17/  MUST MEMORY BE WHOLLY  ASYMMETRIC?

or

     CAN PEOPLE PRE-CALL? - OCCASIONALLY...

Summary:  To ascribe full time asymmetry to memory may not be entirely correct. For if one accepts the common experience of intutions as genuine, they are most simply interpreted as a form of anti-memory  or pre-call.

With a natural frequency of ca. 10^-8 relative to re-call, close observation also suggests that pre-call should have a highly repressed character. 

While the several initial or knee-jerk reactions against its possibility lack clear validity......

The Prime Assumption

As we’ve already seen, time commentators in physics now accept the total asymmetry of memory as a primary given, and without any questions of validity.  Still high expertise in physics need not imply similar competence in psychology or philosophy, a point of especial importance in this case.
 

For one thing certain past philosophers have never been quite so dogmatic as modern physicists, about memory’s full asymmetry. Their ranks go back at least as far as Augustine, concerned with heretical fortune-tellers in his Confessions of 398 AD:

“Whether some process similar (to memory) enables the future to be seen, I confess, my God, that I do not know....”.  ¹

While in 1917  Bertrand Russell suggested that asymmetric memory was ‘merely an accident’.  So that -

“our relations between Past andFuture would be symmetrical, were it not for some fortuitous quirk of mind...” ²

And in 1956 Sir Alfred (‘Freddy’) Ayer maintained:

“There is no a priori reason why people should not succeed in making true statements about the future in the same spontaneous way as they succeed, by what is called the exercise of memory, in making true statements about the past” ³

So does this common notion, of wholly asymmetric memory, owe more to unverified assumption than well established fact?.  For nobody hitherto has ever really considered or tested out whether its future analog – i.e. pre-call or anti-memory – might not in reality be feasible!

One may therefore regard the common position here as humanity’s Prime Assumption.  It’s an unverified epistemic foundation on which rests so many ideas of reality, and derived formal constructs like causality.

Intuition as pre-call ?

In any case also, and through more careful observation on humanity, it appears  that infrequent incidents of pre-call or anti-memory may in fact occur.  Such forms of occasional mentality all come under the general heading of intuition, which I will define for this purpose  as ‘seemingly non-inferential knowledge of future experience’.
 

Intuitions can range  from the trivial (“I suddenly thought of far distant Mary for no obvious reason, and almost immediately she texted me!”) to the more impressive (“John dreamt of a motor accident – and was nearly run down by a car next day!”).   And while statisticians may strive to ascribe all such to coincidence, they can never do so with full individual certainty. 

Intuitions are also much prized by the scientific community, for their proven role in creativity.  As for example when Kekule dreamt up the true structure of benzene in 1862.  Einstein also was especially strong in praise of the intuition faculty: he regarded it as a valuable mentality too much suppressed by logic in the modern age.

But in any case all intuitions of whatever sort exhibit a clear common pattern, one again apparently first clarified by me long ago.⁴   “First think, then see!” is their temporal sequence always, with ‘see’ denoting any kind of observation by ordinary means. 

This common pattern for intuitions of all sorts is also a matter of logical necessity, as further consideration of texting Mary will make clear. For if you’ve suddenly been just thinking of her for no obvious reason, but she then doesn’t text you or whatever, you can have no intuition possibility to contemplate!

But in any case intuition incidents, with their common temporality of “First think, then see!”,  are a clear inversion to more usual past-oriented memory.  In the latter case  “First see, then think!” is the temporal sequence of recall.  For example if long-absent Mary did indeed suddenly text you out of the blue, she’d probably recur occasionally in memory or reflection, over the next few days or hours afterwards.

It’s only when you think about her beforehand  that potential intuition can be entertained!    

The Paranormal Explained

Intuitions of course have also long been the focus of paranormal research, or parapsychology in its modern guise.  This largely began in the 1880s, when the new Society for Psychical Research (SPR) polled the British public, to detail 109 incidents where intuition seemed genuine.

Reports of these incidents were then interpreted as a first proof of telepathy  - a supposed psychological analog to the new Victorian  physics of telegraphy.  It was seen as a mysterious mental process which somehow defied physics, by operating across impossible distances or space.⁵ 

Such thinking stemmed from a seldom realised but near universal thought-habit of humanity, i.e. to think initially in terms of space before considering time. ⁶  And the same thought-habit also produced other space-violating notions of intuition, like (earlier) clairvoyance or (later) hypotheses of remote-viewing or extra-sensory perception (ESP).

