Time, Conflicts and Chance

Abstract

After having briefly introduced the circumstances by which J. T. Fraser was led to build his theory of Time as Conflicts and the way this notion takes consistency through several levels, according to the abilities of the inert or living beings that populate the world, I try to analyze and comment upon them. At each of these levels, the complexity of time is manifested by concepts that oppose each other: permanence and change, movement and rest, divisibility and atomicity, chance and irreversibility, increasing entropy and local decreases, etc. In Fraser’s view, as in mine, the most important issues concern the division of time into past, present, and future, and the irreversibility of the world’s course. Fraser writes that these concepts become consistent only with the appearance of life, because only living beings (and even more so the human race) perceive these things in their Umwelt. Without disagreeing with him on this point, I emphasize the dominant role that Chance plays in the evolution of the world, at all levels considered by Fraser (except atemporality), even if living systems learned, sooner and better than any others, how to take advantage of their position as thermodynamically open systems. I use this argument to suggest, after Alfred North Whitehead, that next to the time of the living we must posit the existence of an objective motor of the world, restoring the ontology of the division of events into past, present, and future, as well as the specificity of the present.