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The Reality of
Time, III
The Reality of Time, II
The Reality of Time, II
For a long time now, ever since I
first read Prigogine, I’ve been dabbling in the question of the nature of
time. (See The Reality of Time, I and II, above). Roughly speaking, the
problem is that in the equations of modern quantum-relativity physics
there is no time. You have changing states of being, but no state is
intrinsically “later” or “earlier” than any other. Time is just the fourth
dimension of space, and in theory it is possible to return to any earlier
period of spatialized “time”, in the same way that it is possible, on a
plain, to move from point a to point b and back.
[i]
The problem is that this goes
against our intuitions and experience. To us, the past is fixed and
unchanging, whether or not it is knowable, whereas the future is
unknowable because it doesn’t exist yet. To many physicists at least, our
intuitions are wrong, a product of our limited perspective of or our
inborn mental biases, and time is an illusion. The “future” already
exists, and “time” consists of its gradual unveiling to us.
I don’t understand the physics of
time / timelessness and rely on secondary sources to explain the science.
At this point I am willing to accept that, in physics itself, there is no
time. and that everything that ever will be already exists, though it has
not been revealed to us yet.[ii]
My own contribution will be an attempt to figure out what the significance
of physical timelessness is to those of us who are not physicists. Most of
the philosophers and scientists I’ve been reading who advocate the
timeless view do speculate about this question, but I find most of their
speculations to be problematic.
It is often said that our sense of
the flow of time and of the “now” is a mental projection, or artifact of
the organization of our brains. Zeh (p. 11-12) compares it to color
perception (a “secondary quality” in early modern philosophy) and Parr (p.
140) simply calls it an illusion:
Chapter Three maintained that our belief
in a “now”, which continually moves, and which divides a region of
certainty which we call “the past” from one whose contents are still
uncertain which we call “the future”, is an illusion, arising only
because we have brains which can store the past and not the future.
In possessing this faculty we are certainly untypical and may
possibly be unique; here may be no structures anywhere in the
universe apart from the brains of living beings on earth (and some
of man’s own inventions, such as books, video cameras, and
computers) where accurate records exist of past events; and in the
absence of creatures with memories there is no such thing as “now”.
Parr, p. 140. |
Consciousness (not a physical
concept at all) plays an extraordinary role in theoretical physics. To
begin with, consciousness is the locus of the subjectivity which leads us
to the erroneous belief in the flow of time and the now. Second, conscious
observation is given a seemingly-magical power to cause one of the most
fundamental events of quantum physics, the collapse of the wave-function:
many say that this collapse is “caused” by observation, or by the mind.
Finally, it is trivially true that the theories of physics are produced by
minds, and not by any entity describable by physics. We seem to be in a
dualistic world, where an unworldly mind produces an exhaustive
description of the fundamental laws and facts of a world within which the
mind itself has no place.
Only a few physicists express an
explicit belief in a non-naturalistic transcendental subject, but many
others seem to have something of that kind lurking in the background of
their thinking. Many of the great physicists were influenced during their
upbringing by high-minded idealism, especially of the German type, often
verging on theism, and few seem to take a naturalistic or profane view of
life or of the mind (except when the errors of thinking are to be
explained). The above triple view of the mind might be unified by saying
that both the perception of time and of the collapse of the wave-function
are subjective and illusory (since the collapse of the wave-function just
marks the branching of two worlds), whereas the mind which constructs the
true theories is the transcendental, true mind. In this formulation, the
actual minds we have are (as in the neo-Platonic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and
Vedanta systems) trapped in the entropic, thermodynamic world of time,
matter, flux and sin from which the true mind has been released. In fact,
the whole history of science has consisted, among other things, of a
reiterated attempt to rid the mind of its specifically-human illusions one
by one in order to produce a purified being, often at the cost of taking a
very harsh view of lesser, unreconstructed humans.
The idealistic physicists’
attitude toward the mind is thus a strange one. The actual time-bound
minds that we know of are a major source of error, though they do have the
power to collapse wave-functions -- but at the same time there is another,
better mind (for which there is no evidence) which they hold in reverence.
Someone with a more naturalistic
view might point out that there is no evidence of any mind at all in the
pure, timeless world described by physics – physics has nothing to say
about physicists. All of the minds that we know anything about, including
the physicists’ minds, are found within the world of entropy
(thrownness?). Furthermore, the temporal, perspectival limitation of the
human mind is hardly a matter of the details of our human brain structure
per se. Any creature with a metabolism will have a temporal perspective,
and the same is true for the measuring devices, pencils and pens, and
“books, video cameras, and computers” which make scientific observation
possible. (The collapse of the wave-function is not “caused by the mind”;
it’s caused by the experimental devices and probes, and happens whether or
not a “mind” bothers to read the measurements). In truth no observations
of reality are known to be possible at all except from within the fallen
world of entropy: all possible observations are local and path-dependent,
each situated in its own “proper time” -- which is not universal time (Zeh
6-7, 12).
The thermodynamic world of entropy
within which there cab be mind is not fundamental, because entropy is not
fundamental (lawlike), but rather fact-like and contingent. In
Boltzman’s words, entropy is
| a grand fluctuation in an eternal universe.
Zeh, p. 81. |
When Zeh says
| Why the beautiful spacetime symmetry of
Maxwell’s and Einstein’s theories is of limited validity represents
the greatest mystery of present-day theoretical physics.
Zeh, p. 200. |
he seems to be talking about black
holes. However, it also seems to be a limit to the validity of fundamental
physics that the reality it describes is essentially inhuman and mindless.