So that in our recurrent example of texting Mary, most parapsychologists would think that she had somehow entered your thoughts, by mysterious mental transmission across impossible space or distance, and just before her text arrived.  While seldom or never considering the simpler time alternative - that you might have been merely ‘thinking forward’, to unusual experience a few minutes ahead!

And yet (as I clarified at the most recent SPR Conference - Sept. 2013),  every last single one of those original 109 Victorian ‘telepathic’ intuitions’, can be more simply interpreted in terms of time violation alone. ⁷  This also applies to at least most subsequent experiments.

If therefore you wish to have most of ‘The Paranormal Explained’, (as is the title of my second book), it’s all quite simple really.  Just discard all those misbegotten  inferences of space violation, and focus instead on that clear common factor of time anomaly alone.  Which will then lead on, through clear anti-memory or pre-call development, to far more productive and physics-coherent science.....

Dunne’s Experiment with Time

About the only previous investigato, who ever likewise considered intuition in terms of pure time anomaly, was JW Dunne - an Anglo-Irish aeronautical pioneer of the early 20th century.  He regarded some 10% of his dreams – and a few waking thoughts – as intuitions very definitely reflecting tomorrow instead of yesterday.  But apart from their temporal anomaly -

 “If they (the dreams) had happened on the nights after the corresponding events, they would have exhibited nothing in the smallest degree unusual” ⁸

Dunne reported his dreams in “An Experiment with Time” (1927) , a work still significant in global time studies.  For example current  neuroscientist Fernando de Pablos finds his main conclusion confirmed, with REM sleep possibly serving to process future and not just past experience. ⁹

Obviously too if such non-inferential knowledge of the future could ever be proven decisively, most prevalent views on time would have to be strongly modified.   This point was well recognised by GJ Whitrow, the original doyen of all modern commentators on time.  So in his definitive Natural Philosophy of Time (1961) he  devotes the very last section to considering the possibilities.  

Though in doing so Whitrow does use the traditional term ‘precognition’, a muddled misdescription as I’ve already shown.  For as a clear antonym to more common ‘recognition’, it would impute qualities to intuition which are simply not there....  

Quantifying through Diagram

Alternatively when intuitions are summarised in more precise terms of pre-call or anti-memory, they start to “make more sense” almost immediately.  For example all of their great variety can be usefully encapsulated into one simple diagram. This makes them easier to comprehend through visual intelligence, a form of mentality often superior to just words.

                       Past       Re-call            NOW          Pre-call?        Future

                                           Memory                            Anti-memory?

                                           Normal                              Paranormal?

Diagram - depicts the common experience of  memory in the left section.  This shows how details of past experience, available to present re-call, grow ever less with time.  Intuition can be incorporated as a much steeper and future-oriented pre-call curve appended to the right!

To diagram intuitions in this way further enables their relative frequency to be quantified more readily.  Just endow the average person with one single act of re-call every second, not worrying too much about whether this figure should really be increased/decreased  by a factor of ten.  Conservatively also, allow him or her just one experience of potential intuition, between every 4 months and every 3 years.

Since these are  time spans of 10-to-100 million seconds, the relative pre-call/re-call frequency in common experience then works out around 10^-7 or    10 ^{- 8}.  But of course anomalies of this slight order have often proved crucial throughout science history.   For example, the extent of the Higgs Boson anomaly as sought by the LHC is about one million times less again.

A repressed mentality

Nevertheless the first obvious or knee-jerk reaction to the possibility of anti-memory, is that it must obviously be impossible.  Or as a pragmatic sceptic might well retort: “There! I’ve just tried to exercise pre-call, and it doesn’t work for me!”

But such a facile retort would deny the likely great initial difficulty in such a wholly foreign and unfamiliar mental exercise.  In addition close observation of  intuitions as commonly experienced, reveals that they have a strongly repressed (subconsciously censored) character.  Most likely because they conflict with the great bulk of other more common temporalities.

Certain strands from conventional psychology also bear this out. For example J. Piaget (the founder of child psychology) once reported to A.Einstein that common time notions are more learned then obvious: they mainly derive from enculturation and language assimilation in our early years. ¹⁰  Which would explain why a strong intuition can strike one as disconcerting or even vaguely threatening: it conflicts too much with those other time notions we’ve grown comfortable with since infancy.

