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Letters
Letters
Change Now! • A Note On A Note • Eating Pygs • Foolish To Be Wise • Out of the Minds of Children • Balance of Possibilities • Natural Disasters • Hobbes on Hume! • Multiple Afterlives
Change Now!
Dear Editor: The comments of Professor Tallis on the philosophy of time in his interview in Issue 120 indicate a problem that seems to afflict the entire Academy at this time, namely a misunderstanding of the limits of science.
Professor Tallis correctly sees that time as it is used in physics is not time as it actually is, and notes that time is a metaphysical problem. He concludes that time is intimately associated with consciousness, for there has to be someone to experience it for it to exist. This is clearly correct. In his mathematical discussion of time, Das Kontinuum (1918), Hermann Weyl makes the same distinction between the ‘mathematical’ continuum used by physics, which is a fiction, and famously paradoxical, and the ‘intuitive’ continuum: the continuum of experienced time.
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