Why we reject the proposition that "time is unreal"

Suppose I have two dollars in my wallet. I've checked very carefully and am certain that that's all I have in there: two dollars. Later, someone gives me two more dollars, and I put them in my wallet, too -- only to find that I now have five dollars in my wallet!

What happened? (The question is not entirely hypothetical.) Most likely I miscounted the money. I must have actually had three dollar bills in my wallet at the outset but mistakenly counted them as two; perhaps two of them had been stuck together or something. Or maybe when I and the other person both thought he was giving me two more dollars, he was actually giving me three. Or maybe someone else surreptitiously put an extra dollar into my wallet when I wasn't looking. Or, if you're willing to entertain  more fantastic hypotheses, perhaps a miracle occurred and the extra dollar materialized in my wallet by supernatural means.

One hypothesis you will not entertain is that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5.

No conceivable extraordinary experience, no matter how well corroborated, will ever make you entertain that hypothesis. People will say, speaking loosely, that its falsity is "self-evident" (which would be news to young children who are learning their sums), but we might more accurately say that it is metaphysically unacceptable -- or, as I have termed such things elsewhere, "philosophically dysfunctional." As Aquinas is quoted as saying in the linked post, such hypotheses "destroy the foundations of a branch of philosophy" and must therefore be rejected. If we admit 2 + 2 = 5 to our system of thought, the system crashes. We may, superficially, have gained the ability to explain that one weird experience with the five dollars. but only at the expense of our ability to really make sense of anything at all. No experience or anecdote, no matter how otherwise compelling it may be, can override that.

One of the philosophically dysfunctional hypotheses (positiones extraneae) Aquinas gives as an example is "the opinion that nothing changes" -- which brings us to Bruce's recent post "The Time Trap," in which he rejects as a nihilism-inducing "pseudo-explanation" the opinion that

All Time is Now - Time is unreal -- Past, Present, and Future are simultaneous - Everything is always happening...

VIP commenter Debbie sent me an email expressing her exasperation with Bruce's position, correctly assuming that if she had left a comment on Bruce's blog directly it would be unlikely to get past his "pretty severe" moderation. How, she asks, can Bruce maintain such a position in the face of her many unambiguously precognitive experiences, experiences which imply that "linear time is an illusion" and yet have made her life more meaningful rather than less so? She writes:

I personally believe that if someone has never experienced the paranormal themselves, which it appears, at least to me, that Bruce has not, then I get somewhat irritated if a person writes or says something that they really don't have personal knowledge of especially if they express their belief as being fact.

But personal experience or lack thereof is actually not germane to Bruce's position. Bruce is certainly aware of the compelling evidence that precognition does occur -- in fact, he was the one who introduced me to the seminal work of J. W. Dunne on that topic -- but his position is that, whatever paranormal or miraculous explanation such experiences may have, the explanation cannot be that "time is unreal" because that is metaphysically unacceptable, a positio extranea, a proposition that will crash any system of thought in which it is included.

Briefly, if there is no time, there is no change. Time and change are conceptually inseparable, and neither can be defined except in terms of the other. And if there is no such thing as change of any kind, then all the unacceptable consequences Bruce delineates follow:

The implication is that nothing matters. 

Nothing makes a difference - because nothing can make a difference. 

There is no possible freedom, no possibility of learning; no possibility of betterment of any kind. 

Indeed there is no-thing At All - except what is, was, always, and evermore... An unchanging situation, that might equally well be nothing as anything. 

Making a difference, freedom, learning, betterment -- these are all subsets of change, and if time is not real, neither is change.

If your life is a book, are you writing it as you go along, or are you merely reading a book that has already been written, a story that can never be anything other than what it already is? If the latter, your "life" is an illusion. You aren't doing anything; nothing is happening; nothing means anything. We reject that possibility as, if not provably false, definitely philosophically dysfunctional. As I wrote in my 2018 post "Richard Taylor's fatalism" (from which I pinched the book metaphor):

If I reject fatalism, my stance is either (a) correct or (b) completely inevitable. Therefore, so far as it lies in my power to reject fatalism, I should do so. I find that I can reject it, and so I do. Perhaps I am right in so doing, or perhaps it is my inescapable fate to adopt incorrect philosophical positions — but I won’t waste any time considering the latter  possibility, because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, there’s no point.

Incidentally, here's a completely insane synchronicity: When I revisited that old post on Richard Taylor, I found that in making my argument I had used as an example the tenseless proposition "There is/was/will be a full cup of coffee on William’s desk at 4:30 pm on May 1, 2018." I guess that was the date and time that I wrote that particular sentence, though the post wasn't finished and published until May 6. I first noticed the coincidence of the date -- today is also May 1 -- and then I glanced at the clock on my computer and saw that it was precisely 4:30 p.m. (I had a half-full cup of green tea on my desk, a near miss.) As a further coincidence, just a couple of days ago, in "Into the mouth of the whale," I posted a synchronicity involving reading the phrase "at 4:30 PM" in a years-old blog post.

Does that synchronicity mean that I was fated to write that sentence at 4:30 p.m. on May 1 and then read it again exactly eight years later, at 4:30 p.m. on May 1? No. For the reasons given above, I reject that explanation and take it as axiomatic that, whatever the sync may mean, it doesn't mean that.

Coming back to the apparent conflict between Bruce's views and Debbie's, Debbie's position isn't really what Bruce is arguing against. She believes in freedom, she believes in choice, she believes that "To see the future means that we can CHANGE IT." In other words, though she likes to say that "linear time is an illusion," she is speaking loosely and doesn't mean it in a strictly literal sense. What she means (or what she would realize she means if she thought it out rigorously) is that linear time is not the whole story -- a position with which I agree and assume Bruce does, too.

Debbie has immense psychic and spiritual gifts, but she is not a philosophically rigorous thinker -- which is fine. Most people aren't, and most people don't need to be. If "linear time is an illusion" is a good-enough shorthand for her to make sense of her experiences, then, well, that's good enough. All of us most of the time, and most of us all of the time, use such imprecise concepts to make sense of the world, because that's how the human brain is designed to work. ("There are no coincidences" is another example.) I respect both Bruce and Debbie and benefit greatly from their very different modes of thinking.

My own understanding of time is essentially that of Dunne. His model accounts for precognition -- including, crucially, the ability to see the future and then change it -- and, far from dismissing linear time as an illusion, it takes as its starting point the axiom that time is real and really elapses, a fact which is impossible to explain or even to express using linear time alone. I believe Bruce currently doesn't have much use for Dunne, since the latter's system is highly abstract, involves complex mathematics, and is fiendishly difficult to wrap one's head around. I agree but do not find that an insuperable objection; after all, the same can be said of Einstein's theory of time (which Dunne partly anticipated in his first book and incorporated in his later work). It's all a question of how rigorous one feels the need to be, and different souls have different needs.