The ocean within

Queen of Night,

I sink into your mists

like the prow of a wrecked ship

slipping through the velvet abyss

to the depths of the ocean within

Dream theater

No one auditions for the parts they play in life; the various roles we assume at each stage are typically unglamorous, and our appearances altogether fleeting. The dialog is third-rate, the action hackneyed and laborious, and our entrances and exits so often lack the proper timing. The theater is condemned and the seats sparsely filled. There are cracks in the ceiling and rats scurrying down the aisles, their bellies full of skittles and little bits of popcorn. The whole play seems to have sprung from the warped mind of a criminally insane asylum inmate whose pathological lack of concern for the well-being of their characters is matched only by the casual disinterest and bewildering inattentiveness of the audience. Every performance is simultaneously debut and final act. There are no rehearsals.

Yet great rewards await those lucky enough to have been paying attention since the beginning, especially if one is in the habit of reading between the lines. And although probably we will never begin to understand why we've ended up in the particular parts seemingly cast for us across the warp of existence (it would seem that the realization that "we" might easily have ended up in different ones lies near the root of ethics), the kind of understanding which constitutes those rewards - the fruits that hang from tree of knowledge - are notably convergent and frequently worth the price of admission.

The beauty of beauty

If truth is beauty and beauty truth it is only because we have already decided that true things are beautiful and that what is appealing does not deceive, for it is so very often that upon encountering actual things that are true we find them to be essentially uninteresting, patently unappealing, disappointing or actively distasteful. Once in the thrall of such a preconception it is easy to select examples of true things which happen to appeal in some other way also, and to pass over the contents of the enormous list, inescapably far longer than a list of all such things that could ever give us pleasure, comfort, hope or joy, of items that are either of no account due to their extreme triviality or are in some way onerous, oppressive, or intolerable to life but which are nevertheless true facts about the universe.    

This must explain the excessive number of true and verifiable things of which someone might become aware but that very few or none will ever actually come to know, and for good reason: Were we to gain immediate access to the truth of everything around us we would quickly become overwhelmed, subsumed, engulfed, etc. by the deluge of information, descriptive data, parameters, contingencies, eventualities, coincidences, consequences and facts in all their resplendent minutiae, with a total paralysis of our sensibility the inevitable result. 

The beauty of beauty is that it can be comprehended, beheld, perceived directly and immediately understood. Impervious to doubt, beauty is something unquestionably felt. The truth, however, is always open to question, always open to doubt and uncertainty. The truth may be hidden; something might have been missed, something that was not immediately obvious might have led us into error. And though unlike truth people can differ, even dramatically, in their estimation of what is beautiful and what is not, and not fall into error, those who come to know beauty indeed cannot be mistaken in that particular estimation, and only in this way is beauty a certain kind of truth, but not because the object of beauty itself partakes of the truth, or because the truth is itself an object of beauty. 

Don't get fooled again!

So-called "conservatives" are so obsessed with their demented notion of personal liberty that they constantly complain about democratic governments encroaching on their supposedly unlimited freedom to deceive, exploit, maim, torture, infect with deadly pathogens, let starve in the street, otherwise injure or simply kill outright their fellow citizens for practically any reason (sometimes but not always in pursuit of some private gain), and without any apparent remorse or concern for the attendant consequences. 

At the same time these self-styled defenders of freedom wish us to admire them for their staunch commitment to high-minded ideals like "liberty" and "family values". This dipshit view of "freedom", promoted not in the service of any actual public good, nor that of any individual possessor (as if these might somehow be incapable of constituting the same good), will result in the enslavement of the majority and the further debasement of public life, institutions, practices and standards if allowed to persist and flourish in democratic societies.

It's about time

A curious feature of Barbour's timeless interpretation is that it entirely collapses the notion of the self as either an abiding entity or a being that undergoes change. Since only the "nows" are real, and there are as many nows as there are instantaneous configurations, each now contains a complete version of yourself at a unique instant -- some nearly identical, others differing wildly, but all equally timeless. This implies there are as many "selves" as there are different nows - many millions of them, an inconceivably large number! It isn't just that you never step into the same river twice, as Heraclitus is supposed to have said, but that both you and the river exist as features within the large-scale (physical) structure of innumerable individual nows. The appearance of change is a consequence of the structure, not of ontologically distinct things within the structures "changing" as a result of something called "time" having passed. So if time really is an illusion, as Barbour and others suspect, it almost certainly follows that the notion of the indissoluble self is also firmly an illusion.  

