I dislike how people call this vague A- (or B-) intuition a theory, given how it is untestable even in principle. It’s no more a “theory” than counting the proverbial angels on the head of a pin. The term “true” does not apply in this case.
Except it is testable, I think. If the A-theory of time is true, we would expect our best theory of space-time to contain an objectively definable notion of “present”. However, our best theory of space-time contains no such notion, and in fact actively militates against it. It is, of course, possible to posit an undetectable preferred foliation of space-time or some such, but this just shows that you have to complicate your physical theory in order to sustain A-theory.* Plain relativity, interpeted naturally, is simply incompatible with it. So the experimental success of the general theory of relativity is strong evidence against the A-theory.
In addition, the fact that our experience of the passage of time can be adequately explained within B-theory in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics means that pretty much the only argument for A-theory (the supposed inability of B-theory to account for our experience of time) fails. So A-theory is a theory that requires us to complicate our best physical understanding of the world for no perceivable explanatory benefit. That is a bad theory in scientific, not just philosophical, terms.
* I see this move as a slightly more respectable version of protecting biblical creationism from empirical refutation by saying that God created the universe 6000 years ago but made it look exactly as if it was billions of years old.
Except it is testable, I think. If the A-theory of time is true, we would expect our best theory of space-time to contain an objectively definable notion of “present”. However, our best theory of space-time contains no such notion, and in fact actively militates against it.
It is true that the original formulation of GR is covariant, i.e. has no time evolution built in, only a “block” spacetime manifold whose curvature is precisely its matter content. Similarly, classical EM, though originally formulated as an initial value problem, also looks better in a “timeless” form, where second derivative of the 4-vector potential is charge-current density.
It is, of course, possible to posit an undetectable preferred foliation of space-time or some such, but this just shows that you have to complicate your physical theory in order to sustain A-theory.*
I disagree. You have to recast GR into an initial value problem and then pick a foliation to model interesting physical phenomena, like stellar collapse and black hole collision. Completely independent of any underlying ontology. There is no intent to “sustain A-theory”, that’s just silly. You want to know how to detect the dying cry of a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, not whether to pick A or B from some book.
Plain relativity, interpreted naturally, is simply incompatible with it. So the experimental success of the general theory of relativity is strong evidence against the A-theory.
Are you saying that this A-theory predicts that there is a preferred foliation? By that logic, wouldn’t B-theory predict that no foliation is possible at all? Or that all foliations are equal, whether they are timelike, null or spacelike? If so, the B-theory has been clearly falsified (if you can ever falsify anything in philosophy of physics).
the fact that our experience of the passage of time can be adequately explained within B-theory in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
This seems like a major category error to me, mixing qualia (“experience of the passage of time”) with statistical mechanics. They are about a dozen of abstraction and energy levels removed from each other. I can’t take arguments like this seriously.
A-theory is a theory that requires us to complicate our best physical understanding of the world for no perceivable explanatory benefit. That is a bad theory in scientific, not just philosophical, terms.
What requires us to “complicate our best physical understanding of the world”, such as recast the beautiful Einstein equation into an ugly ADM form, is the drive to explain and predict what we see or will see. The ontological narrative is a byproduct.
I see this move as a slightly more respectable version of protecting biblical creationism from empirical refutation by saying that God created the universe 6000 years ago but made it look exactly as if it was billions of years old.
This was almost verbatim the Hoyle’s criticism of the Big Bang model, wasn’t it?
Are you saying that this A-theory predicts that there is a preferred foliation?
Not to speak for pragmatist, but, yes, that is my understanding. But, importantly, the foliation isn’t just preferred by some distinguishing physical characteristic (the way a preferred reference frame would be, for example). Rather, the foliation is preferred in a more ontologically fundamental sense: When one leaf exists, no other leaves of the foliation exist at all, nor do the parts of spacetime that they would “foliate”. For the presentist/A-theorist, at this moment, a completely exhaustive ontology of the world contains nothing that is not in the present leaf.
