Time and Consciousness (1)
	March 2004
	The Problem The Infinite Regress The Multiverse Model The Timeless Model A Solution? The Role of Consciousness References
The Problem
	Time passes. Listen. Time passes                                                        Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood)
	But of course time does not pass. It cannot. Nor does it move or flow. Consider what we mean by 'move' when we say, for example, 'the car moved'. We mean that first the car was here then a bit later it was there. If we are being pedantic we might say that two seconds later it was there. In either case we are referring to a clock ticking, independently of the car which is doing the moving. The clock ticks whether or not anything actually moves. So what could it mean to say that time itself moves? Where is the independent clock ticking by which we define that movement? Most people at one time or another ask themselves the question 'How fast does time pass? One second per second,' they say and laugh and go on to think about something else. But it is a good question and it needs an answer. If we say that time passes it is nonsensical to think that it times its own movement, so we are implicitly referring to a second kind of time ticking away, independently of the normal kind, by which we measure its passing. A scientist would call it a second dimension of time orthogonal to the first. Maybe that's all there is to it then. Let's have a second dimension of time.
The Infinite Regress
	Unfortunately this second time has exactly the same problem - it has to pass or move as well. So we need a third sort of time orthogonal to times one and two, and then of course we need another and there is no end to it. Most people faced with this infinite regress have rejected it as a solution to the puzzle of time, but in the 1920s J W Dunne in his book An Experiment With Time proposed that we simply accept the infinite regress at face value. He pointed out that the first term of an infinite series differs from all the rest in that it has no predecessor and he deduced some intriguing attributes for times two and greater. But I do not think this answers the problem. It merely pushes it off to infinity where it is more easily ignored. Let's come up to date a bit.
The Multiverse Model
	Quantum theory is said to be unsurpassed in its ability to predict the outcome of experiments to remarkable accuracy. It has never been wrong and is accepted as one of the most powerful theories available to us. However, it has proved very hard to explain in everyday terms. There are two main such interpretations - the Copenhagen and the many-worlds. In any physical situation having many outcomes of varying probability the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory says that when an observation is made one possibility actualizes and the others disappear instantaneously. This is not simply an expression of our lack of knowledge of some notional pre-existent 'actual' state. The pre-existent state was multi-valued. What disappeared was real. The Oxford physicist David Deutsch in his book The Fabric of Reality explains the many-worlds or multiverse interpretation of which he is a leading proponent. In the multiverse interpretation everything that can happen (is allowed by physical law) does happen, but in divergent universes which are otherwise identical (but which may then diverge further). Universes are undetectable to each other except for interference effects. The multiverse is not a whimsical notion. It arises directly from the need to explain quantum conundrums such as the two slit photon experiment for which it provides a robustly satisfying explanation - something does go through the other slit. It explains where the stupendous amount of work done by a quantum computer would actually be done (quantum computers already exist, albeit trivially limited because of the practical problems of decoherence). It allows for human freewill (since everything that can happen does happen, you may choose). It makes precise sense of such intuitively obvious but hard to justify statements such as, 'If I hadn't done that then this wouldn't have happened.' If you want to know how all that comes about, and the justification for what follows, read the book. What has this to do with time then? In a chapter entitled Time: The First Quantum Concept Deutsch has this to say:
		'To put it bluntly, the reason why the common-sense theory of time is inherently mysterious is that it is inherently nonsensical. It is not just that it is inaccurate. We shall see that, even in its own terms, it does not make sense.'
	His reasons are essentially those outlined above. I picture the multiverse as an extremely bushy tree of snapshots. Each snapshot is the state of one entire universe at a particular moment. The tree contains all the snapshots past, present and future of all universes in the multiverse. All the snapshots exist. (I want to say, 'exist now' but that is the same old common-nonsense appealing as it does to a time over and above that represented by the tree - all the snapshots exist period.) They are all equally actual, equally real. No snapshots are preferred as being the current 'now'. They are all subjectively 'now' to the human consciousnesses in them. Since universes diverge, everything, including people, exist in multiple versions. It is not meaningful to ask which of these variants is me. That assumes the snapshots set out in an external space over and above the snapshots themselves. About the relationships between past, present and future snapshots Deutsch has this:
		'This is the distinctive core of the quantum concept of time:      Other times are just special cases of other universes.'
