 It's good to be informal. So feel free to interrupt me during the talk as well. I mean, if anything would be unclear. So I chose this topic for today's talk specifically because of this working progress. And so I'd really be interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic. All comments, ideas, suggestions are very much welcome. And so even though my arguments that I'm going to present here today are bound to be relatively rough around the edges, I hope they will be clear and controversial enough to fuel the discussion later on. I mean, there's some ideas here, especially the latest ideas that I'm going to defend that are pretty wild. So before starting the talk, it may be helpful to... One second, I'm going to kill your clicker for a moment. Sorry, the camera's going very weird. I apologize. It's totally launching up the slides. I've been having trouble with cameras lately. I had the same problem with teams not too long ago. Oh, there's lots of closure. I have to take my chances with that and hope that it stays readable. The clicker is now reactivated. My apologies. Yeah, you're good. Sorry. So let me just briefly start by saying how this talk fits within what I hope is going to become a much larger project. So the larger project would be to explore the relationship between the different ontologies of time and the various physics rules. Now, as you can see, when you consider the different ontologies of time, there's basically two camps. You have the open future ontologies that take the future to be open in the sense that the future doesn't yet exist. The future comes into existence as time passes. And then you have the closed future ontologies, which on the other hand say that the future is already out there. It's already part of our ontology, and so it is closed in that sense. Now, when you consider the different metaphysical accounts of laws, you can distinguish between the humane and the nonhumane accounts. So the humane accounts, the laws of nature, merely describe how nature is. Whereas on a nonhumane account, the laws of nature don't just describe, they actually prescribe how nature should behave. And I'll say a few more things about the different ontologies of metaphysics in just a moment. But so the question here would be, are the ontologies of time and the different metaphysics of laws somehow related? So suppose I want to subscribe to an open future ontology of time. Does that fact force me somehow to adopt either a humane or a nonhumane account about laws? Or if I am somehow driven by nonhumane convictions, does that force me to adopt one or the other ontology of time? That's the question I would like to explore. It's a simple question, but it's surprisingly underexplored in the philosophy of literature. Good. Now before I get to the actual talk, just a few more words about these ontologies of time. Are you familiar with the ontologies of time? I'll go quick. Considering the open future ontologies, you have either the presentist or the growing blocker. So according to the presentist, only the present moment exists. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist. The growing blocker in the other hand will claim that both past and present events exist. But they both agree that the future doesn't exist yet. So they both deny the existence of the future and I will therefore call them future deniers. The eternalists on the other hand will claim that past, present and future events are somehow equally real. They're ontologically on a par. Basically they are frozen in this four-dimensional block universe. And the moving spotlighter is somewhat of an eternalist, but who wants to make sense of the passage of time and so has this spotlight shining on the now which moves as time flows. But again, both of those would agree that the future exists. So I will call them the future acceptors. They're very quickly moving through the two counts of laws of nature. So on the human account, as I said, the laws of nature are nearly descriptive. They describe the way the world is. And so if you look at the fields of the literature, you'll find people saying that they reflect the way things are. They're just convenient summaries. They're accurate reports. Basically the world just is. And the laws are a result of human kinds attempt to understand that world. On the non-human account of laws, the laws of nature are prescriptive. And so they are taken to govern the world. So you'll find statements like they determine the distribution of matter and energy. They govern the evolution of the universe. They control. They rule. They have causal powers. They dictate. They produce the events of the world. They drive the world. Basically they tell nature what to do. Or in a nutshell, what it all says must happen. And what it all forbids cannot happen. That's the non-human view of laws. And so when you compare these two very different accounts of laws of nature, I think it's pretty clear that on the descriptive view there are no necessary connections between events. And as such, everything in this humane mosaic of events is taken to be contingent. Whereas on the prescriptive view, there are these necessary connections over and above the humane mosaic of events. And it is due to those necessary connections that somehow everything is necessitated. What is more so on the descriptive view, we somehow infer what the laws are from the way the humane mosaic is, from the way nature is. Whereas on the prescriptive view, it's just your way around. In that case we will infer the way nature is from what the laws of nature are. So I think you can feel that the descriptive view, on that field the laws of nature are rather passive and static. Whereas on the prescriptive view, the laws of nature are very active and dynamic. They are the things that govern the evolution of the universe and tell the particles how to move in what direction, what time. And so given those distinctions, at least intuitively, I would say that the descriptive view seems to fit rather well with a closed future ontology. What you want is the entire humane mosaic of events, the entire block universe, four-dimensional block universe, from which to infer the different laws of nature. From which to observe the different patterns and regularities. Whereas the prescriptive view, where the laws are actually governing the world, telling the particles how to move in the next instant of time, that seems to fit much better with an open future ontology, which the future does not yet exist, but comes into existence as time passes and as by which the laws can actually do some active, productive role. So I want to come up with some arguments for these kind of intuitions. And interestingly enough, the last claim here has recently been challenged in a paper by Lisa Leininger called Coordination Coming to Be. Here I have a quick question about the previous slide. I just wonder why the descriptive view wouldn't see law of nature as passive of statics. I mean, we could say for instance there is no such a thing as law, but the word it says exists is a block concept of time. And we, as humans, we try to interfere some correlation. And that can no longer be passive of statics. Yeah, I agree. I think I know what you want to say. So on that picture, laws are just summaries. It's not as if there are laws in nature that somehow govern the way nature evolves. And so in that sense... Yeah, indeed. So that's not a picture I think might. But given that picture, I think that seems to fit very well with an internalist outlook of time. But indeed, I see the best instead of being only the best term for that. In any case, it's the letter claim here that the prospective view requires an open future ontology that has been challenged in this paper by Lisa Leininger. So my talk today would actually be a reply to Leininger's paper. So I mean, not only is it one of the few papers that I've said that actually explores this relationship between the ontologies of time and the metaphysics of laws. It also contains a beautifully simple and at first sight very convincing argument against this idea of absolute becoming. It is against the idea that the future doesn't exist right now and that the future comes into existence with the passage of time. Good. So let me just quickly go over Leininger's argument against the future deniers. So in her paper, Leininger claims that the future deniers, whether they are presentists or growing blocker, they will all face a serious metaphysical problem. So according to her, the problem is the following. First of all, the world seems to be a regular place. So simply put, there are universal generalizations of the form all Fs are in chiefs. All electrons are negatively charged, all humans are mortal, all metals expand when heated, etc. But what is more, this fact only applies to the future denier who doesn't think the future do exist. As that future comes into existence because of absolute becoming, the world