Bergson, Einstein, and What the Word ‘Present’ Commits You To
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays out three competing theories about time, and the disagreement is not about how accurately clocks measure duration. It is about what, among past, present and future, actually exists. Eternalism denies objective ontological differences among the three; on that view the differences are merely subjective, depending on whose present is being referred to. Einstein was an eternalist. Bergson was a presentist, a rival position in the three-way split.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Presentism adds a phenomenological argument: it claims we can recognize that only present objects and events are real through the special vividness of present experience compared with dim memories of the past and dim expectations of the future.
If eternalism is right, then saying the dinosaurs have 'slipped out of reality' is parochial. The line between past, present and future just depends on whose present is being referred to.
The IEP presents these as three live options rather than one settled answer to what sort of ontological differences the present, past and future have.