Not Time II

See Not Time. 

This line of thought has been occasioned by reading an sf work not by Poul Anderson but by Clifford Simak. However, there is an underlying issue here that Anderson gets right but that most people most of the time get wrong and the people who get it wrong include not only Simak but also HG Wells and James Blish! - so let's stay with the line of thought for a while. (N.B.: Neither Wells nor Blish confuses the nature of time as much as Simak.)

The Issue

Matter moves through space and motion takes time but we then think of time itself as a dimension that we move along. Clearer thinking is needed. If you sit under a clock in a waiting room from 9:00 AM until 10:00 AM, then you are fully and equally present at 9:00 AM and at 10:00 AM and at every intermediate moment. You do not in any sense move from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. There is a 9:00 AM with you in it but there is no subsequent 9:00 AM with you not in it because you have moved away from it. Nor can you accelerate and arrive at 10:00 AM before me. We both arrive (if that is the right word) at 10:00 AM at 10:00 AM. 

Wells

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that our bodies extend along the Fourth Dimension whereas our immaterial mental existences move along it.

Blish

"'...the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction.'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), p. 116.

("...that entity..." is Weinbaum's body extending in four dimensions.)

Simak

In City, VII, on pp. 196-197, there is a passage that I will try to summarize rather than to quote in full. It is claimed that we had thought that we were passing through time whereas really we were moving along with it. Seconds did not pass. Instead, a single second moved along and we moved with it! What does that mean? He stays with the idea of motion through time but then tries to differentiate between two kinds of temporal motion. If something moves along through time, then the time that is moved through is measurable in units including seconds. Therefore, the moving entity is not itself one of those seconds.

Anderson

There is none of this in Anderson. In his Time Patrol series and in his There Will Be Time, our bodies extend along the fourth dimension - as in Wells and Blish although not in Simak - but there is no suggestion that any immaterial entities move along those bodies from their births to their deaths. Every moment is the present moment for any organism that is conscious in that moment. There is no moving present.