The Unreality of Time
 

My response to a critic of my line of thought here

When it appeared in 1984, I thought that the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine’s then-recent Order out of Chaos_[1] would permanently change the way philosophers and scientists thought about temporality. His work seemed to confirm what Whitehead, Popper, and others had written about a world whose future is open, indeterminate, and unknowable,  within which novelties emerges and change is real.  I felt that the old determinist and reductionist ideas had been fatally damaged, and that ahistorical universalizing philosophical descriptions of humankind would be seen to be erroneous.

Obviously I was being over-optimistic and projecting my own desires, just as I earlier had been about the potential influence of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. By and large, philosophy and most of the human sciences seem to have made the minimum adjustments necessary for them to be able to continue their work undisturbed. Determinist, reductionist, universalistic thinking, usually in slightly fudged forms, seems as influential as it ever was, and seemingly, very few people seem to see Prigogine’s work as an important turning point.

Within the physical sciences, Prigogine’s most important claim was about the irreversibility of time. In relativity physics time is dealt with the fourth dimension of space, and our perception that time flows is treated as an illusion  of perspective. To physicists, the so-called passage of time is just our process of becoming aware of something, not a real process of change whereby something new and previously non-existent can come into being_.[2]  

Four books and a special issue of the Scientific American published since the appearance of Prigogine’s book all affirm the concept that time is unreal -- and significantly, only one of the five  even mention Prigogine’s name.  In the Scientific American, Paul Davies says no more than this: “Some researchers, notably Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine, now at the University of Texas, have suggested that the subtle physics of irreversible processes makes the flow of time an objective aspect of the world. But I and others argue that it is some sort of illusion”_[3]

Victor J. Stenger gives us one reason why Prigogine is not mentioned._[4] Prigogine (and his allies Coveney and Highfield) believed that they had been able to find irreversibility at the level of quantum physics. According to Stenger (not to be confused with Prigogine’s co-author Stengers), Prigogine’s claim to have done so failed. Quantum physics, like relativity, is timeless.

I am not able to critique Stengers and the others when they talk about physics, and will have to concede that Prigogine’s claim about quantum physics has been refuted. When I first read Prigogine, however, I was not thinking about quantum physics. I was thinking about the macro world, where Prigogine pointed out that many physical systems which were once thought to be reversible and deterministically predictable are in fact irreversible, and not predictable even in principle. Once you understand these systems, you know that you cannot be quite sure what they are going to do next. The future cannot be known and is really "future". Our uncertainty is not merely the result of the contingency of our ignorance.

There are some fairly simple, but very important physical systems among those which are formally unpredictable -- for example, boiling water, the weather, and the long-term behavior of the solar system. The last case is especially startling, since the physics of planetary motion was the foundational discovery of modern science. (Of course, the insolubility of the three-body problem has been known for a century; Prigogine was just the one who started talking publicly about the 800-pound gorilla).

Having conceded Stenger’s point about quantum physics, I back up to Eddington’s position on the “arrow of time”. Reversibility is a function of increasing entropy and holds for those areas of reality which are ruled by entropy. These areas include almost everything we know. In a timeless, reversible world there would be no geology, no evolutionary biology (or any other biology), no human history, and no psychology. And this is not only because landforms, species, organisms, societies, and individuals are all subject to entropy and could not live in a reversible world. It is also because there could be no scientists in a reversible world. There might be physical data, but there could be no physics,  because physicists can only survive physically in an irreversible world of increasing entropy, and experiments can be conducted and records can be kept only in such a world. This is what I understood to be Prigogine’s main point when I first read his book, and I do not think that it has been damaged by the physicists’ criticisms.

When I allowed that entropy and time apparently are not present at the most fundamental quantum and relativity levels of physics, that represented a degree of concession on my part (though as a non-physicist, I never really had an opinion on the question). However, I am not certain that physicists and positivist philosophers have made the concession of admitting that time is, in fact, a reality everywhere that the laws of thermodynamics hold. For them the question really seems to be “How deep in physics does entropy go?”, and if it doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, then to physicists, time is not real.

