If you read these posts, you’ll know that I’m not a physicist or a philosopher, and really, to address the issue that is on my mind just now, I need to be either, or, preferably both. I am puzzled about time. About a specific feature or aspect of time. I’ve been thinking about it for some time and will probably be ruminating on it for some time to come; and I’m considering it now. But my puzzle is: What is “now”? Is there a “present”? If so, what is it?
OK, it’s a weird question but I’d like to know what you think. Most people have never thought about it. At least in all my 66+ years (sigh) I think I’ve only heard / read about the issue a couple of times. This will take a bit of explaining.
I have no trouble conceptualizing the “past.” For most of us, including me — when I’m not doing the hard-core academic historiographical thing (which I do enjoy doing, of course) — the “past” is simply everything that has happened before. (When doing the academic thing I often talk about “the past” as that which we can *establish* as having happened before, but leave that aside for now.) OK, so far so good. And if the the past is what has happened, then the “future” is what will happen. Great.
But what is the present?
It seems kind of obvious until you think about it. The present is
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There was a present, for a moment, but you missed it. Oops, and there went another one.
The illusion of the present moment is closely tied to the illusion of the “self”. Who am I? Am I the same person I was 10 years ago? Am I the same person I will be 10 years hence? At this moment (if such a thing exists), what really defines the experience of being “me”?
I am the same person I was 10 years ago (though hopefully wiser), I will be the same person 10 years from now, and I will be the same person (with an immortal, resurrected body) throughout eternity. So though there will most likely be the awareness of time passing and because there will still be motion, there will still be “the present moment” as we experience it, but the fact that there will be no death and no aging or sickness (no entropy), time’s “teeth” will have been pulled.
It fascinates me, too, and the idea that the past isn’t necessarily static, but could be ever changing. How would you know if it changed? It all seems like a construct to me and that raises the other questions.
I think philosophers have too much time on their hands. At present, I am trying to count the angels on the head of a pin.
I’m not too interested in angels, but I’m interested in life and what it means! Doesn’t seem like a waste of itme to me….
It is a waste of time because no one knows. I have thousands of hours into the study of philosophy… I am no closer to truth than when I first began, except the truth that I wasted time.
My sense is that philosophical query can be highly valuable per se — that its value does not necessarily reside in coming up with “the” correct answer.
This is quite at odds with the desire you posted recently. “To be more present”. You see, the search is a way to keep the mind occupied and this keeps you away from the present. Studying philosophy is a way to procrastinate. It is merely a distraction. Certainly, if that is how you want to spend your time… But I fear you may look back and think what rubbish it was… But maybe not.
Can’t say I disagree more. Know Yourself! It’s not a waste of time. But watching sit-coms probably is!
Snap! This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. It’s worth re-reading Augustine’s chapter on time in confessions (Book XI). My favourite quote from this is: “What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar every day conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an Inquirer, I do not know.” Augustine goes on to point out that the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist and the present is an infinitesimal line between the past and the future. Thus neither the past nor the present nor the future exist, but only the flow of time itself. Time can only be measured by events or by distance moved. If all events in the universe ceased, which would include all movement stopping, would time stop? I think so.
Yup, that’s part of what got me thinking about it. My understanding is that most physicists think that eventually the second law of thermodynamics — say in trillions of years — will mean that there will be molecules floating around but not combined: so basically a big emptiness. Since the universe will still be expanding and moving to disorder, I suppose in that sense there will still be time. But, well, it won’t much matter. (Any astrophycists here: feel free to correct my understanding. I’m getting it from people like Sean Carroll and Brian Greene)
The 2020 physics Nobel Laureate and a philosophically sophisticated top-tier physicist, Roger Penrose, has an innovative, empirically testable, cosmological model on what happens to the universe in the unimaginably distant future, when not only all particles are far apart and disconnected from each other in an ever expanding universe, but when every particle has decayed to massless photons. In general relativity, it is not meaning to talk of passage of time in absence of mass. In the future universe filled with only massless photons, the very big is equivalent to the very small. So our ever expanding universe will eventually lead to origin of a new “era” of the universe starting from a point of singularity. The Big Bang singularity of our universe was the endpoint of a previous era. It is a fascinating alternative to the older cyclic model of the universe undergoing repeated cycles of expansion and contraction.
See his 2010 book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time.
Interviews with Penrose and other cosmologists on his theory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVDJJVoTx7s
A 2010 interview on Premier Christian Radio with Penrose and the Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, discussing Stephen Hawking’s then recent book, Penrose’s cyclic model, and other science-religion issues:
https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-25-Sep-2010-Hawking-God-the-Universe-Sir-Roger-Penrose-and-Alister-McGrath
Interesting! Thanks.
The milky-way and the local cluster (andromeda etc) are gravitationally bound and wont separate. All other galaxies will eventually recede out of view til they are unobservable by astronomers.
This local cluster of galaxies like all other clusters will eventually degenerate into black hole dominated remnants. The black holes themselves will eventually evaporate leaving only massless particles in the universe.
Roger Penrose’s very controversial theory is that the infinite future of this massless particle universe will be indistinguishable from a new big bang and that this new big bang will be one part of an infinite cyclic universe of big bangs and heat deaths.
I recently watched a video describing a man’s NDE in which he died and stood immediately before Jesus. He asked Jesus this question, “Were the events of the cross true?” He said he was instantly transported in time to the crucifixion and experiened its horror (he said, in tears as he related it, that it was far worse than any modern depiction). I have often wondered if I would be able to travel back in time to witness events such as the birth of Christ, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.
NDEs are fascinating!
I remember first being struck by the non-existence of the presence when I was 15 and very bored in class one day (10th grade) — I don’t remember what class it was, but somewhere I probably still have the notebook in which I wrote a little meditation beginning “What is Time? I write ‘now’ and as soon as I write it, it isn’t ‘now’ any longer but is the past . . .” I went on in that vein for about a page. I vividly remember the dizzying, disorienting feeling of realizing that no moment can ever be grasped or held onto, and that ever moment becomes past as soon as it happens. I agree with Bart — it seems that there IS no present, at the same time that the present is all we have.
I was fascinated to read Augustine’s musings on time when I first read the Confessions years later.
Strange stuff.
Kierkegaard: Yesterday is the past; tomorrow the future. The present is the eternal. How he breaks all
this down is interesting!
Henry Van Dyke: Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice and for those who love, time is eternity.
I especially agree with that last part. We keep on loving those we’ve lost and in some sense we have them with us always.
“Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.”
– Abhijit Naskar, the author of “Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost.”
From a physics standpoint, time is a coordinate just like the normal three dimensions we use to locate ourselves within the set of objects in our vicinity, for example. Physics can locate a particular object within the x, y, z and t coordinates. On paper, t is just a variable and I can fix it to a value and then determine the position of all objects at that t value. Well, that is if I have enough information about the speed and direction of all objects. From a perception standpoint, time is a function of our brain’s operation process. We don’t process sensory inputs on a continuous basis, and the brain has a refresh rate. It constructs a model of our surroundings and then updates the changes to that model as new sensory input arrives, but in a stepwise fashion. It uses the ‘past’ model to predict the observational reality of the present, and to predict the immediate future. So blah, blah, blah, the point is that physiologically there is a ‘present’ and the duration of that state is determined by our brain activity cycle. But your’s and mine are different.
God I wish I could have become a physicist….
> God I wish I could have become a physicist….
I did, and, believe me, you’d not be much farther along in understanding “What is time?” Maybe we’ll get there but it’s at best a work in process to understand what time is.
Very understandable… I appreciate that you point out that each ‘present’ can be different for everybody; depending upon the brain’s refresh rate.
My present must be out of sync with the rest of this post, as I came late to the party. – (kidding)
I am curious about the thinking behind a third party occurrence; say, a surprise noise that a group of people hear, somewhere off in the distance (no matter how close or far away) while not having the conscious ability to designate a mental prediction – as an example… but could be anything that happens outside our sphere of mental influence; something that we react to, rather than something that we can have the foresight to predict.
Just a thought.
Thanks for sharing.
,,, “and time will no longer be”.
In my mind, in the concept of consciousness, time is dimensional and related to the senses and functions as a measure of our understanding. Our material-oriented self, the “Self”-detached “ego”, is dependent on time as a concept of understanding and frames our concept of understanding. Time becomes a function of the mind working within the limited context of time and space, but not necessarily for the whole psyche. Within a broader understanding of the psyche, the concept of relativization is not limited to our 4-dimensional framework where time is included, but also outside this concept. To put it as Carl Jung said, “it is a relativization of time and space through the psyche”. This means that reality as it is perceived by the “Self” as a whole is lifted above and beyond its fourth dimension, called “time”.