remains regular. And so it seems that whatever comes into existence is somehow coordinated with what came before such that these universal generalizations continue to be realized. So not only do you see those past and present regularities where all Fs are Gs, but as the future comes into existence, all Fs will remain Gs. Now I will call this the continuing regularity assumption. And given this continuing regularity assumption, according to Leininger, future deniers are facing what she calls the coordination problem. That is how to explain the continuing regularity of the world. Why do those past and present regularities persist in the future when the future comes into existence? That's the challenge for the future denier. Now, a relatively straightforward and standard way of answering this question is by appealing to enforcers. That's a justification, rules of nature or dispositions. To guarantee that whatever comes into existence will preserve those past and present regularities. So typically those enforcers will constrain what comes into existence by introducing some kind of necessary connection. You could call it NFG between present states of affairs F and future states of affairs G. Such that if F presently occurs, then necessary G will have to follow in the future as the future comes into existence. That's the idea. Now according to Leininger, in a world with no future, these enforcers are actually powerless and so they cannot guarantee future regularity. That is, NFG here, this necessary connection cannot ensure that G will always follow F. And the reason for this is actually very simple. So if F happens presently, if F happens in the present, then G will be in the future. And so G does not exist for the future denier. However, for the necessary connection NFG here to exist, both F and G need to exist. So this is the idea that relations are existence and tallying. A relation can only exist if both of its relations exist. To give you an example, I am standing in front of you. Clearly, both you and I need to exist in order for that relation between the two of us to hold true. The same applies here. And so as long as G here does not exist, NFG cannot exist. And so NFG cannot be used to necessitate G into existence. Yeah. No, I feel like the debate is about what does it mean to exist more than what does it mean to future desicitation. For instance, let's say I am a bloker and I deny the future. But I can state that epistemologically, the concept exists. So I can speak about what we call the rule. But the existence has to be taught in another way, ontologically. And so I want to say why that would be an objection. I think I am going to come to some of the points you are just raising in just a bit. So bear with me just for a few more spies. But of course the problem here is a metaphysical one. So even if epistemologically you could make sense of all of this, the fact is that metaphysically, according to future deniers, those future events, even if they will come into existence, do not yet exist. So you don't have them as a resource in order to make sense of these necessary relations. And I have another point about the fact that the existence of the relationship implying the existence of the relationship. Because I'd say that it depends on the relationship. Because if I say the liver produces insulin, but this relation doesn't necessitate the existence of the liver and insulin at the same time point. Fair enough. Again, I'll come back to that as well. There's definitely one of the things we can do in order to challenge her coordination problem here. It could challenge the fact that relations that already, at least in this case, the necessary relations here have to be existed and tailored. There has to be one way of trying to respond to this. So I'll come back to this also in three slides. I'm just going to follow up with the same idea. We can say the same with the mathematical object. Sure. Yeah. It doesn't mean that it exists. I mean, it depends on how you define it. Absolutely. One of the key discussions here is going to be what do we mean by exist, what do we mean by real. So a lot of this, yeah, so if you're quickly getting into relatively deep metaphysical waters here. But I think the argument is clear enough. Even if there are hopefully a lot of ways out, that's the argument. So according to Linder, that shows you that the future deniers must be wrong. So, yeah, the future doesn't come into existence. There is no absolute becoming. There isn't some kind of ontological shift in which the unreal future somehow becomes real in the present. Now the future must exist if you want to make sense of this continuing regularity. And so eternalism, according to Linder, must be the correct ontology of time. Now, even though I myself am much more inclined towards eternalist conceptions of time, I don't agree with our argument. And so my reply here today will be two-fold. And some of the points I'm going to say will probably fit nicely with what you just raised. So I'm going to argue that the future deniers can either avoid the coordination problem altogether by rejecting this continuing regularity assumption. Or the future denier can answer the coordination problem by distinguishing time from token level necessitation. But so let me start with the first kind of reply. So notice that in her paper, Leininger simply assumes the continuing regularity of the world. And she then very rightly so demands an explanation for this fact, which she does the coordination problem, and which she then argues no future denier can successfully answer. But notice that a Humian could very easily reject this continuing regularity assumption that is even if the world has been regular so far and is up till the present moment, there is nothing on the Humian picture that requires the world to remain regular in the future. And the reason as I said is that all the Humian view, there are no necessary connections between events. Or as Hugh said, all events seem entirely loose and separate. So what it means is that the world does not have to be the way it is by some kind of necessity. It just is. All efforts do not have to be achieves. By necessity, it just happens to be the case that so far all efforts have been achieves. So in other words, this regular constant conjunction of efforts and achieves in the Humian mosaic of events, at least up to the present moment, in fluke, it's a cosmic coincidence. So without necessary connections, without these little arrows here linking the Fs to the Gs, nothing on the Humian picture guarantees that the Fs would remain Gs in the future. That is, the past and present regularities here may not persist in the future contra-aligninger's continuing regularity assumption. The question, however, remains whether a future denier can appeal to this kind of Humian response in order to avoid a coordination problem. By just rechecking the idea that the world has to remain regular in the future. That is to put it more precisely, can one combine an open future ontology of time, such as present as more growing blockism, with a Humian metaphysic? And I think at first sight it has turned out to be no. I mean, following the late David Lewis, most Humians today are internalists. They take the Humian mosaic of events to be the static four-dimensional space-time block of past, present and future events. So they also subscribe to a closed future ontology. But interestingly enough, there is an alternative on the philosophical market, which is supposed to be compatible with an open future ontology. And it's therefore called open future Humianism. Now, as you can see on the picture here, open future Humianism is typically linked to growing block theories of time. Because in that case, the growing block here still affords us with a dynamic four-dimensional block of past and present events, from which to infer the Humian rules of nature. So, so far, so good for the growing blocker. But what about the presentist? Could a presentist who, remember, has only access to present facts, could a presentist be an open future Humian? Is a three-dimensional slice of present events enough? Now, it isn't. According to Presti Miller, we cannot extract Humian walls from the present moment alone. We need access to the entire mystic effects in order to determine the appropriate systematization of those facts. Smart in more recent papers that presentism is ill-suited to Humian conceptions, since the presentist thesis provides only a very small super-Venus base for the rules of nature to super-Venom. So, the situation looks much more oblique for a presentist, but I beg to differ with Miller and Smart. And my reason for doing so is the following. Consider any past tense statements, such as dinosaurs did exist. Now, trying to account for the truth of this past tense statement is a relatively straightforward matter for the eternist, for whom both past present and future events exist. So, the eternist can just