In Musser’s words  “Thus the second law is not so much a fundamental truth as a historical happenstance, perhaps related to events early in the big bang.” [5]  (As a non-physicist I am puzzled as to how happenstance can be so powerful in a timeless world.). Parr concedes that “Almost everything of significance that happens in the universe is irreversible, and the reason for this time-asymmetry cannot be found in the fundamental laws of physics” -- that is, almost everything significant happens in time. Nevertheless, he goes on to say, seemingly aware of the hopelessness of his wish, that “Whenever possible we should visualize processes as a static four-dimensional model in space-time rather than as a moving three-dimensional picture.”_[6]  Davies accepts the reality of entropy and irreversibility (which requires unpredictability of the future) for some areas of experience, but also says that “The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and present are fixed”._[7]  According to him, our perception of the flow of time is a subjective error: “The flow of time is subjective, not objective”_[8]. Several of these authors even speculate about the atavistic neurological or brain mechanisms which cause people wrongly to believe that time is real.

This all strikes me as terribly wrong-headed. Within the post-Big Bang, irreversible, entropic world where all live, time is real -- in fact, we could not live in a timeless  world. Our common-sense feeling of the passage of time gives us a pretty good way of understanding our experienced reality and our metabolic reality, and it can hardly be called an illusion. It just isn’t usable by someone studying quantum mechanics or quantum theory.

Beyond that, the belief in irreversibility is not just a trait of thoughtless non-physicists. Physicists themselves intuitively believe in the reality of time, and they really have to do so, because they need to believe that their apparatus and the mechanisms they use to record their observations (e.g., photographic film) exist in real, irreversible, time with a before and an after. Observations about the timeless, fundamental, pre-entropic world are, and can be, made only in the world of entropy, and only by creatures whose metabolisms require entropy. The problem is that physics as a whole requires Time in one area -- the observer, the apparatus, and the act of observation -- while requiring Timelessness in the other area -- the objects being observed. (In this respect, all the agonizing about the unreality or reality of time might be regarded as an internal struggle within the split minds of physicists, except that the problem is seldom stated without some sort of intimation that it's only the naïve, simple-minded laymen are incapable of understanding the  sophisticated concepts of physics. Physicists are not known for humility or tact.)

It seems to me that this problem could initially be handled by making a conceptual distinction between T1 and T2. T1  would be the fundamental time of physics; T2 would be the less-fundamental time of the world of entropy. It then can simply be explained that while T2 is real within its sphere, the chief characteristic of T1 is that it is not real -- or perhaps it should just be said that T1 is eternity.  (Later on T3 and T4 could be added, the first being time as experienced by an individual -- which Davies misleadingly identifies with T2 -- and the second being culturally-coded time: time publicly and authoritatively interpreted as cyclic repetition, progress, degeneration from an ideal, the approach to apocalypse, etc., etc. Culturally-coded time affects personally-experience time, but is distinguishable from it, since members of a culture  appropriate the public cultural codes in widely varying ways.)

This four-part distinction might be regarded as just a fudge, since there are major  problems that it doesn’t solve, but I think that it at least states the problem of “Time" (T1,2,3,4) clearly enough that the relationships between them can begin to be discussed. In particular, it does not say that the time of entropy is “unreal” or “subjective”, while still recognizing that entropic time does not exist in fundamental physics. Furthermore, once they have been distinguished, the relationship between experienced time and entropic time can be discussed, as can the relationships between experienced time and culturally-coded time. (The idea that our subjective time sense is aspectual or relational, so that “now” means “from the point of view of the speaker”, might be a valid one. But the further, anti-humanist assertion that this definition means that “time is psychological and unreal” is not valid. Even relationally and aspectually, the word “now” is only usable within real, entropic time).

