An old GBT’s new solution

ABSTRACT

An advantage of a typical growing block theory (GBT) or moving spotlight theory (MST) is that it can easily account for tenseless or tensed truths involving past entities. The paper indicates what is required for such an advantage is that a particular like a rock doesn’t change its status of being a rock when turning past from being present. But a typical GBT or MST, which implies that a particular’s turning past from being present doesn’t make a physical difference, faces a series of problems. The paper then regards the exclusion of the implication of making no physical difference by a typical GBT or MST as the second requirement for being a tenable GBT or MST. It’s difficult to satisfy both requirements – even Miller’s (2019) MWT fails to do so. The paper shall reveal how a GBT can satisfy both requirements.

KEYWORDS:

• The Sarvāstivāda
• causation
• presentness
• the moving spotlight theory
• the growing block theory
• the present problem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tooley’s (1997) GBT adopts an open-future view. There are also recent attempts to work out GBT open-future views (e.g. Grandjean 2021; Mariani and Torrengo 2021). But the GBT proposed here is open to the possibility that the future is fixed. Such a view is due to the Sarvāstivādin metaphysics. A Sarvāstivādin GBT could concede that there are no future entities but insist that there are truths about the future. However, I shall not discuss any further in the paper how such view would account for future-tensed truths.

2 Tenseless truths lack tensed verbs or their adverb surrogates. But, according to some GBT like Tooley’s (1997), a tenseless truth like ‘John F. Kennedy wins the 1960 United States presidential election’ is not true as of 1900, since the block has not grown long enough to include relevant entities. In such case, a tenseless truth is a temporary truth.

3 For GBT the block universe is constantly growing, but for MST it’s not.

4 According to the view of Williamsonian passage, many or all fundamental properties are temporary (see Deasy 2015, 2077). So this is a view of a thin block universe. According to Meghan Sullivan’s (2012, 166–167) minimal A-theory: past or future entities don’t have a spatiotemporal location. If the view entails the absence of many or most fundamental properties, then it’s also a view of a thin block universe.

5 What fundamental physical properties are depend on what a physical theory takes them to be.

6 See also Miller 2017b, 769; Ronkin 2018. ‘The Kathāvatthu’ refers to Aung and Davids’s (1915) Points of Controversy Or Subjects of Discourse: A Translation of the Kathāvatthu from the Abhidhamma-Piṭaka.

7 ‘Nyāyānusāra’ refers to Cox’s (1995) Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence: an Annotated Translation of the Section of Factors Dissociated from Thought from Saṇghabhadra's Nyāyānusāra. ‘Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya’ refers to Dessein’s (1998) Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya: Heart of Scholasticism with Miscellaneous Additions (See also Kalupahana 1974, 187; Lancaster 1974, 209; Chadha 2015, 546; Miller 2017b, 771; Ronkin 2018).

8 Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

9 ‘The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā’ refers to Siderits and Katsura’s (2013) Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Nāgārjuna’s causal argument targets a presentist stand rather than the Sarvāstivāda. But I find Siderits and Katsura’s (2013, 221) commentary on Nāgārjuna’s argument particularly inspiring with regard to the issue here. Their commentary is this.

10 According to GBT⁺, present entities exert their causal power to bring a new time-slice into existence. But GBT⁺ is neutral with regard to whether entities lose their causal power when turning past.

11 It is a brute fact that we receive causal messages from the past but not from the future. Note that anti-realism about backward causation is not assumed here. The point is just that we haven’t observed it.

12 I am not claiming that undetectability of future entities entails their non-existence. The point is that, the assumption of future entities’ non-existence has a bearing on physical detectability.

13 The phrase ‘the spatiotemporal location of e₂’ is not intended to imply the view that there is a space-time independent of events. Phrases like this are compatible with the view that space-time is constituted by events (along with their geometrical relations).

14 Holding a synchronic notion of causation in such case is a disaster. For it means that a photo of e₁ is available at the spatiotemporal location of e₁.

15 I owe an anonymous reviewer a lot for bringing up the issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number MOST 108-2410-H-002-246-MY3].