So relatively speaking, time and the present are percieved within our consciousness.
I find Wittgenstein persuasive:
“1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.1 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being *all* the facts. ”
If you conceptualise your reality as your experience of *things*, then you have a problem with the ‘present’ (as you have found); since the present time is being conceptualised as a stage on which ‘things’ are presented to you. But that not only creates a conundrum about time; more problematically it creates a conumdrum about ‘others’. If my reality consists of things present with me; how can my present reality and your present reality be one and the same?
So, a rigorous understanding of ‘reality’ defines it as a reciprocal discourse of ‘facts’. The universe is the totality of this reciprocal discourse; within which ‘things’ function as metaphors, not as entities in themselves.
But that reciprocal discourse is purposive; and its purpose is the ‘future’. Way back, my then tutor recalled a helpful simile; reality is like riding a motorbike backwards. The point is to continue forwards; but the sole factual basis is the backward view.
Maybe time is the illusion… it doesn’t exist. We exist on a timeline… but what is that timeline but a collection of points that we never stop on. We just keep moving. Maybe it’s not about past, present for future… maybe it is all just a journey of our existence. We did, we do, and then we hope to do.
I was thinking Zeno from your first sentence. The present is just a link connecting the past and the future.
But it is an illusion. The points you have to traverse between the present and the past or the present and the future are infinite but the time you have to traverse those points are finite so passage of time from those points are impossible.
Time doesn’t exist. It doesn’t pass. There are too many points and not enough time.
I can only conceptualize NOW in terms of models. It’s like numbers: -1…0…1. The negative and positive numbers reflect a value of sorts, but 0, which divides the positive from the negative has no value at all. Or think of the presentations you give with PowerPoint. The slide you are showing contains content, but the mouse you use as a pointer to specific spots on the slide is not content; it points out content, but doesn’t exit within the content itself.
Now I’m think about tacos, so I can say more tamale:-)
Thankyou for this thoughtful post. Although no longer a card-carrying Christian I still retain a soft spot for CS Lewis & especially The Screwtape Letters. Therein this topic that you raise is tackled, leading to the wonderful phrase “The Present is the point at which time touches eternity”. That whole Letter is an excellent read – they all are!
My less-profound contribution to this is to note the distinction what a situation / reality actually IS vs what our own perception of it tells us. We are, as always, bound by our perception, even when perceiving the “facts”!
Back to CS Lewis, might I ask you Prof Ehrman do you, like me, retain dear relics from your past faith-life that still nourish you now? I still adore The Screwtape Letters, & especially the audio book read by John Cleese!!
I’m not a big fan of Screwtape any more, but I like a lot of his fiction.
Could it be that every moment is the present? Divisible by infinity, unable to move forward or backwards, the present is. I pondered this thought for far too long some years ago, and came to the understanding that I am too dense to understand it. My takeaway is that I can only experience the now, the then and the when are entirely unknowable.
In Buddhism and Mindfulness we try to focus on the present as much as possible. But that’s not quite true. Instead we try to have “moment-to-moment” awareness. As you say the now is constantly changing. And once you start trying to decide how long “now” lasts it tends to disappear. It seems to me that maybe trying to focus on one moment after another, actually seeing change as it happens, might get around the problem of how long the present lasts. So maybe when we are concerned about what is happening now it’s more of a matter of getting into the “flow” of time than it is trying to grasp one moment.
The present exists while nothing changes. If your definition of ‘nothing changing’ is loose enough you can have experiences in the present.
If nothing changes while you drink a cup of coffee you can be presently enjoying a cup of coffee.
Welcome to Buddhism!
This reflection reminds me of the days when I was a Buddhist!
One problem with the past, with history, is that we tend to think of it as being somewhere else, in another place. Actually, if you’re in a given place and want to know it’s history, you might want to say that the past has become the present, the past has grown into the present, the past is incorporated into the present. That would be a way of being connected to the past while you yourself are In the here and now. The best example I can think of is time lapse photography/sped up videos. The past is simply the “transformation” of things into what presently exists. We often say that we need to understand the past in order to understand the present. But the reverse is also true. We need to understand the present in order to understand the past. At least if we want to feel a real connection to the past we need to understand the present to see how it’s roots are in the past.
One of my theological speculations is that nothing in the past has ever been completely lost because it is incorporated into the present, perhaps a kind of living memory.
Actually, the same problem exists for “place” or “location”, and it has to do with the notion of a point being infinitely small; you can always imagine it being divided into two or more parts, whether referring to a point in time or space. So, does that mean something can’t be anywhere right now? In math, you must make your piece with, or get used to, such abstractions as “instantaneous” values of constantly changing functions, and, in science, you accept the necessity of “operational” definitions, where it is understood, either explicitly or implicitly, that time and location are measured only within certain achievable limits. But, you don’t say, therefore particular times (like, t=0) and locations don’t exist.
This makes me think of Iain McGilchrist’s take on the two brain hemispheres. the right hemisphere is connected to reality (a lot of neuronal interconnections) but it doesn’t have language or analytics. it has been called the “dark” hemisphere. It has broad attention.
the left hemisphere is analytic and not connected to the body (there are disconnected neuronal silos in the left hemisphere.) Also, see all the studies of people with right brain strokes try to draw things – the left hemisphere can only draw stick figures). the left has focused attention.
the left has language and seems dominant, however the right hemisphere is connected to the present moment and reality; the “dark” right hemisphere which does not analyze. McGilchrist’s more recent book “The Matter With Things” addresses questions like you asked. His other book “The Master and His Emissary” details the differences in the hemispheres.
Is it that once we try to understand and analyze the present, we out of the connection with the moment we are trying to analyze? Is it that the present moment can only be felt in dark way – without explicit language?
This doesn’t actually address your question(*), but to the best of current understanding the shortest unit of time that it makes sense to talk about is the Planck length, 1e-35 meters, divided by the speed of light, 3e8 meters/second. So about 1e-43 seconds or, if you like words, one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second. Pretty short.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
(*) IMO, we have good evidence that the present does exist but very little idea what it is.
That ancient philosopher Zeno walked into a bar. He walked half way to the bar. Then half of that distance. Then half of that distance. Eventually he died of thirst.
HA!!!
Another version of that: Put the guys on one side of a room and the girls on the other side. At a signal the guys walk half the distance to the girls, and the next time walk half that distance, and so on. The mathematicians (and most of the physicists) will tell you that the guys never actually make it all the way to the girls. The Engineers will tell you that they get close enough for all practical purposes…
As a mathematician, I would make the following remarks.
First, the paradoxes of Zeno. When you study real analysis and set theory, you arrive at some interesting answers. At least mathematicians find them interesting. What Zeno would say of the answers given by modern math is of course not a mathematical question, but I think he would at least be intrigued. Or at least I hope so.
Second, time. The way to formalize questions involving time is almost always to formalize the question atemporally. For instance, the definitions of limit or derivative at Newton’s time were temporal (WHEN x APPROACHES 0, we have that f(x) APPROACHES L). These definitions were known not to be entirely satisfactory: Newton himself knew it. The modern definitions are atemporal (for all epsilon there exists delta such that for all x …).
I like Faulkner’s line in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
RE: …every present moment that we recognize is in a sense recognized only when it is past… So when is “THE” moment when we are in the present?
I’m considering the sort of tragic crisis scenario that makes time slows down: A deer is crossing the road. You are slamming the breaks. You hear the bang–Yes, you really are/were hearing it in the moment it is/was happening. You pull over look back. As expected, a deer lies dead.
Is experiencing the present moment something like hearing that “bang” sound?
You run into infinities when you slice and dice time like you are doing.
There’s a school of thought in physics that considers spacetime to be quantized, instead of being a continuum that can be infinitely divisible into small parts.
It’s part of the effort to reconcile quantum theory with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. I’d start reading physics trade books in this area of research/speculation to find an answer to your question. Philosophy and religion are dead ends.
Quantization is an idea of Max Planck from 1900 in his effort to understand the spectrum of blackbody radiation. That idea is arguably mankind’s greatest idea since it led to quantum theory. And quantum theory is the basis of our present technological civilization.
Oh, I completely agree. Philosophy and religion ain’t gonna get us anywhere on this one…
Philosophy, as the handmaiden of theology, is the only thing that will get us anywhere close to the nature of time. Science, which I endorse wholeheartedly for its utility, will have us chasing our tails through the infinities. Quantum theory, only a hundred years old now, is the first little step on a long path.
