Wednesday 7 May 2014

A Matter of Time

I would like to say that I am writing this post in the present time, except that I do not know when the present time really is, or how long it lasts. To simplify matters, and also to leave something for another day, I will not even try to deal with the past and the future, except where I need to set the present, assuming I can find it, in some sort of context. If I can assume that some kind of understanding of the present time can be reached, I must ask myself why the present time, the 'now', is so important. Well quite simply it is because I cannot deal with matters that lie in the past, or which are yet to come.
The act of writing my first paragraph lies in the past. I cannot change the past even by editing what I have written. I simply create another part of time past. The fact that a reader will not see the pre-edited script is neither here nor there. The act of completing this paragraph at some point in the future is even more problematical, because I do not yet know for a certainty what I am going to write. I will know that only when it has slipped into the past. In fact, all my thoughts about the future rest on my memories of the past. So tightly are the past and future bound to each other that they seem to be a single entity with the present time somehow sandwiched between the two. So what is the present and where or when does it exist?
Let me narrow the study down somewhat. Each word I type on this keyboard has a beginning and an end. When I type the first letter it slips into the past, whilst the last letter still lies in the future, if it can be said to exist at all. A similar argument applies to a single letter word, except that then I would be dealing with the first part of the letter as being in a different time from the last part of the letter. The point I am arriving at, somewhat laboriously you might feel, is that the present time is infinitely short. 'In the limit', as we say in differential calculus, time tends to zero. That is to say, the present time ceases to exist anywhere, or anywhen.
Now here is the paradox. I do not exist because the present time does not exist. By definition, I do not now exist in the future, nor did I exist in the past which was simply a series of present moments. Yet I am here, and have been here! In other words there is an awareness of a subjective present, which is of variable length and coexists with a non-existent real present time. Of course I would accept that there may be a problem of logic involved here, and logic does not always allow one to arrive at correct, that is reasonable, solutions. There are two other possible explanations that can be brought to bear on this problem.
The first explanation is that when we are dealing with time, we are simultaneously dealing with conscious awareness, and that can only be seen through the medium of the ego which is a flawed state anyway. The state that sees more truly is the Higher Self, or that to which we choose to give that name. And it is said that the Higher Self is eternal, not everlasting which implies time passing indefinitely, but eternal, which is timeless.
The second explanation, which is admittedly of a more frivolous nature but not a jot less spiritual, is that currently (we will not allow the word presently) Lucy and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary, and that is always likely to jumble one's wits, especially when a marriage has been as happy as ours. And there I will stop before I slip into an insane, mental timewarp.  

19 comments:

  1. Congratulations and happy anniversary to you and Lucy, and wishes for many many more, in whatever timewarp :-) Keep on loving and taking care of each other.

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  2. i drove by a large mural on the wall of a modern art museum in wroclaw just the other day. in translation, it said "WAS WAS WAS WAS is WILL BE WILL BE WILL Be" with the is written in a tiny font while the past and future words were larger. it grabbed me immediately, and now this post feels very much like a reiteration of the concept.

    congratulations to you both!

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  3. Marja-Leena; Thank you from us both, and certainly will do!

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  4. Agnieszka; Nice to have you back, and hope you had a good time. Re Wroclaw, it certainly seems to be happening everywhere and everywhen. Thanks also from us both.

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  5. Tom! You choose an epsilon, I'll grab a delta and we will both live joyously in the present which may be short but please, not infinitely so! :D

    All the very best to you both on your anniversary.

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  6. Sunlight takes about 7 minutes to reach us. Twinkles from farther stars can take millions of years. Heat from firewood has been stored for a long season. Sound arrives in its own time and touch takes a moment to reach the brain...Our awareness of the present, now, is always greatly or slightly arrears of the tremendous operations that compose it. Each moment,now, is a construct of astonishing antiquity. I suspect we all participate with everything in a single instant that is infinitely variable and really really big.

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  7. And happy anniversary to you both!

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  8. Halle; Will do one's best. :) Thank you for your best wishes from both of us.

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  9. Geo; I take your point, but there is still an implicit assumption that we know what time is. I would suggest that, like energy (which we define in terms of capacity to do work - as defined by physics), we do not know what time is. Simply dividing that abstraction into bite-sized pieces only makes it usable, not knowable.

    Please give me a few days to come back with further thoughts on this issue. Thank you for your comment and for your wishes of happiness from both Lucy and me.

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  10. Happy anniversary to two good friends.

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  11. Our warmest thanks, Bruce.

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  12. Belated best wishes for continued celebration of love to you Tom and Lucy.

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  13. There have been artists able to make time expand for me. Pink Floyd were very good at doing just that: 'The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older'.

    Happy Anniversary to you and Lucy.

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  14. Susan; When you say 'you are older', what has happened in reality to produce the effect of time? Or are we merely measuring deterioration as a function of gravity?

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  15. I suppose it has to do with the persistence of memories. Many years ago David Bowie wrote a song called 'Changes' whose lyrics still affect me - or perhaps it's the melody:

    I watch the ripples change their size
    But never leave the stream
    Of warm impermanence and
    So the days float through my eyes
    But still the days seem the same.

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  16. Personally I don’t think you can say what time is, but I am attracted to the idea of Eternalism; that there is no distinction between any points of time which are all equally real.
    in other words a further dimension within the general theory of relativity, to postulate the future events are already there as a further dimension, so we have eternal recurrence.
    Best wishes

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  17. Lindsay; An interesting point. And as there are so many aspects of the physical universe that we cannot sense, why not time also? It is indissolubly bound to space anyway, according to the theory of relativity.

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  18. Tom –Why not? -for us to exist coherently I think we were blessed with a mind ; one that functions so that memory informs us of a time in the past, allows us to imagine a time in the future but otherwise informs us we are in the present, all of which is reinforced by the evidence of biological aging.

    But we remain trapped on planet earth, unable to grasp time in its entirety in space, other than what we know that time and space are inextricably linked.
    Best wishes

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