Matthew asked:

I have long maintained a notion that time is a dimension in the manner of space. 'Moments' do not
disappear but rather occupy different positions within this dimension. Our everyday perception/
experience of time is thus due to a limited perspective from which it is impossible to escape. I would
not claim to necessarily be able to prove such a notion, but it has a strong intuitive appeal to me. Can
anyone elucidate this intuition by referring to thinkers who possess similar ideas, or via its refutation?

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Your idea is at least 300 years old and was (and is) still in print in the Correspondence between
Clarke and Leibniz.In this exchange of letters, in which Clarke represented Newton's side, Leibniz
said just this: that time is not real, but a relation between events. To understand time properly, it
should therefore be geometrised, which is the same as treating it as a dimension superadded to 3D
space. Of course, Einstein's theory uses pretty much the same notion, the difference being that time
is not added to, but integrated with space. You might be interested in Barbour's book The End of
Time,which gives you the latest wrinkles on the idea. Mind you, it is indispensable to have some
elementary physics under your belt before you read this. If you do, you'll find it totally fascinating.

Jürgen Lawrenz

It's called the "block universe" theory, and comes rather directly from special relativity. Fred Hoyle,
the astronomer and sci-fi writer, wrote a rather nice novel around the idea, called October the First is
Too Late.You might check it out. One problem with the theory is explaining our experience of the
"movement" of time, or "through" time. If the universe is a block in, say 4 or 5 dimensions, of which
time is one, then why do we have the perception (technically, the "apprehension") that we move at
all? In his book, Hoyle proposed a solution in which consciousness successively "illuminated"
different "slots", so to speak, of mind in the time dimension. The problem with that, of course, is that
in order to do that, consciousness would then have to have its owntime dimension in order to move
from slot to slot, to explain our experiencedtime dimension. But the problem was to explain
movement in the first place. So that doesn't work, unless you're into infinite regressions which never
actually settle on the solution.

No, I'm afraid that no one has actually come up with a way to get from the block to our experience of
motion. Yes, sure, we can say that our consciousness is spread out through the time dimension, but
however you cut it, you're still not getting from non-motion to motion.

But there are other problems with this notion. The "time is space" idea is a metaphorderived from
ways ("image schemas", according to Lakoff and Johnson — see below) of dealing with the passage
of time that we employ as children, which ultimately gives rise to a certain mathematical description of
time (or to intuitions which are derived from that metaphor). Well, it's all very nice for mathematical
description, up to a point, anyway (the point where special relativity turns into general relativity), but
does that mean, just because it lets us do some calculations, that this metaphor actuallydescribes
reality... or is it just a convenience to let us calculate? For a nice analysis of metaphors on time, you
might check out: Lakoff, G. 1990. Women, fire, and dangerous things.2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press; and: Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: the
embodied mind and its challenge to western thought.1st ed. New York, NY: Basic Books.

There are of course many other ways to conceive of time... none very satisfactory as explanation of
the basic apprehension of motion. For a very difficult, but in my opinion absolutely the best, analysis
of the subjective experience of time, try: Husserl, E. 1990. On the phenomenology of the
consciousness of internal time.Edited by R. Bernet. Vol. IV, Edmund Husserl: Collected Works.
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Noteasy reading, but an extraordinary
work.

Steven Ravett Brown

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