The Past and Present of the Self

Notes on a conversation with a friend ...

The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference.

On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of the brain - mostly the result of (unknowable) past influences on neurons and synapses in the "past" (going back years or more), plus the magical ability of the brain to factor in future events. Picture, for example, the state of consciousness of an outfielder as he tracks a fly ball.

The idea of "living in the present" (what most people think "Zen" is about) is certainly good advice. We should certainly train ourselves to do this as much as possible and to have that frame of mind available to offset our usual obsession with re-writing history or dreaming about the future. But I resist efforts to turn this advice into claims that there is some special, ultimate state of mind that is only available to special people after years of training. As you know, Buddhism has a "middle way". The essence of that is to do what you can and get on with life.

There is a related core idea we see gurus pushing, "no-self".  The self, like the "present', dissolves when you look at it too closely. Again, it's very useful to cultivate the ability to "stand back" and subtract your "self " from the way you experience the world. In some cases, we should be able to do this at the same time as we focus on the current moment, but we can do it in a wider sense when we make decisions and attempt to understand the world. The same is true of "time". It is useful to shake off our obsession with "now" and sit back to observe the sweep of history. This also applies to "here", where our "self" seems to be. We need to cut down the amount of time we spend on "current events". Perhaps I can coin a term to put up against the idea of "timelessness": we should seek to be "timeful" - aware of the richness of the past everywhere in the Universe as well as the possibilities the future holds. In such a state of mind, we see the individual "self" is nothing but a snowflake. I do like Wilber's that we have a "self" that extends beyond the individual. We can thus apprehend the past and future of our own culture, humanity itself, all life on Earth, and the Universe itself.

Time Machines and the Eternal Now

I just watched "Arrival" - not a bad SF piece. Possible spoiler - these days conquest of time seems to be a favorite theme. as it is in "Back to the Future", one of the best movies on the theme which appropriately makes a joke of the concept of time travel.

We are obsessed with time. Can we "travel" in it aside from the 60 seconds per minute pace we are stuck with? Does the future exist or has fate laid it all out like the road ahead? Does it all exist in one "eternal now"?

You would think Science is immune to such fantasies, but there are serious scientists who would seem to say that time is an illusion. We supposedly live in the "eternal now" - whatever that could possibly mean. Others say time is basic. Lets face it, they are dreaming and guessing like the rest of us. The skeptical part of me suspects that if we paid our physicists better they would not need to write books for the general public challenging the reality of time.

As for myself, I think that the present moment is real and the future is open, not like the road ahead and not compatible with the idea of "fate". I have reasons for this, but of course I could be wrong.

• Einstein's discovery of "space-time" lead many to picture time as "space like" - something you could "travel" in. This was an unfortunate spin-off of his analogy. In fact, special relativity showed that you cannot send any message, let alone a souped-up Delorian, into the future. Einstein showed that my "future" is in the "future" of every other observer in the Universe, although it's farther in the future for everyone but me.
• Quantum mechanics seems to show that, at a small scale at least, events occur without what we normally think of as a "cause". There is a probabilistic connection between "now" and the next moment. Historically speaking, the idea of probability has had a hard time sinking in. I do understand that Schrodinger's famous wave equation is deterministic - reversible in time, but when it "collapses" into specific measurable events, it does so with a cosmic "roll of the dice".
• The second law of thermodynamics (not really a "law" but a "theory") is not reversible in time. It more or less defines the "arrow of time" in Science. There is a lot of carping around the edges of this issue from Scientists (as there should be). For example, for some reason the "law" is violated at the moment of the Big Bang (also a theory not an observation).
• Our daily experience deeply depends on time. Even if it is an "illusion", one may ask what use it would be to "know" this, since life is full of "decision points" and unexpected events.

Given this, it is still important to understand some of the ways that time violates our expectations in our  daily experience.