I think you are referring to Lattice Gauge Theory developed by Ken Wilson in mid 1970s. I in fact did my PhD in Physics in Lattice Gauge Theory by discretizing space-time on a lattice and calculating some observables on such a lattice. However, this is purely a mathematical technique developed by Ken Wilson to get around singularities and does not really mean we think the space-time is discrete in reality. The technique requires one to take the continuum limit eventually to calculate the observables.
I think the meaning of *now* depends on the context.
From a grammatical point of view, a particular moment in time takes into account more than just the smallest possible fraction of a second. It is about a chain of events that must be considered together in order for our perceptions to make sense. For instance, saying, “that man is slapping someone in the face” takes into account two people’s relative positions and movements over several divisible moments in time, yet collectively they are viewed together in order to say that something is happening *now*. Of course, that kind of observation would be made after-the-fact, so maybe some actions are not clear *now* but can only be accurately described later. However, I’m pretty sure that I am typing right *now* .
From a meditation perspective, *now* and the *present* feel like murky concepts as one tries to focus the mind while simultaneously experiencing that the mind is a never ceasing thought-producing and feeling-producing machine. After a while though, meditation does produce a sense in which *now* can feel like an elongated moment of time. Is meditation something you have practiced or practice? Is meditation part of the evangelical Christian spiritual experience?
Yes, I’ve had a meditative practice for years; and no, most conservative evangelicals I knew back in the day thought meditation opened your mind up to demons.
That type of thinking is disturbing!
I inherited a means of perceiving the temporal passage of events from my human parents. This means of perception worked successfully for them, enabling them to meet, marry, have a child, and then raise that child to adulthood with the aid of extended human family and other humans to which I am not related, all of whom manifest a very similar means of perceiving the temporal passage of events. Whatever this sense of “the present” really is, it works, or else I wouldn’t be here. I’m doing my best to return the favor for fellow humans and non-humans, especially the next generation so that they, in turn may survive and hopefully thrive.
Wow! Such deep thoughts for an early morning.
You should ask Dr Lawrence Krauss to give you the answer or at least point you in the correct direction.
What is “now”? Fleeting! “Now” must be either an average of some period of time or else it must be a single very short point in time.
Small leads to quantum measurements in the space-time-gravity continuum. Could “now” be Planck time (its definition is based on the speed of light and the Planck length). It is the smallest amount of time that works within the framework of the laws of physics. That would make “now” so short as to be as unattainable as past or future.
Now the scary part, if “now” is Planck time it can only be viewed as quantum time. But, quantum involves uncertainty and a certain amount of randomness.
Looking to longer periods of time, we know that time isn’t uniform. The rate of time to one observer differs to another. It is also affected by gravity.
I believe George Carlin once pontificated about time. That must be on the Interwebs somewhere, although, as I understand it — it’s in the past.
Much to our regret, he’s in the past as well…
Yes, but you’re thinking only as if time is like you say, a quantum, a measurable particle like matter, or I guess a unit, however small, of finite time. However, like in quantum mechanics, we must perhaps also think of it as a wave, something continuous and (theoretically) unending. Many things can either react to or place their influence on a wave, bending it in a gravity well, for example, or speeding it up or down depending on the medium through which it travels, or changing it’s direction or stopping it by obstacles. Interesting stuff, either way.
Mathematicians have dealt with a similar problem. A point on a line has no length but where is it. They use the concept of limit. Pick a length around the point. Pick another length shorter than that that still includes the point. You will find one point will always satisfy this process of picking shorter and shorter lengths. That point has no length. Apply these concepts to “duration” and “now”. “Now” is the moment defined as the point in a time line that is the limit when “duration” shrinks to 0. Past and Future are both real but insubstantial. “Now” is the instant when the insubstantial past transforms into the insubstantial future.The Cosmos is only present at that moment.
Physicists have another problem. How does one’s “now” correlate with “now” at a distance? Consider two clocks set to the same time. Accelerate one clock and then have it return. The clock at rest points to a time later than the clock that moved.
If the moving clock had come ended its acceleration. There’s the clock way over there. Is the “now” over there the same “now” here? I believe the speculation is that “Time” is not absolute. That was a Newtonian concept.
A favorite bit of ‘timeless’ wisdom:
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
– Heraclitus
That little sentence contains an eternal mystery.
This one has had me pondering and wondering for years now:
“For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.”
– Seneca
I think he’s saying that with our attention and imagination in order we are not moving toward oblivion but toward eternal life.
I neglected to mention that by “eternal life” I mean only right here and right now. The first and the last perpetually switching places!
This reminds me of the old riddle. I walk half the distance between where I stand and a wall. I then walk half of the remaining distance between my new starting point and the wall. I then leave my third starting point and walk half the distance again. As long as I repeat this approach, I will never reach the wall. Maybe present should be viewed in a similar manner. Only by redefinition can the present be defined.
Interesting post. I’ll have to look up Zeno, but for now I’m reminded of an almost equivalent philosophical point of view – the scene in one of the Pink Panther movies where they try to synchronize their watches, but never can. As soon as one mentions the exact time, it is already in the past for the other.
If time is a continual flow there doesn’t seem to be any interval, however short, in which this flow ceases. When we talk about the present it seems that it is more of a generic, and relative, term without a definition of some exact moment. The “present” baseball season, or “present” presidential administration, or “present” whatever implies a part of the past and a sequence of events which are flowing until some point of termination. However short the duration of what we are calling “present” – and there is no duration in which the flow of ceases – it is not some fixed point in time. So, to me the present is a relative term depending on what we are talking about.
Psychologists tell us that it takes up to 100 milliseconds for the brain to process a perception, so if there is a now, we’re always a half step behind and can never catch up. I guess we’ll have to revise Ram Dass: “Be Here Soon.”
I would refer you to a Scientific American article, “Time on the brain: how you are always living in the past, and other quirks of perception. “
We are all effectively living in a simulation of our own making. The ‘present’ is a synthesis of the last 80 milliseconds of our perception, combined with a
prediction of about the next 40 milliseconds.
This, but with a variable measure. The “past” are those events within our perception and memory that form the basis for the mind’s hypothesis of how the world works while the “future” is our prediction of how the world will work based on that hypothesis. The “present” is the amount of time it takes to synthesize the past, apply the hypothesis and predict the future in order to initiate an action. The “present” varies in measured time to fit the time needed to process the past and predict the future for the subject action. My decision to pick up a pencil has a very short present – I have done it many times in the past, there are few variables with very little volatility in past experiences and my synthesis/action process is almost automatic as I don’t really even think about the act of picking up the pencil. My decision on whether to move to a new city requires an expanded present as it will take some time to synthesize the past and all of its variables in order to fit into an acceptable predictive model – will this move make me happy?
It seems the sense of “I – ness” or an experiencer of an experience occurs after the event has occurred. In other words, the event happens or there is stimuli, our central nervous system processes the data, and then a sense of “I ” emerges. However, as a Buddhist once said, “I don’t have any answer, I’m a non-prophet”.
There is no time like the present. Literally
Interesting. Interesting because I too have been thinking about time for some time now. 🙂 Only, I don’t think about the present, I think about the past. And the fact that the past has no beginning. It’s easy to conceptualize the future, we know it will go on forever. But to conceptualize the past is mind bending. You can go back into the past indefinitely. Before the big bang. Before 100,000,000,000,000,000 to the 100,000,000,000,000 power big bangs. And then do it again an infinite amount of times. To me, the past and the future don’t mean anything anymore. Only the present…
Except that time did not exist before the Big Bang. That’s why it cannot be asked “what was happening before that.” The big bang is when time and space began.
I like Hawking’s comment: Its like asking what is South of the South Pole?
Well, that’s one idea anyway. Many physicists these days aren’t totally convinced that nothing came before – they would prefer there to be some universe-generating mechanism that they could ideally derive from first principles. So far, all they have are the laws of quantum mechanics, which only pushes the problem back one level – i.e., where did the laws come from?
Well, I’d assume that’s necessarily an infinite regress, if one takes that route.
I agree, it may well be turtles (universes) all the way down. We can’t wrap our brains around the concepts of infinity or eternity, but that’s probably what we’re dealing with, however nonsensical that sounds. In the eternal inflationary cosmological model, our universe is just one bubble in an infinite, eternal “froth”.
On a side note, I personally suspect that black holes might eventually be implicated as being universe-generating mechanisms, but that lies in the realm of sheer speculation for now, of course.
I’ve been reading quite a bit about time lately; namely, books from theoretical physicists Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli and Brian Greene (there’s always a book from Brian Greene and one from Bart Ehrman on my bedside table).
Time, in general, is probably the single most mysterious (emerging – as it seems in quantum gravity theories?) quality of the universe, but as far as the issue of present is concerned, I think Einstein has kind of settled that with what is called “relativity of simultaneity”, a by-product of his theory of special relativity.