look at those past events, such as dinosaurs roaming planet Earth, and can make them act as truth-makers for those past tense statements. But for the presentist, for whom the past no longer exists, those past events are no longer available to act as truth-makers. So, this is, of course, a truth-maker problem. It's a very well-known, it's a very serious problem for the presentist. But it has, of course, been extensively studied. And so, the presentist has come up with a variety of answers to the truth-maker problem in order to make sense of these past tense statements. Whether this is going to be in terms of tense properties or tense facts or God's memory or traces or the laws of nature or as such times is not of my concern today, but insofar as the present is disabled to provide an answer to the truth-maker problem, I don't see any reason why the presentist couldn't include these past tense statements as facts describing how the human being was like in the past, thereby enlarging her supervenient space for the human walls to supervene upon. Yeah? Yeah, I think I agree with you, because my question is, even if I'm a presentist, I won't deny that presently I have a memory of the past. Maybe this memory is true. Maybe we can take it. Yeah, well, absolutely. Future and old age, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the truth-maker problem is serious and I don't think all of the the stretches that have been proposed to solve it are very successful, but there definitely are ways of making sense of this problem, which would help us here as well to be an open future human being. So I would argue that all future deniers therefore not only the growing blocker but also the presentist can endorse open future communism as a way out of the coordination problem by just rejecting the idea that the future has to remain regular, that the world has to be regular in the future. Good. I have a question about a presentist. Maybe a more stronger objection would be that a present doesn't exist yet. I mean, if you want to make a relationship into a present, the problem is that once you start saying something, you know, it's already in the past. So maybe that won't be a better argument. I don't know if you... It seems like you're about to be dead. Yeah. There is, of course, I mean, even when you look at presentism, you'll see that the presentism has become very much of an umbrella for all kinds of different kinds of ontologies of time. So you have hypercom presentism, hyperplane presentists, have point presentists, and you will have, for example, presentists who take the present, not to be this very thin, three-dimensional slice, but will take it to have a certain extension in time as well. Otherwise, the question even doesn't make sense. Yeah. Sure. And you can see how that would help to resolve a lot of potential problems for the presentist. But I want to move to my secondary point, which in a sense is going to be very substantial. So imagine that the future denier does not want to subscribe to some form of humanism. Yeah. Imagine the future denier is driven by non-humane convictions. In that case, the solution I just proposed is no longer available to the future denier. So the future denier will have to come up with an answer to the coordination problem. That is how to explain the future denier. And now, although Leininger actually nowhere makes it really explicit in her paper, I'm going to argue that her coordination problem is just another variation of a much more general and well-known problem, namely the problem of cross-term or relations. So the problem of cross-term or relations is very briefly goes as follows. So, this is the idea that all relations are existence and tally. Premistus's some relations are cross-term or and they therefore hold between present and non-present events. So, given premis 2 and premis 1, if there is such a thing as a cross-term or relation that holds between present and non-present events, and if both relata need to exist for the relation to exist, then clearly non-present events must exist. Now, to give you some examples of cross-term or relations, you have precedence relations, such as Newton's bird's earlier and Einstein's comparative relations, such as I am torn now and Einstein was in the past, or just calls of relations. Yesterday's storm calls today's flood. All of those are present and oral relations. But consider now premis 4, if presentism is true, then non-present events do not exist. Indeed, according to the presentist credo, necessarily everything that exists is present. But I just argued that non-present events must exist, and so we conclude that presentism must be false. Or to put it maybe more correctly, given the contradiction between premis 3 and premis 4, it's not obvious how the presentist is supposed to account for the truth of claims involving such cross-term or relations. Claims such as the ones I've just written down here. Now, what is more, given the sheer variety and pervasiveness of these cross-term or relations, the problem of cross-term or relations is really set in a plethora of ways. And so one specific variation on this cross-term or relations is the problem of causation. So once again assuming that causes C are always and poorly prior to their effects E, all calls of relations and CB will be cross-term orally exemplified and will therefore be subject to the problem of cross-term or relations. So here is Leiminger's own formulation of the problem. She says the relation here, this calls a relation N is supposed to be a connection and a connection cannot exist without its realata. So this rules out that N comes into existence when the cause C comes into existence. Because at that point, one of the realata namely the effect E does not yet exist. But if N does not exist without E, then N cannot guarantee its existence. And so the cause therefore seems to be able to exist without E necessarily following. In the previous slide I did not grasp the conclusion. Why does it mean present in this cause? I understand the the state but for presentness I would say obviously non-present events do not exist. It doesn't mean present in this cause. Sure, thanks. So this is what I said so the more correct way of concluding this would be that there is a challenging for the presentness because the presentness will really want to make sense of such claims which are very straightforward and easy to make. And that of course will be a challenge for the presentness in a way that isn't for the internalist. But yeah, I fully agree. It doesn't just follow that presentism is false but it does give them something of a challenge. And so for example any cause of claim will be a challenge for the presentness. How to make sense of the cause of claims if there is no way to make sense of this cause or relation because it can't exist since one part of the relation is not the end of the era. Good. And so I think that in her paper Leimer essentially generalizes this problem of causation to the other enforcers so to laws of nature or to dispositions. And so in that way her coordination problem really is just another variation of the same cross temporal team. But just to illustrate it here's my own coordination problem and so I've left the problem of cross temporal relationship on the right for comparison sake. So you can see that we start with the same premise that relations require the existence of their realata. Premise 2 then says that necessitation relations are cross temporal and they therefore hold between present and future states of affairs. It follows from those to premises that future states of affairs must exist. Yet premise 4 if future deniers are right future states of affairs will exist and so Leimer concludes future deniers must be wrong. Or as she writes in her paper ultimately the regular nature of the world demands the postulation of a relationship called it NFG between what exists at the present F and what is not G. A relationship that can only principle be supplied given the assumption that relations are existence entity. So let me just go back very quickly to the problem of cross temporal relations. Given its generality and the fact that it is so well known there have of course been a lot of strategies that have been proposed in order to meet this problem so I think it is worth checking whether any of those strategies would help us here in trying to answer Leimer's coordination problem. Now any future denier will want to retain premise 4 for obvious reasons. The future will be forced to answer the coordination problem by either rejecting premise 1 that is rejecting the idea that relations are existence entity or by rejecting premise 2. So those would be the two strategies to be entertained. So the first strategy consists in rejecting premise 1 that is in denying that relations are existence entity. Due to time constraints I am not going to go into this but also for reasons I am heavily going to maybe later on during