Metaphysics (3): Time and Person

Note: This is the third instalment in my comprehensive summary and an opinion piece of this book.

Time

For a change and its cause to occur (discussed in the previous instalment) time is an element definitely involved.

Not only in this but nearly everything that has to do with reality so it only makes sense to include it under metaphysics.

How fast does time pass though? Does it go in reverse? Or since time exists independently of events, can nothing occur while time passes?

Bringing back temporal properties has some value regarding these questions. An event yesterday has a temporal property of past while an event now has for present.

But the order does generally seem future, present and past.

Shifting gears, believing in the present moment as real is called presentism and this view is getting popular through meditation these days.

But the problem of this is obvious: how long or short is present exactly? A millisecond? A second? An hour? People say a moment but that doesn’t exactly tell how long.

We can only roughly gauge a moment to be one till the period we acknowledge as so.

But another problem also lurks. Is it possible for two spatially separated events doing simultaneously such as getting sunlight and the sun taking over eight minutes to reach you? Is that still the present ‘moment’?

Coming back to tenses, why is the past acknowledged as real while it would be considered false to say the future is real as well?

The rational answer for it: since the past was present and thus, a real event occurring in the timeline whereas the future is not present yet thus only a probable possibility that is to occur but is this true?

The ancients also had opinions on these and these might seem appealing compared to what has been discussed so far.

Aristotle would start from the genesis of change (big bang theory), changes and finally construct it into time. This is called Eternalism.

It simply means that the clock started ticking from genesis.

Person

It’s good to question if a person consists of a special property regarding metaphysics since we possess intelligence.

That being said, it’s also important to note that not all humans are a person since if a person is in a vegetative state then it’s hard to say if they do qualify as a person.

A person is simply someone who can be an agent of his actions and thus his own morality as well.

If the puzzle of a person ought to be solved, memory plays a significant role in it.

While we may not remember everything, our consequences of past events overlap and shape us creating our psychological continuity.

If we do dive deep in what a person is exactly, we may come across the popular notion of dualism.

That our mind (or soul, depending on the philosophy) and body are separate and can exist beyond the physical body. Though this is obviously not confirmed since there is no contact of information after a person’s death so far.

If we do indeed admit this to be true, we also admit that spiritual substances do not follow the rules of the physical which poses a problem.

This results in materialists thinking all things are reducible to materials whereas an idealist thinks that those are mental things.

But if we still do believe dualism is real then even though everything does occur from the mind, it needs to be explained what connection makes so that our physical body and mind is perfectly in sync.

We may explain this through causation but since spiritual substances do not follow physical principles, a different causation is necessary.

One last thought however, this brings back to our similar concept of twins within table subsection back in the first essay.

The only way to know that you are not a duplication of yourself but original from a mind perspective is impossible but from a physical perspective, it is easy since the spatial position and the bodily connection between you and yourself cannot be replicated.

This puts the duality argument at an unconvincing position.

Regardless, we are chasing after the spiritual aspect of ‘person’ since that seems to set us apart from others.

Whether it is us or them, we both have physical bodies so the natural difference is our mind but as we know from our duplicate example, this is hard to say.