in the seventeenth century, actually powered several philosophers argue that the world is eternal alongside God. Because then there was no act of creation, during which things change, God's just always been there. And the world has always been there.

Justin E.H. Smith  46:05
Right, right. Right, right. Is there a philosopher of time who seems particularly attractive to you, one who really stands out as the person who figured it out?

Emily Thomas  46:21
That's a wonderful question. Off the top of my head, no, actually. I think that I really like borrowing different bits from different people. I really admire C. D. Broad. I think that his writings on time—he shares my sympathy that we have to make sense of this moving present, but he's extremely clear in laying out the different options. And I really like that. Henri Bergson, I find significantly less clear. But I find his views very powerful, actually, that our starting point should be our experience of time, and then we build our metaphysics out from that. I actually don't think he is particularly interested in metaphysics he's much more about our experience. But I share his starting point.

Justin E.H. Smith  47:17
I mean, I don't know where I would place Bergson in terms of traditions, but certainly in the twentieth-century, continental philosophy, traditions, broadly conceived, time is almost by definition, grounded in the phenomenological experience. Right? For someone like Heidegger, for example. It comes from us, and whether Heidegger is even paying attention at all to what contemporary theoretical physics of his era is saying about time, I don't know, but he gives no evidence of caring so much.

Emily Thomas  47:58
Yes. That makes perfect sense. Whereas, I think, by that point, the early analytics—they're not hugely interested in relativity early on, but they are very interested in… So the debate we mentioned earlier about whether time is a kind of container, or whether time is relations holding between things, they're very interested in that. And then the impact that has on your metaphysic of time. Their starting point is very different, I think.

Justin E.H. Smith  48:29
Yeah. I have just one more question for you. It might surprise you because we had agreed not to talk about it, but your other work on travel. I'm wondering if you see a connection. I recently read some of Bruce Chatwin's work that you probably are familiar with. And, you know, I've got a lot of troubles with Chatwin. I find him frustrating in a lot of ways. But he's extremely preoccupied with this idea that the human essence is nomadic, right? And that we are primates that evolved to walk long distances with bare feet and so on. And that when we stop doing this, when we get sedentized, it kind of warps our nature, right, and gives us a distorted view of who we really are. Right? And it's for that reason that the greatest kind of instance of otherness in the contemporary world—it's not racial, or economic or national or anything like that—it's between the sedentists and the nomads. Right?

Emily Thomas  49:54
God. [Laughs.]

Justin E.H. Smith  49:55
And I find this I find this really, really interesting. But also, you know, it does make me wonder and I'm thinking here about Chatwin's Song Lines, a book about the Australian Aboriginal, kind of geographical, or the mapping songs by which Australian Aborigines kind of cognize huge territories and travel across them—when you lose practices like that, and you start to conceive of your being as rooted to a piece of real estate, right, I'm wondering if you think, in your reflections on the philosophy of travel—which is, you know, you have to admit a somewhat more rare and special philosophical subdomain than the philosophy of time—if your reflections on the philosophy of travel have, perhaps in a broadly Chatwinian way, but not necessarily, motivated you to rethink the question of the nature of time. That makes sense?

Emily Thomas  51:19
I think you'll have to say a little bit more about what you're thinking.

Justin E.H. Smith  51:23
Okay. Well, I mean, I guess, basically, the question is, do you think that these are two different philosophical subdomains? Or do they somehow intersect? And does the one help you to understand the other in in any measurable way?

Emily Thomas  51:44
Okay, that's a really great question. The short answer is, I find them to be quite different, actually. And I have done a lot of work on the philosophy of space. And then in a very basic way, travel is just change of place over time. So there is this kind of fundamental connection between traveling and place and time. But actually, I find the philosophy of time to be seeking answers about things, about the about the architecture of the world that is so fundamental, we can't even see it. We can't see or touch or taste time, it is this sort of abstract, invisible thing, and what philosophers are doing, and physicists, is trying to understand this thing that we can't poke or prod or touch. And in contrast, I think that philosophers who are engaged with problems around travel are being as worldly as they can be. It's about getting out into the world, and you know, whether they're talking about what a map is, like a piece of paper that you could turn over and look at, or wilderness that you could go out into and touch and breathe in, I find that they're looking really concrete aspects of reality. And so actually the driving questions and motivations are quite different.

Justin E.H. Smith  53:23
That's so interesting. I have to read your 2020 book on travel. I think that will, and maybe you can come back again, and we can we can talk about this.

Emily Thomas  53:34
Hopefully. It's a really fun book. My book on time is not fun. But the travel book is.

Justin E.H. Smith  53:41
Well, some some books shouldn't be fun. That speaks in its favor. So we're kind of getting towards the end here. I think, I hate to say it, but once again, I find myself in agreement [bells] with my guest. Yet again. I can't help it. But no, I mean, sometimes I've noted that, that I fall under the spell of my guest, and am in agreement with them only for as long as I'm talking to them. But then the podcast ends and I'm like, wait a minute. This time, I think we we really do agree because, at least to the extent that we present the problem in terms of A theory versus B theory, because I have significant qualms about B theory as you presented it. And like you, I also feel deep in my gut that the present is real. That said, there might be a point of difference, and maybe we can ask you what you think about this. I feel like maybe it's because I've been in France too long. But I feel like I am somewhat sympathetic to the phenomenological tradition's understanding of time as coming from us, right. 

Emily Thomas  55:41
Okay.

Justin E.H. Smith  55:42
In some way, as special for Dasein, and not for, you know, stones or asteroids. I don't know if—you know, I'm not I'm not going to defend that. I'm just going to say that, that when I think about time, it's generally through that lens that I start to think about it. Would you say that this is a plausible point of difference between us?

Emily Thomas  56:14
Yeah, I would. I clearly have been in analytic British philosophy too long myself. Because yes, I very much think time is something in the world.

Justin E.H. Smith  56:23
Yeah. Okay. Well, then maybe I take that back. We don't agree. [Goat bleat.]

Emily Thomas  56:33
We can agree. I think that the starting point of our philosophy of time should be our experience of time.

Justin E.H. Smith  56:40
Yeah, right. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. That sounds like, yeah, partial agreement.

Emily Thomas  56:46
[Laughs.] There's a Venn diagram, there's a bit of overlap somewhere.

Justin E.H. Smith  56:49
Yeah, this is super complicated. This is the most complicated episode ending I've yet confronted, in fact. But I mean, look, I have to say that, you know, I'm not a phenomenologist myself. And, you know, I'm also not a philosopher of time, myself. And if, you know, if I admit that that's how I tend to think about it, it really is a result of passive influence, rather than, you know, any kind of commitment. Right? Yeah. So listen, this has all been super interesting. And I mean, when I say we have to do another episode on travel. Because that is—I think, when we were talking earlier, we visited the idea. But you know, time is probably the one that you should check off the list before you get around to travel. But you know… Travel is more niche. I'm doing one on breakfast soon.

Emily Thomas  57:49
Travel is less niche than that.

Justin E.H. Smith  57:51
What is breakfast? So it's not like we have any prejudices here. 

Emily Thomas  58:01
I'd say not. [Laughs.]

Justin E.H. Smith  58:02
All right. So listen, again, this has been “What Is X?” and I've been talking to Emily Thomas about time and what it is, and I hope you'll join us here next time. Thank you, Emily.

Emily Thomas  58:20
Thank you. It's been wonderful.