By that logic, wouldn’t B-theory predict that no foliation is possible at all? Or that all foliations are equal, whether they are timelike, null or spacelike? If so, the B-theory has been clearly falsified (if you can ever falsify anything in philosophy of physics).
The B-theory allows foliations to be different from one another in physically real ways. The B-theory doesn’t allow that leaves of one special foliation “pass into and out of existence”, which is what the presentist/A-theoretic approach requires.
(That is my understanding of what a presentist would say, anyway. But, as I said, I can’t really make sense of presentism, so I might not be portraying the view accurately.)
I disagree. You have to recast GR into an initial value problem and then pick a foliation to model interesting physical phenomena, like stellar collapse and black hole collision. Completely independent of any underlying ontology. There is no intent to “sustain A-theory”, that’s just silly. You want to know how to detect the dying cry of a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, not whether to pick A or B from some book.
None of these amounts to picking a single foliation and stating, “This (and no other) is the correct foliation of space-time.” A-theory requires a single privileged foliation. The fact that we often use foliations when modeling physical phenomena has nothing to do with sustaining A-theory, you’re right, but I didn’t say that any use of a foliation would have that role.
Are you saying that this A-theory predicts that there is a preferred foliation? By that logic, wouldn’t B-theory predict that no foliation is possible at all? Or that all foliations are equal, whether they are timelike, null or spacelike?
No. The B-theory predicts that there is no single preferred foliation. That is not equivalent to saying that no foliation is possible. Nor is it equivalent to saying that all foliations are equal.
This seems like a major category error to me, mixing qualia (“experience of the passage of time”) with statistical mechanics. They are about a dozen of abstraction and energy levels removed from each other.
There is, of course, a mystery about how (or even if) particular qualia are produced by physical processes. I don’t claim that statistical mechanics can answer that mystery, but that is not a mystery that A-theory claims to answer, either. However, if you grant (as I think you should) that our experience of the passage of time is related to the way in which our brain performs various computations, then stat. mech. becomes immediately relevant, and isn’t dozens of levels removed. There is a rich literature applying statistical mechanics to understand constraints on computational processes.
The beauty of stat. mech. methods is that they are not constrained to a particular energy level. They can be applied to understand the behavior of molecules in a gas, but also to understand the behavior of galaxies in a supercluster. In any case, my mention of stat. mech. in this context wasn’t just a throwaway. Part of my dissertation was about understanding the experience of time direction (in particular, the fact that cognitive systems record memories in one temporal direction and intervene in the opposite temporal direction) in statistical mechanical terms. I’d be happy to summarize the argument if you’d like, when I have the time.
What requires us to “complicate our best physical understanding of the world”, such as recast the beautiful Einstein equation into an ugly ADM form, is the drive to explain and predict what we see or will see.
As I said before, the motivations and consequences of the ADM formalism (at least when applied to obtain numerical solutions to initial value problems) are quite distinct from those of the A-theory. Now it may turn out that in our ultimate theory of quantum gravity, we do have to specify a single preferred foliation of space-time, in which case I will readily admit that this particular objection to A-theory no longer holds. But that just highlights how this debate is responsive to empirical confirmation and disconfirmation.
This was almost verbatim the Hoyle’s criticism of the Big Bang model, wasn’t it?
Perhaps it was, I don’t know. But if it was, then he was wrong, because the criticism certainly doesn’t seem to apply to the Big Bang model as we know it. Just because the criticism can be misapplied doesn’t mean it’s never valid.
Part of my dissertation was about understanding the experience of time direction (in particular, the fact that cognitive systems record memories in one temporal direction and intervene in the opposite temporal direction) in statistical mechanical terms. I’d be happy to summarize the argument if you’d like, when I have the time.
Drool—I would very much like to get a copy of this part of your dissertation, or the whole thing, or a summary, whatever and whenever is convenient to you. I think I sorta get it on an intuitive level, but to fill in more of the physics would be wonderful.
