Conceptual Issues

I have copied this post from Personal and Literary Reflections. It was published there in connection with Alan Moore's Jerusalem but is copied here because it is equally relevant to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol.

Conceptual confusion is generated when:

time is spatialized;
statics is reduced to dynamics;
the single temporal dimension is reconceptualized as a fourth spatial dimension

- and yet:

dynamic/temporal processes are assumed to occur within this otherwise static four dimensional space;
thus, a second temporal dimension is tacitly introduced;
in discussion, it becomes unclear which of the two temporal dimensions is being referred to - the first, which has been reduced to space, or the second, which is not clearly acknowledged.

The next post will apply these remarks to recent discussions.