In the whole range of human curiosity and philosophical speculation one of the most interesting topics to me is that of time, the kind you observe on a clock and which keeps passing. My grandfather, John Napier Plato, Sr., told me that he first started thinking about it when he was about the age of ten and his parents had decided to take the family on what seemed to be an endless trek out West, to Seattle, down through California, the Grand Canyon and elsewhere. The family did the same thing the next year by different routes so they could see other sights. The parents had decided that my grandfather and his older sister, my great aunt Natalia, should see the West, of which they had seen nothing previously and about which they knew very little --- Yellowstone Park, the Rockies, Mount Rushmore and so on. They saw many wonderful things but they also had those endless miles to travel, so they needed things to fill up the time in addition to the usual 'car' games such as Twenty Questions and Three Thirds of a Ghost. In that pursuit my grandfather remembers looking out the car window and observing a phenomenon which seemed stranger and stranger the more he thought about it. He would see, for example, a billboard touting the wonders of some commercial product or perhaps one of those wonderful Burma Shave poems that I heard so much about. As the car moved closer and closer to the sign it would fill more and more of the field of vision.
"And then", he said, "the sign would be behind me! What had happened? Where was the sign? Naturally, I knew that it had gone 'behind' me as the car passed it", he explained "so I'm not referring to the physical location of the sign but, rather, the experience of seeing it --- the phenomenon, as a philosopher might say. I could not shake the sense of weirdness this produced. I still can't". And after he told me about those experiences I puzzled over them myself, and found that I had similar reactions to time. When the present moves into the past, where does it go? This seems strange and inexplicable to me but it is very difficult to explain why it does to anyone who doesn't feel it himself. You either feel it or you don't.
Then in about the year 2001 I saw something in Time Magazine about a British physicist named Julian Barbour who had written a book titled The End of Time in which he argued that time really does not exist! It's just a mental construct or some such. I was only thirteen at the time but the subject really intrigued me, so I read the book but could not follow the argument, which may have been due to my age and shortage of scientific education. So I e-mailed the author, who resided in England, and he was nice enough to respond but I still couldn't get there from here. I concluded that my problem was that he did not seem to explain what he meant by the word time. He did not seem to define it or if he did I missed it. You cannot discuss the existence of something intelligently if you have one concept of what you are talking about and someone else has a different concept --- if in discussing the word giraffe, for example, one of you is picturing something like a horse with a long neck and the other chocolate pudding. In any case, once more I was hooked on the subject of time and for that I thank Dr. Barbour. If I don't quite understand what he was saying it is due to my own lack of scientific sophistication and not any fault of his. What I decided to do was to try to analyze time philosophically, where I am on firmer ground, rather than scientically where I am found wanting. I do not believe that time is definable. Any definition of anything explains something you don't know in terms of something you do know. If you don't know what a giraffe is you can picture a horse with a long neck. But there is nothing at all similar to time. So if we are to get anywhere we have to try to describe it. How can you describe the inexplicable? Perhaps you can't, but we can try, so here goes.
We must try to deal with elements of time, categories, which may be no more than mental constructs without corollaries in noumenal reality, i.e. the actual, material universe. In other words we will juggle mental concepts, phenomena, without knowing the extent to which they corollate with what is really 'out there', or noumena. With that prelude, time can be thought about in terms of the following: Sequence, Ratio, Duration Causation, Simultaneity, Synchronicity, Unidirectional progression, Motion, Past, Present, and Future. To most of us the word time probably means simply duration, the third in the foregoing list. We say that we spend a lot of time in doctors' waiting rooms, or in lines at a bank, reading a book, waiting for someone to return a call, And duration is a good place to start, with the words time and duration meaning about the same thing because it would be awkward to say "duration flies".
At what rate does time flow? True, we can argue that it doesn't 'flow' at all. Maybe it moves in discreet segments as a motion picture film does, one frame after another, giving the appearance of flow. Or maybe we should think of the future flowing toward us rather than our going into the future. Either way, we still meet the question of rate. Your car can move forward at sixty miles an hour. That's its rate. Suppose that I boil a three-minute egg while you drive three miles simultaneously, so we get into ratio, simultaneity and synchronicity. But we have not and cannot answer the question "at what rate does time itself move forward"? A rate is a relationship between one thing and another, and there is no 'other' to relate to. Even if we posit some sort of super-time against which we measure our time, all we have done is to push the problem one step back. In other words, we then face the question of the rate of our hypothetical super-time. We haven't gotten anywhere. Motion raises the same questions in a different format. Suppose that with my legendary golf swing I send the ball flying toward the green. As it flies, does it move in an even, undifferentiated flow or in a sequence of discreet still positions? No matter how you try to answer that question, the answer raises more questions. Yet something happens, doesn't it? The ball does move at a certain speed, right?