the Q&A but basically my fear is that this strategy is going to lead us to some form of mononism which is a position I have difficulties accepting just like this. So what I want to do for this tool is to entertain the second strategy that is rejecting premise 2 by denying that those necessitation relations are cross temporal. Now admittedly at first sight this strategy may not seem much more promising than the first because after all if the game here is to answer the coordination problem by explaining how past and present regularities can persist in the future through the introduction of these necessary connections then clearly those necessitation relations will have to be cross temporal they will have to link the present states of affairs to a future state of affairs and yet I believe there is a way out of the cross temporal threat namely by carefully distinguishing between two kinds of necessitation namely between tight level necessitation and token level necessitation. So what I want to do for remainder of the talk is to apply this distinction to the three kinds of enforcers that is applying to causal necessitation and metaphysical necessitation. For necessitation due to causation due to the laws of nature and due to the dispositions of the word. Let me start with causal necessitation. So the key to solving the causal coordination problem I maintain is this distinction between two kinds of causation which actually occur at two different ontological levels so there is tight level causation and there is token level causation. Now, token level causation such as CX causing EX in that case you can see that the cause of relation NCX-EX holds between the token cause and token effect. An example here could be flicking the light switch in my kitchen causes the kitchen light to go on. With tight level causation the cause of relation NCX-EX holds between a tight cause C and a tight effect E. So the example here would be flicking light switches very generally causes lights to go on. Now what is important is that token causes and token effects are particular events. It's me flicking the switch in my kitchen it's my kitchen light switch going on. And so because they are particular events they can be located in both space and time as I indicated here. And so assuming that causes are temporally prior to their effects token level causal relations will always be cross temporal and they will link a present cause to a future effect. Tight causes and tight effects on the other hand are kinds of events and because kinds of events can have multiple different instances they cannot be located in space and time. And so the tight level cause of relations NCX-EX will therefore fail to be spacial temporal again actually best be told in 8 temporal terms. It's more of an 8 temporal relation. Finally tight level causation and token level causation are not independent. Now which kind of causation is more fundamental than the other is very much open for debate. But what I want to argue is that if the aim here is to avoid the threat of cross temporality then we will have to argue that tight level causation is more fundamental than token level causation. That is we will have to argue that somehow tight level causation is ontologically prior to token level causation. Or to put it even more specifically we will have to argue that the presence of a cause of relation on the token level obtains in virtue of a much more general connection on the tight level. That is CX here causes EX in virtue of C-causing P. So how does this answer liner's coordination problem? Well first of all note that in her paper liner doesn't make this distinction between the time and the token level. And this is particularly obvious in the quote I just showed you before on the problem of causation. As you can see liner systematically writes C and E for the token causes and the token effects rather than CX and EX and then she therefore somehow wrongly assumes that these token causes and token effects are populating the same ontological level as this cause of relation NCE. And therefore argues that NCE cannot exist as long as both C and E do not exist. But as I've just tried to argue NCE is a relation of the tight level linking tight causes to tight effects. So in the assumption that tight level causation is ontologically prior to token level causation this cause of relation NCE will hold independently of any spacial and oral instantiation of that relation at the token level. And so NCE can be used to explain why EX must follow CX when the future comes into existence thereby answering liner's coordination problem. The cross temporal problem can be avoided by invoking an 8 temporal necessitation relation NCE at the tight level to bring its cross temporal instantiation at the token level into existence. Now a very similar strategy can be used with respect to nomic necessitation. So with nomic necessitation the idea is that there are laws of nature there are governing laws of nature that govern how the universe will evolve and it's through the presence of those necessitation relations that we can explain why the past and present regularities will persist in the future. Now the standard governing account of laws was independently developed by Gretzky, Thule and Armstrong who is therefore referred to as the DTA account of laws. So just as a very brief refresher of this account according to DTA a regularity of the form of all FSRGs will be a law of nature if and only if FNG are universal. So this FNG must be properties that can be multiply instantiated. Secondly, a nomic necessitation relation and should fall between those universes FNG. So this state of affairs is then typically symbolized as FNG. So to give you an example all humans are mortal. Is this considered to be a law of nature in the DTA account because first of all being human and being mortal are universals that are properties that can be multiple instantiated and secondly a nomic necessitation relation and is supposed to fall between these universals FNG. So according to DTA then whenever a particular object X instantiates the property F the instantiation of F that is FX guarantees via a nomic necessitation relation that the property G will also be instantiated mainly GX. And so what is important here once again is that FX and GX are tokens. They are particular states of affairs that is their particular instances of a universal that X here could be any person who happens to instantiate the property of being human or who happens to instantiate the property of being mortal. And as such they can be located in both space and time. Whereas FNG here on the other hand are types their types of states of affairs and their universals which can be multiple instantiated the property of redness can be multiple instantiated and so you call therefore localize the property of redness in space of the plural terms. Now since the nomic necessitation relation NFG links the universal F to the universal G rather than FX to GX and itself here fails to be space here that plural. The different instantiations of NFG at the token level that is NFX GX on the other hand are cross temporal. So for example takes them to be cases of singular causation where FX at one time is closely connected to GX at a later time. Finally by postulating this nomic necessitation relation NFG at the type level as opposed to at token level DTA at least seem to suggest that the type level is ontologically prior to the token level we'll have to come back to this in just a moment but at least that is what seems to follow from the DTA account and in that case FX cross temporal necessitates GX in virtue of F A temporal necessitating G at the type level. So just as we call the necessitation the cross temporal problem here can be avoided by carefully distinguishing between these two kinds of necessitation at two different levels time and token level necessitation. So just to include your argument being that it's impossible to be human on a future denier Sorry can you see? In previous slide you had some confusion if you are human can you be a presentist or a eternalist so it seems to be only a problem if you are human if you are a future denier because if you are human you won't accept this idea of position so in that case, denier argument will hold I think for the human the problem just arises because human is just not going to agree with Leininger that we need to explain this with the human regularity So it's point one Yeah, your point two wants For the non-humane who believes in the existence of necessary connections, whether it is due to causation being somehow anthropologically fundamental or lost in nature or dispositions will face this kind of coordination problem, but I think can avoid by going via the time level and by taking the eight temporal roots thereby avoiding this kind of post-temporal problem That's the claim But I think and then this is leading to the more wild ideas that I need to defend here It is