Well, I guess I sort of agree that “B-theory” is not as constraining, even if both use the term “exist” in a way I disagree with. In any case, they seem to be more of an inspirational value, like the Mach principle (wrong if quantified) was for Einstein.
I am not clear on how one can use stat.mech to explain our time perception, feel free to elaborate some time. Maybe in a separate post, if the argument is long. I agree that humans only experiencing the present is not an argument against “static” block spacetime.
Anyway, I get frustrated by these discussions online, too much is left unsaid, the back-and-forth is slow and selective, only bits and pieces of the argument and motivation get expressed. Could be just my lack of communication skills, of course. If you are ever in Vancouver and feel like meeting up, lunch/dinner/drinks are on me.
I appreciate the offer. The next time I’m in the vicinity of Vancouver (I currently live over 10,000 km away, unfortunately) I’d love to take you up on it.
My point was that thermodynamics explains (most of) the experience of passing-ness. Or, more precisely, it explains why our cognition is set up to process time dynamically, with memories accumulating as we grow older, and with the future appearing to be “open”. I don’t believe there’s any objective phenomenon of passing-ness, so that’s not something that needs to be explained.
Even if passimgness is not an objective reality, it is a subjecrive illusion, and that is no easier to explain.
An eternalist theory can’t explain why we process dynamically, since it is exclusive of dynamism.
Eternalism can account for an arrow of time , and therefore why I don’t have memories of time T4 at moment T3. What it can’t account for is why I don’t have simultaneous direct awareness of T2 and T3 and T4. Saying that that is because they are different times answer the question easily under the A series theory, because T4 does not exist at T3. But if all times co exist, why don’t I have consciousness of all of them? If I am a 4D entity, why don’t I have a 4D consciousness ?
Consciousness and other brain states are not properties of you, the 4-D entity. They are properties of particular time slices of that 4-D entity, and different time slices can instantiate different properties. So it is a category error to ask “Why don’t I have consciousness of all times?” if by “I” you’re referring to a 4-D entity and not an individual time slice. 4-D entities are not the sorts of things that are conscious. Time-slices of (certain) 4-D entities are. I don’t even know how to answer your final question, because I have no idea what you mean by “4-D consciousness”.
Now maybe we can re-word your question like so: “If all times co-exist, why don’t my time-slices have consciousness of all of them?” But the answer to this question is simple: Your time-slices do have consciousness of all of them (at least, all of the ones between your birth and death). It’s just that different time-slices are conscious of different times; each one is conscious of the time at which it is located. It is (currently) true that my time-slice from two hours ago (who is located at a time two hours in the past of the time I’m typing this) is conscious of that time.
An analogy: Suppose you invent a time machine. You use the time machine to travel three years into the past. As a consequence, there are now two spatially separated “yous” located at the same time—the “you” from three years ago and the “you” who just time-traveled. Let’s say the former is in England and the latter is in Greece. Surely you wouldn’t expect each one of the “yous” to have some sort of combination of England and Greece experiences. You’d expect the one in England to have England experiences and the one in Greece to have Greece experiences. For similar reasons, the eternalist should expect each time-slice to have experiences specific to its own (space-time) location, not some combination of the experiences of all time-slices. And, indeed, that is what we observe. So I don’t think there’s any deep mystery here.
To explain the phenomenology of passingness, then, reduces to a problem of explaining why each time slice identifies strongly with other time slices, and the particular structure of that identification. The way in which my current time-slice’s psychological states are related to those of past time-slices is very different from the way in which they are related to those of future time-slices. Also, the way they are related to proximal past time-slices is different from the way in which they are related to those of distal time-slices. I think it is analyzing the nuances of these cross-temporal relationships that will get us farthest towards understanding the phenomenology of temporal passage (at least, as far as we can get without a solution to the hard problem of consciousness). A-theory and presentism, by contrast, do not help me understand passage at all, so I really don’t see their advantage in this regard.