	And later:
		'The snapshots which we call "other times in our universe" are distinguished from "other universes" only from our perspective, and only in that they are especially closely related to ours by the laws of physics.'
	That is a remarkable claim. Here is Deutsch summing up the quantum concept of time:
		'Time is not a sequence of moments, nor does it flow. Yet our intuitions about the properties of time are broadly true. Certain events are indeed the causes and effects of one another. Relative to an observer, the future is indeed open and the past fixed, and possibilities do indeed become actualities. The reason why our traditional theories of time are nonsense is that they try to express these true intuitions within the framework of a false classical physics. In quantum physics they make sense, because time was a quantum concept all along.'
	The idea of the multiverse may seem impossibly far-fetched but it answers hard questions which otherwise have no answer at all.
The Timeless Model
	Another physicist with an even more radical view of time is Julian Barbour. In his book The End of Time he makes the case that time does not exist at all. Here he is quoting from the nineteenth century Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (he of the flying numbers):
		'His comments on time also encouraged me greatly:  "It is utterly beyond our power," he [Mach] said, "to measure the changes of  things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by  means of the changes of things." This was just the conclusion I had reached.'
	In his timeless model of reality, Nows - disjoint instants of time - are points in a (massively) multi-dimensional relative configuration space which he calls Platonia; each point is the complete state of the entire universe at an instant. Configurations which have the property of containing records which appear to demonstrate a development history (such as tracks in cloud chambers, memories in human heads, geological strata in the earth) he calls time-capsules of which he says:
		'If we discount the direct perception of motion in consciousness, all this fantastic abundance of evidence for time and history is coded in static configurations that persist … This is why I believe the secret of time is to be unravelled through the notion of time capsules. It is also the reason why I seek to reduce the other hard and persistent evidence for time and motion - our direct awareness of them in consciousness - to a time capsule structure in our brains. If I can make such a structure responsible for our short-term memory - the phenomenon of the specious present - and for the actual seeing of motion, then all appearances of time will have been reduced to a common basis: special structures in individual Nows.'
	And a little later:
		'The sense we have that time has advanced to the present Now is simply our awareness of being in that Now. Different Nows give rise to different experiences, and hence to the impression that the time in them is different.'
	The perception of motion in the specious present is accounted for, he suggests, by the fact that the brain may contain at any instant data from several preceding instants and it is the processing by the brain that produces the illusion of motion. Barbour speculates that if such a brain pattern were preserved in aspic, that brain would be perpetually conscious of the same motion. This might be so. He asks:
		'How does Nature create this rich, rich structure that speaks to us so insistently of time? How could it and we come to be if there is no time?'
	and goes on to describe in considerable detail a timeless formulation of both general relativity and quantum mechanics leading to a demonstration that time capsules are just those configurations which are selected with high probablility by the Schrödinger wave equation; ie more likely to be experienced. On the way he makes some insightful observations. For example when referring to an experiment by Galileo in his laboratory equipped with a water clock Barbour says:
		'it is water, not time that flows. Speed is not distance divided by time but distance divided by some real change elsewhere in the world.'
	The feeling we have of time bustling along is quite false, even if time exists. It is objects in space which do the bustling. The movement of a hand around a clock-face is just that. Time, if it exists at all is silent and still. Of the multiverse interpretation of the two slit experiment he says:
		'Everett came up with a simple alternative [to collapse of the wave function]. Collapse does not happen at all: the multiple possibilities represented in the entangled state continue to coexist. In each possibility the observer, in different incarnations, sees something different, but what is seen is definite in each case. Each incarnation of the observer sees one of the possible outcomes that the Copenhagen interpretation assumes is created by collapse. The implications of this are startling. A single atomic particle … can, by becoming entangled with first the pointer and then the emulsion, and finally the conscious observer, split that observer (indeed the universe) into many different incarnations.'