going to lead to some kind of form of plainteness Yeah So there is a final problem and I think the problem actually becomes particularly salient when you consider Armstrong's specific developments of the DTA accounts There are differences of course between Dretsky, Tule and Armstrong particularly in Armstrong's case that we are going to face an important problem So let me try to briefly explain So part of Armstrong's metaphysics is the Aristotelian claim that Universals are somehow imminent and by this he means that states of affairs such as fx are all to launch a prior to the Universals f or to put it very victorily when god created the world he first had to create states of affairs before he could create the different Universals Now contrast this with the Platonic claim according to which Universals are not imminent but transcendent meaning that Universals are ontologically prior to the states of affairs and just the opposite thesis Finally notice that Armstrong's imminent thesis entails the so-called principle of instantiation and it says there can be no an instant state that Universals for the Universals f here to exist there must be at least one instance of that Universals for that is one state of affairs fx or as Armstrong writes appropriateness is the appropriateness of some real particular or again similarly a relation is all between real particulars and for the relation being in front of to exist there needs to be at least one instance of two particulars at art standing in that relation to one another and so what I want to argue is that the solution I just proposed to the coordination problem is going to be incompatible with Armstrong's imminent thesis and will actually force us to accept the Platonic ontology of Universals according to which Universals are transcendent So let me try to briefly explain why I think this is the case so imagine that fx here presently exists then by the principle of instantiation the universal f also exists and now the question is why does gx invariably follow fx clearly I mean trying to invoke this noministic situation nfg here is going to be problematic for Armstrong because if gx is in the future then gx does not exist for the future denier so by the principle of instantiation the universal g also doesn't exist and so given the assumption that relations are existence and tailing nfg cannot exist so nfg cannot be used to explain why gx follows fx so it seems that the only way I mean there are a couple of you could try to wiggle yourself out of this problem in a couple of different ways and I'm happy to go into this during the discussion but basically they will be rather desperate moves and in the end they are going to lead to nowhere and they won't be able to solve this problem so what I think we should do here is to give up on the principle of instantiation we should give up Armstrong's immanence thesis and instead adopt the transcendence thesis according to which the universes definitely are transcendent by this I mean those universes somehow exist in platonic heaven and they do so independently of their instantiations in the concrete world and so since f and g can happily live in platonic heaven obviously the nfg exists and so it can be used to explain why gx follows fx even though gx does not exist good coming towards the end of my talk very briefly how does this idea apply to metaphysical necessitation so there was one last way for the future denier to try to expand the continuing regularity of the world and that was through dispositions not the rules of nature, not the position of dispositions so briefly dispositions are typically characterized in terms of their causal behaviors so you will say an object can have a disposition d to display a certain manifestation m when it is triggered by the right kind of stimulus s for example a fragile face is said to be disposed to break when it is broke and so typically the connection between the dispositions stimulus s and its manifestation will be taken to be one of metaphysical necessitation such that if the object has the disposition d then necessarily the object must manifest m when triggered s and we call it a relation of metaphysical necessitation because the idea is that in all possible words objects with that disposition are disposed and will always follow s if s happens presently m must follow in the future and a problem of course once again that these blingers would say is that if s is happening in the present then m is in the future it doesn't exist and so this relation can't exist it can't be used to explain the continuum regularity and the solution once again will be the realization that this metaphysical necessitation relation and as an is a temporal necessitation relation at the time level and not a cross temporal necessitation relation at the token level and nsm here is a second order relation between universals rather than a first order relation between states of affairs or between particulars and so nsm can be used to explain the future regularity of the world and of course once again in order for this relation nsm to exist both s and m's universes have to exist so once again we better adopt a platonic ontology of universes according to which those universes just exist in platonic heaven and do not need any instantiation in order to exist and so to conclude I just wanted to link briefly to a book that recently that was recently published by Matthew Tobey because in this book Matthew Tobey actually raises a very similar kind of argument in order to argue for a platonic ontology of properties so I wanted to show the dissimilarity here so Tobey starts his argument with a very central principle about dispositions namely the fact that a particular can have a disposition even if it never manifests that disposition so for example vase can be fragile even if it never breaks sugar cube can be soluble even if it never comes into any contact with water so as central and unproversial as this principle may be according to Tobey it leads to a paradox a paradox of unmanifested dispositions because remember in order to make sense of dispositions in order to characterize them we had to invoke this this connection between the stimulus or between the disposition and its manifestation and so as Tobey writes an obvious way to account for the connection between a disposition and its manifestation is to appeal to a relation of some sort the problem however is that as soon as the central principle is acknowledged it is as soon as they acknowledge that some dispositions will never manifest themselves then one will be left with cases in which that relation has only one relation and so once again Tobey certainly wasn't the first to notice this kind of problem David Arkshaw himself already referred to this problem as the Manonium problem in his book in 1997 when he wrote that when a particular has an unmanifested power that a particular cannot be related to the potential manifestation of this power because the instantiation of a relation demands that all insters exist and so he concluded we have here a Manonium metaphysics in which actual things are in some way related to non-existent things that's the Manonium problem and according to Tobey the solution will be a platonic position a platonic ontology of properties a platonic metaphysics writes Tobey of properties can help us to resolve the paradox so on this position objects have dispositions in virtue of effect that they instantiate universals which stand in relationships of dispositional directiveness with other universals namely with the manifestation of universals and so these other manifestation universals exist even if they are not instantiated so the directiveness of unmanifested dispositions is secured and allows us to avoid a mysterious Manonium picture and so just to compare Armstrong's Manonium problem and Tobey's answer to it with Linier's coordination problem and my answer to it I think you can see how similar they are basically what Linier did was to then polarize the Manonium problem but both start from this Aristotelian claim that there is no M without Mx no universals without at least one instantiation of the universe and then both will argue that there isn't any Mx Linier will argue that there isn't an Mx because Mx is in the future and so Mx doesn't exist whereas Armstrong will claim Mx doesn't exist because it will never manifest itself but in any case if Mx doesn't exist M doesn't exist and so the relation doesn't exist and the solution in both cases is the Patonic claim that M can exist without instantiation in the complete world and so to conclude I've argued that you can meet Linier's coordination problem in two ways so by endorsing open future humanism, future deniers can just avoid the coordination problem all together by simply rejecting the continental irregularity assumption or secondly by endorsing non-humianism future deniers can actually answer the coordination problem if only they are ready