In short, Einstein showed that time elapses differently for two observers that are in relative motion between them. And since their (moving) clocks fall out of synchronization, they have a different notion of what events are simultaneous; they don’t agree on which things happen at the same instant. This means that there can’t be an objective, ubiquitous “now” – assuming that an objective now encapsulates every event happening at a certain moment in time.
I have no idea if my comment addressed your queries at all, but I guess I would recapitulate my take as “there’s no such thing as present – only a persistent illusion of it”.
Although physics has some interesting things to say about time itself, it seems to me the phenomenon of our experienced present is much more wrapped up in our experience of consciousness itself. While we are still waiting (in my opinion) for a fully developed theory of consciousness, the present, as we experience it is simply (?) our experience of consciousness from moment to moment. Although time itself is thought by most physicists to be continuous, and consequently infinitely divisible, our experienced present cannot be. Whatever consciousness is, it involves the brain, and the timing of neuron activity which can be measured at no greater than milliseconds, although our perception of this activity is probably much slower given all the different brain processes that must be involved. . So our “present” is our moment-to-moment conscious experience divisible into something like tenths of a second at most.
OK, an attempt at a short(-ish) answer:
One issue is that there are two quite different questions being asked here:
1] If the question is “What is Time?” in an (accessible) Physics-y sense, my recommendation would be to look to Sean Carroll, either his book “From Eternity to Here” or his course “The Physics of Time” (from The Great Courses) which covers the same material.
2] If the question is “How do our minds *perceive* Time —or more specifically ‘The Present’?”, again I would point to Carroll’s book where he also discusses this topic. Alternatively, when you were working on (if I recall correctly) “Jesus Before the Gospels” you mentioned that you had been reading Daniel Schacter on memory. Although Schacter’s focus isn’t specifically on the perception of Time/Present he certainly discusses related aspects of this topic, so you might consider looking back through his stuff.
A couple follow-up notes on Sean Carroll’s work:
Concerning his course for Great Courses you might be particularly interested in Lecture 15 “The Perception of Time” and Lecture 16 “Memory and Consciousness”.
Concerning the more “physics-y” aspects of these questions, Prof Carroll did a “CoViD-Shutdown” project that resulted in an excellent series of videos “Biggest Ideas in the Universe” (available on YouTube).
I heartily recommend the series to anyone who might be interested in an overview of the ideas current in the field of modern Physics (the course is pretty accessible but does require some effort on the behalf of the listener); but of particular interest here is video #5 in the series, “Time” (and the follow-up Q&A video).
Hope these are of some help.
Yup, Sean Carroll got me thinking seriously about some of this. Thanks.
If reality only exist in the “present” and the “present” is infinitely short then does reality ever exist? If these type of questions frequent your mind then I suggest you purchase a Central European wall clock that has a small bird behind a normally closed door but once an hour the door opens and bird comes forth and announces your state of mind by verbalizing “coo, coo”.
I’ve just completed the draft for a book proposing a new theory of time. My theory accepts all experimental evidence, can demonstrate the truth of its premises, and show (through a formal syllogism) the validity of its logic. I’m currently working with an editor toward completion. If you are interested in hearing about the theory, please contact me at [email protected].
I like what Dr John Tallant of Nottingham University, specialist in the metaphysics of time, has to say: “If I’m playing with my daughter, this stuff makes no sense.” Who am I to disagree? 🙂
Link: https://youtu.be/zw6hS_gy9MY
We seem to distinguish time only by motion… we measure it in terms of motion relative to other motion. As organic beings our capacity to detect that motion is mostly visual, a sense that we know functions as a series of still images. So, what we perceive as “now” is one or more still images. I suspect that holds true even if we close our eyes. Hawking called it the psychological time arrow which is pointed along with the thermodynamic time arrow at the greatest disorder or entropy. For further confusion and ompheloskepsis see : A Brief History of Time; Chapter 9: The Arrow of Time; Hawking, Stephen, 1988.
Spent 5 decades trying to understand Time.. So good luck.. as “Time” as we can prove and theorize is a property of the Physical Universe. Here is the real “kicker” to try to wrap your mind around regarding time (according to Einstein). Time and Space are linked and the gravity we experience is the curving of time and space around a mass. You may want to watch this short video as it expains very well in laymans terms. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2JCoIGyGxc&feature=emb_rel_end). Time is like a river flowing one direction (future) however it is thought possible to “jump” time into the past and present.. When we observe stars and galaxies we are seeing the past.
Whatever God is… is outside of the physical universe thus timeless. I’ve changed my inquiries to exploring what is conscience? Most science have a dualistic understanding of it as both physical (brain) and “mind”. The brain is the recieving instument but little is known about the “mind” broadcast to the brain. Universal consciousness I find very intreging. My hypothesis is that such universal consciousness may be God with different “recievers” doing different tasks. The process order of Gen 1 is spot on.. heavens created earth
According to this article, the “present” is 2.5 to 3 seconds long. Enjoy!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjd4yd/how-long-is-right-now
“So what do you think?”
Thanks for asking, Bart.
I think I’d prefer Biblical scholarship.
Many thanks! <3
I get it. But this is the most commented post in a very long time. Whatever time is.
Great post! (and of course I have to add my two cents to it!) I will say up front that if you can figure out what time is, you better dust off your tuxedo, cuz you’re heading to Stockholm to pick up your Nobel prize. Zeno had a good idea, but like Einstein, his hangup was an analog conceptualization of space (the idea that distance can be infinitely subdivided). And even though Einstein proved the atomic theory of matter and ushered in the quantum revolution, he couldn’t wrap his brain around how this might apply to the fabric of spacetime itself. The newest thinking in physics is that there is in fact an indivisible unit of both space and time (the Planck length and the Planck unit of time). One suggestion I would make if you wish to venture into this territory would be to familiarize yourself with Einstein’s Relativity theory as much as possible when contemplating what constitutes the “present” moment (spoiler alert: there *is* no present moment, or, rather, it is different for everyone depending on their particular position and velocity relative to someone else).
Putative length of time beyond which the notion of events ceases to exist according to what we know of physics MAYBE-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
If correct, at least conceptually, it does mean there is a definable, quantifiable minimum to time in an objective cosmic scale.
But what about when it comes to humans? That’s hard for me. What exactly goes on when we make the decisions we do in our brains? Those are electrical signals that fire off based on uh cosmic predestination/(free will?!?) I don’t know.
For Christians, how many plank lengths ago did God Allmighty asexually father Christ His son into existence as the second/third person of the trinity? Was it pre eternity as in, a time beyond time? Or a definable time? Maybe most would prefer to go with the former. Why do so at that time and not a moment later or earlier? Divine mystery. Did sex originate then or are the male terms Father and Son after the fact impositions on a parent-child godhood? Time has forever challenged theologians philosophers and scientists alike. The very act of thinking it through seems to take time, defy intuition and leave all who grasp for its true understanding unfulfilled.
Recommended reading:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/where-do-space-time-and-gravity-come-from-20220504/
Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?
My mind is strangely comforted by the fact that the second on a current standard atomic clock is marked by the regular vibrations of an ensemble of cesium atoms. The exact speed of this vibration is 9,192,631,770 cycles per second. The large number let’s me off the hook from having to keep track.
The present is going to be relative depending on where you stand. By the time you comprehend what is 100 feet, 100 miles, 100 light years away, the moment has already passed and that which you’re perceiving is only an image of something that has already passed before. If I gaze at something that is a 100 light years away, I’m looking at an image of something long passed and its “true” present is completely unknowable to me.
I appreciated Bruce Mailina’s discussion on how time functioned in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of Jesus. People were present oriented first, past oriented second (and only in terms of how it illuminated the present) and future oriented last of all (if at all). He determines the present as including a general sense of now that would include what we consider to be the immediate future. The harvest was part of the same “now” as the time of planting and the birth of a baby is part of the same “now” as the time of pregnancy. Our obsession with measurement looks for something more particular and precise but that’s on us. I think the “present” is the “kairos” we’re currently in.
Great post, my thoughts: As humans, we think of three times, the past, the present, and the future. In the Bible, we’re told of a fourth time, “eternity,” and while we can’t comprehend it, we think of it as “the present–‘the now’–going on forever.” The Bible has a distinct language for each of these four times. The past is expressed in historical language, but also in the prophets and in the ‘promises’ of Jesus, who told us in the past what to expect is ‘coming’ in the future. We’re told that there was a beginning way back in the past, and that if we can only ‘remember’ that far back, we can get to that beginning in the end. The present is expressed in present-tense talk, i.e., “The kingdom IS within you,” “I AM WHO I AM,” and “I am always with you.” The present is the only time we can philosophically confirm, for it is always with us. The future is coming–no avoiding it–but ‘the good news’ is we can change our future–from bad to good–by our beliefs and good deeds here and now. Whew! Two hundred words, and the end has come. “It is finished.”