	The extension of entanglement to include the observer (and universe) is unexpected and intriguing.
A Solution?
	The multiverse and timeless models have much in common.
	both Deutsch and Barbour assert that whereas we define change in terms of time it is really the other way around; there is change, a difference between what is here now and what we remember, and we invent time and its passage to explain it. both models are static; Deutsch's legal snapshots and Barbour's lawful configurations all coexist. consciousnesses embedded in them exist in multiple copies and variations. I have examined these most radical models of time in some little detail to see if they provide an answer to the time problem. While Deutsch and Barbour seem to believe that they do, that a static set of snapshots or time-capsules, plus a mechanism for the appearance of motion in the specious present, fully accounts for our perception of time and its passing, I am not convinced. It is only half the story. It could account for my perception that I have progressed through preceding moments to arrive where I am now. So long as my memories are consistent it makes no present difference whether they were actually experienced or not. But a static model does not account for the fact that today I am in Tuesday and tomorrow I will be in Wednesday. I know on Tuesday that a Wednesday Colin exists, (and a Thursday one and a next year one), but I do not know what befalls the Wednesday Colin or what is on his mind, but I will just by waiting. My snapshots are not all equal. There is a preferred one, where I have got to so far. Deutsch says:
		'Nothing can move from one moment to another … different snapshots of the observer perceive different moments as "now". But that does not mean that the observer's consciousness … moves through time as the present moment is supposed to.'
	But that is exactly what we all experience in all our waking moments.
The Role of Consciousness
	So how else might that come about? Well there are some possibilities. Universes can interact if only weakly by interference effects - that is after all why the multiverse was postulated. Information can pass. Perhaps consciousness is an interference effect. The physicist and philosopher Danah Zohar suggests in her book The Quantum Self that a Bose-Einstein condensate in the brain is the physical basis of consciousness which would thus have quantum mechanical properties. There is anecdotal evidence that sensory input to consciousness is quantized, that we scan our sensory inputs discretely on an internal clock-tick rather than continuously. Many of us will have experienced the stretching of time that sometimes happens in an emergency. A colleague who was knocked off his bicycle in traffic and flew through the air before colliding with a lamppost reported that it all happened in slow motion. This is very suggestive. Slow motion film is produced by shooting the film frames at a rate greater than that for replay. If the internal human clock speeded up, that would produce just such an effect - exactly what you would expect from a sophisticated organism trying to get as much information as possible to deal with an emergency. There is a more dramatic example. Consider what would happen if the internal clock ran a little slow for some reason. Everything would seem to happen rather quickly. Slower still and events that happened between ticks would not be detected at all. Even slower and the sufferer would become completely disconnected from the environment unable to respond or interact meaningfully. This seems to match very well the state of those patients of the neurologist Oliver Sacks in an institution in the US during the '60s (portrayed in the film Awakenings). Sacks discovered accidentally that a drug given for some other reason recovered some of his patients from their apparently catatonic state. Unhappily the effect was not long lasting, and after a few weeks they all sank away again. Even if consciousness is an interference effect, however, it is hard to see how that could account for the animation we experience. There is another explanation. When Deutsch says that nothing can move from snapshot to snapshot he means nothing embedded in the snapshot. Perhaps consciousness is not embedded in the snapshot, in the time and space and matter of reality, but exists elsewhere.. Consciousness is primary - everything we know or think about reality comes to us through consciousness. We can doubt all its contents, but we cannot doubt consciousness itself. Despite this and the fact that we all have direct access to the raw data we know next to nothing about consciousness. It is time we did.
All contents ©Copyright Colin McArthur, 2004-2019