Consciousness and other brain states are not properties of you, the 4-D entity. They are properties of particular time slices of that 4-D entity, and different time slices can instantiate different properties. So it is a category error to ask “Why don’t I have consciousness of all times?” if by “I” you’re referring to a 4-D entity and not an individual time slice. 4-D entities are not the sorts of things that are conscious. Time-slices of (certain) 4-D entities are. I don’t even know how to answer your final question, because I have no idea what you mean by “4-D consciousness”.
A 4D consciousness is what you would naturally expect a 4D entity to passed, and a 4D entity is what you would naturally expect to find in a 4D universe.
Empirical, entities seem to be 3D, and consciousness, where present, seems to supervene on 3D states...seems empirically that is. Fully fledged empiricism would not only suggest 3D consciousness, but presentism … there us no direct evidence of past and future start. Fully fledged 4Dism would suggest 4D consciousness. What you have put forward is a compromise. 3D consciousness is a natural consequence of presentism, because there is only a 3D slice to available to supervene on. 3D consciousness is not a natural consequence of Eternalism.
It’s not the only compromise position either...the growing block universe is also a compromises.
On reflection, I disagree that consciousness seems to supervene on 3D states. Consciousness seems to me to be a necessarily temporally extended phenomenon. I don’t know what it would mean for an object that only existed for a single instant to be conscious.
Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you were able to freeze me right now, so that all processes in my body halted. In particular, my brain remained frozen in its current state, with nothing happening in it. Would this frozen version of me be experiencing things continuously? It seems to me that both science and intuition strongly suggest that the answer is “no”, that the frozen me would be unconscious. Yet if you believe that consciousness supervenes on 3-D states, then you would have to say that the answer is “yes”. Each 3-D slice of that frozen person is identical to my current 3-D slice (or the 3-D slice of me a few moments ago, to be more accurate), and there’s no denying that I am currently experiencing things. If those experiences supervene on my 3-D state, then they must be shared by the frozen version of me, but that seems pretty counter-intuitive to me.
So in a sense I agree that consciousness is a property of 4-D entities. Not the entire 4-D entity corresponding to a person’s space-time worm, but of thin (but not infinitesimally thin) slices of that worm.
Also when you say that empirical entities seem to be 3-D, you are presumably talking about prima facie appearance. Our most sophisticated empirical understanding of the world suggests that those entities are 4-D, since presentism (and even endurantism) has huge problems reconciling itself with relativity. It would be a poor empiricist who placed more credence in prima facie empirical evidence than the carefully refined empirical evidence provided by our best science.
Relativity, however, is a bad match for quantum mechanics. The growing block universe is, on the other hand, a good match for the objective reduction. I agree with Rovelli that each major physical theory has a different picture of time.
I also agree that we should expect consciousness to supervene on small but nonzero stretches of activity.
I don’t know how to give an intensional definition. But the use of the word “theory” in discussions of the A-theory vs B-theory and Eternalism vs. Presentism gives an ostensive definition.
I dislike how people call this vague A- (or B-) intuition a theory, given how it is untestable even in principle. It’s no more a “theory” than counting the proverbial angels on the head of a pin. The term “true” does not apply in this case.
Except it is testable, I think. If the A-theory of time is true, we would expect our best theory of space-time to contain an objectively definable notion of “present”. However, our best theory of space-time contains no such notion, and in fact actively militates against it. It is, of course, possible to posit an undetectable preferred foliation of space-time or some such, but this just shows that you have to complicate your physical theory in order to sustain A-theory.* Plain relativity, interpeted naturally, is simply incompatible with it. So the experimental success of the general theory of relativity is strong evidence against the A-theory.
In addition, the fact that our experience of the passage of time can be adequately explained within B-theory in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics means that pretty much the only argument for A-theory (the supposed inability of B-theory to account for our experience of time) fails. So A-theory is a theory that requires us to complicate our best physical understanding of the world for no perceivable explanatory benefit. That is a bad theory in scientific, not just philosophical, terms.
