Subjective Matters

We’re taught early on, in school and culture, to think of time as a dimension — height, width, breadth, and time. The 4th dimension of time. Post-Einstein science has brought us a world view where time and space are an inherent part of the same stuff — spacetime. Move through time, move through space.

We’re excellent at moving through 3D space. Sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing ensure that we can navigate and probe 3D space as experts. Five senses, each with an easily identifiable and corresponding body part no less, all devoted to probing a 3D space. But with five senses devoted to probing spatial dimensions, have we given any thought to whether we’re equipped with at least one “sense” to probe time?

Actually, time as a concept has had a long journey in our culture. Only in the last 100 years have we put it on the same unified playing field as the other 3 dimensions we’ve become so familiar with. This unified view is actually a big deal conceptually — it means that time is less “mysterious” and more knowable than we previous thought. The fact that a unified spacetime is such a relatively new concept, coupled with the fact that we don’t have a nose-for-time sitting somewhere on our face with most of our other spatial senses, makes it difficult to start thinking about time in anywhere but academic circles.

But what if we did, now, start thinking about time differently? If physics so easily and verifiably integrates it with space, maybe we should start doing the same with our day-to-day concept of it. What if we started thinking about time as something that can be “sensed”? Sensed, probed, investigated, and explored just like the five senses do so well with the 3 spatial dimensions.

Taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight help us to operate in the physical world by simultaneously enriching and limiting our awareness of it. They enrich by adding to the information we have available to us about the physical world. They limit by being selective about just what information is available. For example, our 5 physical senses are only keyed to a small range of what we know physically exists — our eyes only detect a narrow window of actual lightwaves, our noses are certainly not as keen on the full scope of smells that a dog’s nose is, and so on.

Perhaps the experience of time is similar, and it features a corresponding sense. Just as we probe a specific spectrum of lightwaves with our eyes, what if we can probe time in an analogous way? Just as we can conceive of a larger spectrum of light, yet only naturally perceive a subset of that spectrum, perhaps we can’t ultimately sense time to the full degree that we can conceive of time, but to a degree nonetheless. As our physical senses provide information about a temporal, time based, world (first 3 dimensions). Our time sense in turn provides us with information about a non-temporal world, outside of time (4th dimension).

If we possess both temporal faculties and non-temporal faculties, why are the temporal faculties so exaggerated and obvious? Simply, we’re so excellent and conditioned to think in terms of temporal activities and physical senses, that our non-temporal "time sense" is atrophied. We’re not sure how to access it, and we’re not sure when we’re accessing it. Like other faculties, some of us are better at it than others by default.

We don’t feel “stuck” in our 3D space. We’re free to look through it, receive sounds from across the room, take its temperature, and even consume it. But we feel stuck in time, despite its unity with space. If we could collectively start thinking about our total being in terms of both types of faculties on day-to-day basis, we may be able to start exploring, considering, and hopefully experiencing this time sense as a more normal part of our experience.

To preface, I value science. I value most outcomes of science. The act-of-science and its outcomes in general represent very creative and magnificent acts in their own right.

I’m concerned for science in general, however — concerned for the scientific community, and those deeply involved with it. And, I’m concerned for those of us sitting outside of science looking in. That’s most of us using scientific outcomes, reading about its latest developments, theories, proofs, etc.

Science right now is our guiding light. It is our reality arbiter — our current judge of reality standing in a place once exclusive to the Roman Catholic Church (for westerners). The current Roman Catholic Church, in contrast to its colorful past, has become quite secondary to life — it has lost its world dominance as the sole arbiter of reality.

Science might be next. In the future we may look back and see that it followed in the historical footsteps of the Roman Catholic Church. What once was a primary source on reality’s truth, now a secondary source. Whether it knows it or not, science is dealing with its own midlife crisis right now.

For science as we think of it to persist, to survive into the wise-old-stage of existence, it must expand its definition of reality. It must be brave enough to explore deeper truths, deeper than the skin of physical reality. I question science’s ability to evolve and adapt to other frameworks. The Roman Catholic Church could not adapt to a new framework (physical science), and it was subsequently reduced as a source of truth. We reduced it in time because we recognized that what once seemed a legitimate source of truth appeared shallow in the light of science. Science said there was more to it all, and we agreed.

However, there were other mass-accepted frameworks in the past than the Roman Catholic Church and [physical] science. It would be naive to think that we are not headed for additional mass-accepted frameworks in the future. Can science survive its midlife crisis and adapt to inevitable new frameworks…? Ideally science could be the harbinger of the next framework, but it may not be up to the task.

That task may be up to us, you and me.

What could the next framework be? Possibly a framework that values and explores consciousness and private / personal reality… The exploration of this next framework would take place not with the expensive tools and particle colliders of science, but with the one "tool" that is inherent to every being — consciousness.

