150. Kristie Miller | Life in Four Dimensions

What if the flow of time is an illusion, and the past, present, and future all exist together right now?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestKristie Miller is the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time. Her work has focused on metaphysics, especially as it relates to time, temporal passage, identity, and agency.Check out her recent book, "Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory"!https://academic.oup.com/book/62313https://a.co/d/04YERGhM2. Book SummaryLife in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory argues for the block universe view of time—the thesis that reality is a four-dimensional spacetime block in which all events (past, present, and future) exist, with no objective, non-perspectival fact about which events are “really” present. On this static picture, what exists never changes and nothing has the property of being objectively present; talk of past, present, and future is merely talk about where events sit relative to one’s own location. The author’s central target is not dynamical theories of time themselves (presentism, the growing block, the moving spotlight), but a specific family of arguments against the block view, which he calls the General Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation (IBE) argument: the world seems to us as though time robustly passes, the best explanation for this seeming is that time really does pass, and therefore time passes. Rather than taking the usual “gaps” route—conceding the world seems dynamical but explaining that seeming away—the book defends the bolder “no gaps” approach, contending that we live in a block universe and that it seems to us as though we do.What distinguishes the book methodologically is its blend of analytic argument with experimental philosophy: the author reports over forty empirical studies, conducted with collaborators, probing what he terms the “manifest temporal image”—how time actually seems to ordinary people—rather than relying on armchair pronouncements about how things collectively seem. After laying out a precise version of the block view in Chapter 1 (built on two theses, “No Change in Existence” and “No Objective Present,” plus assumptions about spacetime drawn from general relativity), the book works through four variants of the IBE argument. Chapters 2–4 attack the Experiential version, defending “deflationism”—the claim that we do not in fact have experiences as of robust passage—and arguing it better explains people’s reported temporal seemings. Chapter 5 takes on the Conceptual version, presenting evidence that our time-related concepts would not fail to be satisfied in a block world; Chapter 6 addresses the Attitude/Preference version (tensed emotions like relief and dread, and future-biased preferences), arguing what makes such attitudes fitting are perspectival facts that obtain in block worlds too; and Chapter 7 examines the Belief version, marshalling data showing considerable population-level variation in what people actually believe about passage.Having dismantled each route from “seemings” to dynamism, Chapter 8 goes on the offensive, offering a positive IBE for the block view—arguing it better explains our asymmetric knowledge of past versus future—and contending that robust temporal passage is explanatorily redundant, doing no genuine work (including no work in explaining the asymmetry of physical processes). Since positing passage explains nothing, the author concludes, we ought not posit it, and should accept the block view. The overall achievement is twofold: a sustained defense of a static, four-dimensional metaphysics of time, and a demonstration—of interest even to those unmoved by the block view—that many influential arguments in the metaphysics of time, all of which lean on claims about how time seems, rest on empirical assumptions that the actual evidence about human temporal experience does not support.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:02 - What is the “block universe”?08:57 - Overview of book13:26 - Experimental work18:42 - Folk intuitions23:42 - Methodological concerns32:15 - Sampling bias45:27 - Is the dispute substantive?58:21 - Experiential argument1:16:46 - Possible contents1:27:52 - Rejoinder1:31:45 - Contingency vs. necessity1:37:48 - Further response on content1:43:01 - Temporal bias1:52:13 - My thoughts2:00:30 - Skeptical charge2:07:09 - Special relativity2:13:20 - Balaguer’s approach2:16:16 - Parsimony2:21:52 - Balaguer on truthmaking2:28:01 - Summary2:29:36 - Value of philosophy2:32:15 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe