#philosophyoftime

Living near an artillery range changes your relationship with time forever. Each explosion isn't just noise—it's a heartbeat of existence, a physical reminder that another moment has just passed and will never return. It's a unique chronometer that measures life not in silent seconds, but in reverberating booms that shake your windows and resonate in your chest.

At first, these explosions were my enemies. They interrupted thoughts, shattered concentration, and disturbed any semblance of peace. But over time, they became something else entirely: teachers of one of life's most crucial lessons.

The Physical Reality of Time

We live in a world where time has become abstract—numbers changing on screens, calendar notifications, digital reminders. But there's something profoundly different about feeling time's passage through your entire body. When each moment arrives with a force that makes your bones vibrate, you can't maintain the comfortable illusion that time is an infinite resource.

The artillery range strips away our modern cushioning from time's reality. Each boom asks a simple question: What did you do with that moment? Did you use it to move forward, to build, to grow? Or did you let another precious block of time slip away into the void?

The Relentless Auditor

Every explosion becomes an audit of your commitment:

Did you protect what needed protecting?

Did you build what needed building?

Did you teach what needed teaching?

Did you act when action was needed?

The artillery doesn't care about your excuses. It doesn't pause because you need more time. It just keeps marking the passages, keeps counting down the moments, keeps reminding you that time is the one resource you can never mine more of.

From Awareness to Action

This isn't about living in fear or constant stress. It's about living with acute awareness. When you can physically feel time's passage, you start making different choices. The transformation happens in stages, each boom pushing you further along the path from passive observer to active participant in your own life.

First comes the awakening—the moment you realize that time isn't just passing, it's passing through you. Each explosion forces you to acknowledge another moment gone, another opportunity either seized or lost. This awareness begins to seep into your decision-making process, creating a new sense of urgency that's not about panic, but about presence.

Then comes the shift in how you approach possibilities. When time becomes tangible, you stop treating ideas as distant dreams to be pursued "eventually." Instead, they become immediate candidates for action. Plans become actions because you understand that planning without execution is just another form of procrastination. Ideas become projects because you realize that an unrealized idea is just a ghost of what could have been. Intentions become commitments because you know that good intentions without action are worthless in the face of time's relentless march.

The most profound transformation happens in your relationship with "now." When each boom reminds you that time is finite, "someday" loses its power as a placeholder for dreams. The perfect moment reveals itself as the illusion it always was. You begin to understand that "now" isn't just a time—it's the only time you can actually use.

The most dangerous illusion in our modern world is the idea that there will always be more time—that we can wait for the perfect moment, the right conditions, the ideal circumstances. The artillery strips away this comfort. It makes time's passage unavoidable, undeniable, impossible to ignore. But more than that, it teaches you to use time rather than just watch it pass.

This new relationship with time manifests in practical changes:

You stop waiting for inspiration and start creating conditions for action

You reduce deliberation time not by rushing, but by making decisions with the understanding that perfect information is rarely available

You learn to distinguish between necessary preparation and unnecessary delay

You develop a bias toward action that's tempered by wisdom rather than paralyzed by fear

The shift from awareness to action isn't a single moment—it's a continuous process of aligning your behaviors with your understanding of time's value. Each boom becomes not just a reminder, but a call to action, a moment of decision, a chance to move from knowing to doing.

The Lesson of the Boom

What the artillery taught me wasn't about rushing. It was about removing the illusion that time is an infinite resource. Each explosion drove home the same lesson: Time will pass anyway. The only question is what you do with the time between the booms.

This understanding changes everything. When you truly internalize time's relentless forward motion, you stop waiting for permission. You stop looking for the perfect moment. You realize that the next boom is coming whether you're ready or not.

A Universal Timer

While most of us don't live near artillery ranges, we all have our own versions of these booms—deadlines, heartbeats, sunrise and sunset, the endless scroll of news and social media. The key is to find your own artillery clock, your own physical reminder of time's passage.

Because ultimately, that's what the artillery range teaches: Each moment that passes is gone forever, just like each round fired can never be unfired. The next boom is always coming. The only question is: What will you do before it arrives?

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Time isn’t just a number that moves — it is the heartbeat of life, flowing endlessly without ever looking back. Each second is a choice, and every choice is a direction — toward the light or into the darkness, toward paradise or away from it.

⏳ Every second you live is precious. It does not wait, it does not bargain, and it never repeats. Within a single breath, we can plant goodness, seek forgiveness, or delay what may never come again.

⚖️ At the crossroads of life, time is the most honest witness — it records every quiet step, every sincere intention, and every moment wasted when it should have been taken seriously.

So, stop playing around. Time is not a game — it is the subtle test that measures the depth of our sincerity in living this life. Use every second to grow, to do good, to become better — for every second will one day testify for or against you.