to distinguish time from token level necessitation and for this kind of recline to work the time level has to be ontologically prior to the token level and so with respect to nomic necessitation to governing accounts of rules or to some form of dispositionalism this will force us to adopt a lateness position according to which universes are presented once again break your pointer oh the spammer alright we've got spam in the chat let's me we're getting big so yeah I have questions but do you want to take a break or do you want to show any questions it's up to you maybe we can take a two minute break cool two minute break works for me yeah I have a little this takes me back I spent a long time actually my undergraduate senior thesis did try to do exactly the same thing with space and metaphysics instead of time and metaphysics so this takes me away with that I'm going to start with a more basic kind of exegetical question because I'm wondering I mean the move basically taking the Armstrong move seems I guess what I'm doing here is I'm just going to throw shaded lining a little bit taking the Armstrong move to me seems I mean it's such a well known move in metaphysics of laws I'm a little floored that there's not something about that as a potential way out that that's not no it's really just not noticed in the argument in her paper can you repeat it so taking the move of putting the necessary connection between the universes instead of between the objects she just doesn't notice that no okay no I'm just actually surprised but that's fine she doesn't notice that so I think that's very straightforward way of trying to avoid the problem I think what is more interesting is my plea for Batonism even someone like Armstrong was very happy to accept the existence of universes realism of universes in being an Aristotelian I think he's facing just as much even swagger at us I've always been surprised by the same thing the idea that the kind of uneasy marriage of full on heavyweight necessary connections between universes within Aristotelian Aristotelianism about universes I mean I think that's just those have to be uneasy bad fellows and I find it surprising that not more has been written on this or that not more people have actually voiced these kind of arguments so I mean there's Matthew Thugby of course there's Tyler Hildebrand who's again try to show that there's inconsistencies in Armstrong's metaphysical if you take all of the different claims he has you will end up having contradictions especially due to the Zimbian stasis that universes have to be instantiated but but despite that fact somehow most metaphysicians are still very happy being Aristotelians and then very few are ready to adopt a Platonist position so that's kind of interesting but yeah thank you for I find much more clear on that rather than to continue I'm stronger also because there are a lot of stuff but this position wasn't the answer but that's the point that I want to make the dispositional way out of the problem doesn't have to be Platonistic and to know what that is if you relax the idea that this situation implies existence straight from other way and if you allow existence to be a more liberal notion that film could exist actually or potentially the source of this position is a very good object that exists presently so if you're a presentist and dysfunctionalist you say that the source of this position is present presently existing and the ratio is with potentially existing stuff and not actually existing stuff so in this way I feel that if you are liberal of what existence means allowing existence to be a potential existence and if you take these positions to be the source of what we are instantiated it's a way out yeah thank you I see what you mean does my clicker work? oh yes I want you to go that button and yes I think it does now right it's definitely something I need to look into in more detail because I agree this may be a way out but I think I have one slide on this wait here's my worry what you have unrealized possibilities and why I'm not so tempted in entertaining that kind of way out so again the cross-tempo relations are holding between the present and future events both present and future events have to exist for the relation to exist and in the future it doesn't work because the future event doesn't exist so you I think are saying something along the lines why not say that the future exists potentially as in some kind of unrealized possibility it's not yet an actual concrete occurrence it's just a potential fee and so the two reasons why I'm kind of an easy with that strategy is that I think it would first of all significantly inflate our ontology in the sense that you would have to accept the existence of every possible unrealized possibility yeah the space of possibility is defined by the situation that you have instantiated in the presence so it's not like every I still have strength so you would constrain it just by the nature of the dispositions the space of possibility is defined by the situation that you have in the presence yeah fair enough and I agree since I'm inflating my ontology as well in going to Platonist route I think having to find a way out of it the other maybe more serious premise is that if you're ready to accept the existence of unrealized possibilities then I think as Louis already showed in his book those real possibilities can actually ground most of your global claims so you can make sense of counterfactuals etc etc and so if they connect as the truth makers for all these modal truths then it's not ever clear to me what experimentary work there is for the irreducible dispositions to do and I think that's the reason why a dispositionalist is not going to be happy to just accept the existence of unrealized possibilities because in a sense a dispositionalist wants the dispositions to be the fundament of their ontology and to do the heavy work here in being the truth makers so I think there is some kind of tension maybe if you're not a dispositionalist then this would very well be a position to adopt here it's true but it's a position usually that most of the time I don't explain much as much as describe stuff so there are real but it's a good point and it's definitely more than I need to explore for this yeah sure you didn't speak, you didn't discuss point one and when you explain lame news, arguments that was the first objection that raised my mind I don't know personally I find it a bit weak to say that the relationship only exists if there is data that exists and we can take a very basic example if I say tomorrow is going to rain the condition to give a sentence a meaning is to imagine the contrary that tomorrow it's not going to rain in some way so it's related to non-actual possibility so it seems like why or maybe how lame news does define the point that the relationship exists maybe you can give some more details yeah so why does lame news take those necessary connections to be relations between two relates I'm not sure this is just her reading of it which I think is fair enough but I agree with you that there are at least two ways out of that by just focusing on this idea that the necessary connections have to be a relation so the first one would be to argue that for example when you consider causation where C calls E we're not dealing with calls of relations in which there is this kind of connection between C and E but that you need to think about it in non-relational terms in more productive terms for example so I think there's a lot of accounts of causation that go this non-relational route so that may be way out if you're able to make sense of causation in non-relational terms then obviously the whole problem here is this is not going to occur so that would be one way of dealing with it the other way I'm more skeptical about and that is why I didn't want to entertain the first strategy that would be to say yeah I mean the cause of relation is a relation but it isn't because one of the two relates doesn't exist and therefore the relation kind of exists and causations do not have to be existence entailing then I find more difficult to believe because that seems to me to some form of monomianism according to which you would have to subscribe to yeah to such things as non-existent objects and in that case you're linking an existing object to a non-existing object that seems some strange yeah I don't know I think it depends how you define existence in some way but for instance if I understand a law of physics I can produce some counterfactual example for instance if light speed would be different the world would be different too so it seems pretty usual in order to understand in the actual world to have a necessity relationship about non-factual world but maybe in some case we say light exists in some way so we are speaking about an existing object but in a non-existing world maybe we make a relationship between something that exists which