We can get wound up in words and start letting words and their definition control thought. But that's not all bad. Is it really time which flows (or stands still while something else "flows")? Perhaps it is "now" --- "the present" --- which is flowing through the medium we call time. Or perhaps even that is only an appearance. The word "time" may simply describe the entity, of past, present and future. Perhaps nothing actually "flows". That is, perhaps, nothing "goes" anywhere. Things --- reality --- just is. Go back to the idea of a motion picture. Suppose that you have a round cannister and within it is the film Patton starring George C. Scott and recounting the adventurous derring-do of the colourful world war two general. It begins as the War does and ends shortly after the War ends. But we are holding the whole adventure in one hand. Nothing moves until we project it on a screen in sequence and then, frame by frame, events seem to transpire. But not really. When the projector stops, so does the action, replaced by absolute inaction. Each frame can be seen as an appearance in a chain of the eternal nows and the links appear to come and go from our consciousness. Accoring to this scenario time doesn't flow. In fact nothing "moves". Movement is an illusion; the way we perceive. Think of the movie Patton remaining forever stationery. Our perception of ever-changing reality has created the illusion of continual change. "Now" simply describes a place in the collidascope of perception. The bank of a river isn't going anywhere. It is the water in the river which appears to be going somewhere past the bank. Driving from St. Louis to New York you go through Indianapolis, then Columbus, around Philadelphia and into New York. You have left behind you St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus and Philadelphia but those cities have not ceased to exist. They are still there. It's your attention, or perception, which has become elsewhere. Is this the correct way of looking at matters? Frankly, I doubt that there is any correct way, because we are dealing with concepts which have no counterpart anywhere else and, hence, we can't define them. A giraffe is like a horse, we say, but what if there isn't any horse with which to compare it? I discuss all this simply to make us careful about thinking we can wrap reality in a package of words, tie a bow around it and call the result "reality". Perhaps when we think we are saying something we really aren't saying anything.
What is the present? "Well, it's 'right now'" one might say. All right, but "right now" is gone as soon as it arrives. There is no discreet segment of time which if it could be isolated like an atom would be observed as something which stands still so that we can observe it at our leisure. It won't cooperate that way. It will not "stand still". In geometry a point is a location without dimension. So, plainly, is the present. (However, see the Addendum at the end). And positing frames like the frames of a motion picture will not help us because we then have to determine what is between the frames. If it is nothingness then the frames are all piled one on top of another, so to speak, and we have now denied the reality of duration entirely. That, however, does invite the possibility that time, in the sense of duration, in fact does not exist, as Julian Barbour maintains, and even that sequential progression is in some way illusory. That, in turn, would lead us to ask if the whole thing is being manipulated by some Cosmic Mastermind and therefore God Himself.
A geometric point can be located on a piece of paper. The piece of paper may be on a desk, the desk in a room and so on and so forth until we get to the planet Earth, the Solar System the Galaxy, the Universe itself. But how do we locate the Universe itself? We can't. It isn't anywhere, it just is, and that applies to the present as well. That is the problem which I have when someone, even a learned scientist, tell us that the Universe is, say, fifteen billion years old. It implies that it could be much older or much younger, yet the Universe itself can only be so many years old within itself because by definition there isn't anything outside itself. I can say that I have lived 24 years and that is a certain 'stretch', or duration, relative to other things within the Universe such as the age of trees, or clouds, your car or the length of time you are put on 'hold' because of course your call is important to someone in India or Pakistan or wherever. But how do we know that the progression of time within the Universe is synchronized with whatever is outside the Universe? How could we ever know? There is nothing at all outside the Universe or, if there is, it really isn't outside of it and to refer to something which is outside the Universe and inside of it simultaneously is of course an oxymoron. Whatever kind of clock we may have to measure the passage of time, such as a clock per se or seasons or the speed of trains or radio waves, or anything else we may try to use for measurement turns out to depend on the relative place of the observer. And that is exactly what Albert Einstein told us. If you are travelling almost the speed of light in a rocket ship there is a time within the rocket ship. To someone on a platform in space you may be moving very slowly but you think you are moving normally. And here's the kicker. You are both right. This is not simply a point of view, a matter or perception. It is very real and experiments have proven it.
