Life in Four Dimensions : A Defence of the Block Universe Theory

A philosophical defence of the idea that our world is four dimensional: containing three spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension with past, present, and future events arrayed along the temporal dimension so that no set of these events is singled out as being 'metaphysically special' by being objectively present.

There is a widespread idea that we experience our world as if it is other than a block world; as if, instead, our world is dynamical and time passes in a robustly A-theoretic manner. In light of this, some argue that there is good reason to think that our world is robustly dynamical, for the best explanation of our having these various experiences is that we are experiencing time as it really is, in itself, as dynamical. Thus, there is a kind of inference to the best explanation from the nature of our experience, broadly construed, to the conclusion that our world is not a block. This book takes up the challenge of responding to this argument in its various guises, where these guises reflect the different ways that we might be said to experience time (whether in terms of our attitudes, our beliefs, our temporal preferences, or our perceptual experiences). By appealing to new empirical work undertaken at the Centre for Time in Sydney, it is argued that for a whole range of ways that we experience our world temporally, including attitudinally, preference-wise, belief-wise, and perception-wise, we experience the world just as it is: as a block world. There is, at the end of the day, no pressure to conclude that our world is dynamical via the nature of any of our experiences of the world.