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.       Kahlil Gibran

Hourglass 54 SPb Green Acrylic

Acrylic green hourglass Saint Petersburg on Prague

Hourglass 54 SPb Green Acrylic Hourglass Collection on MHC Virtual Museum We have more than 1000 objects in My Hourglass Collection Hourglass Collection, Collection catalog: Collection catalog 300-399Collection catalog 200-299Collection catalog 100-199Collection catalog 1-99Collection catalog, The List

Hourglass 54 Information about time tells the durations of events, and when they occur, and which events happen before which others, so time has a very significant role in the universe's organization. Nevertheless, despite 2,500 years of investigation into the nature of time, there are many unresolved issues. Hourglass – measurement device. An hourglass, sandglass, sand timer, or sand clock is a device used to measure the intervals of time. Hourglass 54 Philosophy of space and time is the branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology, and character of space and time. During the Age of Enlightenment (17th and 18th Century), early modern philosophy began once again to consider questions of whether time is real and absolute or merely an abstract intellectual concept that humans use to sequence and compare events. In the 19th Century, philosophers began to question whether the present was really an instantaneous concept or a duration, and the conventionalists and phenomenologists all made their own contributions to the debate on time.

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Salmon of Doubt

World Physics Year 2000 #557

As I sat on the edge of my bed, wrapped in a towel facing the mirror, I looked at my 23 year old body and studied my face. All this time gone, the time it took to get here, memories of experiences and relationships; exists only in my head. Did anything really happen the way I perceived it? Did any of it happen at all? The only evidence of time passing is my ageing body, yours and photographs. But what if ageing was just a warped filter we were taught to look through? It’s as if the only self we were taught to be conscious of was our physical one, decaying through linear time. I feel as though my consciousness is evolving and learning, though not ageing like my body. “Who I am” is just a memory of how I’ve responded to “events”. 

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time has has occupied the attention of many philosophers of time since its publication in 1908. While few today accept the soundness of the argument in its entirety, his categorization of the serial conceptions of time into what he called, rather blandly, A-Series and B-Series, have been almost universally adopted. An A-Series is a tensed, dynamic series of time, in which the positions run from the past, to the present, and to the future. The B-Series, on the other hand, is a tenseless, static time series, in which positions run from “earlier to later” (McTaggart 1908). Broadly, McTaggart’s argument has two basic parts; firstly, he shows that the A-Series is the only true time series, and then, secondly, he proceeds to show the A-Series to be incoherent, leading to his famous conclusion that time does not exist. We will here briefly outline both of these parts, and then assess a popular criticism of the argument.

McTaggart begins his proof by outlining two basic intuitions about the nature of time; (1) that time involves change, and (2) that time has a direction. The B-Series certainly accommodates the latter of these intuitions, but it is not clear whether it can account for real change. Perhaps change occurs in the B-Series when one event stops, and another starts - but the B-Series involves an eternally ordered set; events can not simply ‘pop in’ or ‘pop out’ of the series! Perhaps then, the change occurs when two events overlap in time. The same problem, however, reoccurs here; while two events can have a common element, they can not be the same event, for this would preclude the possibility of change. If some event M changes into some other event N, M has ceased to be M and N has become to be N - but as we have already seen, no event can begin or cease to be in the B series. Hence, the B-Series cannot account for change.

The A-Series, on the other hand, involves both direction and change; events in the A-Series change from being future, to being present, and then become past - therefore making it a true time series. However, according to McTaggart, on closer inspection the A-Series appears to be incoherent. If we take the A-properties of “being past” or “being present” or “being future” in the A-Series as being non-relational, then every event simultaneously has all three of these contradictory properties, as every event will be past, present or future at some point in the series. Of course, we know that an event cannot be past, present and future all at once; events travel from ‘being future’ to ‘being present’, then to ‘being past’ - but this is a vicious circle, as it assumes the existence of time in order to make sense. Perhaps then, our A-properties are relational to something - the present. But by what virtue do we take a certain event to be present? Perhaps it is that a present event will have the A-property of being present - but if this is the case, all events would have this property, as all events are/will present at some point. It would seem that the relational point needs to exist outside the A-Series. With this in mind, we could posit another A* Series that gives a special property to present events. But again, all events would have this property, so another A** Series would be needed, and so on ad infinitum. So, McTaggart concludes, as the A-Series is the only true theory of time (because it accommodates both of our intuitions about time, while the B-Series cannot), and the A-Series is incoherent, and these exhaust the options, therefore time does not exist.