As soon as we think about the present it’s already in the past. Without memory there is no awareness of the present. It’s like thinking about consciousness. Consciousness is ‘intensional’’. In other words it’s always consciousness ‘of’’ something. When we think about consciousness we objectify it. And that puts it in the past. Consciousness and the present are coterminous. They can’t be known directly, but we can’t deny them because the very act of denial is an act that occurs in the present. Consciousness and the present are constantly running ahead of us. Failure to grasp this has caused most philosophers, and scientists, to miss the point entirely. Keep that in mind if you read the literature about Zeno’s Paradoxes. Does this make it any clearer what the ‘present’ is? No, but it tells us what it isn’t. All we can say is that it is a condition of our experience. Otherwise we couldn’t even think about it. Thinking takes place in the present. We know intuitively that there is a present, but like everything else, the more we think about it the less we understand it. There are no Absolutes in Philosophy, or anywhere else.
Of course, linguistically, tense falls under the category of deixis, or parameters by which we contextualize our utterances to a set of parameters of time, place, and speech relationships (who is talking, who is being addressed, who is being spoken of). We have terms in English to indicate nearer or farer proximity: this, that, here, there, etc. We have temporal deictics: now, then, etc. The grammatical category of person, first, second, third, contextualizes speech act participation. As many know from studying Greek, what we call “tense” is often a combination of tense (contextualization of a speech act in time) and aspect, (characterization of whether an event is described as ongoing, completed, iterative, etc). English *grammatically* has an interesting tense system that primarily distinguishes past from non-past, so we can say, “I’m going to Chicago today/tomorrow,” but not *”yesterday.” Your post really got me thinking about many things, and helped me realize how vanishingly little I know with any confidence about deixis. But key: some of your problems seem linguistic.
I would say that we do live in a present, but we cannot absolutely in the present *report* on it or *reflect* on it, because the implied thought “takes” time.
Interesting digression from the usual set of topics. My own ruminations:
– The argument that the past does not exist because it cannot be duplicated and we have no direct access to it, is making a mistake common to amateur philosophising: conflating ontology with epistemology. The mistake is easily illustrated with examples. Due to technological limitations, we don’t have direct access to what exist in centre of the planet and we may never will. But it is clearly fallacious to conclude that we have reasons to doubt the existence of the earth’s core. There are ontological facts of the matter what materials constitute the core, their physical state and density. The limitation is epistemic – we don’t know with certainty, though with our best scientific theories coupled with indirect observations (e.g. measuring seismic waves travelling through the earth’s core during a major earthquake) we have reasonable conjectures on what those facts are. The same is true with study of history – both human history and evolutionary history.
– Zeno’s paradoxes relate to the nature of continuous time and space, not the unreality of past-present. They don’t arise if spacetime is discrete, which might be the case under a quantum theory of spacetime.
In your transition from liberal Christianity to agnosticism/atheism, did you consider or try Deism? In a lot of ways it seems like Christianity, especially in ethics, but with little or no superstition and without the problems created by Christ’s purported divinity. It tried to be based on reason and what can be discovered about God in nature. It aligned itself with science, and aspired to be a universal religion. It was also able to accommodate an afterlife and ultimate justice.
Of course it doesn’t solve the problem of horrible suffering but at least it doesn’t expect Divine intervention either. Nevertheless God would still be culpable for suffering resulting from his original design.
Now that I think about it I wonder how similar Deism and liberal Christianity are?
I’ve always thought it was possible, but I’ve never seen any reason to believe it myself. It just seems to be a hold hover from theism, once the involvement of God with the world is taken out of the equation.
God said, “let there be time!” and everything else is a consequence of that! The shortened book of Genesis .
Two thoughts: the first is a corollary of Rene Descartes, “I think; therefore, I am.” The other is a metaphor. Expanding on Descartes, while I am thinking, I am a part of now, the Present; when I die and my thoughts cease, I belong to the Past. The metaphor requires the experience of having witnessed the line of combustion crossing a sheet of high cotton content paper. Now, the Present, is that line of flameless combustion; the Past is ashes; the Future is fuel for the present.
1] “I tend to agree with this crowd, at least for now. I don’t see how there can be a present. Even though I know there is a past and a future.”
OTOH, one could argue that this is exactly backwards.
That is:
The Past no longer exists. (We have only our memories/records of it.)
The Future does not yet exist. (We have only our speculations/anticipation about it.)
Only the Present can truly be said to exist in any meaningful way.
2] Concerning Zeno’s paradox:
The problem is that Zeno didn’t understand the mathematics of infinity.
Roughly speaking, his argument was “There are an infinite number of steps in the path. Therefore there’s no way to complete the trip.”
But as any modern first year calculus student understands, this reasoning is incorrect. While it’s true that you travel half the remaining distance with each step, each steps takes only half the amount of time.
In short what Zeno didn’t appreciate is that it’s possible to add up an infinite series of numbers and still get a finite answer.
As an example the infinite series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + …. can be shown to equal 2.
Reflecting on Bennet’s comment: time is basically a postulate that particles in space will persist.
Ran out of ‘chars” in first comment and wanted to expand on why I diverted my focus from “Time” to conscience. As I said in first comment God is transendent of Time as time is a physical phenomona. The “Mind” or Conscience also is transendent of Time. We relive past in present and we sometimes see future in Present so the mind is not just filled with memories of past. In my early 20’s I started having future thoughts and dreams that later played out exactly as forseen. It was a time of high stress in my life, so I sought out a psychologist as someone to tell this to as all of my friends would think I was crazy. He tested me having me tell him of events I had envisioned then after a time he would ask if they came true.. Every one of them played out within a matter of weeks. Events involving other people separate from any interaction from me. Events I played no part in thus could not manipulate. One involved him and his wife. So I’m convinced that there is “Time” outside of physics… That all stoped long ago thus led to interest in time
Future minus Past = Present
I consider both past and future to be infinite (despite the Big Bang and it’s opposite, the Big Crunch) . The difference between the two is Now. But since infinite minus infinite equals nothing then Now does not exist. Instead Now is just the Future becoming the Past.
Imaginary numbers help me understand this idea. The square root of a negative can not exist. But add that beautiful magical element of i and the root does exist: 2i.
However, returning to the formula of Infinity less Infinity = nothing the solution is Nothing + P. Where P stands for the magical element of the Present.
It’s a paradox where the Present does and does not exist because as soon the Future moment becomes the Present the Present moment becomes the Past.
Another aspect of that Time measures only the finished past and not begun future. But in Time there is no Present except with the addition of the magical element called the Present.
I love paradoxes. They always leave room for more.
I can’t begin to explain the math, but the concepts of time and whether it really exists are big questions in the world of physics. The speed of light, relative motion, entropy, and whether examining the macro world or the quantum world effect how the math works. Some theories posit that time is a string of singular “now” moments at the Planck scale that are something like beads on a string. In short, what is “now” depends on the question being asked and the equations being used to answer it. I’ve not read all the comments, I’m sure others have pointed out the excellent sites covering the physics of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
“Planck scale refers to quantities of space, time, energy and other units that are similar in magnitude to corresponding Planck units.”
Prof Ehrman, since Judaism doesn’t recognize the concept of original sin how do Jews usually understand the passage of Psalm 51:5 and what is your understanding of that passage?
You’ll need to quote teh passage and then ask your question (in the same comment) so other readers of the blog will know what you’re referring to and then make sense of my answer.
“Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” Psalm 51:5 New International Version. Prof Ehrman, since Judaism doesn’t recognize the concept of original sin how do Jews usually understand this passage and what is your understanding of this passage? Thanks!
Yes, that’s speaking in metaphor; it simply means that I’ve been sinful from the “get go.” It’s kind of like when a prophet says he was “sent” from God. That doesn’t literally mean he pre-existed. The Christian idea of “original sin” as it has come down to us is, as you probably know, an idea not clearly formulated until the time of Augustine in the early fifth century. He *bases* it on his reading of Paul, in part; but Paul didn’t ever express it in that way (or even close)
To add to my rather tongue-in-cheek earlier comment, I think our difficulty with the concept of time largely comes from viewing it from one of two different perspectives – from “inside” the box (where we live, entropy runs the show, and we perceive an arrow of time), and from “outside” the box (sometimes what physicists call the “view from no-when”), where we would perceive the universe from a God’s-eye view in which all events – past, present, and future, are “frozen” as if trapped in a block of ice (Einstein’s appropriately named block universe idea). The impasse comes in our seeming inability to hold both perspectives as equally valid – equally real – at the same time.