What is the relationship between T1 (the physicist’s timelessness) and T2 (the time of the actual, entropic world we live in)? It would seem that in one sense T1 is ultimate and fundamental, but that in most other senses it is distant, foreign, and almost irrelevant. When trying to understand a phenomenon in the macro world, for example geology, how often would it be helpful for you to remind yourself that physical reality is fundamentally timeless? My guess is, as seldom as never.  Geology -- and a fortiori biology, psychology, human history, and the social sciences – is an essentially historical science. Most of questions necessary to ask when studying quantum theory or relativity are useless for someone studying geology.

A comparison with computer code might be made. When debugging or tweaking a computer, you usually go a step or two deeper into the program – to the source code, application code, the OS code and perhaps deeper still._[9] But even though it’s the most basic and most fundamental level, when you’re trying to understand what’s going on with your computer you almost never end up going all the way down to the deepest bit-level binary plusses and minuses. The information you can get at that level is basically  useless if you’re trying to understand the higher levels. So while it’s true that everything true that can be said about the higher level coding must necessarily also be true at the bit-level, and that in that sense the bit-level is fundamental, it is not really possible at all to understand the higher levels on the basis of information gathered at the bit-level alone.

In the language of pure physics, entities which exist in time are ultimately not even entities at all.  When atoms are joined into a complex organic chemical, no atom and no subatomic particle is changed in any way. They are all just rearranged in relation to one another. If the molecule is then  disassembled back into the elements of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on, from the point of view of physics there is no change then either. From the molecular point of view, there has been an enormous change (from being to non-being and back).  But a molecule is not a fundamental entity recognized by physics, and its appearance and disappearance does not even register as an event on the physicist’s register. Matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed, but molecules can be. There is no time in physics, and for this reason time-bound entities (such as ourselves) do not exist for physics. The atoms making up our bodies live in a timeless world, but we do not. And for this reason, physics is of limited usefulness when we try to understand our own lives. (I don't say completely useless: we are physical beings and should never forget that we have mass and expend energy).

Philosophies of order have always valorized the permanent, the ancient, the eternal, and the unchanging (“the real”) over the transient, the emergent, the new, and the mortal, and often they have taken a fallacious metaphysical comfort from their fiat definitions. Davies reveals some of the motivation for the physicists' aversion to temporality when he writes this:  “And what if science were able to explain away the flow of time? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve for the past…. The sense of urgency that attaches to so much human activity would evaporate._[10] His statement is meaningful only for someone for whom the truths of physics are the  absolute metaphysical reality and the only source of value. But a consequence of this statement is that, at the end of human and biological time (i.e. T3,T4^, and most of T2), and after the whole story of life on earth and the whole history of evolution from the origins of life until the final extinction, we would know (if we were there) that matter-energy is exactly what it had been to begin with, and that during that whole "time", nothing had even happened at all: for the world we had known was a transient, and was extinguished when equilibrium was reached.

If time is unreal, then we, too, are unreal, and the reality of the world of physics is ultimately a transcendent reality, disconnected even from such essentially human things as metabolism. (This does not mean that human beings are exempt from the laws of physics, but that nothing specifically human, nothing living, can be described using the language of physics). Human concerns appear only when you start asking questions which are not a physicist's questions and when you accept the reality of entities which are not describable in the language of physics. Some physicists actually do identify with the Vedantist union / extinction of selfhood in the One, but they might just as well identify heat-death with the end-time Ragnorak of Norse mythology.

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APPENDICES

I. Two odd conjectures by physicists

A.

At times Davies ascribes an extraordinary power to the mind -- the same mind that wrongly forces people to believe that time is real. Speaking of the collapse of the wave-function, a very fundamental class of events in quantum theory (and the only quantum event that we can observe), he writes:

“There is no agreement among physicists how this transition from many potential realities into a single actuality takes place. Many physicists have argued that it has something to do with the consciousness of the observer, on the basis that the act of observation causes nature to make up its mind.” _[11]

In the smallest space you can imagine, the event in question occurs an almost infinite number of times during the smallest time-lapse that you can imagine. Where do the scientists come from  whose observations trigger this near-infinity of essential events, without which the physical world as we know it would cease to exist?