changes the speed can we say speed exists so if you understand I think everything is contained in this very basic concept and of course this isn't something that needs tackling just here it's basically at the heart of the discussions and debates between presidents and eternists because they basically disagree on what exists obviously they both agree that dinosaurs do not exist right now they disagree on whether dinosaurs exist implicitly and so the present is somehow will will no longer quantify over the past and in the future events so this is somehow more restricted three-dimensional but it's surprisingly hard to make clear sense of those distinctions and it actually has led to a whole bunch of issues by people such as Deeks I think who actually ended up saying that there actually isn't any fundamental difference between the present and the eternist actually if you look closely enough at what they are both claiming you're so disagreeing at all because there are so many ways of interpreting on the more it exists do you interpret it temporally, atemporally, only temporally I agree, things get very confusing there and I think you can see exactly the same here yeah in a way when I said there is nothing existing outside my mind for instance, we are talking to some debates it's maybe reasonable to say we cannot prove it or counter prove it so I wonder if at least it's not the same kind of phenomenon that happened here the philanthropists say dinosaur doesn't exist because nothing exists outside my mind my mind is present so I have this feeling that at the very end of the debate we are turning to a kind of non-decidable statement about is it true that the world exists outside my mind so I wonder if people could just agree if we make some economy in the way we state the issue so I have the feeling once you use the word existence you can very easily make people disagree but share a bit more clear we just accept ok, this is not decidable ok, you accept it I don't we don't need to say future doesn't exist we just try to understand what are the non-decidable states then again I think it's more than just coming from what we mentally think I mean the present is driven by by intuitions most of us will share about we all feel stuck in the present and we all feel as if we have some kind of freedom to shade the future so the future is still open I mean it's still to be realized and so we all feel as if we're moving towards the future at a certain speed, you know, on average one second per second so there is this flow of time all of those are very intuitive feelings and the present just wants to take them seriously and will therefore argue that the world or what exists must be limited to the present moment only and that that moment must change with time as time passes so they're trying to somehow make sense of the notion of temporal becoming of the idea that only the present exists, that the past and future don't exist and of real change because in the rock universe you could argue that there isn't like a real substantial change it's just a variation over time the present is what's more than that so I think all of these things are very much happening in the real world so I think there is I'm I'm not persuaded by the arguments by Deeks and Dorato that there isn't any disagreement here between the present and the future I think they really have very different claims, very different wishes for sure and I think the simplest way just to see this in a new way is to look at the ontology one will subscribe to a three-dimensional world that just stretches out in space and the eternist will also take it an oral dimension into consideration making four dimensions so I think those are clearly fundamentally different ontologies but yeah I agree it becomes fake and difficult and hard once you ask a question what do you mean when you say that the future is real or the future is not real exists or it doesn't exist those are difficult, difficult terms and they are being spelled out enough or at all in most of the literature on the philosophy of time very few authors have actually tried to make more sense of these things and I think that leads to a lot of confusion and a lot of problems so you should stop true, I think we really need it because I mean except that if you are already into the debate and so you feel like it's very easy to understand because you are in and that happened to me at the end of the presentation but it never changed the fact that at the very beginning I'm like it doesn't mean nothing but do we mean so it's like I'm brainwashed and I feel confident and I don't think I might even but initially the same with a lot of maybe in physics we don't know when does it mean or there's a theoretical term but after a while we get used to it kind of get a feeling for it so it would be useful so I also this feeling that maybe we can define without being platonist but stating something kind of as if but I don't know if it will hold for instance let's say I'm a million and broke list and I said the future doesn't exist but the only way I can understand the world is reasoning as if it was platonist even if it's not at all so I can make relations which are not raw because of anything a million but I can make so-due relations in a so-due platonist way in order to understand the possibility for the future I don't know if this will hold I don't know I don't know we have to think about I mean to me that definitely is the more interesting question that somehow came out of this this little project namely should we be a platonist or is this to me this seems to suggest that that if you are driven by non-community convictions if you take the idea of roles covering the universe really seriously if you want the roles to dictate, if you want them to rule then platonism is by far the best, maybe the only position to adopt and that to me is very interesting because once again most metaphysicians today whether someone like Armstrong who is a governing account of roles in mind or people like Bert or Ennis or Mumford who are much more dispositionalist if they are going to be realists about universes they will be Aristotelians, there are very very few platonists around and that to me comes somewhat of a surprise because I can see how platonism fits much better between these kind of convictions than Aristotelians I thought that was really interesting in the talk because the other thing that it reminded me of is for all of it now it is, I would say most often used as a contribution to the debate over non-causal explanation we often tend to forget that the first paper about the cicadas and prime number explanation is intended to be a defensive platonism at the end of the day, right? I've actually been to dinner with it once he came to LSU one time while I was teaching there I always find it really weird that I'm a philosopher of science now because I'm a philosopher of math I wrote that paper because I think people don't care enough about platonism that was the whole reason and I think it's kind of interesting here it's funny one event could be random but two starts to look like a trend it's interesting to see this idea that maybe the right way to approach this is not to just get neck deep in questions about numbers of universals purely speaking but to see what kinds of consequences adopting that position has for other stuff that you might be more interested in or for that matter this gets to some of what I was saying places where you might have clear intuitions where you don't just wind up foundering over yeah how exactly do you feel like interpreting what it needs to say that the past doesn't have any present existence you might feel like you have a little bit more traction over so what's the right way to understand laws we at least have a lot more literature on that at least we can make some appeals to scientific practice somehow that might help it's a cool idea in general I'm interested to see if this trend continues I have to preface my comment by saying that I'm way out of my area of competence but I was thinking about the relationship between the type level relations and the token level relationship distinction on the one hand and Platonist metaphysics on the other hand and I'd say that there might be quote unquote quasi again an alternative to the Platonist metaphysics that could be used to understand this frame understand this relationship the distinction between type and type relations and token level relations because for instance we could state that the token level relations obtain in virtue of type level the existence of type level relations but that at the same time type level relations superveen over the existence of a certain set of a certain arrangement of a certain set of states of affair that are at the same ontological level as token level relations and to give an example for instance we can we can state that we can explain the fact that an apple falls from a tree as a relation as