For example, we know that our experience of time, even the way that machines such as clocks "measure" it, is "local". Famously, if one twin went on a round trip to the nearest star at near the speed of light and came back to Earth, he would be years younger than his brother when he got back. His "clocks" would really run slower than the clocks back on Earth. Time "flows" at a different rate for different observers. That's an observable fact. Another case that fascinates me is how time slows to a crawl, closer and closer to stopping, flinging the observer into the far future as he falls into a black hole. Of course this is assuming the observer would survive the atoms of his body being pulled apart as he nears the event horizon. But if he could survive, he'd get a quick ride to the end of time (not, as depicted in too many movies, a quick survivable ride back in time).

But in all these cases, time "flows" in one direction, like a river, with different rates of flow in different parts of the river.

I think time is flowing differently for my dog than for me. Her reactions are implausibly quick. Birds flying full-speed through a forest are another example. Whatever a dog's "experience" is like, its clock runs very fast (relative to my own). It's also possible that it runs slowly at times  - she can stare at me for 20 minutes waiting for me to feed her. Is she aware how long she's been doing that or has time somehow stopped for her? I'd also love to know how my dog's experiences of the future. Watching her run at full speed through an obstacle course of logs on the beach, it's plain that she is very good at anticipating the "future" a split second ahead. This is also evident in her ability to catch a treat thrown at her face. As to the long range future, she "runs on rails", anticipating the "normal"course of events (especially meal times) and seems to be able to carry out rudimentary "planning". But I doubt that she's aware of the "future" like you or me. In this sense, the future is a construction of the human brain and, in this sense, it is an "illusion". It is not time itself that's the illusion. Just the future.

Brain Science also teaches us that the "present" is a construction of our nervous system. The "present" of our consciousness lags behind events in the world by a few milliseconds and can actually get the order of events wrong. For example, the signal to move our hand away from a shock originates in our brain before we "decide" to move our hand. In this narrow sense, the present is also constructed by the brain and is therefore a kind of "illusion". Like many aspects of consciousness, the "present moment" is a "magic trick" pulled on us by our brains to make sense of what is happening.

What would happen if we had some way of measuring time at a very small scale and super-short time intervals? This leads us into the realm of Quantum Mechanics, where we learn that measuring tiny intervals of time runs into the same problems of measuring tiny intervals of space. At sub-atomic scales, space-time is subject to quantum rules. Our ideas of "causality" may not apply to quarks for example. Even so, none of this turns time into an illusion. It just says that our ideas of time need fine tuning (like all our ideas) at very small scales. We have, in fact, conducted experiments where time intervals are in the pica-second range (the time it takes a photon to traverse a proton) and no overhaul of our concept of time seems to be required.

Feynman Diagram of Particle Interaction

For me, the Feynman diagram is a picture of what happens in space and time at all scales down to the "bottom". These diagrams successfully depict what is happening at quantum scales all the way down to the range where observation is impossible in principle (the "foam" of empty space). One axis of the Feynman diagram is time. In fact, the diagrams summarize fundamental equations of Quantum Mechanics which also fundamentally involve time. So far, these equations successfully predict behavour of the Universe down to the limits of observation. Interestingly, these diagrams (and the equations they summarize) depict possible interactions when the "meaning" of the axes are reversed (time to space and space to time). I'll let you know the implications of this fact once I complete my Ph D in physics but intuitively, the above diagram "makes sense" if you read time as going from bottom to top or left to right (or from right to left or top to bottom).  Momentum is depicted by the slope of the lines in the diagram (space per unit time). It is preserved in any case at any moment in time. I'm also aware that, strictly speaking, the particles shown in the diagram don't exist - only the corresponding fields. However the very concept of a field involves something that has a value at every point in space and time.

I guess that I would say that time is perhaps the ultimate mystery - an irreducible part of the Universe. Trying to unravel its mysteries is perhaps the most interesting part of the human journey.

Milestones - Mind, Time, Society

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization.

THE PROBLEM OF "MIND

I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.

I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.

At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.

Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?

Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.

TIME, FREE WILL

The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.

NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING

A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.

The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.

Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.