Four Thoughts About Time
Time is a tricky thing. It seems obvious even to a child that time exists and flows in one direction. Yet the smallest probe of contemplative or scientific inquiry unravels the whole structure, revealing that we don’t understand much at all.
Cause and Effect
- If I’m taking a plane ride next week and that causes me to get a COVID test today, was the cause in the future and the effect in the past? We’d probably say the cause of both events was the earlier decision to take a plane ride. But what caused that impulse? A long chain of causal events extending back to the big bang? Can we know the impulse was dependent only on past events, or could it be influenced by future events too? Could the whole thing be an interconnected causal spaghetti of phenomena that aren’t linear in time?
Serializing The Experience of a 4D Matrix
- In relativity theory, past, present and future already exist in a four-dimensional space-time matrix. At the smallest scale, space-time becomes quantized like sand on a beach. If we have a giant 4D matrix of all possible space-time moments existing simultaneously, one way for the universe to experience itself is to traverse this matrix in a serialized fashion through one or more consciousnesses. Is that what this is?
Time Symmetry and Asymmetry
- Most basic laws of physics work the same in both directions. Physical processes can run backward without violating any laws. They are symmetric with respect to time. Yet psychologically we draw a radical distinction between past and future. The past is known and unalterable. The future is unknown and seemingly influenceable. The process of a fruit rotting or a gas expanding to fill a chamber is asymmetric. The way we account for irreversible entropic decay is to connect it to the expansion of the entire universe. Nothing exists independently of anything else.
Now Is All There Is
- Time is experienced moment to moment and actual experience happens only in the present. The past was experienced as a present moment, in the past. The future will be experienced as a present moment, too. Past is remembered as past in the present moment. Future is contemplated as future in the present moment. So each moment carries all of time, without exception. Can anything other than this moment be real? Is time just a mental construct, a pointer if you will, to refer to some aspect of the present moment that exists only in the minds of those experiencing it?
I don’t have answers or practical advice to end with. It’s fun to stir the intellectual stew now and then.