In C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia time moves differently in Narnia than it does on Earth, where a day in London may be a hundred years there, or three weeks. The two time tracks do not coincide evenly. Psalm 90 has the poet praying to God that ". . .a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night". This implies that there is another Universe, or maybe more than one, and may contradict the claim that nothing is outside the Universe. In other words perhaps we should revise that to say that everything within this Universe can be related to everything else within it but not to anything on the outside unless such a comparison has been prescribed by the God who created both, and for all anyone can know God can synchronize two Universes --- for some purposes, perhaps, but not always or in all respects. (The suggestion that there "is" another Universe is an example of the confusion of language which we encounter whenever we try to put into words some concept which is simply not compatible with the language which we have and with which we must work. "Is" is a word denoting simultaneity, which of course raises the question "simultaneous with what")?
So we are spinning around in a kind of relativity soup. The past is gone, we don't know where, the present doesn't exist and the future, aside from not being here now, is rushing at us at an indeterminate speed and when it reaches us will rush past us without stopping, that is, without spending any time at all. We can't even know that matter is absolutely "real" apart from perception because all we can know about it is relative location (there being no absolute location of the Universe), size, color, texture, things like that, but matter itself is mindless, and all those traits are relative to the observer. I cannot even be certain that the red and blue which I see are the same as the red and blue which someone else sees. So, passing over a lot of ideas, we can ask the real question "Is anything real in and of itself and without reference to anything else"? The answer is yes, ideas and thoughts can relate to realities which do not require measurement by anything else. That includes mathematical propositions. Two times eight is sixteen, whether there are any objects in existence or not, and whether there is any person to apprehend it or not. A circle is an enclosed curvalinear configuration plotted on a plane whereing every point thereon is equidistant from the center. That is true and will always be true without reference to anything else. It will be true even if there are no actual circles on which to operate or any mind to apprehend it. Forms do not require the consent of anyone or the assent to their existence by any conscious, sentient being..
Forms are more real than any attempt to represent or approxiamte them because in fact forms are not 'things', they are concepts, or truisms, without the need for anything else. Every attempt to locate a form --- a circle, a triangle, or whatnot -- somewhere in the Universe, or even to assign measurement to it, fails because representations of lines have to have some thickness and no distance can be perfectly plotted on a piece of paper. And, we can add, no piece of paper is perfect for the purpose. But the concept of "circle" is absolutely real and will remain so forever whether or not any mind remains to appreciate that fact. In other words, it is impossible to imagine any material thing existing on its own, but forms obviously do exist on their own. They are not invented. They are discovered. And so it is with potential. When the Big Bang went Boom the potential existed that I would have coffee with my breakfast this morning. (This is not to posit any form of mechanical determinism, which is another question entirely). And finally, the concepts of right and wrong are absolute. It is wrong for me to steal my neighbor's car even if there is no car and even if I do not have a neighbor whose car I could steal if I had a neighbor and he had a car. In other words, a moral proposition is valid even if there is no object or thing on which it can operate.
There is actually some question whether the Universe "exists" apart from any minds existing to perceive it. In fact the Universe appears to some questioners to be mental, not material, although that idea is so opposed to human intuition and instinct that it will probably never go anywhere in the court of public opinion. But another way of putting it is this. There is no need for matter, we only need the thoughts and perceptions which seem to originate partly with matter and partly with mind. And it appears that there must be some Central Mind to spawn other minds and mind matter. That would be God.
However, lest there be any misunderstand, any suspicion that I am a mystic or a crackpot (albeit two very different kinds of people) let me hasten to say that in any case we cannot ignore matter because we are stuck with it, for now. I do not intend to jump from a tall building this afternoon on the assumption that the building and the ground below are not "real". They certainly are real for every practical purpose, and we are constrained to operate in a practical Universe. But is it a noumenal Universe, existing on its own, or is it a mental Universe; and Whose Mind do we mean? These are all matters which organized religion should explore in addition to questions about whether this bishop or that guru or some other potentate or ayatollah thinks he knows what awaits us in Heaven or who is or is not going there, which is entirely up to God and about which it is not man's business to decide. This does not mean that we should dispense with hymns and inspirational or motivational messages but it is a good idea also to exercise, as Hercule Poirot might say, "the little gray cells". God gaves us those "little gray cells" as well as a capacity for music appreciation with the expectation, no-doubt, that we would put them both to good use..
