The Illusion of Time
Introduction
As you can see from the title of this post, I will be arguing
here that what we call ‘time’, the mysterious and often ill-defined concept
which it is, is simply an illusion. It doesn’t actually exist out there in
reality either as the succession of concrete objects and their changes, or as a
fundamental structure of reality that can bend and warp in the extremes of
physics. In-fact, I will focus here on where our belief of time comes from and
show that analysing this alone shows that belief in time is not be trusted as
anything of merit or intellect. I will also respond to two anticipated objections
to this line of reasoning.
1 – White Mind State
I want to start at what I call ‘The White Mind’ (I was
planning to call it blank mind but it is too similar to John Locke’s blank
slate theory in epistemology). This is a state of removing all inferences and
models you make up to make sense of things, and staying with what you are
directly and immediately aware of. This means removing inferences to things
like matter, other minds, time, space, etc… The things which are so immediate
and direct to you that it is impossible to doubt. When I am in this state I
classify things such as sense experience and their phenomenal aspect of qualia
as immediate and direct. It could also be classed that emotions and thoughts
would also be immediate and direct however I put these all under the same
bracket as sense experience and qualia. All emotions are, are sense experiences
with differing qualitative aspects. So all there is on The White Mind is
experience and the knowing of experience (which again is just the feedback loop
of experience generating personal identity). With thoughts, these are either
directed to the future or the past (relations of time) because if they are
directed to the present then this is simply having a sense experience of that
in the present. You cannot experience things in the future or the past. I will
now introspect about thoughts of the past/future. When I introspect and focus
on a thought about the past, I am simply refocusing my attention onto an experienced
state of affairs which are obfuscated into deeper aspects of my psyche, as
memories. Therefore, when I think about the past or future, I am simply
refocusing onto experiences which are in the present but hidden at deeper
levels. Memories are simply experiences living within the deeper aspects of our
psyche, running on loops, falling deeper and deeper down, until they become so
obscured that we will never be able to retrieve them. They become part of our ‘personal
unconscious’. When we are in the White Mind state, we have simply the present.
When we think about what we call past and future, we are already allowing into
our state a model which is based off inferences not allowed to enter when in
the White Mind state. All we have is the presentness of sense experience and
qualia being directed to different experiential loops in our psyche, hidden at
different layers. They all operate simultaneously and interact with each other.
All these facts can be known through the omniscient eye of introspection alone.
This is the majesty of the White Mind state.
2 – Nature of Memories
Now I have outlined the White Mind state and the operations
of what we call memories, I want to analyse how we go from memory to the belief
in the real existence of time. Once again, memories are simply experiences
which live in the deeper aspects of our psyche. When we focus our attention to
this aspect of the present, we can access the experiences again, albeit in a
diminished and less powerful form. You can
think of the psyche as a massive Jenga tower. Bricks on top of bricks. All the
bricks exist in the present, all the layers below the highest one represent our
memories, personal unconscious and our part of the collective unconscious.
Whenever a new experience comes across our dissociative boundary and penetrates
our Markov blanket (Kastrup, 2018), it files onto the top layer and pushes
everything else down. What was once our ‘present’ experience gets pushed down
into an immediate memory. As more and more sense experiences come across our
Markov blankets, the memories of other present experience becomes less and less
clear as more experiential states are blocking our access to the deeper
memories. The abstraction of time begins with a clearly fallacious step in
reasoning, when we conflate the access of deeper parts of our experience, to
the idea that these experiences are no longer occurring and only occurred at
some point in the past. We believe that we almost recreate and represent the
past experiences in diminished form, however we are actually reaccessing them
in a still functioning state. Claiming the 1st hypothesis (that when
we remember, we actually ‘play back’ the experience in a re-representation from
brain matter) is an unnecessary inference which is not needed to explain any of
the facts of reality (Kastrup, 2018). An equally explanatory hypothesis such as
the 2nd of mine (that we reaccess experience in a still functional
state) can do all the explaining of the 1st and makes less
assumptions, ontological inferences and epistemic moves away from the White
Mind state. To conclude this section, memories are our awareness being refocused/recentered
around an experience which is hidden in a deeper part of our psyche, obfuscated
by higher layers of more present experience. It is not the case that all the
below layers are ‘past experiences’ but they are not immediately made aware in
the present. They still occur and very much exist but not immediately to our
immediate awareness. The practice of meditation and introspection can give us
access to these experiences once again, but in a diminished form (a fact both
idealists and materialists can make sense of).
3 – The formation of time beliefs
The very foundation of time is the idea that some things occurred
in the past, some things are occurring now in the presentness of experience,
and some things will occur in the future. The past is the collection of things
which have occurred (or have been experienced), the present is what is occurring
(or what is being experienced) and the future is the collection of things which
will occur (or will be experienced) – all bracketed terms are the parallel
concepts strictly within the bounds of consciousness. The question is this, if
we did not have the concept of memory, would we have gained the intuition of
time? The short answer is no. The long explanation is because without memory,
we would only ever have the immediate and direct awareness of the present
experience which pushes through our dissociative boundary and Markov blanket.