Here’s a neat example of your brain altering your perception of time (or “the present moment”) to make your experience of the world “make better sense”.
Close your eyes and have someone simultaneously touch your big toe and the tip of your nose.
(You can do this by yourself, but it seems more convincing with a helper.)
You will notice that you experience the two touches as happening at the same time.
But if you think about it, since your toe is significantly farther away from your brain than your nose you _might_ reasonably expect the two “touches” to feel like they’re happening at different times.
(You could try to explain this discrepancy as resulting from the fact that your nose and toe are “close enough” together that the nerve-signals arrive at the brain at effectively the same time. But this isn’t correct. Your brain and nervous-system are more than capable of monitoring and resolving differences in time far smaller than this.)
Rather, what is happening is that the brain “knows” your toe is much farther away; consequently it adjusts your *perception* of “when” the events occurred in order to make them —simultaneous sensations at different points on your body— “feel” simultaneous.
Cool, huh?
And if you’ll excuse me, while it’s not exactly a “perceptual” issue, here’s one more cool example of how the brain and the nervous system alters what “the present moment” can mean.
The next time you see a major league pitcher throw a blazing fast curve ball keep this in mind:
By the time the pitcher comes out of the stretch (that is, when the pitching hand holding the baseball, moves past the pitcher’s shoulder) the nerve impulses controlling the complicated release of the ball are already traveling down the arm in order to reach the hand by the time they are needed to do their job.
I believe the pitcher comes out of his stretch long before getting in position to release the ball. It’s the moment he moves from his mandatory stationary position. 🙂
Fair enough. (That’s what I get for trying to use a baseball —or more generally any sporting— term. 😉 )
But the basic, fundamental point still holds. How synchronization in our brains and our nervous systems works is a wondrous thing.
And how we perceive it or how it “seems” to us to be working is very often quite far from what’s actually going on.
Most of your reflections involve the physics of time, but a good bit of it seems to be about our perceptions of it, like what does ‘now’ really entail. What we perceive is a highly processed creation of our brains and all of that processing takes, well, time. ‘Now’ is actually a few 100 milliseconds behind actual time and our brains have a few tricks to keep us from noticing this. E.g., if you have someone touch a toe and your face at the same time, you will feel the touches as simultaneous even though the signals from the toe arrive substantially later. You should check out some of David Eagleman’s videos, he’s done a lot of fascinating research on this and he’s really good at explaining it, he’s up there with the likes of you as a lecturer. He has even tested the idea that time slows down when you’re in an accident, it’s a great story involving dropping grad students from great heights. It turns out it isn’t something like thinking faster in dire circumstances.
You might look into Julian Barbour, a physicist who claims time doesn’t exist, he’s no flake.
“A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist” – “Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only “partially” ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” in a far-off galaxy. The present is a localized rather than global phenomenon.
“And song, as Augustine observed, is the awareness of time. It is time.”
“Then the song fades and ceases. “The silver thread is broken, the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well, the earth returns to dust” -“And it is fine like this. We can close our eyes, rest. This all seems fair and beautiful to me. This is time.”
from “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli
Bart, I’m going to be provocative and argue that we should listen to philosophers and theologians on time, not physicists 😀! The one group that we shouldn’t listen to about time is physicists (unless they have had training in the philosophy of time). Julian Barber told us that time doesn’t exist. That was nonsense, it is nonsense and will always be nonsens! Many physicists tell us the time is reversible and is simply the result of the second law of thermodynamics. More past, present and future nonsense! The second law of dynamics presupposes time. In order to have less disorder followed by more disorder, time has to pass to separate the two conditions. If the second law of thermodynamics reversed, it would not be time that reversed, rather, it would be the order of events within time that reversed ie the law reversing. The future will always be the future, time is more fundamental than the second law. More criticism of physicists re time coming up …. see next comment
Part 2 of philosophers & theologians vs physicists on time 😀. Another big group of physicists tell us that time is just one dimension of the block universe of space-time. More triple tensed nonsense! Time is very different to space. Space is stationary. As long as there are events or movement, time will always pass or flow. Time is the separation of events, engendered by causation in which two or more events in a causal relationship are separated and manifests as the maximum speed of causation (c). Without that separation. everything would happen all at once which means everything would be *one* and nothing would actually happen. So events and causation are dependent on time and vice versa. If the universe is all that there is (the definition of the universe which multiverse physicists seem to have forgotten), then, as Augustine said, there would be no time and therefore no *before* the universe began.
Ahhh… Time! – a bit like driving down the highway and trying to pick the exact point in time when you pass a sign post.
There are a few great responses within this thread, but they seem to only deal with how the mind perceives the present.
How about the rock that is sitting in the desert; mindlessly encountering the elements one moment at a time or the mountain range that is slowly being eroded by millions of years of weathering; the cloud that is ever changing shape as it is pushed along by the wind… and so on? Each responding to the dictates of time, moment by moment; yet there is not a mind present to perceive each individual moment.
Imagine yourself stepping out side of the physical and being able to view the whole universe and all the complex mechanisms that are bound up within.
The present interacts with the perception of the individual, one moment at a time; yet the present is also everywhere at the same time… if viewed from outside of the physical.
It reminds me of how believers try to unite; yet disentangle Jesus, the man from Jesus, the God.
Present = Present Continuum?
A physicist colleague of mine used to joke that he would show his watch when his non-physicist friends ask him “what is the meaning of time for physicists”. The equations of physics (like Newton’s second law or Maxwell’s equations of Electromagnetism, etc) that describe nature are time-invariant, that is, they work both forward and backward in time. However, we all observe that time has a direction. This popular science article from physicist Frank Wilczek (the Nobel Prize in Physics 2004) does not directly address your question of what present is, but argues that there may be a deep connection between the missing mass of the universe and the direction of time. Perhaps you’d enjoy reading it https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-axions-may-explain-times-arrow-20160107/
For about 15 years, I volunteered nearly every Saturday at a local prison, doing a nondenominational Bible study. An inmate, an expert at “doing time”, taught me a poem about time, titled The Gift:
The Gift
Yesterday is history,
tomorrow is a mystery,
today is a gift,
which is why we call it
The Present.
~eric.
MeridaGOround dot com
Just a suggestion, but I’d like to see what you and the readership have to say about the Fermi Paradox.
I hope others can chime in! My personal guess is that there is life elsewhere, that none of it is anything like us, and if there are superior beings out there the laws of physics are going to make it highly unlikely that we’ll be seeing any of them.
If I can make a book suggestion: “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Arik Kershenbaum.
The book has little discussion specifically about the Fermi Paradox, but Kershenbaum has a lot of thoughtful and well-reasoned things to say about the kinds of things we can reasonably expect to find in any life that exists elsewhere in the universe.
(And to return to Sean Carroll for a moment, Kershenbaum was recently a guest on Carroll’s “Mindscape” podcast:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/03/14/188-arik-kershenbaum-on-what-aliens-will-be-like/ )
I think there is probably lots of alien life out there, including perhaps in our own solar system, but what we would think of as intelligent life may be somewhat rare in the universe. The interstellar distances involved are also such that we probably won’t be seeing them anytime soon – I agree.
My suspicion is that what we think of as “intelligent life” — i.e., us — is a transitory phase that is followed by something that doesn’t manifest itself in ways we can recognize. Extinction would qualify, but so would further development into hyperintelligent beings who have better things to do than impress human-level life forms.
How so? There are thousands of individuals claiming they have been abducted by aliens. That they are here, and they are operating clandestinely with an agenda no one knows.
Now, one might write that off as hooey, but the odd thing about it is, these are people from all walks of life, going back to the 50s and 60s, long before ‘Communion’ was ever published, and the vast majority of the pretty much describe, in embarrassing detail, the same thing. That fact, is what I find compelling. I recommend a thorough reading of Dr. David Jacob’s (a historian) book, ‘Walking Among Us”. I think you will find it interesting.
Whose to say an advanced race of beings haven’t conquered the problem of timely interstellar travel? I think it would be arrogant to assume it is impossible.
I don’t think personal anecdotes are scientific data! Psychoanalysts have had some very interesting discussions about where these reports of abduction come from. I had a colleague in my department once teach an entire course on it; students took it becuase they thought, Wow, this will be cool! They were always massively disappointed because it was never cool at all.
My colleague maintainted that the narratives involved displacement that came from very bad incidents occurring in childhood, expressed in escape narratives with a particularly modern idiom that people readily thing in today (so that it’s no accident that these experiences started precisely in the space age), disabledupes{1d1eb38172996f7da561f35763eab37b}disabledupes
“ Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.
