Time & Matter
Change, causation, and impermanence
Overview
Matter is the substrate that changes, and time is the dimension through which that change unfolds. Causation — the idea that prior material states produce later ones — is the hinge that binds them. Without time, matter would be static; without matter, time would have nothing to mark its passage.
Central Tension
Does matter require time to exist, or does matter's activity create time? Process philosophers argue that becoming is more fundamental than being — that matter is not a thing persisting through time, but a process that constitutes it. Materialists counter that time is simply the measure of physical change in a pre-existing substance.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Is matter fundamentally persistent or fundamentally in process?
- Does causation require temporal succession, or can causes be simultaneous with effects?
- What makes material objects "the same" object across different moments of time?
- Is entropy — the irreversible degradation of matter — the only reason time has a direction?
Schools of Thought
Reality is constituted by events and processes, not enduring material substances; time and matter are inseparable.
Each material state causally necessitates the next; time is the sequence of materially determined states.
Matter is impermanent (anicca) — all composite things arise and pass away in time, and attachment to material permanence causes suffering.
Matter evolves through contradictions over time; history is the temporal unfolding of material forces.
Matter and its temporal evolution fully explain reality; no non-physical cause or timeless substance is needed.
Material things in time are expressions of an eternal spiritual reality; the temporal is subordinate to the timeless.
Synthesis
Time and matter are co-constitutive: matter gives time something to measure, and time gives matter the dimension in which to change. Their relationship is at the heart of every physical law, from conservation of energy to the second law of thermodynamics.