When memory enters the mix, we start becoming aware of parallel functioning
experiences which are not in part of our immediate awareness without the need
for introspection. It is flatly false to conclude that these experiences have
happened in the past though. They are still happening in the present. Take the
following analogy. I observe the planet Mars at t=0 orbiting around the Sun. At
t=20 I return and see that Mars is still orbiting the sun, but at a slightly different
location and position to t=0, since it has moved in the difference in time. It
would be ludicrous to suggest that between t=0 and t=20 that Mars didn’t exist
and was in fact not orbiting the Sun during this time. However, the representationalist
with memory says just that. They claim that the memory is simply stored through
a magical unknown process in brain tissue and can be retrieved and ‘played back’
or re-represented at a later time. However, the omniscient eye of
introspection, coupled with the White Mind state shows that memories are simply
reaccessed into the immediateness of experience. They never go away or get
stored or played back. They continually exist in a deeper level of our psyche. Time
is simply the convenient construct we use to explain the nature of memory; however
this is derived from faulty assumptions about the nature of consciousness and
the brain. As Rupert Spira says, all there is is experience and the knowing of
experience. When we stick with introspection and the White Mind state, the idea
of time goes away quickly and the only thing with any reality is the
presentness of experience which is directed at various aspects of our psyche.
Everything which is non-inferential happens in the present as the presentness
of experience. Our attention is simply directed to different aspects of our
psyche, which constitute all of our reality. It is only when we make unnecessary
inferences to things such as space and matter that the illusion of time emerges.
4 – Responses to two anticipated objections
Here I wish to respond to two of the most anticipated
objections I may face to this idea. The first is based off the very idea of
memory I have espoused in sections 2 and 3, and the second is based off the
predictive success of general relativity.
4A – The Metaphysics of Memory Objection
The objector would take issue with the very idea of memory
itself as presented by me. The objection would something like this…
The whole idea of memory in the idealistic case is to say
that an experience or qualia has passed through the dissociative boundary and
Markov blanket but now is no longer passing through it and is simply contained
within it and recurring in a loop in the depths of the psyche. Wouldn’t the
idea of time or temporal succession arise when contemplating the idea that the
experience or qualia once was passing through to your psyche but is no longer
having to pass through?
Here, it is important to note what the potential objector is
really saying. They are saying that there was an instant (say t) where a qualia
was impinging and passing through their dissociative boundary and Markov
blanket and then a later instant (say t+10) where the qualia is now inside the
depths of their psyche. First to note is that this is begging the question. The
objector is assuming that there are distinct and discrete instants of time
which progress in succession which contain changes in the experiential
landscape within each of them. Another issue with this objection is that
experiences and change is not discrete. There are not isolated moments which
pass by like frames in a film within the experiential landscape, it is an
ever-present experience of constant qualia. It is not like reality shoots a
bullet of qualia every now and then to pierce your dissociative boundary and perforate
your Markov blanket. It is constant and ever present, only ever in the present.
The future is just an idea in our heads, we constantly worry about it but it
never comes. Only the present comes and obtains. We slap the label of ‘past’ to
account for memories of experiences which are still happening and can still
impinge on our boundaries in an outgoing direction. For example, the experience
of happiness can impinge on our boundaries and present in the third person as a
smile.
4B – The Predictions of Relativity Objections
The objector in this case would reply by saying that since
Einstein made future testable predictions with relativity which were confirmed,
this counts as strong evidence that time is a fundamental aspect of reality and
can physically bend and warp. The objection would run something like this…
Since Einstein made a hypothesis and then made a future
testable prediction for his hypothesis that time is a fundamental and physical
aspect of reality, which was then confirmed, this is strong evidence that time
is not an illusion but is as fundamental to reality as space and matter. To
argue that time is an illusion is to argue that Einstein and the consensus of physicists
are wrong about relativity.
This objection is much easier to argue against because it
relies on faulty metaphysical presuppositions. Einstein’s theory will only work
if he presupposes the existence of material matter and space. Idealism can make
sense of the data from the experiments but the whole matter model has a number
of unfounded metaphysical presuppositions (upcoming blog post). Idealism and
materialism are empirically equivalent theories, meaning that they can both
make explanations for the same empirical data of reality. This also means that
they can make the same predictions about how reality will behave. However,
Einstein’s predictions made a claim not only about how nature behaves under
certain conditions, but also about what nature is. This claim about the
fundamental nature of nature is a philosophical one and will naturally flow
from the metaphysical presuppositions of the author. I am not a physicist so it is not my job to
make sense of the theory of relativity on idealism. If only we had people from
every section of study which were idealists then much more progress could be
made; much like how much progress has been made by the millions of materialist
scientists in perfecting their models. But it is just that, a model.
5 – Conclusion
Here I want to conclude my thesis here, which is that time
is simply an illusion and a model we make up to try and explain memory.
However, once we free ourselves from the faulty metaphysics of materialism, we
have no need to do so; the omniscient eye of introspection and the White Mind
state are more than enough to tell us about how our minds and reality work,
since they are all that is unmediated and unassumed.
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