In the same vein S. Freud considered the common construction of experienced time , as a form of ordering imposed by the conscious intellect to make sense of reality.  This was because –

“The processes (of the unconscious) are timeless; they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time, in fact bear no relation to time at all.” ¹¹

And his one-time colleague CJ Jung went further:

“We are finally compelled to assume, that there is in the subconscious, something like an a priori  knowledge, which lacks causal basis.” ¹²

All of which then suggests that pre-call would likely be a highly repressed mentality, as indeed close observation of spontaneous intuition also shows.

Premature Speculation

“But how could it possibly operate?” is of course another objection to any possibility of pre-call.   However this frequent question is best regarded as too premature right now.  For humanity has been using re-call with great success for several million years - but still has no clear idea (or perhaps no idea at all?)  about  its underlying physiology.

At this early stage of brain/mind knowledge therefore, to speculate about potential mechanisms for far less frequent pre-call, must seem unwisely premature.
 

And in any case more pragmatically and using suitable psychology - and  as I will report in my next blog - learned pre-call is indeed quite feasible.  So that - through its further employment in suitably directed experiment – that great trichotomy (between time understanding in RT, QT, and everyday experience) may eventually be healed...¹³

1 – Augustine of Hippo - Confessions – 398 AD - Ch. 10

2- B.Russell – Mysticism and Logic – 1917 – p 202

3 – A.J.Ayer – The Problem of Knowledge – 1956 – p 166

4 – Parascience Conference – London 1973

5 – FW Myers et al – Phantasms of the Living - 1886

6 – GJ Whitrow – Time in History – 1985 – p5

7 - See SPR Website, 2013

8 – JW Dunne -  An Experiment with Time – 1934 – p50

9 – F de Pablos  – Scientific Foundations of Precognitive Dreams - 2011

10 – J Piaget – The  Construction of Reality in the Child - 1954

11 – S Freud – Collected Papers – 1959 – Vol 4 – p.368

12 – CJ Jung – Synchronicity – 1954 – p.43

13 – S.O’Donnell - Five New Experiments with Time – ebook 2013

  24/11/13                               BLOG 16

WHY CAN’T PEOPLE  ‘REMEMBER THE FUTURE’ – REALLY?

RECONSIDERING THE CURRENT CRISIS OF TIME

SUMMARY: Though physicists frequently query why “people can’t remember the future”, this statement as commonly expressed is just a demonstrable oxymoron.

The question is more productively rephrased into anti-memory or pre-call  terms.....

The Tripartite Rift

As I’ve just summarised in Blog 15, there’s a growing consensus that the present large crisis in physics is largely to do with the ‘nature of time’.  Or more precisely with the general puzzlement associated with the same.  There’s conflict between what scientists and philosophers understand about personal or subjective time as formalised by psychology, and the nature of objective time which physics apparently implies. 

And even within physics  there’s still further conflict: the nature of time as apparent from Relativity Theory (RT) conflicts with what Quantum Theory (QT) suggests. 

So that current conceptions of time involve a tripartite rift – between RT, QT, and common experience.  Along with the strong suspicion that “there’s something vital missing”  which might unite them all.

In the next few articles therefore I’ll show how this psycho-physical impasse might readily be resolved.  This requires  a new and dramatic extension of time awareness beyond its current boundaries.  Though one also soundly based on more thorough observation, more accurate description, and a newly informed pragmatism. 

My suggestion forms the core of three books I’ve written over the past two decades, with the latest an ebook containing the argument in final form.¹   In effect these increasingly develop an old proposal, for “A Relativistic Approach to Subjective Time, first advanced by me at the London Parascience Conference 1973 ². This proposal was however left mostly in abeyance over the interim, and largely because the scientific Zeitgeist was never at all ripe for its proper consideration until now....

Relativity is the simplest physics option

Considering therefore the situation within physics first, RT regards future events as fixed and determined just like past ones, with Now a mere local label of no more ultimate significance than Here.  Whereas QT regards future events as indefinite or  unpredictable in principle  – but (somehow?) transforming  into definite past ones through observation at the point of Now.   

