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The B-theory of time, also called the "tenseless theory of time", is one of two positions regarding the temporal ordering of events in the philosophy of time.B-theorists argue that the flow of time is only a subjective illusion of human consciousness, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless: temporal becoming is not an objective feature of reality.
In the first mode, events are ordered as future, present, and past.Futurity and pastness allow of degrees, while the present does not. When we speak of time in this way, we are speaking in terms of a series of positions which run from the remote past through the recent past to the present, and from the present through the near future all the way to the remote future.
This conception of an individual as always present is opposed to perdurantism or four-dimensionalism, which maintains that an object is a series of temporal parts or stages, requiring a B-theory of time. The use of "endure" and "perdure" to distinguish two ways in which an object can be thought to persist can be traced to David Lewis.
Presentism is a view about temporal ontology, i.e., a view about what exists in time, that contrasts with eternalism—the view that past, present and future entities exist (that is, the ontological thesis of the 'block universe')—and with no-futurism—the view that only past and present entities exist (that is, the ontological thesis of the ...
David Lewis theorized that events are merely spatiotemporal regions and properties (i.e. membership of a class).He defines an event as "e is an event only if it is a class of spatiotemporal regions, both thisworldly (assuming it occurs in the actual world) and otherworldly."
In 'The Myth of Passage', Williams confronts the objection that time passes in an important sense and because of the passage of time the pure manifold theory of time leaves something out about the nature of time and so is wrong. He argues that any appeal to temporal experience or a direct phenomenological intuition of time's passage is bogus. [21]
This is contrasted with the B series, in which positions are ordered from earlier-than to later-than relations. Thus the A series represents the events in time in a moving relation (from future to present to past) to the temporally moving observer, whereas the B series orders the time events as in firm and fixed relations to other time events.
In the B-theory, temporal passage and becoming are subjective and illusions of consciousness. Craig explains: [38] "On a B-Theory of time, the universe does not in fact come into being or become actual at the Big Bang; it just exists tenselessly as a four-dimensional space-time block that is finitely extended in the earlier than direction.