INTRODUCTION

I have been more successful in saying what time is not than what it is. Perhaps this should not occasion surprise. The other side of the idea that time is real is the belief that it is sui generis, and consequently not analysable in terms of other things – as a quasi-spatial dimension, a succession of numbers, the direction of events, or pure change. All interpretations of time that do not translate it into something else turn out to be implicitly or explicitly circular; so that apparently satisfactory definitions turn out on closer inspection to be tautologies along the lines of “time is the temporal relationship between events” or “time is measurable duration”. I shall be content to have arrived at the notion that time is fundamental or primitive – that time is time. There is, however, one final important job to be done, which concerns less what time is than what it does or rather what (human) time permits. In this final chapter, therefore, I want to examine the relationship between time and human freedom; more precisely between tensed time and agency.

(Voluntary) actions seem incompatible with the conventional idea of ourselves as a material part of a material universe, whose events express unfolding processes directed by fundamental physical laws established before we appeared on the scene and continuing after we have left. This vision of the world that brought us into being seems to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of free will, expressed in actions that are not traceable back to the Big Bang but originate with us, manifesting something that is unique to ourselves, deeds that redirect the course of events in accordance with our intentions. To see that this is possible, though perhaps not fully to understand how it is possible, we need to highlight phenomena that do not fit into the physicalist world picture. The items in question are intentionality, and its increasing elaboration in humans, and the temporal depth with which it interacts.

In the investigation that follows into how tensed time makes it possible for (conscious) humans to exercise freedom, I arrive at the fundamental purpose of this book: to rescue the image of humanity from the increasingly common view that what the physical sciences say about the universe as a whole gives a complete and truthful portrait of what we humans are.