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i don't think these 3 options reflect either the complexity of thinking time through a language that tends to spatialize and render discrete, nor the problems that accompany conflating time with the systems of marking that come to characterize or define it. in my 3-d activities, i worry these problems alot....
1 is probably best seen as a description of the dynamics of temporal experience. it isn't particularly accurate because it introduces meaningless terms into the mix (free will? what the hell is that?) and avoids thinking through how this dynamic might work if it's mapped onto the process of, say, perception which would be an aspect of the process of continual constitution of a world (and of a self that constitutes a world)...
2 is an old metaphysical illusion concerning time as manifold. the center of it seems to me to be the simple fact that time is a noun. as a noun, the word time is defined by a series of predicates. you can imagine the word as an x around which are arrayed all its predicates. shift that from the word to the concept and there you have it.
if you think the past is stable, you haven't thought too hard about the past. seriously. i don't mean to sound snippy about this because i'm not--it's just the case. say for example that a central component of your experience is memory--that's what enables you to differentiate one thing from another for example. the memory that's involved with any particular act of differentiation is not all your memory. the idea of memory as a whole, that it is a kind of object, is curious and probably follows from the name again, like the notions of time. same thing with "the past"---things move around continually, the past is continually revised in the image of the present, both at the micro and macro levels. that this revision process is bounded seems a condition of possibility for that revision process being coherent. it doesn't mean that there is no revision.
and histories change alot. trust me on this one, if you don't know this from your own experience.
3. built into the description above is something like the logic of alchemy.
i have to go, but i'll say that one of the most interesting approaches to time, its nature and limits, is alfred north whiehead's lectures on the concept of nature.
they're available online--i'll see if i can find them a bit later and will post a link.
but these are quite difficult lectures--i think they're well worth the trouble of ploughing into, but they're serious stuff.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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