But of these two conflicting temporal viewpoints, Occam’s Razor (or even naive realism!)  suggests that the QT viewpoint is likely the  least valid one.  For quantum  ontology – or basis in reality - is notoriously problematic, uncertain, and indeed open to half-a-dozen differing interpretations currently.  Whereas the RT viewpoint  is much simpler, less controversial, and with just one main interpretation generally agreed.

So that in further considering  the great time confliction between physics and psychology, it must seem simplest to adopt RT (and not QT) as the prime physical standard.  

The main problem here is of course that RT’s implications - of a predetermined future and a purely local Now - seem totally opposed to common time notions, and all the psychology which derives therefrom.  

Ultimately however these latter all rest on that prime personal experience of memory.   This is commonly taken to be a strictly one-way process which can only reflect fixed past experience.  And with an unfixed future, which is also unknowable, starting just beyond the point of Now.

Change Physics or Psychology?

Broadly also there can be only two ways out of the main psycho-physical dichotomy.  Either one might change time physics to suit time psychology, as Sir Roger Penrose once agonised³ . Or alternately you might change the psychology to suit the physics, which must seem the simpler course by far. 

For the well-proven laws of Relativity have been tested to exhaustion and always found to work with complete exactitude.  Whereas time psychology has largely accepted those common notions  of ordinary perception, but never with any testing remotely comparable to RT’s experimental proofs......

Rephrasing an Oxymoron

This weakness of common perception  is again evident in an question often posed by physicists over the last few decades. Their ranks range from Richard Feynman, through Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking,  to Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin more recently.  Impelled by considerations of time symmetry, all these have observed that “We can’t remember the future” - and in just those words.⁴  Then typically invoking entropy to explain....

But the scientific art is often one of asking proper questions, with language as its primary tool.  And given further that ‘ wrong words may carry one’s thoughts in the wrong direction’ this frequent statement from physicists clearly requires to be rephrased...

This is because ‘re’ means ‘again or later’, whereas ‘future’ implies ‘not yet experienced’.  So to speak of ‘remembering the future’ is just a confused oxymoron!

A less confused question would therefore be to ask “Why do people have no memory of the future?”  - which at least removes that oxymoronic prefix of ‘re’.  But since ‘memory’ and ‘future’ concern different time realms,  that would still leave a lingering element of illogicality.   

“Why No Anti-Memory?”  

The question can therefore be further refined through the neologism of anti-memory , a term apparently first proposed by me long ago ⁵.  So that the status of memory’s perceived asymmetry can then be rephrased in a still firmer way: “Why have people no anti-memory ?”  

This new theoretical word-concept would of course operate towards the personal future, so mirroring the normal comprehension of memory as directed towards the past. The initial problem here would be that what people term their future is regarded as unfixed and unknowable, though more so by common consent rather than by RT.

But in any case this new idea of anti-memory has two strong advantages over those previous oxymora.  First it coheres well with physics terminology, where other once theoretical constructs like anti-matter are now entirely practical.  Second, and given that ‘words are the shorthand of thought’, it confers new tangibility on an issue which was literally unthinkable before! 

 Pre-call is more precise!

But even though anti-memory may fit comfortably into physics terminology, it  still requires further clarification or refinement when psychology becomes involved.  This is because ‘memory’ is a broad descriptive or summarising term, with various sub-functions like retention, encoding, recognition, recall. 

Of these just the last two - i.e.recall, and the more complex process of recognition -  need concern us here.   Wherefore the former alone soon qualifies, for more precise consideration of the wider anti-memory  idea.... 

This is because to re-call’ means ‘to summon to mind some present-ation from past personal experience’; to ‘pre-call’ would mean ‘to summon from future experience’ likewise.

Such also demotes the term ‘precognition’ (sic), long traditional in philosophy and parapsychology.  For the latter suggests temporal inversion to ordinary ‘recognition’, for which it is the antonym.  A supposed relationship which proper observation can easily clarify as untrue.

So that “People can’t pre-call” then rephrases that hoary old chestnut about “not remembering the future” into a simpler final clarity.   

Not forbidden by ‘time’s nature’

The common response to “Why can’t people pre-call?” is of course that "Such a process would obviously be impossible - because the ‘nature of time’ must forbid it to occur." Which answer can also be extended to explain why people never seem to pre-call anyway.

But such an argument would be illogical or circular.  This is because the common view of time’s nature is based on what people know of memory.  And not the other way around.  So that the initial argument against pre-call rests not on ‘time’s nature’, whatever that may be.  But rather on just the common perception of memory, as a strictly one-way or past-to-present process.