But you don't have to disbelieve in the fundamental reality of time to have serious doubts about the idea of a singular, persisting self. As others have pointed out, the cells in your body are constantly being replaced, as well as the atoms they contain, although the rate at which this occurs varies greatly according to bodily location. There is evidence that certain cells, and presumably some atoms, do in fact persist throughout the lifespan of the body (particularly in the heart and the brain), and the rate of cell renewal among neurons is characteristically slow. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the body is entirely replaced, or "replicated" if you like, on a regular basis, on time scales ranging from just a few months for the skin and gut to about 10 years for the entire skeleton. Ultimately all of this regeneration and renewal is made possible through metabolic processes driven by the sun's energy stored in plants.  

It seems natural to think about all these ongoing processes in terms of a certain amount of time passing for regeneration to occur, but this is precisely what the temporal skeptics are arguing against. In their alternative version of events all that really exists are the different configurations, or possible nows, that the molecules composing your body, along with the rest of the universe, can exist in as a complete unit. Some combinations are statistically more prevalent than others, and hence more likely to be experienced. Exactly how an instant comes to be perceived is as yet unknown, but the important thing to grasp is that the instant is not located "in" something called time, existing independently outside the universe of things and passing uniformly for everyone. Rather, the experience of time emerges as being one possible path, somewhat like a geodesic, between a series of "nows" or individual moments which can be thought of as occupying a region of timeless existence called configuration space. At least that is what Barbour's mathematical description suggests. And it is a description that he takes great pains to show is entirely compatible with the findings of both general relativity and quantum mechanics; unfortunately, most of us will probably have to take his word for it on that account.                       

What does seem is clear to me, at any rate, is that the question of time is deeply enmeshed with the question of subjectivity. Obviously there must be some significance to the fact that countless people have lived their entire lives before any of us were around, and countless people will presumably live similar lives long after we're completely out of the picture. And yet the same can be said from the perspective of those people, whose lives were no less real to them than ours are to us. That's the first clue, I suspect, that time is not one single thing silently chugging away the hours, minutes and centuries tucked somewhere underneath the fabric of some universal "arena" called reality. And even though we are fortunate (or unfortunate as the case may be) to share our existence with so many others who are part of the same material universe, in a very crucial sense "my time" can never be the same as "your time", even if we might decide to spend some of it together! After all, according to the principles of relativity worked out by Einstein in the early 20th century, every inertial frame is equivalent but, thanks to the Lorenz transformation, every observer will come to their own conclusion regarding simultaneity and the order of events. There is no absolute framework of space, and no absolute or universal time as Newton originally proposed. Time, then, must be something that exists in eye of the beholder, if it is not a property of the universe at large.   
 
Many critical questions remain, which I feel have been inadequately addressed: First, precisely where does this configuration space exist, if all we can ever see or come to know are the configurations themselves? If the universe in fact consists of a near infinity of possible nows, it's not at all clear where we would ever find additional room for an utterly divergent realm (which Barbour discouragingly refers to as "Platonia") which somehow contains the "real" universe behind the appearance of change in things, save perhaps in the mind of the physicist. It almost seems a case of ushering one fictitious entity out the door while letting another one slip in through the window unnoticed! Then there is the question of just how the powerful illusion that time does exist and that things do change - something most of us take for granted - is generated from an arena consisting of a collection of static events. Barbour deals with this issue somewhat awkwardly, leaving it mainly to the neuroscientists to determine how configurations productive of such an illusion translate into actual experiences having all the hallmarks of temporality, not to mention why they exist in the first place. This is perhaps the weakest aspect of the proposal. It relies heavily on assumptions about the inner workings of the brain that may ultimately be disproved by subsequent discoveries. If, for instance, the appearance of motion (such as the Phi phenomenon) cannot be generated within discrete neurological states that are themselves static, then the problems of time and motion cannot so easily be explained away as being nothing more than psychological artifacts. 

