The No-Time World

[apolliana]

"Time is a necessary representation that grounds all intuitions. In regard to appearances in general one cannot remove time, though one can very well take the appearances away from time. Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all actuality of appearances possible. The latter could all disappear, but time itself (as the universal condition of their possibility) cannot be removed” (Kant, CPR, B46/A31).

Strawson imagined a world without space. Why not, rather, imagine a world without time? Would it similarly bode ill for the possibility of thought about mind-independent objects? Or would it perhaps have the opposite effect--make it such that thought could only represent objects as oddly disconnected from the mind thinking about them? If so, it would seem to be a lesser shortcoming than the inability to think of things as independent from the mind.

Imagine a world with no time. You must set aside the problem that your imaginings of the no-time world take time; we'll come back to that later. The no-time world is a spatial expanse. It may contain whatever entities you like, but they cannot come into being, pass away, or move. It may contain sounds; but they too are instantaneous and frozen. Perhaps it's better to say it may contain 'sound.' (There would in fact be no particulars individuated non-visually.) It is difficult to determine the expanse of this world, as that would require moving through it, which we cannot do. We must either imagine a limited expanse seen from a normal, grounded perspective, or a less limited expanse seen from above.

Could we have a conceptual scheme resembling our own in such a world? Could we have a conceptual scheme that allows for distinct but simultaneous instances of the same universal? The answer to the second question appears to be affirmative. Imagine there are 100 rabbits in the no-time world. There seems to be no problem with saying they are all rabbits. There is invariably simultaneity, since there is only one moment.

What, if anything, do we lose in such a world? We would lose all of the properties of which objects demonstrate possession by changing--i.e., by moving around, being poked, prodded or experimented upon. Unless the observer is imagined to be omniscient, the properties objects have would be only those that are immediately observable; objects would have far fewer properties. The content of a thought about this world would be a report of the things it contains. This suggests that the structure of such a thought would be different from our own. The no-time world, after all, contains no actions or processes, no verbs; and therefore, no agents. None of the concepts we have that include actions or dispositions to react to things in a certain way would be available.

A thought about this world would have the structure of an instantaneous list. Since a list cannot truly be instantaneous, it might better be thought of as a picture--an image. The inhabitant of this world, at the instant that she exists, grasps an image portraying all that the world contains. How she comes to know the 100 rabbits and their locations instantaneously is unclear; she will be epistemically superb--perhaps like a super version of Sherlock Holmes whose deductive capacities are both hard-wired and deliver literally immediate results.

Could thought as we know it really be possible in such a world? Thought, after all, is usually discursive, something that unfolds in time; it is not usually best represented by an unmoving image. But as there would be no reason to suspect that the predicates "is" and "exists" would be lost, we could still form propositions describing this world--providing we do so instantaneously. Spatial demonstratives could be used; although they would not be able to be used for reidentification of things. There would be no need to keep track of objects (or sounds or mental states, or days), for the same reasons.

It is a simpler world. The more difficult question about this world is whether we can make sense of anything recognizable as thought taking place in it. If the imagined instantaneous picture-knowing imagined above is coherent, the answer is yes. What is less clear would be the sense in which the instantaneous picture-thinking mind would be related to the world it pictures. We can conceive of it having a body and being located at a point in space; but what could it know about its own body without having time to discover it in. What it would know would be what is immediately perceivable. It would not, therefore, be a 'self' with memories and a history. Nor would it be able to have knowledge concerning regions of the world it doesn't currently perceive. Time is needed, it seems, to house spatial particulars too. Without the ways of exploring the world and determining our relation to its contents provided by time, together with space, the mental life--if we can call it that--of the perceiver in the no-time world, is hard to imagine. It seems strange even to call a 'mind' something with no knowledge of its own history or stream of current thoughts. Such a mind would be a mirror of nature only. While a world with no space might preclude objectivity, a world with no time, might, in a sense, preclude subjectivity.

Total losses for the no-time world: events (including audible events and mental events), causation, actions, dispositions, agents, unperceived spatial particulars, memory and personal histories, reidentification.

Total wins for the no-time world: simultaneously instantiations of the same universal, mind-independent particulars.