Stepping down from mere appearance: Modelling the 'actuality' of time

Shrapnel, Sally and Evans, Peter W. and Milburn, Gerard J. (2023) Stepping down from mere appearance: Modelling the 'actuality' of time. [Preprint]

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Abstract

In her paper, 'The Open Universe: Totality, Self-reference and Time', Ismael argues that the agent experience of dynamic time, in which the world comes into being, is more than 'mere appearance'. The key to her argument is that the actual world includes agents (minds) and their corresponding agential (mental) activity, which Ismael describes as 'the crucial step down from 'mere appearance' to actuality'. We present here a model of an agent as a complex physical system with a view to providing a tenable illustration of Ismael's schema for understanding the 'actuality' of time. The radical implication for physical time as a result is that there is, in Ismael's words, 'no pure... conception of the way [the] world is independently of ourselves and our representational activity', but rather only 'embodied and engaged' knowledge of the world.

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Creators	Email	ORCID
Shrapnel, Sally	s.shrapnel@uq.edu.au	0000-0001-8407-7176
Evans, Peter W.	p.evans@uq.edu.au	0000-0003-0214-4748
Milburn, Gerard J.	g.milburn@uq.edu.au	0000-0002-5404-9681