They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises.
Rather childish really.”
— Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
Time is one of the four dimensions of space-time, and mathematically can be compared to them. Suppose you are on a road facing east. The expanse behind you on the east-west line is like your past in the time dimension. Similarly, the expanse before you is like your future. Looking down, you see that your feet straddle a point on that east-west line. Similarly, your body straddles the past and the future in time and our senses see only the fluidity of time’s passage. For us, the “present” is whatever interval along the time-line we sense, or “feel”, we are in.
Here’s an after thought. What about someone who understands time less than we do? Case in point is Merlin, my Great Dane. Merlin seems to have no concept of time in terms of short or long. I go out for an hour, or, I go out for a day, or longer. On my return Merlin is thrilled. He is happy without regard or difference to how long its been. I wonder if Merlin doesn’t understand something I dont…..
Yup, living in the moment. Study your dog!
First thoughts turned to my early college days and reading Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” and “Nausea”. But that is just me. Thanks for sparking some memories.
I am a physicist, at least in the sense that I have a physics degree.
I think that most of these questions tend toward the philosophical end of the spectrum. I suspect that most of the physicists I know would concede that each of us exists in our own present, but we won’t agree on each other’s present because special relativity is weird–for instance, if I am on a train I can synchronize a clock at the front and a clock at the back of the train, so that any observer on the train will agree that they are synchronized, and observers on the train next to me that is travelling parallel to me and in the same direction and at the same speed will agree that the clocks are synchronized. But observers on the platform, or on a train with a different velocity will necessarily see that my clocks are out of sync, because to them, I started the clocks at different times!
I am mildly surprised that no one has mentioned Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, i.e. that the more information you have about an object’s location, the less you can say about its velocity. If you consider time as a 4th coordinate of physical location, the more you know about the “time location,” the less you can say about the velocity of the object, but of course the object still has a velocity through all 4 coordinates.
This particularly relates to Xeno’s paradoxes. He completely ignores the velocity of the arrow. Couple that with the idea of limits, as understood in calculus, and there are no real paradoxes.
Just to say the Uncertainty Principle is a bit stronger than that. It’s actually not the case that an atom actually has a position or velocity but that we can’t learn about both perfectly. It more represents a limit to the concepts of position and velocity, i.e. that it’s not meaningful to ascribe atoms positions and momenta outside of measurements. See the Kochen Specker theorem for a proper account of this, that microscopic objects can’t be given observation independent properties.
I cannot answer your questions but I believe they will be impossible to answer without talking about phenomenology, perception, and experience.
There appears to be a number of modern physicists arguing that time in an illusion. In my view, given the simple fact that past is memory, and future is imagination, which is to day, both past and future exist in the abstract, which is to say, both the past and future do not actually exist in any material way. Therefore, in my opinion, and it is the opinion of a layman, ‘time’ is the illusion brought about by the juxtaposition of recollection and imagination upon the current. That being said, since absolutes are unobtainable, there is no absolute moment. So, as one attempts to capture the current moment, alas, that, too, is impossible for it is like the dog trying to chase it’s tail.
However, the ancient sages tell us such is possible through meditation and the achievement of ‘enlightenment’, AKA ‘samadhi’ ‘self-realization’ etc.
I think it was Socrates who made a similar statement, but there is one thing I am 100% certain of, and that is, the older I get, the more I’m convinced I know absolutely nothing about the hows an wherefores of existence.
And, was it that philosopher whose name starts with a K ( I could never spell it) “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived’, (paraphrased that way by the late OSHO).
Frankly, though I believe mother nature will let us in on many of her secrets, but the ultimate truth of the universe, she’s going to keep that one for herself, forever.
It seems that there are 3 difficult questions: 1. What is time? 2. What is the present? 3. Is time fundamental, or is it derivative from physics/mathematics? Time seems to be a continuously extending or moving way of *separating* such that events can occur and causation may be active. Whether time arises from causation or vice versa is difficult, but I think the former. If so, this would be in keeping with the laws of The universe be more primary than time (? The logos). The present does not exist in physics because it is an infinitesimally thin line between the past and the future, but it does exist for conscious beings as an artefact of brain function via holding in working memory the recent past, together with anticipation of what may happen next. William James father of psychology, called this the specious present. Its length is arbitrary and depends on what events the attention is focused on when making this comparison of the recent past with the anticipated future.
From the physics perspective, Einstein
pointed out that the speed of light (which is the fastest that information travel or the fastest that causation can act across a distance) results in simultaneity being relative to one’s frame of reference. However, an omniscient God unlimited by the speed of information/light would be consistent with Newtons absolute time and hence consistent with absolutely simultaneity. Space is a three-dimensional set of coordinates which represents energy spent over a period of time, or from a conscious perspective, effort exerted in a particular way (walking or running or moving one’s arm from one point to another – note the circularity because it’s difficult to define Space without movement). Many from east and west have stated that space (and the rest of the physical) is an illusion: Maya. Parmenides, Zeno, the Buddhists, Plotinus and now modern mathematical physicists such as Max Tegmark and Stephen Wolfram chime the same note. I do think that space is derivative from time and causality and that both time and consciousness are very fundamental.
Within physics time is treated quite differently in quantum theory and relativity.
In Classical Physics time is essentially treated as in everyday life: a label on events/number on a clock. This culminates in Relativity’s approach where time and space join together into spacetime and the universe is treated as a single four-dimensional geometry/shape with time being simply particular “slices” of that shape, much like how different latitudes are “slices” of the North/South direction of the Earth’s surface.
In Quantum Theory however there is a fundamental distinction between what has occurred and what may occur in the Future since the theory uses probabilities to model future events. In Quantum theory “time” is more an observer’s own internal ordering of events they have witnessed rather than some external “objective” quantity.
These two views aren’t incompatible, Schwinger and Tomonaga got Nobel prizes partially for reconciling them, but research in Quantum Gravity strongly suggests the Quantum one is probably the fundamental one.
This then makes the question of the “present”, the question of “how” do events become true/occur for an observer. There’s no real answer to this currently and it’s one of the things quantum theory is cryptically silent on.
First, tell me/us what “consciousness” is. Then we can discuss ‘time’ as related to ‘it.’
Sincerely, your Bereitschaftspotential.
Consciousness is experience of any or all of: sensations and perceptions of coming from outside the body, thoughts, feelings and emotions internally. It is the most fundamental entity in the universe, so it cannot be described or defined in terms of anything else, hence using the synonym ‘experience’ makes my definition circular. Time is the consciousness of separate events occurring in an asymmetrical irreversible causal sequence. Sincerely, readiness potential.
Consciousness is a mystery, percieved almost as a bottomless pit, and I do not think we get around it easily.
Consciousness is basically the invisible “I” ness, or “consciousness” to measure what physics has always considered to be the basic fundamentals of what everything is built, which is “Time”, “Space” and “Mass”. Consciousness becomes a particularly clear factor when you look at it through the eyes of quantum physics, which simply said, there is nothing” out there “until there is something” in there “in our mind. Within this perception, consciousness becomes a transformative action and becomes an essential factor of the physical universe. Consciousness is the element of measuring or understanding time, mass and space.
Since the mentioned building blocks of physics (time, space) are evidently relative in relation to speed up to a point (speed of light) where it ceases to exist, suggests that the percieved reality is a relativation of space and time through the psyche.
This might give “conciouissness” a proper setting to discuss “time”
What is time? Short answer, no one really knows. Longer answer is that time as we perceive it doesn’t actually exist. In general, nothing exists as we perceive it. For example, our visual perception of the world around us is almost entirely made up by our brains since color doesn’t really exist in the physical world. Pretty weird when you think about it. So what is that stuff you’re looking at? Well, it’s not what you perceive it as. It’s not green or red or white or black. It’s just stuff. Time is similar. At a quantum level, time doesn’t exist. There is no past or future. There is a constant “now”. Quantum mechanics tells us that everything exists in a cloud of possibilities. The world as we know it comes out of this cloud only when the underlying fields fluctuate. Particles are always coming in&out of existence as a result of this. So the “now” is basically the moment when things from the cloud of possibilities become real.
[My comment seems to have had no past, present, or future…. Wonder what I did — or didn’t do! : )
My tuppence:]
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Fascinating question — and responses!!
Your question made me wonder what Process thinkers say…. and this essay by David Ray Griffin makes sense to me —
“Time in Process Philosophy”
“The past is settled actuality, the future involves potentiality to be settled. The present, the ‘now’ between past and future, is assumed to be the time in which potentialities are being settled. Constant becoming refers to the fact that this ‘now’ does not stand still but always divides a different set of events into past and future.”
http://www.anthonyflood.com/griffintimeinprocessphilosophy.htm
Never wanting to pin anything down, this appeals to me! Thanks for the fun exploring!!