Note finally here that people could hardly form much notion of time if they had no memory at all.  Whereas if they could only exercise pre-call - or even better had a symmetrical memory with both pre-call and re-call - their temporal ideas must differ greatly from conventional  understanding now....

1 – 3 books by Sean O’Donnell:

          1996 - Future, Memory and Time

          2007 - The Paranormal Explained :

          2013 - Five New Experiments with Time - ebook

2 – London Parascience Conference 1973 - “A Relativistic Approach to Subjective Time”

3 - R.Penrose – The Emperor’s New Mind – 1990 - p574

4 – e.g Sean Carroll -- From Eternity to Here – 2010 – p 40

               Lee Smolin – Time Reborn – 2013 - p 204

5 – Internat. Parapsychology Conference –Tufts U – 1987: Poster presentation

23/10/13       BLOG 15/  IS ‘NOW’ AN ILLUSION ? 

Summary: Recent comments from physicists highlight the tripartite rift – between Relativity, Quantum Theory, and common perception – in what each implies for the ‘real nature’ of time. 

And since common time perception is the region least scrutinised by science so far, it must seem most likely to hold the answer to better time understanding overall......, 

Two New Scientist Articles

The latest review of time’s current crisis – i.e. scientists’ lack of understanding  about what it all really means – appears in New Scientist - Nov. 2 2013.  This follows fast on an earlier feature (August 5, 2013), which examined the seeming confliction between relativity, quantum theory, causality and free will. It concluded that our understanding of at least one of this quartet must be wrong.  But which one is erroneous remains unresolved so far...

In similar vein the later New Scientist describes recent efforts by physicists and cosmologists to resolve a very old question long known to philosophers.  Is the moment of ‘now’ real in any sense outside of our personal experience? Or alternately is it just an illusion of human consciousness?

This latest feature is by Australian Michael Slezak, who has tutored philosophy at the University of Sydney.  Since this institution  is also associated with the pioneering Centre for Time (founded by Philosopher Huw Price in 2002),  it’s no surprise to find he has special expertise on time affairs.

The Block Universe

First therefore Slezak summarises how most physicists now probably consider reality as essentially timeless, a concept also known as The Block Universe.  This is a very old philosophical idea given new life over the last century, largely through the great pragmatic success of Einstein’s Relativity Theories.

Relativity has always proven to work with total precision wherever it’s been tried.  But it also implies that our labelling of events as Past-Present-Future, is a purely local description, ultimately of no more significance than ‘Here’.  It holds that events of all sorts really lie timeless or coexistent against the background of space-time – and that we merely “‘dis-cover or come across them” as our lives proceed.  

Obviously such an implication must seem in strong conflict with our everyday experience of memory and reality.  Further it conflicts with one of the main tenets of Quantum Theory – the Copenhagen Interpretation which regards the future as essentially indeterminate....  

Time Reversal Common?

Some physicists therefore now concentrate on “the arrow of memory”, perceiving it as the main criterion through which we derive a direction for time.  They seek to explain why it should always seem to work from present to past – and never from present to future - quite exclusively.

In an earlier feature (The Guardian – 27/08/2009) Slezak has written on one such attempt. He summarised an article in Physical Review Letters (Aug 2009) wherein M.I.T. physicist Lorenzo Maccone proposed that the psychological time arrow of one-way memory could be explained through  quantum entanglement.

Maccone invoked symmetry, to suggest that time-reversed effects may occur in reality - and just as often as those others we normally observe.  For example a cup lying smashed on the floor might rise up to reassemble itself from its scattered fragments – and indeed might be doing so in reality just as often as we see it falling down to shatter in the normal way.

Maccone’s hypothesis also can be seen as the latest restatement of much older ones, 
for example those once summarised by Martin Gardner in Scientific American  -  Jan 1967.  Back then early theorists considered time in relation to  whole extraterrestial regions composed of anti-matter, and with all their inhabitants likewise.  If so, their extraterrestial memories might only reflect what we would see as their future, a process they would regard as entirely natural!

This could even be extended to an entire mirror-Universe where events run in the opposite direction to our own, as indeed Sean Carroll has suggested in a more historical context lately (Blog 14).  And more invocation of symmetry might even suggest it’s continuously interacting  with our own like two giant meshed cog wheels.  If so, some natural constraint of biology might keep us forever unaware of this other anti-Universe.