relations between the instantiation of a relation between the mass of the apple and the mass of the earth and this relation is a gravitational attraction and this token level relation between the mass of the earth and the mass of the apple obtain in virtue of the existence of a more general relation described by Newton's law but at the same time the existence of Newton's law if I'm not mistaken presupposes the existence of a certain general state of affair of the universe state of affairs which is the post big bang universe and we cannot know whether there exist in some such a thing as a type level relation similar to those described by Newton's laws in the pre big bang universe yeah thank you for that for me that that is exactly the reason why I have my doubts about the Aristotelian position because it seems to me that we are turning in circles here and that this may be something of a dangerous circle so I'm not familiar enough with Hegel to see how this may help but I think with the Aristotelian conception of a few universes that exactly is the problem so as I try to explain here and I think this was exactly what you were trying to argue for I think that this Aristotelian conception where the universes are imminent in space and time isn't stable for exactly that reason because if they are imminent then they as you said somehow ontologically depend upon the very sequences that they are supposed to explain and so the question would be how can something explain or determine the very things on which it ontologically depends or in the case of dispositions how can dispositions in the concrete world inherit their dispositional directness from the universes that insinuate if those universes are ontologically dependent on their instantiations and there is this funny circularity here that that makes me feel very uneasy about the Aristotelian conception but and I think it's been raised I think Arbusring has struggled with it I think Arbusring has struggled to make sense of it but not very successfully on the other hand I don't think it's been raised very much or enough and so I'm surprised Aristotelian or some Aristotelian given this kind of tension so maybe I'm missing something here maybe there are some seems connected I have a question coming in from Peter by the way I believe it's because the project of Aristotelian metaphysics is not so much as it is descriptive we try to capture the things that better describe or better explain the same thing as with the general idea that if you want to make sense of the practice or something you will consider that the better way to take it to account what the practice is doing is this position because it's the thing that reasons the world the best but it's not an explanation of the sense that you need an explanation in the science actually I've seen some papers that are criticizing this trend of trying to think that that is what explains stuff and not trying to find the best presentation that fits the best of the things that are being done but the project is more descriptive but would you say that that people like Byrd or Lumpford aren't taking their project to be maybe they're not taking it to be but in the end that's why what finish being is when you read some decors the most biggest component of Aristotelian metaphysics the way they describe what they are doing is that they are pretty much doing discussion about what's happening by just trying to explain that to modernity and potential way the world is a stratification of what the world is and what the world could be yeah that takes for that follow up I have a follow up on the rational between immanence and ontological dependency and the expatriate problem because I'd say that the solution might be to say that to argue that I have to say that I don't know enough cosmology to really argue the point but I might suggest that we could argue that for instance physical type physical token level relations depend ontological depend on time level type level physical relations but that this dependency is relative to a particular macro state of the universe for instance the most big bang state of the universe and in this sense this ontological dependency of token level relations to type level relations is a product of the history of the universe and that is ontological dependencies of temporal I would have to think about it in any case I don't take Armstrong to be I don't think he has that in mind when he subscribes to the immanence thesis I mean so thank you for that I would have to think about it the one thing that is clear from Armstrong is that he is an internist for obvious reasons he kind of needs to be an internist but not to run too quickly in any of those struggles for example with unmanifested dispositions and so given that Armstrong takes past, present and future events to exist it's sufficient for him that that some manifestation token has occurred somewhere in the past or in the future for the universal to exist in order to be able to use the second border between the universes but I'm not sure how to connect with what you just said question from Peter who says nice talk thanks small clarification question what are the FX and the GX really supposed to be so are they events are they states of affairs are they individuals having properties etc does the answer to that question have any impact on your conclusions for example about the dispositionalist solution so there's a first question yes I know yeah thanks I don't know if that would have any consequences for the argument I just gave I think in my paper I framed it in terms of states of affairs because I was basically engaging with Armstrong who is of course very happy to use that kind of language so in that case it's really a particular instantiating a universal so the X instantiating the property of ethnos and then it's taken to be a state of affairs but I'm pretty sure that someone like Matthew Tubbie isn't talking in terms of states of affairs and we'd rather talk in any of the other ways but I don't see how that would affect your argument I don't think you would make a fundamental difference to the argument you just raised of course if you want to follow up Peter I'm still looking at teams other question and this I think is related to Kevin's question from earlier as well so yeah could it be a way out from the present as the future events only exist in some other possible world and yeah that comes back to that so that's really in place with it and that's definitely enough for me to be explored here if you want to avoid blatantism of course cool yeah sure but we wait for Peter to maybe have a follow up I had one more this is much more speculative but when you talk about ontological priority between objects and relations this immediately makes me think about structural realism now of course all those guys are eternalists for reasons that I mean check out with the rest of their neo-aristotelian metaphysics like cool like mine are there well post neo-aristotelian projection of neo-aristotelian but hanging onto those bits of neo-aristotelian metaphysics could it I guess one thing the best way to frame this is could there potentially be a way out here to explore would it be enough to just invert the priority relation I guess maybe that's the right thing for me to say does that suffice I feel like the answer is no because you still have a problem if the Rolada totally don't exist at all yeah um I don't know good question I don't know I have no idea but that was because I mean I remember having I did a very early on in the structure in the OSR days we had a graduate reading group when I was getting my Ph.D. with Catherine Brady and we were all standing around the blackboard one day and it was just like how do you reject that you know first order logic RXY entails there's an X and there RAB entails there's an A and there's a B and it feels sometimes like they have to make that move but then that's one of the moves that I think is the hardest to understand and have a corpus anyway yeah I mean yeah yeah and in I mean in reading up for this talk I ended up reading something with some structural realism and yeah I think you're right and I'm pretty sure some people have played with except in those ideas I'm not sure what it was but so yeah there's definitely stuff there but no idea to me that I've got to wrap my mind around it but yeah why not me okay but that may go even towards towards what you were trying to claim it seems like you were putting them all on the same logic level isn't it if you're going to why not really but let's say I said that the relation between those geontological levels need to be understood from a time-poor standpoint okay okay I know so that would be different yeah there's no it's metaphysical dependence not time for structural realism something quite grounded yeah you can suddenly just play by so that would be interesting to look at check if there's anything someone want to see great all right thanks