Ciro - I agree - memory is certainly central to our construction of our intuitive sense of both "space" and "time".
I have found much solace in these daunting topics in the writings of Tom Lethbridge - arguably the only investigator of the 20th century who has produced a comprehensive and convincing theory spread over 9 books (e.g. Ghost and the Divining Rod, ESP: Beyond Time and Distance) of the paranormal, providing some excellent evidence of the existence and measurements of multi-dimensions and their effect on the concept of time-space. In my view one of the most wide-ranging and original minds in modern parapsychology.
Nice points.
..in that intuition demands the acknowledgment of a mental construct before the acceptance of a mathematical one. I enjoy the argument of reductio ad absurdum in this development; meaning, for intuition, existence indicates 'constructive existence'.
dear david,
could you clear up the meanings of the words endurance and perdurance? or have you done so already?
Persistence through time: endurance vs. perdurance
Presentism and eternalism are views about the status of entities in time; the A-theory and the B-theory are views about the passage of time; and serious tensing and detensing are views about what is true about entities in time. *Endurance* and *perdurance* are views about how entities persist through time.
Endurantists hold that material entities have no temporal extent; that they exist in their entirety at any one instant; and that they persist through time by being wholly present – by having 'all their parts' - at each instant of their existence. Thus, on endurance, three-dimensional objects have spatial parts, but no temporal parts.
Perdurantists hold that an entity persists through time by having temporal parts at different times; most also hold that entities are extended in time much as they are extended in space - Ted Sider (2001) remarks that, while eternalism is the view that spacetime is ontologically four-dimensional insofar as other times are as real as other places, perdurantism is the view that material objects are mereologically four-dimensional, insofar as they have temporal as well as spatial parts.
More recently, a distinction has arisen within the camp of those who favour perdurance between ‘worm’ theorists and ‘stage’ theorists. The ‘worm’ theory corresponds to the traditional perdurantist view; on this view, physical entities are four-dimensional wholes (spatiotemporal ‘worms’) occupying determinate regions of spacetime. For stage theorists (notably, Ted Sider or Katherine Hawley), parts or stages of four-dimensional entities are themselves the fundamental entities of the perdurantist ontology; parts or stages at other times are "counterparts" of a stage at a given time.
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