What Should I Do When My Intuitions Clash With Physics?

p: I am sitting here writing a blog post. It is now later than when I wrote the previous sentence.

Can I doubt the truth of what I just wrote?

Let’s say I can rationally doubt p if there is some scenario S that falsifies p, and I cannot conclusively rule S false. Certainly there are admissible scenarios that falsify p: I may be dreaming. So I can rationally doubt p.

Let’s say doubt is sceptical if it spreads to unrelated propositions. The dream scenario falsifies p, but it also falsifies everything else I that I seem to perceive. Let’s say a doubt is empirical if it does not spread. I may doubt that my computer is working properly. But this doubt, based on the computer's odd performance, does not spread to the proposition that my printer is working properly. (More details here.)

I would claim that I cannot empirically doubt p. I can doubt that it is now later than when I started writing, but only by dream scenarios and other sceptical stratagems that cast doubt on all contingent propositions.

Yesterday, Eric Schliesser posted a reference to James Ladyman’s review of Tim Maudlin’s book The Metaphysics Within Physics. Ladyman reports Maudlin as inveighing against “metaphysical debates based on intuitions about what is and is not possible.” Metaphysical debates should be grounded on physics, Maudlin maintains, not intuition. Eric remarks that he is himself sympathetic to this view, though under the influence of Katherine Hawley, he has come to think that intuition-driven metaphysics has “neo-scholastic virtues.” (I must say that the term has an oxymoronic reek.)

In the course of the review, Ladyman reports that Maudlin defends the objectivity of “temporal passage,” i.e., the forward motion of time.  Ladyman’s own view is that “the asymmetry of time is not enough for us to say that time has a direction rather than a directedness.” Maudlin and Ladyman both think that the issue between them can (and must?) be resolved within physics.

I find this genuinely puzzling. It seems to me, on intuition if you will, that time has been steadily moving forward since I started writing. And bracketing sceptical doubt, it seems to me that I know this. Now, just conceivably, a metaphysician could prove that I am wrong. Perhaps she could show that there is something inconsistent about the “intuitions” that lead me to this belief about temporal passage. Perhaps: but I do not think that physics could prove me wrong.

I don’t wish to deny that physics can prove some pretty interesting counter-intuitive theorems about time—about reversals and simultaneity and what-not. But my feeling is that these results are about some metric concerning sub-atomic particles and such. A physicist can certainly prove that my intuitions about time are wrongly extrapolated to microscopic phenomena. But I still can’t imagine a physicist convincing me (i.e., on grounds of physics) that time has been running backwards since I began this post.

Wasn’t it Suzanne Langer who said she didn’t understand Arthur Eddington’s claim that the table isn’t solid? This table is what I mean by solid, she said. I am in the same boat as far as time moving forward is concerned. I am open to the possibility that my conception of time will be proven inconsistent by a metaphysician. But I cannot imagine a physicist doing it on the basis of something about space-time. Physics doesn’t interact with “ordinary phenomena” in this way.