Did not the philosophers of old tell us that everything is in a state of flux; you cannot step in the same river twice … if I am just “being”, I could understand what the present is. But I am not. I am always in a state of becoming and so the “now” is an illusion to this three-dimensional person. Perhaps through yoga and meditation and contemplation we can still the body and then the mind and thus slow the river down and get a better sense of the “now”. Even then, as the Bhagwat Gita tells us, God would have to reach down and draw us into his field for us to understand that state of being, what mystics call extasy.
I have put this matter to thought on several occasions, after being asked that by those who like to delve into both Astro-physiology and/or Philosophy. Ever since Einstein tossed in the idea, the Relativity of Time, loads of people have been playing with this. I have always felt, time is merely a passing of moments, no matter what the circumstances. In my view, time is all relative to the factors around it, be it biological, physics or atomic.
And in life, that could be when you discovered the point you changed your life, the point of no return, or the point you realized that your life was not really your own, as long as there are other people in yours. You can’t change time, but you can change what follows.
The only other approach I can offer, that possibly plays with the time factor, is probably visions, signs, dreams and prophecies. But I do not necessarily see these episodes as time warps, but more like windows, or perhaps, a touch from God. These I’ve had.
Wow! This one generated a TON of interest. Great post, especially’cuz it has *zip* to do with the NT!
I am trying to decide if I prefer a classical Newtonian now, or the Quantum version…Neil Tyson might argue that, according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, there is no past, or present,or future, but only an “is” that always…is! So what is “now”? Well, everything that is not “then”…
The 2nd Law is actually closely tied to the notion of past/future since entropy increases into the future. Some would be tempted to go further and say entropy defines the direction of time, but current physics at least doesn’t fully support that since there isn’t really a well-defined notion of the entropy of the whole universe.
David Mermin wrote an essay in 2014 on “The Present” in physics, called “What I think about Now”, that sums up all physics can currently say on the topic. It’s not enough to answer Dr. Ehrman’s question, but it’s a fun read.
Thanks. I had the sense that the one-directionality of time was connected with entropy and that the sense was that the second law necessarily applied to everything that emerged from teh Big Bang (i.e., the universe). So that’s not so? Is there something to read on that that a non-phycist (think: NT scholar 🙂 ) could make sense of?
This may be of help Prof. Ehrman – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKbJ9leUNDE
I tried to find a nice accessible introduction to these issues, unfortunately all were fairly technical (but see below).
The essential issue is that entropy is not known to be well-defined outside of very specific situations for very specific systems. So not only might the notion of “the entropy of the universe” make little sense, even the “entropy of a mouse” probably makes little sense.
The only non-academic source I found about this is actually this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe. See the “Opposing Views” section first paragraph. I do have issues with it since it presents the opinions of people like Yngvson and Lieb, world experts on thermodynamics who gave the theory a logical mathematical foundation, with people like Sean Carroll whose main expertise is in a completely different area, as if they were on equal footing.
There are some nice quotes about the limitations on thermodynamical ideas in Section 2.1 of the second Chapter of André Thess’s wonderful “The Entropy Principle. Thermodynamics for the unsatisfied”, but they’re too large for this comment section.
It’s still jargony, but if you can access it it’s the simplest explanation I’ve found that I use in lectures.
Thanks.
Replying to KT above: I agree with pretty well everything you say, except that I would use the term inconceivable or ineffable rather than invisible to describe consciousness. I would also point out that consciousness is not just a quantitative measurer, but rather it is a qualitative experiencer and, as you point out, a declarer and confirmer of that which exists (including time). Furthermore, just adding to the thread, if you think about it deeply, time and space are those entities which divide or separate – both of which are necessary in order to have “a universe”. Contrastingly, Consciousness is that which unites I.e. brings together as one to a single subject. This encapsulates the 2 great branches of philosophy: ontology (the nature of being and existence) and epistemology (the nature of experiencing and knowing).
Thanks for your reply. If you read my post again, I hope you see that it is “inconceivable or ineffable” I try to say in my limited Norwegian-English, and I do not relate awareness to physical experience, but rather but not explicitly to the quality “experience/level of being”.
You divide consciousness into two philosophies. I do not, I think of them as one. The prerequisite for this perception is in fact the enormous subject concousness is, and which probably no one understands the full extent of. The reason I do not believe it is neither one or the other philosophy bases on my understanding of your being. I regard man as both physical, mental and spiritual which combines a the two philosophies of conciousness as you mentions. Concouisness is not a measure of time and space per se, but rather dealing with mental concepts that affect the physical and physically related mind, with reference to the quatum phisics fundamental understanding of the conciousness in relation to time, space and mass. This will apply to the “epistemology” philosophy you mention. The other “ontology” view relates much to our mental-spiritual and the spiritual side of ourself which reach beyond the mental concepts of time and space.
So I think we agree beside I will go to the extent to unify your two philosophical schools as one. These are (in my mind) both nessecary interdependent as we as are beings which operates within our own 3 aspects of being, the physical the mental and the spirtial.
Part 1/2
I heard the audio reading of this post this morning as I was doing my morning chores, and its profundity stayed with me throughout much of the day. As I did my evening chores I listened to the audiobook reading of “Talking to My Daughter about the Economy: or How Capitalism Works and How it Fails” by Yanis Varoufakis (which is great and also quite profound in a different sort of way) which he concludes with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the last of his “Four Quartets” –
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
– this put me in mind of the conundrum you posed at the start of my day. I hadn’t read the poem before, so I looked it up and was struck by how much the rest of the poem even more explicitly seems to be about this circular (?) nature of time…
“Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well”
Part 2/2
In the process of looking up the poem I saw that the last two lines quoted here are a refrain that is repeated throughout the poem, and then I subsequently learned that they are actually a quotation of a 14th-15th C. medieval mystic and the first known woman writer in the English language – Julian of Norwich – from her 16 Revelations of Divine Love. Apparently she was an anchoress, meaning that she was walled up in a tiny cell adjoining the church where she lived out her life for decades, dedicating herself to contemplation of God!
I’m guessing that you are already familiar with the works of T.S. Eliot and Julian of Norwich, but I wasn’t before today, and chances are if it hadn’t been for your post, I might not have pursued the quote that led me to learn about both of them this evening – so I don’t know what to tell you about the “present” but I wanted to let you know about how your ruminations inspired these discoveries for me 😉
In response to KT, why is “consciousness” such a mystery? It is simply the presence of an object to a subject, who gets a sense of the ‘self’ as knower in the act of knowing the object. And since most of the objects we are aware of are physical, they occupy space. Our thoughts do not occupy space when they are the ‘object’ of our thinking. But even then, there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to that act of knowing. And so if anything is a mystery, it is ‘time’ – a mental construct which seems to derive its meaning because we try to measure it with our clocks and sun-dials and calendars…
My sense is that most philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and … folk like me from teh outside, do consider it a major problem — that is, for those of us who understand the mind to be made up of cells which are made up of molecules, none of which (cells or molecules) is aware of existing….
It might seem that we are drifting from what the post was all about,,,the time and the present, but still it is not seperated from it.
I have no problem with an “Ego” which I might think you indirectly refer to, being the center of where all conscious content is related. If so, the “Ego” is often referred to as a “Self” detached so called “entity” (just as Revelation 17 calls “was and is not, but still is”) is mostly formed as a center of the field of consciousness, and for our personality the so-called “Ego” is often a subject of all personal act of conciousness.
I might understand from your post that it is the content (then it should be a psycic content at least) presented to the so called “Ego” that forms the criterion for conciousness, and that no content can’t be conscious unless it is presented to a subject. Well, in my mind that might limit the scope of what the subject is,,,at least. Theoretically, consciousness is unlimited to a point where it meets the so-called unknown. In psychological terms it is often called the unconscious, or maybe even collective.consciousness.Within this scope you come in touch with a much broader understanding of our own Self , all subjected to this field of consciousness. Within this field of consciousness I believe that we are more related to what can be called a mind-spiritual, or our spiritual being of our self.
Based on this, I understand your definition of and scope of consciousness to be inadequate.
This is a little late but you might enjoy this YouTube video on time by Arvin Ash. He explains complex physics issues simply.
https://youtu.be/mxb336no2rI
I thought I’d offer this interesting video discussing the latest in multiverse speculation. Doesn’t talk about time per se, but is the best and most concise exposition of multiverse ideas I know of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jmNzlTd09E