Time & Perspective

by Don Berry

Scientific Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), , English, It is commonly thought that what is taking place in the present is all that the past no longer exists, and the future is yet to exist - merely an abstract set of possibilities. This view is known as 'tensed' time. It turns out, however, that this view of time is deeply problematic, and so some philosophers and scientists have suggested that time is in fact more like a the physical ordering of a set of stages of the Universe, which all exist together as one connected object. According to this picture of things, there are actually no differences between what we perceive as present, past and they are all equally real. In Part I of this essay, Don Berry sets out the four-dimensionalist picture in more detail, and presents various arguments against the classical tensed view. In Part II, the essay explores how the knowledge that every moment of time exists can change the way we think of ourselves and the world around us in our everyday lives; from the debate about free will, to a concern that is close to many of human mortality.

40 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2011

About the author

Primarily known for his historical novels of early Oregon country -- Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship -- Don Berry lived and worked from 1974 until his death in 2001 as a writer, painter, musician, sculptor, instrument maker, poet, and Zen practitioner on Vashon Island, in Seattle, and at Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island. He ventured into educational software in the pioneering days of computers, authored scripts for adventure films, wrote commissioned books, and built a website called Berryworks for his own unpublished fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and philosophy. Berry developed his writing skills with science fiction stories in the 1950s, but it is his trilogy of novels and his non-fiction history A Majority of Scoundrels (all written and published between 1960 and 1963) for which he is best remembered. With them, he helped create a new Northwest fiction style. Journalist Jeff Baker has called him "Reed's Forgotten Beat" for his work, his practice of Eastern metaphysics, and his longtime friendship with poets Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Philip Whalen (1923-2002), an association that began at Reed College in Portland in the 1950s. Berry's novels, and Scoundrels, were republished between 2004 and 2006 by Oregon State University Press.