Oh come one… at least word length labels give me a chance at guessing which philosophical position resolves to sane. A and B give me almost nothing!
The A-theory is identified with the view that “becoming” is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe, and that it’s not just an illusion created by, say, our only having memories of times t < t0 at time t0. A-theorists hold that, in some ultimate sense, points in time change their ontological status as they transition from the future, to the present, and into the past. To say “The event E will happen in the future” is not just to say that the time of E’s occurrence has a larger coordinate than the time of the utterance. It is just to say that E will happen in the future, full stop. The process of becoming that is the universe just hasn’t gotten to E yet. As this process of becoming unfolds, the truth-value of the statement will change.
At least, those are the kinds of things that A-theorists say. I have a heard time of making sense of it beyond its being a denial of the B-theory.
B-theorists subscribe to the “block-universe” view of time. All points in time have the same ontological status. All statements about the timing of events are really relative statements, perhaps about the relative timing of the statement’s utterance and some event. Properly understood, the truth values of these statements are the same at all points of time. There is no becoming; this is an illusion, created perhaps by the physical state that our brains have at different points in time.
The A-theory is identified with the view that “becoming” is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe, and that it’s not just an illusion created by, say, our only having memories of times t < t0 at time t0. A-theorists hold that, in some ultimate sense, points in time change their ontological status as they transition from the future, to the present, and into the past. To say “The event E will happen in the future” is not just to say that the time of E’s occurrence has a larger coordinate than the time of the utterance. It is just to say that E will happen in the future, full stop. The process of becoming that is the universe just hasn’t gotten to E yet. As this process of becoming unfolds, the truth-value of the statement will change.
At least, those are the kinds of things that A-theorists say. I have a heard time of making sense of it beyond its being a denial of the B-theory.
B-theorists subscribe to the “block-universe” view of time. All points in time have the same ontological status. All statements about the timing of events are really relative statements, perhaps about the relative timing of the statement’s utterance and some event. Properly understood, the truth values of these statements are the same at all points of time. There is no becoming; this is an illusion, created perhaps by the physical state that our brains have at different points in time.