* I see this move as a slightly more respectable version of protecting biblical creationism from empirical refutation by saying that God created the universe 6000 years ago but made it look exactly as if it was billions of years old.
It is true that the original formulation of GR is covariant, i.e. has no time evolution built in, only a “block” spacetime manifold whose curvature is precisely its matter content. Similarly, classical EM, though originally formulated as an initial value problem, also looks better in a “timeless” form, where second derivative of the 4-vector potential is charge-current density.
I disagree. You have to recast GR into an initial value problem and then pick a foliation to model interesting physical phenomena, like stellar collapse and black hole collision. Completely independent of any underlying ontology. There is no intent to “sustain A-theory”, that’s just silly. You want to know how to detect the dying cry of a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, not whether to pick A or B from some book.
Are you saying that this A-theory predicts that there is a preferred foliation? By that logic, wouldn’t B-theory predict that no foliation is possible at all? Or that all foliations are equal, whether they are timelike, null or spacelike? If so, the B-theory has been clearly falsified (if you can ever falsify anything in philosophy of physics).
This seems like a major category error to me, mixing qualia (“experience of the passage of time”) with statistical mechanics. They are about a dozen of abstraction and energy levels removed from each other. I can’t take arguments like this seriously.
What requires us to “complicate our best physical understanding of the world”, such as recast the beautiful Einstein equation into an ugly ADM form, is the drive to explain and predict what we see or will see. The ontological narrative is a byproduct.
This was almost verbatim the Hoyle’s criticism of the Big Bang model, wasn’t it?
Not to speak for pragmatist, but, yes, that is my understanding. But, importantly, the foliation isn’t just preferred by some distinguishing physical characteristic (the way a preferred reference frame would be, for example). Rather, the foliation is preferred in a more ontologically fundamental sense: When one leaf exists, no other leaves of the foliation exist at all, nor do the parts of spacetime that they would “foliate”. For the presentist/A-theorist, at this moment, a completely exhaustive ontology of the world contains nothing that is not in the present leaf.
The B-theory allows foliations to be different from one another in physically real ways. The B-theory doesn’t allow that leaves of one special foliation “pass into and out of existence”, which is what the presentist/A-theoretic approach requires.
(That is my understanding of what a presentist would say, anyway. But, as I said, I can’t really make sense of presentism, so I might not be portraying the view accurately.)
None of these amounts to picking a single foliation and stating, “This (and no other) is the correct foliation of space-time.” A-theory requires a single privileged foliation. The fact that we often use foliations when modeling physical phenomena has nothing to do with sustaining A-theory, you’re right, but I didn’t say that any use of a foliation would have that role.
No. The B-theory predicts that there is no single preferred foliation. That is not equivalent to saying that no foliation is possible. Nor is it equivalent to saying that all foliations are equal.
There is, of course, a mystery about how (or even if) particular qualia are produced by physical processes. I don’t claim that statistical mechanics can answer that mystery, but that is not a mystery that A-theory claims to answer, either. However, if you grant (as I think you should) that our experience of the passage of time is related to the way in which our brain performs various computations, then stat. mech. becomes immediately relevant, and isn’t dozens of levels removed. There is a rich literature applying statistical mechanics to understand constraints on computational processes.
The beauty of stat. mech. methods is that they are not constrained to a particular energy level. They can be applied to understand the behavior of molecules in a gas, but also to understand the behavior of galaxies in a supercluster. In any case, my mention of stat. mech. in this context wasn’t just a throwaway. Part of my dissertation was about understanding the experience of time direction (in particular, the fact that cognitive systems record memories in one temporal direction and intervene in the opposite temporal direction) in statistical mechanical terms. I’d be happy to summarize the argument if you’d like, when I have the time.
