Time, consciousness and the knowledge argument

John Perry

pp. 81-93

in: L. N. Oaklander (ed), The importance of time, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

Hugh Mellor's Real Time II is an excellent book, for the following reasons. First it deals with an important and difficult philosophical problem, the passage, or apparent passage, of time. Second, Mellor is basically right. Mellor is a B-theorist, in the sense that he thinks that the B-facts, the facts that are not relative to a time, provide all the truthmakers we need. I was convinced that this must be right by reading D.C. William's "The Myth of Passage" a long time ago, when I was in graduate school. But although I knew which side I was on, this conviction was based more on seeing problems for the A-theory, and thinking that the A-arguments weren't very convincing, than on understanding how the B-theory could account for everything. And this is the third thing I like about Mellor's book. As I read it, I really felt, for the first time, that I understood, or at least began to understand, how the B-theory not only must be right, but could be right.