Time, Conflicts and Chance

What is it about?

The most important issues concerned by the philosophy of Time are 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 environment. Without disagreeing with him on this point, I emphasize the dominant role that Chance plays in the evolution of the world, even if living systems have known, more than any others, how to take advantage of their position as open systems, exchanging matter and energy with their environment, to gain in complexity. I suggest, after others, that we must posit the existence of an objective motor of the world, not identical to our notion of time, to fully account for the role of chance in the world’ s evolution, and restore the full objectivity of the division of events into past, present, and future, as well as the specificity of the present.

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