But of course in practice we never see such examples of time reversal, except in backward-running films.  To explain why not, Maccone postulates a very extravagant and ad hoc addition to quantum entanglement. He suggests that all our memories of such time reversal, may be naturally “erased by (quantum) necessity”.

There is of course no hint of evidence for any such ‘quantum necessity’, nor indeed that extensive time-reversal could ever actually transpire.  So Maccone’s argument dpeends on a wholly theoretical extension of entanglement, a notion itself ontologically dubious.   Wherefore It all seems like another metaphysical example of ‘fairy-tale physics’, which author Jim Baggott so deplores on the modern physics scene. (Cf: Blog 13).

In any case Huw Price – former head of the Sydney Centre for Time and now Cambridge Professor of Philosophy – regards Maccone’s argument as circular: his novel extension to quantum entanglement is “assuming the conclusion he wants to derive”.  Nor does it “explain why all observers have the same orientation in time – why don’t some observers remember what we call the future.....?”

Still the fact that Maccone  was published in Physical Review Letters  is just another testament to time’s growing importance on the modern physics scene.  Likewise his particular focus on memory is a very important matter to which I’ll return in Blog 16....

A Growing Block Universe?

In similar vein Mikchael Slezak’s article reports on how South African cosmologist George Ellis again proposes to use Quantum Theory to explain our experience of Now and its resultant memories.   Ellis invokes the quantum Copenhagen Interpretation which regards the future as indeterminate – until one of its various potentialities becomes suddenly transformed into a definite present through observation at the point of Now.

So the present is defined as that  observation instant which divides a real Past from an unreal Future, and which only comes into existence once such an observation is made!

The Ellis approach would also restore a common moment of Now across the Universe:  if it’s twelve noon now here on Earth, is must also be noon out in the furthest galaxy.   This would also seem to imply a sort of growing Block Universe, but one wherein just the past sector is fixed and determinate.  

But otherwise Ellis discards the full Block Universe implied by Relativity.  He quotes Quantum Theory to conclude that  “You can’t predict what will be tomorrow,  so the future can’t be real because its not even fixed yet”

To which Huw Price retorts that even though the future is unknowable to us, it may still exist, like whatever lies on the other side of an intervening hill! 

In addition the Copenhagen dictum invoked by Ellis results in the well known fable of Schrodinger’s Cat, an example of quantum illogic which British astronomer Fred Hoyle long ago reduced to absurdity.  For if you replace Schrodinger’s mythical cat (which is both-dead-and-alive until inspected!),  by a quantum detonator for an atom-bomb placed in London, then the capital is both there-and-not-there until some outside observer decides to look!

Directional Geometry?

In contrast New York mathematician Time Maudlin accepts common notions  of perception without further consideration, contending that “The notion that time passes is absolutely commonplace.”  Though on this one may observe that whether “time passes” by us – or alternatively instead whether it’s we who “pass through time” as implied by Relativity -  is not at all so clear!

In any case Maudlin proposes that all lines of all sorts drawn in space should always be given an arrowhead of direction as a fundamental property.  (Normally they lack this directional quality.)   From which he hopes to develop a whole new kind of geometry in which time direction is always integral.

Relativity Modified?

Ontario cosmologist Lee Smolin accepts common perceptions of time as valid much like Maudlin does, and seeks to integrate them with what physics apparently implies.   But in doing so he discards Relativity’s  Block Universe, reformulating Einstein through the mathematical medium of shape dynamics.  

So where Relativity Theory renders both space and time elastic for observers travelling at different speeds, these new mathematics would just stretch or compress space alone.  Those various observers would then only differ in their estimates of size or distance, while sharing a common or universal moment of Now.

Smolin’s idea would therefore agree with Quantum Theory to this extent of a universal Now.  But it does seem difficult to reconcile  with all those numerous effects of altered clocks and time dilation now readily observable.  And proven to agree with Relativity mathematics over the past 40 years.  

Still Smolin holds that “all that exists is this moment”, which makes the present the most important, indeed singular, aspect of time . So the past can only be real in terms of present records or traces which former events have left behind. And the future likewise in terms of present indicators sugggesting what may possibly occur.

Why time seems to ‘flow’ ?