As I said before, the motivations and consequences of the ADM formalism (at least when applied to obtain numerical solutions to initial value problems) are quite distinct from those of the A-theory. Now it may turn out that in our ultimate theory of quantum gravity, we do have to specify a single preferred foliation of space-time, in which case I will readily admit that this particular objection to A-theory no longer holds. But that just highlights how this debate is responsive to empirical confirmation and disconfirmation.
Perhaps it was, I don’t know. But if it was, then he was wrong, because the criticism certainly doesn’t seem to apply to the Big Bang model as we know it. Just because the criticism can be misapplied doesn’t mean it’s never valid.
Drool—I would very much like to get a copy of this part of your dissertation, or the whole thing, or a summary, whatever and whenever is convenient to you. I think I sorta get it on an intuitive level, but to fill in more of the physics would be wonderful.
I’ve been meaning to make a couple of posts summarizing my dissertation, since it is rationality-relevant. This is an added impetus. I’ll get on it.
Well, I guess I sort of agree that “B-theory” is not as constraining, even if both use the term “exist” in a way I disagree with. In any case, they seem to be more of an inspirational value, like the Mach principle (wrong if quantified) was for Einstein.
I am not clear on how one can use stat.mech to explain our time perception, feel free to elaborate some time. Maybe in a separate post, if the argument is long. I agree that humans only experiencing the present is not an argument against “static” block spacetime.
Anyway, I get frustrated by these discussions online, too much is left unsaid, the back-and-forth is slow and selective, only bits and pieces of the argument and motivation get expressed. Could be just my lack of communication skills, of course. If you are ever in Vancouver and feel like meeting up, lunch/dinner/drinks are on me.
I appreciate the offer. The next time I’m in the vicinity of Vancouver (I currently live over 10,000 km away, unfortunately) I’d love to take you up on it.
Thermodynamics explains the arrow or direction of time, not the passing-ness. You can have a static, eternal, arrow.
My point was that thermodynamics explains (most of) the experience of passing-ness. Or, more precisely, it explains why our cognition is set up to process time dynamically, with memories accumulating as we grow older, and with the future appearing to be “open”. I don’t believe there’s any objective phenomenon of passing-ness, so that’s not something that needs to be explained.
Even if passimgness is not an objective reality, it is a subjecrive illusion, and that is no easier to explain.
An eternalist theory can’t explain why we process dynamically, since it is exclusive of dynamism.
Eternalism can account for an arrow of time , and therefore why I don’t have memories of time T4 at moment T3. What it can’t account for is why I don’t have simultaneous direct awareness of T2 and T3 and T4. Saying that that is because they are different times answer the question easily under the A series theory, because T4 does not exist at T3. But if all times co exist, why don’t I have consciousness of all of them? If I am a 4D entity, why don’t I have a 4D consciousness ?
Consciousness and other brain states are not properties of you, the 4-D entity. They are properties of particular time slices of that 4-D entity, and different time slices can instantiate different properties. So it is a category error to ask “Why don’t I have consciousness of all times?” if by “I” you’re referring to a 4-D entity and not an individual time slice. 4-D entities are not the sorts of things that are conscious. Time-slices of (certain) 4-D entities are. I don’t even know how to answer your final question, because I have no idea what you mean by “4-D consciousness”.
Now maybe we can re-word your question like so: “If all times co-exist, why don’t my time-slices have consciousness of all of them?” But the answer to this question is simple: Your time-slices do have consciousness of all of them (at least, all of the ones between your birth and death). It’s just that different time-slices are conscious of different times; each one is conscious of the time at which it is located. It is (currently) true that my time-slice from two hours ago (who is located at a time two hours in the past of the time I’m typing this) is conscious of that time.
