Roberto Mangabeira Unger puts this more elegantly.7 Either time is real or it is not. If time is not real, then laws are timeless — but then the choice of laws is inexplicable, for reasons we have already discussed. If, on the other hand, time is truly real, then nothing, not even the laws, can last forever. If the laws of nature act forever, we are in the Newtonian paradigm, and you could use them to reduce any property of the world at a later time to a property at an earlier time. Or, equivalently, you could replace any physical causation with logical implication. So time being real means
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