In fact this collapse doesn’t take place when someone knows that it has collapsed. It collapses whenever the event in the timeless subatomic world has an effect in the macro, entropic world. In the Schroedinger’s cat experiment, the decision is made not when someone sees the dead cat, or when the vial of poison is broken, or when the hammer begins its fall, but as soon as the quantum event triggers any irreversible event whatsoever in the world of entropy. No consciousness is required.

B.

When conjecturing about the possibility of reversibility, decreasing entropy,  backward movement in time, and time travel at a scale larger than an electron, philosophers tend to talk about easily-imaginable effects comparable to running a film backward (one example being ripples converging to the middle of a pond and finally disappearing). Another simple example often mentioned is for all of the gas molecules simultaneously to leak out of a room, leaving a vacuum. The physicist’s point is that these events are not impossible, but merely very unlikely. (That is, very, very, very…. very unlikely -- but not  impossible or infinitely unlikely.)

When living beings are involved, however, reversibility would require a reversal of metabolism. A man would not only have to walk backwards out of the room. He would also have to exhale more oxygen than he inhaled, collect water from the air and absorb it into his sweat glands, take waste in at one end and expel perfect, unchewed carrots at the other, and do all of this on negative energy – putting more energy into the carrot he produces than was present in the fecal matter he produced it from. To me, the phrase “very unlikely” is not sufficiently strong to describe the possibility that this might happen.  
 

II. Why do physicists and philosophers think that way?

It has always bothered me when physicists and philosophers assert that time is an illusion, the belief in which is to be explained by psychologists. So now I’ll return the favor and psychologize them. I think that the reasons I discuss here explain why five of the six advocates of timelessness  I discussed did not mention Prigogine at all.  If Prigogine had merely made a conjecture about quantum physics, all of them would have mentioned the conjecture's refutation. But the other points Prigogine made were more telling, and harder to refute, so they were ignored.

The argument about timelessness foregrounds several problematic areas in the physico-philosophical psyche. Many physicists do feel real distress about the contradiction between their own personal intuitions about time and what they know about the timelessness of physics. At the same time, the belief in the unreality of time gives philosophers and physicists a way of distinguishing themselves sharply from the vulgar mob, and distinctors of this  this type are very important motivators during the early stages of specialized professional training._12]

This leads to a second area of tension: that between physicists’ (and positivist philosophers’) need for physics to be the fundamental reality of realities, versus  the feeling that many of them have (just as we civilians do) that the physicists’ idea of time is foreign to the actual world we live in. My proposed distinction between T1 and  T2 would allow them to solve the first problem (the disjunction between their own common sense and their science), but at the cost of not only reducing the scope of validity of their science, but also of taking away some of their distinction from naïve non-physicists. (Though even some physicists are bothered by the anti-humanist consequences of making physics the ultimate reality).

Poidevin’s book begins with McTaggart’s hundred-year-old argument that time is unreal, and his method of argumentation and choice of theme both remind me of contemporary analytic philosophy – the methodical, meticulous advocacy of a counterintuitive  proposition. Russell, of course, began his life as an absolute idealist of the McTaggart type, and Russell’s technical philosophy and its successor philosophies have always had McTaggart’s aggressive hostility to context and common sense._[13]

Modern science arose in a Puritan or Jansenist environment which held ordinary impure mortals in great disdain, and a considerable degree of contempt for fallen humanity peeks through in many positivist writings. (The austerity, purism, and stern reformism of Russell, early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists is very striking.) Thus, the internal conflict a physicist or positivist feels between his own intuitive time-sense and his professional commitment to timelessness might be seen by him as a  temptation to sin which threatens his redemption and which might drag him down into the fleshpots and swamps of common humanity.

Some citations I’ve collected relevant to historicity

Key citations from Ilya Prigogine

Time in Chinese Taoist philosophy (this paper needs revision!)

1990 piece from the New Scientist by Coveney

Another piece by Victor Stenger

Victor Stenger’s summary statement on timelessness

The impossibility of time travel

NOTES

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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