An analogy: Suppose you invent a time machine. You use the time machine to travel three years into the past. As a consequence, there are now two spatially separated “yous” located at the same time—the “you” from three years ago and the “you” who just time-traveled. Let’s say the former is in England and the latter is in Greece. Surely you wouldn’t expect each one of the “yous” to have some sort of combination of England and Greece experiences. You’d expect the one in England to have England experiences and the one in Greece to have Greece experiences. For similar reasons, the eternalist should expect each time-slice to have experiences specific to its own (space-time) location, not some combination of the experiences of all time-slices. And, indeed, that is what we observe. So I don’t think there’s any deep mystery here.
To explain the phenomenology of passingness, then, reduces to a problem of explaining why each time slice identifies strongly with other time slices, and the particular structure of that identification. The way in which my current time-slice’s psychological states are related to those of past time-slices is very different from the way in which they are related to those of future time-slices. Also, the way they are related to proximal past time-slices is different from the way in which they are related to those of distal time-slices. I think it is analyzing the nuances of these cross-temporal relationships that will get us farthest towards understanding the phenomenology of temporal passage (at least, as far as we can get without a solution to the hard problem of consciousness). A-theory and presentism, by contrast, do not help me understand passage at all, so I really don’t see their advantage in this regard.
A 4D consciousness is what you would naturally expect a 4D entity to passed, and a 4D entity is what you would naturally expect to find in a 4D universe.
Empirical, entities seem to be 3D, and consciousness, where present, seems to supervene on 3D states...seems empirically that is. Fully fledged empiricism would not only suggest 3D consciousness, but presentism … there us no direct evidence of past and future start. Fully fledged 4Dism would suggest 4D consciousness. What you have put forward is a compromise. 3D consciousness is a natural consequence of presentism, because there is only a 3D slice to available to supervene on. 3D consciousness is not a natural consequence of Eternalism.
It’s not the only compromise position either...the growing block universe is also a compromises.
On reflection, I disagree that consciousness seems to supervene on 3D states. Consciousness seems to me to be a necessarily temporally extended phenomenon. I don’t know what it would mean for an object that only existed for a single instant to be conscious.
Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you were able to freeze me right now, so that all processes in my body halted. In particular, my brain remained frozen in its current state, with nothing happening in it. Would this frozen version of me be experiencing things continuously? It seems to me that both science and intuition strongly suggest that the answer is “no”, that the frozen me would be unconscious. Yet if you believe that consciousness supervenes on 3-D states, then you would have to say that the answer is “yes”. Each 3-D slice of that frozen person is identical to my current 3-D slice (or the 3-D slice of me a few moments ago, to be more accurate), and there’s no denying that I am currently experiencing things. If those experiences supervene on my 3-D state, then they must be shared by the frozen version of me, but that seems pretty counter-intuitive to me.
So in a sense I agree that consciousness is a property of 4-D entities. Not the entire 4-D entity corresponding to a person’s space-time worm, but of thin (but not infinitesimally thin) slices of that worm.
Also when you say that empirical entities seem to be 3-D, you are presumably talking about prima facie appearance. Our most sophisticated empirical understanding of the world suggests that those entities are 4-D, since presentism (and even endurantism) has huge problems reconciling itself with relativity. It would be a poor empiricist who placed more credence in prima facie empirical evidence than the carefully refined empirical evidence provided by our best science.
Relativity, however, is a bad match for quantum mechanics. The growing block universe is, on the other hand, a good match for the objective reduction. I agree with Rovelli that each major physical theory has a different picture of time.
I also agree that we should expect consciousness to supervene on small but nonzero stretches of activity.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1jm/getting_over_dust_theory/88rs
However, this still isn’t a hold match for full strength Eternalism.
The numerical value of each part of that slice is equivalent to the numerical value of the same part of your current slice, but the derivative is not.
It is true that the word “theory” is used with different meanings in different contexts.
What is the meaning of “theory” in philosophy?
I don’t know how to give an intensional definition. But the use of the word “theory” in discussions of the A-theory vs B-theory and Eternalism vs. Presentism gives an ostensive definition.
If the b theory is true, and can’t even explain even an illusion of passing time then there’s your test.