And that leads into my final point. Science and religion seem to have been at war for several centuries. In the long pre-historic past, apparently, man explained anything he could not understand by attributing it to a Supreme Being, or God, by one name or another, and frequently more than one; for example the god or gods who cause volcanos or eclipses. As man became capable of explaining more and more phenomena in naturalistic (scientific) terms, God's work assignments constricted. In other words He was needed less and less for explanations. Churches grew up and, like all human institutions, attracted the seekers of fame and power as they became increasingly powerful themselves. Naturally, they resisted intrusions by those who claimed that they could explain something like an eclipse, or the roundness and orbit of the earth, in naturalistic terms. The contest thus set up was sometimes resolved by violence. Then science gradually got the upper hand in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, and the reverse process set in. That's where we are now, when the practitioners of pseudo-science claim that nothing the world around us should be attributed to God, who may not even exist. It really is not surprising that science (or pseudo-science) has now become as intolerant and superstitious as 'religion' once was. It is against the law to burn people to a stake, but "enlightened" people have adopted the vocabulary of pseudo-science and do the next best thing with ridicule and censorship so that, for example, no questioning of Darwin's theory of evolution is even allowed in the public arena, the schools and whatnot, however modestly, reasonably and fairly presented. In this atmosphere witches aren't burned but Christians are hounded and insulted out of public presence. Science has its own priesthood, no less intolerant than the church priesthood of former times. The problem is not with science or religion. It is with human nature, fallen man. Even when Creation by a Supreme Being seems almost irresistably clear the priests of pseudo-science and distorted science want to ban any form of Creationism, some of which are not related to any specific body of religious belief. There are powerful and persuasive arguments for the proposition that the Universe was created by design, but no one is even allowed to say the words in public schools. Why won't the enlightened ones take up those arguments and then refute them if they can? Is it because in reality they probably would not know a science lab from an ice cream social?
If the day ever comes when science and religion stop fighting each other we should see universal celebration. Instead of "scientific truth" or religious truth man should pursue truth --- period. Here is an illustration of what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, I once exchanged e-mails with a British physicist on this very subject, time. We just couldn't connect. I explained that I attributed that to my own shortage of scientific education. But there was something else. In trying to understand time, or anything else, I take into account hypothetical thoughts as to God's possible purposes. This, in turn, helps me to develope my ideas. But my correspondent would not do that. It wouldn't be "scientific". That does not mean that he doesn't believe in God or necessaritly that I do (though in fact I do). It does mean that he has eliminated from his work a variety of lines of thought which might correspond to the truth. Science may now be almost as far off the track as religion was once accused of being. How can we know if religion and science will not talk to each other? It may be possible, for example, to reconcile certain biblical claims, such as the relatively short age of the earth, with scientific claims of a much greater age if we consider different ways of expressing time. As odd as it sounds, science and religion may both be right. The objective of religion, science and philosophy should be truth and reality, and not which truth or reality is better than another.
ADDENDUM: The concept of simultaneity seems to remove reality from that of the present, or 'now'. Think about some friend who has gone to the Moon. What is she doing now? Do we mean her now or ours? And what do we mean by simultaneity? That word means now. If two people are playing tennis they don't think about simultaneous action. They both seem to be acting in the same time frame. Except for that, they couldn't be playing tennis at all. But if we say that various observers are scattered about the Universe at a hodge-podge of varying distances, to say that they are waving their hands simultaneously would appear to have no meaning whatsoever because their motions would be simultaneous for some, but not others, and minutes apart or hours or years apart. Is there any absolute now? For some observers very far away George Washington could, in their present time, now be marching on Trenton, New Jersey, December 25, 1776. But not in his. How close do two people or two objects, or one object and one person, have to be in order for it to be said that they can interact. I can play chess with someone in Australia by exchanging mailed letters but is that "interaction"? What if we are using e-mail? Is it interaction in one case but not the other?
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