In contrast to Smolin, California cosmologist Sean Carroll emphasises the marvellous successes of Relativity in so many fields.  So “we shouldn’t attempt to change the Block Universe to explain our experience of time flowing, ...but should concentrate on explaining human experience in light  of what our very successful physics tells”. 

But then to explain Relativity’s related implication of a fixed future, Carroll invokes Quantum Theory’s supposed extensibility into the Multiverse.  This would hold that an infinity of fixed futures already lie waiting before us – but that we can only encounter one of them.

Philosopher Craig Callender agrees with Carroll that physics should hold on to what is already proven to work so well.  So that “(to explain) our apparently aberrant perception of T, does not mean we have to overturn physics or invent a whole new way of geometry”.  And this is a viewpoint commendably parsimonious in contrast to much of what I’ve described above.

As opposed to the modern notion that the future ‘lies ahead’ of us, Callender seems to favour one  Ancient Greek viewpoint which held that the past lies in front of us and the future behind.  A picture perhaps more realistic and appealing than the modern convention in several ways. 

So that while we may seem to be moving “backward into the Future with no clear idea of where we’re heading”, Callender holds that such is merely due to our egocentric need for a continuous identity.   Instead one might regard all the observations of a lifetime as a series of about 3 billion second-long slices, each one “existing motionless” at its respective moment in space-time.  And from them we generate the illusion of time flowing, by combining all these moments into one egocentric and enduring sense of personal identity. 

Or  “because I think I’m identical over time, that’s why time seems to flow, even though it doesn’t”, as Callender concludes.....

In sum, a trichotomy......

Surveying all the foregoing therefore, and at the risk of undue repetition, it’s clear that a trichotomy, or tripartite rift, exists between current time understandings on three disparate frontiers.  The implications from Relativity don’t agree with those from Quantum Theory, and neither agree with what common experience or perception seems to say!

Of these three great conflicting regions in time understanding, it’s clear that Relativity is most soundly based.  Conversely perception must be the weakest,  in fact never really examined so far with rigour remotely comparable to physics experiments.

It’s therefore through a much deeper re-examination (literally a re-search!) of common ordinary temporal perceptions and preconceptions, that the answer to time’s overall enigma is most likely to be found. 

And that is an exercise to which I’ll devote the next few features here......

NEXT BLOG  “Why can’t people ‘Remember the Future’ – Really?”

14. TIME AND THE CURRENT CRISIS IN PHYSICS

Summary

Three books published within the past year reveal how the question of “time’s real nature” is now coming to the fore with increasing urgency, while further showing how its essential mystery eludes physics still.

Of these 3 recent books the most comprehensive is “A QUESTION OF TIME – THE ULTIMATE PARADOX”.  This is a new ebook from the editors of Scientific American, one which collects together recent time writings from the same source. 

It expands on Scientific American’s special issue on “A MATTER OF TIME” (Spring 2012) – a compendium I’ve already reviewed in a recent blog.  There I noted a great lack of overall order - or connectivity between the various topics it considered.  Though still with a  fairly comprehensive treatment overall.

And it’s fair to say that the same holds true for this new ebook likewise. ...

“A QUESTION OF TIME” then republishes 17 time-related articles, from recent issues of the parent magazine and its several subdivisions, over the last five years.   Of these articles some two-thirds consider the role of time as apparent from physics, while one-sixth (3 articles) deal with “The human side” . 

Which also leaves one-sixth of the total (3 articles) concerned with philosophy, the “most original and general of all the sciences”.  Philosophy has been trying  to bridge the great rift between the inner and outer realities of time ever since it first took hold in Ancient Greece around 600 BC. 

Nowadays this rift is expressed more formally as the great temporal gulf which separates  psychology and physics, two disciplines with  very different views on time.   

So that “the gap between the scientific understanding of time and our everyday understanding of time has troubled thinkers throughout history” as contributor Craig Callender states in his article.  He considers the very common question of whether time might be just be an illusion, despite what our all common experience seems to say.

Elsehwere George Musser describes our current lack of temporal understand-ing as “a hole at the start of physics”.  While physicist Paul Davies argues from relativity that “the most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed”.  This expressed a viewpoint first expressed by Zeno and Parmenides ca. 450Bc, and long known to later philosophers as The Block Universe or block time.  

