The Existance of Time

A while ago, I watched the annual Burton and Garran Hall public speaking competition. One of the speakers presented an argument that "the structure and perception of time are invalid." This post will describe the argument made (in more or less broad strokes as suit my purposes) and some objections to it.

The analysis of temporality and related phenomena has always been a mainstay of modal logic. The study of objects and their properties, on the other hand, is usually studied in first order logic or some other logic with quantification. The study of objects and their properties over time has yielded a number of logics and philosophies each of which has a different goal. Here we consider a fairly naive quantified temporal logic that is capable of considering non-existent objects (such as Sherlock Holmes and a flying pig).

If we consider such a logic, it becomes clear that the argument the speaker presented conflated two concepts:

the existence of an objects; and
the existence of a state (or set of states).

The former is a statement made of an object (that it exists), possibly indexed by some particular time, like "now" or "250 million years ago". The later is a statement made of a state, or set of states: an instant in time. That instants, or periods, of time are not objects ought to be obvious - objects are temporally located and have some degree of persistence and identity through time (though the exact nature of these properties may be disputed).

Thought I have not seen any other informal arguments against "time," I imagine that conflations and confusions might be common. This is, perhaps, an argument in favour of the adoption of a more formal approach...

Thomas Sutton 16 August 2005