In a previous article, I discussed the illusion of time, and gave a physical analogy that exemplifies how all moments of time can exist simultaneously — we are only conscious of a specific moment (the present) according to our perspective.

This created a problem, though. If time is an illusion, and all moments effectively exist "simultaneously", does that create a situation where all moments are predestined? After all, most of us get a little uncomfortable with the idea of predestiny. The answer is simply "no": just because time does not exist, does not mean that all moments are predestined. Let’s elaborate:

One scenario that continuously makes an appearance in the scientific community is that of "infinite universes". It is typically framed along the lines of "everything we do, and every infinite variation of choice we could make exists in an infinite number of universes, a universe for every possible decision/consequence/atomic collision/etc". You can even see this concept appear in mainstream literature such as Discover magazine. In visualizing infinite universes, every possible thing DID/DOES happen — an infinite number of universes exists for every infinite possibility along life’s path. These infinite possibilities are simultaneously existing in a timeless "state". This concept / visualization gets us close to solving our predestiny problem in a timeless universe.

A perfect analogy that relates our life to infinite universes of possibility may be in the smaller universe of a video game. However complex, all possible situations in a video game are pre-programmed. In a sense, all of the vast (though limited) possibilities that can occur in the video game, occur simultaneously in the programmed timeless "potential" of the game whether it is turned on or not. From the moment you start playing the game, all of its possibilities exist in a state of "potential" — events which could potentially unravel based on the actions of your fingers and decisions. Each time you play the game you follow a sequential perspective through preexisting potential. Despite these potentials preexisting, we would hardly say that your path through the game is predetermined — it is still a unique "run" through the game. Through each run of the game, you pluck a set of events from that preexisting potential to add to your linear experience of it in that individual run.

Such is our timeless life — an infinite construction kit of potential possibilities, vastly and infinitely larger than the possibilities available in a video game. Our consciousness in this physical realm experiences as time a linear path through those possibilities until it reaches the "end". The pool of possibilities is infinite, as is the perspective a consciousness can have as it progresses through the chosen possibilities. Our consciousness chooses which of those existing possibilities will be "tuned" into within this physical realm. We label those chosen possibilities as they exist in our timed perspective past, present, and future.

Though science has recognized the concept of a timeless universe in theory, I don’t think it is willing to explore all of the implications. To go ahead and take this out of the realm of scientific comfortableness altogether (why not?), we can talk about the popular notion of past lives. In our timeless universe, they’re not really in the "past" at all, they are simply other "runs" that your consciousness has taken (is taking) through the vast pool of possibilities in life’s construction kit.

In short, a lot of what most of us consider esoteric ideas actually make more sense in a timeless universe and the interaction of our consciousness within it. Science presumes that consciousness is bounded by time, arising from linear biological processes. But what if consciousness didn’t originate through timed processes? What if consciouness is an integral part of a scientifically recognized timeless fabric? In that case, in an area fully unexplored by science, consciousness has far more leeway in "life construction" than we imagine.

Time is frequently cited in eastern oriented, and other works, as an illusion — that it "does not exist". Instead, everything is accessible and "exists" all at once. Our concept of time is merely one perspective of many possible perspectives that can experience "all that is". Thinking of time as a perspective certainly fits with the scientific view of time as a "dimension", but what does all of this really mean? How can time be an illusion, a perspective, and what are the implications?

First, an analogy on how we might conceptualize the illusion of time. If we approach a building from a distance we are first and only aware of its front face. Perhaps in this example there is the potential for the building to be a facade only, such as in a movie set. It is only as we get closer to and eventually pass by the building do we become aware of its sides, its back, its other "dimensions". It is not that they were not there all along, they certainly would have existed whether we passed by or not, it is only that we were not fully aware of them until we passed by.

Now, compare the approach to the building on foot as "walking" through the days and weeks of "time" in life. It would seem to us that we do not experience / become aware of a given moment (the side of the building) until we "pass it by"… nevertherless, like the sides of the building, that moment was there all along.

This comparision to passing by a building and passing through time is relatively easy to imagine. Where things become complicated is that this analogy seems to look much like another troubling concept: predestiny. "If the sides of the building always exist, waiting for me to become aware of them just like I eventually become aware of moments that are already existing in my ‘future’, then doesn’t that mean events are predetermined?"

I think the answer to this question is in realizing that the question of predestiny itself doesn’t make sense in a timeless framework. The very concept of "predestiny" assumes that time as we know it exists. That analogy helped with figuring how it could be envisioned differently: existing at once, at all times. But, we’ll have to come up with a new analogy for dealing with the time-dependent concept of predestiny…