Such implications from physics are of course in direct conflict with what we seem to encounter in everyday experience.   But on this Gary Stix further notes that  “Science has barely begun to consider how we perceive passage.”   Presumably the science he’s talking about here is psychology which deals with perception.  Though one may reasonably question whether psychology is as yet fit to tackle such  questions at its present early stage of development.....

In sum therefore the ultimate time paradox seems to be the total confliction, between the implications of physics and our everyday experience.  But the sophisticated laws of physics – and in particular relativity – have been tested to exhaustion and never found to fail.   Whereas those tests on our time experience seem rudimentary in comparison.

It therefore seems likely that common experience is somehow misinterpreting, or missing something crucial, about the “real nature” of time.  This is a very important question which deserves more critical consideration, and to which I’ll be returning in my next few blogs....   

FROM ETERNITY TO HERE 

...is another recent time book (2010) written by cosmologist Sean Carroll,  well known for his popularisation of science as derived from his theoretical cosmology. 

In this ‘new history of time’ Carroll ventures far beyond Stephen Hawking’s original BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.   Fot the latter only dealt with time from the Big Bang event, which most people think started off our current Universe some 14 billion years ago. 

But Carroll now theorises that reality may be much older than this.  In fact it may be infinitely old – i.e. eternal - with the Big Bang just the latest in an ongoing and never-ending series of creation events.  Of these the last one has meant that we’re now living in a “time forward” phase, one which entails increasing entropy as the source of our past-to-future arrow of time.  

But Carroll theorises that there may have been a previous or ‘pre-Big Bang’  Universe (i.e. before 14 billion years ago) in which time’s arrow may have been reversed. And with others before that again in an infinite series stretching back through all eternity.

So that the real history of this supposed greater and eternal Universe goes far beyond our current episode of just 14 billion years, being also “statistically time-symmetrical”.  Or with an equal number of “time backward” and “time forward” episodes, the latter being the kind we live in now.  

Of all those many far-flung speculations in cosmology, this surely must be the most cosmic idea of them all.  And it must seem near impossible for non-specialists to follow through on whatever mathematical reasoning lies behind.  Though the prime factor may have been the desire to preserve time symmetry for things  overall....

TIME REBORN

...is another recent time book (2013), written by cosmologist and former advocate of string theory Lee Smolin.  And as compared with Sean Carroll’s book,  it seems almost cosmologically restrained.  For Smolin’s time-span just deals with the history and future of our current Universe.   

He holds that the current crisis in physics just comes down to our lack of understanding about the real nature of time – a problem at the root of ‘all of the mysteries which physicists and cosmologists face’.   

In contrast to others who claim time is unreal in the natural world, Smolin contends it’s a basic factor in all those physics laws we apply to our own particular Universe.  But thence he proceeds to a more arguable contention: if these laws are to be explained they must have evolved in time. 

And furthermore if so, they should be subject to the same principles as Darwin’s Natural Selection in biology.  So that Smolin’s proposed principle of cosmological natural selection may have sorted things out in aeons past, to leave us with those physical laws and constants we now have!

Elsewhere Smolin refers to the current battle between Relativity and Quantum Theory ,with their two very different conceptions of time.  He believes that Relativity needs to be rethought away from its implications of a block universe - in which all events both past and future lie ‘timeless and already written’, as numerous authorities have believed.  

Here his position is in contrast to most commentators who suspect that there’s something amiss with quantum ontology, i.e. the picture it seems to afford us for reality.

 Though if one follows Smolin, a new understanding of reality can result.  It affords a new world-view  in which ‘time is reborn’ and again becomes a dominant factor for the Universe.  As it was in the era of Newton or before Einstein.

Overall however the more grounded and down-to-earth among us may feel that such heady speculations of cosmology  come dangerously close to metaphysics – a traditional preoccupation of philosophy which was always lacking in much evidence.  Likewise there seems little or no factual evidence of any sort to back up such far-flung cosmological ideas.  This too was the argument in John Barrow’s FAREWELL TO REALITY which I reviewed in my previous Blog 13. 

It may therefore be wiser to adopt a more practical approach to the question of ‘time’s real nature’ – going back to the very basis of what makes us think of it all in the way we do.  And that will be the subject of my next blog, wherein I will reconsider a far more grounded and so basic starting-point for time.

NEXT BLOG (15)  “So why can’t we remember the future – really?”