Uncluttering our minds
Hoarding can also occur in our heads
More than a century ago — in 1905, to be precise — famed physicist and future Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein published four papers in Annalen der Physik, the prestigious German scientific journal. One of the papers, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, focused on special relativity and introduced the world to the concept of spacetime. (Before this word entered our zeitgeist, scientists used two separate theories to explain the motion of massive objects and the properties of light.)
Spacetime is also a philosophical concept. Four-dimensionalism (also known as the doctrine of temporal parts) states that an object’s existence throughout time is akin to its extension through space. This view helps address the paradox known as “the ship of Theseus”, which asks whether or not an object that has all of its parts slowly and continuously replaced over time is still the same object.
Three-dimensionalism’s answer — almost by definition — has to be “no”; adding the fourth dimension of time to an object, or even a person, introduces the concept of “temporal parts”, or parts of an object that exist in separate time periods. Thus, in the case of a wooden ship whose planks have been replaced one by one over the years, all the stages in which it had one part replaced can be seen as a single…