I want to believe...

How often one now encounters the terms "skeptical" or "skepticism" used, or rather misused, to refer not to the systematic application of doubt, but rather to positive belief in some idea which has simply come to replace a previous belief in something else!

One cannot be said to be skeptical in the proper sense of the word while demonstrating a robust faith in the reality or truth of any given proposition. 

Islands of time

(For the previous post) ... These instants, the moment-islands from which the experience of time is derived, are known by another name - "Nows" - and it is always now. There is never any other time for us. This aspect of embodied cognition is practically impossible to deny. From the standpoint of experience this is as close to an observational fact as anything. Everyone's "now", no matter the relation between observers, is essentially unchanging as a structure. The only things that seem to change are the contents within that structure. Everything that can be known, felt, or understood exists as a part of some "now" which is a possible reality for some entity or cognitive agent. 

Some "nows" also exist within other "nows", while remaining complete structures in themselves.

Nothing like this occurs, as far as presently can be known, for matter in general; only for a vanishingly small proportion which happens to persist in a highly ordered state, which we are apt to refer to as a brain or the central nervous system, or more specifically the . Even the awareness of the existence of those features and the names given to them must occur within the reality of some perceptible instant, or as is more often the case, across a multitude of "nows".

If we allow for the existence of nothing else, we must at least allow for the reality of each instant as a concrete existence, neither "coming into" being nor "passing away", because if they partake of any reality whatever - at any time, that is - they cannot suddenly spring into existence ex nihilo and promptly vanish into the same nothing! Where would they go, and where would they have come from? Nature is everything, and nothing exists outside of it, so if the all the instants are not real in some permanent or timeless sense then nothing can be real in any sense whatsoever.  

"It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of the changes of things."      

             - Ernst Mach, quoted from The End of Time by Julian Barbour, Oxford University Press, 1999

It is often said that a great work of art or music is "timeless". But what if everything, the whole of nature itself, surely the greatest work of art known to anyone, is literally timeless, possessed of a permanence which only ever appears to us in fragmentary form? This is in fact a very old idea, going back at least as far as the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides (6th-5th century BCE), who famously asserted that all change is mere illusion, and that behind the appearance of movement the entire universe is static. His sole surviving work, On Nature, a prose poem that exists today only in fragments, contains what is widely thought to be the first extant example of a philosophical argument. It is here that Parmenides lays out his case against the reality of change and our conventional notions of past, present and future:

"As yet a single way remains,
that it is; and along this path markers are there
very many, that What Is is ungenerated and deathless,
whole and uniform, and still and perfect;
but not ever was it, nor yet will it be, since it is now together
    entire,
single, continuous; for what birth will you seek of it?
How, whence increased? From not being I shall not allow you
to say or to think: for not to be said and not to be thought
is it that it is not. And indeed what need could have aroused it
later rather than before, beginning from nothing, to grow?
Thus it must either be altogether or not at all.
Nor ever from not being will the force of conviction allow
something to come to be beyond it: on account of this neither
    to be born
nor to die has Justice allowed it, having loosed its bonds,
but she holds it fast. And the decision about these matters lies
    in this:
it is or it is not; but it has in fact been decided, just as is necessary,
to leave the one unthought and nameless (for no true way is it),
and <it has been decided> that the one that it is indeed
    is genuine.
And how could What Is be hereafter? And how might it have been?
For if it was, it is not, nor ever it is going to be:
thus generation is extinguished and destruction unheard of."

(trans. John Palmer, from Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2009)

Despite countless attempts by subsequent philosophers to provide a definitive answer to this challenge, none have as yet been successful at resolving this fundamental contradiction between the competing demands of existence for the same object(s) at differing times. 

So perhaps reality really is, after all, just as the French would have it: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!"

Note: I am indebtted to Julian Barbour both for the terminology of "nows" and for the underlying physical argument. The case he lays out in the work cited is a compelling one, and I confess to having been greatly impressed by the possibility that time is not a fundamental physical constituent of the universe. To be sure there are a number of outstanding difficulties with this admittedly bold proposal - something I hope to discuss in subsequent entries - but it is striking how well the idea seems to match up to the available evidence, quite contrary to intuition.