Most attempts to refute McTaggart’s argument have either involved accepting his first premise (that the A-Series is the only true time series) while denying the second (that the A- Series is incoherent - also known as McTaggart’s paradox), or denying the first while maintaining the second. One instance of the former has been posited by William Lane Craig and Robin DePoidevin, who point out that McTaggart may not be attacking the A-Theory at all in the second part of his argument, but rather a hybrid A-B Theory, which “combines tenseless ontology with temporal intrinsic properties of tense” (Craig 2001). Although this seems to be an odd objection (McTaggart defined our terms, after all), McTaggart does seem to implicitly maintain that any series of time must always include some kind of B-Theoretic event ontology; an eternally indexed, tenseless series of events. An A-Theory of this kind certainly exists; the moving spotlight A-Theory combines the B-Ontology of eternalism with a privileged present and thus tense, and hence falls easily for McTaggart’s paradox. However, as the paradox relies on “an event ontology of tenselessly existing events” (DePoidevin 1991), an A-Theory that has no such B-Ontology - such as presentism - would never see it arise. On presentism, the relational point of the present is easily defined, as present events are the only events that exist. This eliminates the need for a relational point outside of the A-Series, thus avoiding the infinite regress of A* Series’ that follow in the paradox.

Nathan Oaklander has disputed this point, however, pointing out that Craig appeals to tensed possible successive worlds¹ which “did, do or will obtain” to justify his talk about events having existed in the past (Oaklander, 1999, emphasis mine) - that is to say, that the past and the future exist in some sense, but only obtain as they become present. This, however, obviously begs the B-theoretical concept of succession; past and future events still exist both tenselessly and in an eternal relation on this view, even if they are abstract objects. With this in mind, Craig’s view of presentism seems to be little more than a hybrid A-B Theory - a group which he himself claims are ‘in deep trouble’ with regard to the paradox (Craig 1998).

This is not to say that every presentist is committed to a B-ontology in this way. Oaklander points out that Prior, Levison and Christensen - presentists, of whom Craig counts himself alongside - all reject B-ontology in favor of a ‘pure A-Theory’ of presentism. According to Oaklander, their presentism differs from Craig’s, in that they “... reject an ontology that includes events, they reject the property of presentness that events acquire and shed, and most importantly, they reject the notion that there is a genuine change that an event, or anything else, undergoes as it becomes present and recedes into the past” (Oaklander 1999). Prior explicates this in his (1968), claiming that “... what looks like talk about events is really at bottom talk about things, and that what looks like talk about changes in events is really just slightly more complicated talk about changes in things.” (Prior 1968:10). The flow of time, he thus claims, is “merely metaphorical, not only because what is meant by it isn’t a genuine movement, but further because what is meant by it isn’t a genuine change” (Prior 1968:11).

By denying that temporal becoming involves change, this form of presentism adriotly avoids McTaggart’s paradox, as it denies the existence of the A-properties ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ that events gain and shed. It does not, however, avoid the first premise of his argument, as it flatly denies McTaggart’s first intuition about time; that time involves change. This is because, as Oaklander points out, on a pure A-Theory of presentism, “... there are only individual things and the present tensed facts that such individuals or substances enter into” (Oaklander 1999). By McTaggart’s lights, this “pure A-theory” would not be a true time series at all, for exactly the same reason that initially disqualified the B-Series.

By way of summary, we have assessed two unsuccessful strategies that presentists have deployed to avoid McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time; to either reject B-ontology completely in favour of a ‘pure A-theory’ that denies temporal becoming as a species of change, and thus disqualify itself in the first premise of McTaggart’s argument, or, in an effort to make sense of talk about past and future events, accept a hybrid A-B theory that rests (in some capacity) on B- ontology, and in doing so become subject to McTaggart’s paradox in his second premise. Of course, this does not prove presentism or the A-series as a whole to be necessarily inconsistent; one could certainly reject McTaggart’s intuitions about time, or attack his argument in other ways than which we have discussed, but, as we have seen, either disposition of presentism cannot completely avoid McTaggart’s argument, as it has been claimed.

  Notes

¹ Meant in the serious actualist sense. Oaklander: '... states of affairs which exist as abstract objects but which are not instantiated' (Oaklander, 1999)

        References

Craig, W. L. 1998. McTaggart’s Paradox and the problem of temporary intrinsics. Analysis 58: 122–27.

–––––. 2001. McTaggart's Paradox and Temporal Solipsism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79, Iss. 1

LePoidevin, Robin. 1991. Change, Cause and Contradiction: A Defense of the Tenseless Theory of Time. London: Macmillan.

McTaggart, John Ellis. 1908. The Unreality of Time. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17: 456-73.

Oaklander, L. N. 1996. McTaggart’s Paradox and Smith’s tensed theory of time. Synthese 107: 205–21

–––––. 1999. Craig on McTaggart’s Paradox and the problem of temporary intrinsics. Analysis 59: 314.