Einstein seemed aware of a problem:
| There is something essential about the Now
which is just outside the realm of science.
Zeh, p. 198; see also Prigogine, p. 293. |
It would seem more reasonable to
describe physical reality, rather than as the fundamental reality, as the
inventory of components required in order to produce the higher, emergent
worlds within which there can exist mind, observations, science, time, and
the like. In short, an ontology within which humans are not an
embarrassing and defective loose end.
'I' is not the name of a person, nor
‘here’ of a place, and ‘this’ is not a name. But they are connected
with names. Names are explained by means of them. It’s also true
that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 123, #410. |
These words are indexicals:
“here”, “there”, “now”, “then”, “this” and “that” -- and like “I”, and
“you” – are defined from the point of view of the speaker, and have
meaning only within a dialogue. Not only anyone who can make observations,
but anyone who can join the scientific dialogue in order to report them,
belongs to the perspectival, time-bound, indexical world of entropy – each
with its “proper time”, each local and path-dependent.
The injunction that we should try
to put ourselves in the formally impossible place of a timeless
consciousness sounds like an attempt to resurrect, in a rather
hypothetical, fictionalist form, the all-knowing, perspectiveless,
timeless Newtonian God which has been proven impossible by relativity and
quantum theory. It would be far better to accept the multi-perspectival
view of Hua-yen Buddhism (Cook, Odin), wherein each unit of consciousness
reflects its own partial view of the whole universe, each of them slightly
different than the others.
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Appendix: Metaphysical Comfort
Here are three examples of
physicists finding taking a highminded metaphysical comfort in
timelessness. To me, these are examples of the kinds of escapist
other-worldliness that Nietzsche described, and represent a kind of
wish-fulfillment which I think is intimately connected with their
horror of the common human condition. Without triggering Godwin's Law, it
should also tactfully be noted that what is said below would justify
equanimity in the face of any human disaster whatsoever.
In some sense they all seem to
believe that there is something holy about the ontologically fundamental
world of physics, and something impure about the fact-like world of
entropy, but almost all of the forms of value that we know of are found
only --
albeit always in imperfect form -- in the entropic world. Even the
great work of the discovery of the timelessness of physics was achieved by
entropic creatures with metabolisms.
As far as I know, the three
passages below all make enormous category mistakes. Regardless of what is
subatomically true or not true of multiple worlds or timelessness, this
only applies to the fundamental entities spoken of and studied by physics.
Physics does not speak of us living creatures. For us time must be real,
and we have one single life to live, which is over with when it's over
with. The physicist's comfort in timelessness comes at the cost of
negating the ultimate value of every entity, for example a human entity,
which can only exist indexically and thermodynamically in its own
path-dependent, local, “proper time”.
| And what if science were able to explain
away the flow of time ? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the
future or grieve about the past. Worries about death might become as
irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might
cease to be part of the human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of
urgency which attaches to so much of human activity would
evaporate….[T]he past, present and future would literally be things
of the past.
Davies, p. 47 |
| Our present viewpoint, with its insistence
that wrong conceptions of time can invalidate much of our thinking,
renders such stories even less plausible. The idea of a God, so
appalled at the plight of the Israelites that he takes the extreme
action of suspending the laws of Nature to avoid a catastrophe that
He had not foreseen, presupposes that God suffers from the same
blinkered view of history as we ourselves, a view imposed upon us by
our physical brains, constrained by the principles of
Thermodynamics.
Parr, pp. 145-6 |
| Can we believe in many worlds? The
evidence for them is strong. The history of science shows that
physicists have tended to be wrong when they have not believed
counterintuitive results of good theories…..Soon after I started
writing this book, Princess Diana was killed, and Britain – like
much of the world – was gripped by a most extraordinary mood.
Watching the funeral service live, I did wonder how seriously one
can take a theory which suggests that she survived the crash in
other worlds. Death appears so final.
Barbour, pp. 323-4 |
Sources:
Time is Unreal:
Barbour, Julian, The End of
Time, Oxford, 2000.
Davies, Paul,
“That Mysterious Flow”, Scientific
American, Vol. 287, #3, September, 2002.
Paul
Davies, in the Scientific American,
op. cit., p. 43.
Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the
Eternal Return, Bollingen, 1954.
Le Poidevin, Robin and MacBeath,
Murray, eds., The Philosophy of Time, Oxford, 1993.
Parr, Hector, Time, Science,
and Philosophy, Lutterworth, 1997.
Price, Huw, Time’s Arrow and
Archimedes’ Point, Oxford, 1996.
Zeh, H.D. The Physical Basis of
the Direction of Time, 4th ed., Springer, 2001.
Victor Stenger’s summary statement on timelessness
A longer piece by Victor Stenger (from his “Timeless Reality”, Prometheus
Books, 2000)
Time is Real:
Cook, Francis, Hua-yen
Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra , Penn State, 1977.
Coveny, Peter and Highfield,
Roger, The Arrow of Time, Fawcett. 1990.
Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’
Error, Avon, 1994.
Gould, Steven Jay, Time’s
Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Harvard, 1987.
Griffin, David Ray, ed.,
Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, SUNY, 1989.
Odin, Steve, Process
Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism, SUNY, 1982.
Prigogine, Ilya (with Isabelle
Stengers), Order Out of Chaos, Bantam, 1984.
Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield,
Jane The Discovery of Time, Harper and Row, 1965.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan,
1958.
[i]
Thanks to Dennis Des Chene of
Tlonuqbar for recommending Zeh to me, as well as for the links on
kaon transformation in the next footnote.
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