"What something is is not simply a question of its material constitution but of its relationship to other things as well." — darthbarracuda on The Philosophy Forum
In the first part of this blog post, I had begun to challenge the idea that the present moment has no duration. One source of the false intuition that the present moment, which we commonly designate as now, is instantaneous and hence temporally unextended is that we conceive of it as the moving boundary between what has already happened (the past) and what is yet to happen (the future). This boundary seems to be unextended since, by the time we are thinking of it, it has already passed! This is a very common argument heard in popular discussions where mention is made of the elusiveness of the present. Why are we conceiving of the present in this way, as something thin and elusive that slips away as soon as we seek to get a hold of it?
One reason, I surmise, is because the passage of time is something that we witness. As we watch a clock ticking, we are powerless to stop its movement. Likewise, as we grow older, we are powerless to stop the aging of our bodies. As the deadline for an assignment approaches, we are unable to recover the time we have wasted postponing the moment when we would start working on it. All of those processes are continuous and relentless. In this sense, the passage of time is objective: it is not subject to our whims and it occurs whether we are happy with it or not.
While I believe that it is true that the passage of time is objective in this way, I want to insist that it is also subjective. Objectivity and subjectivity aren't contraries. I would like first to briefly sketch the idea that objectivity and subjectivity are two complementary features of all our empirical human judgements about the world with the help of a concrete example. For a fuller discussion, refer to this blog post.
What does it mean for something to be a tree? Suppose you are walking in a public park and are wondering how many trees there are in that park.
(Work in progress...)
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