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A
Very Brief History of Time
I
just had a chance encounter with a garden slug, and it got me
thinking about time.
In
this ostensibly inanimate, impersonal universe, a garden is a
miracle. All the more so is a garden slug, an animal that can
extract sufficient energy from the garden’s vegetable matter to
move from place to place under its own power. When one is in the
right mood, watching the shimmering spotted slug slide over the
mulch evokes the miracle of biology in all its splendor; the
creature’s pulsating aliveness is hypnotic. But then one recovers
his bearings and realizes that this is only, after all, a garden
slug, and that the ladder of biology goes much higher. The miracle
of life has culminated in one’s own species, man. Unlike
the slug, whose nervous system has barely enough complexity to let
it interface with the environment, a man’s nervous system,
nucleated by the adaptive and inventive human brain, can abstractly
model its surroundings and project itself consciously and creatively
through time.
A
slug can learn. The small neural network that serves as its brain
can be modified by sensory input from its environment, and the
slug’s behavior modified accordingly. To this extent, the slug
"remembers" the input. But because its simple brain cannot
form an internal model of its changing relationship with the garden,
the slug cannot recognize its memories as "changes"; the
state of its nervous system at any given moment can pass for all
that it has ever known. Because the neural function by which the
slug identifies self is instinctual and perceptual as opposed
to cognitive – because the slug "defines itself"
strictly by nonreflective instinctual processing of environmental
stimuli - the dependent neural function time is limited to
here-and-now. The slug recognizes no past self or future self on
which to define an extended temporal relationship.
As
the slug’s primitive example shows, our awareness of time depends
on the extent to which our mental models of reality reflect change.
To see an object change, one must recall its former state for
comparison to its present state, and to do that, one must recall
one’s former perception of it. Because perception is an
interaction between self and environment, this amounts to bringing
one’s former self into conjunction with one’s present
self. That past and present selves can be brought into
conjunction across a temporal interval implies that momentary selves
remain sufficiently alike to be conjoined; that they can intersect
at any given moment to compare content means that the intersection
is changeless. So when self is generalized as the intersection
of all momentary selves, it acquires a property called time
invariance. It is the rock of perception, the unchanging
observation post from which the net of temporal connections is cast
and to which it remains anchored. Indeed, it is the fabric from
which the net is woven, its relationship with the environment
serving as the universal template for all temporal relationships.
Through
learning, mental models of time evolve in time. As the
brain’s neural connections are modified and the strengths of
existing connections are adjusted to account for new information
regarding both self and environment – as it learns - its
model of time changes as a function of time. In other words,
the model changes with that which is modeled. If the brain is smart
enough, then it can model itself in the process of being changed,
and depict its own learning process as a higher level of time. But
even as the self absorbs its educational history and deepens its
reflexive understanding, it remains static at its core. Otherwise,
it would lose temporal cohesion and fall apart. Since self is
static, time too should possess a static description that does not
change in the temporal flow it describes (if time were the water
flowing in a river, then a static description of time would be
analogous to the rocky banks that determine the river’s course).
Such
a description arises by abstraction. As cognitive models
become more sophisticated, cognition becomes increasingly abstract;
concepts become increasingly independent of the particular objects
they describe. Among the first things to be abstracted are space and
time. The most general abstract system incorporating both is a language.
Although the term "language" usually refers to a natural
language like English, it is actually more general. Mathematically,
a formal language consists of three ingredients: a set of
elements to be combined as strings (e.g., symbols, memes), a set of
structural rules governing their arrangement in space, and a set of
grammatical rules governing their transformations in time. Together,
the latter two ingredients form the syntax of the language.
It follows that neural, cognitive-perceptual, and physical systems
can be described as languages, and the laws which govern them as
their syntaxes. On a subjective level, time itself can be abstractly
characterized as the grammar of the joint language of
cognition and perception. The rules of this grammar are the general
ingredients of subjective time.
Because
time is defined in terms of transformations among spatial
arrangements of objects, it is conceptually entwined with space.
Thus, it is actually part of a linguistic complex called spacetime.
Spatiotemporal relations exist on many levels; if level one consists
of simple relationships of objects in space and time, then level two
consists of relationships of such relationships, and so on. Because
logic is stratified in much the same way, one can say that
time is stratified in a manner corresponding to predicate logic.
This must be true in any case, since any meaningful description of
time is logically formulated. Spatiotemporal stratification allows
time to be viewed on various scales corresponding to ascending
series of contexts: e.g., personal awareness, interpersonal
relationships, social evolution, evolutionary biology, and so on.
The histories of people, institutions, cultures, and species are
nested like Chinese boxes, with the abstract principles of each
history occupying a level of temporal grammar corresponding to an
order of predicate logic.
Because
of the relation between self-awareness and temporal awareness,
temporal stratification induces a stratification of self. What we
have already described as the static intersect of momentary selves
becomes a stratified relationship…a terrace of temporal vantages
conducing to long-term self-integration. As the self becomes
stratified, the principles abstracted from higher orders of
experience tend to be objectivized due to their generality,
with science and philosophy among the results. Thus, the subjective
and objective sides of reality – the self and the environment –
tend to merge in a symmetric way. On one hand, the environment is
absorbed by the self through experience, and the laws of nature are
thereby abstracted; on the other hand, the self is projected onto
the environment in such a way that it "selects" the laws
of nature by analogy to its own internal laws. Either way, the core
self tends to intersect with the environment as momentary selves are
intersected within it. This brings the subjective and
objective phases of reality - and time - into closer correspondence,
blurring the distinction between them from an analytic standpoint.
As
time grows more abstract, ways are sought to measure it, diagram it
and analyze it numerically. This requires a universal depiction of
space and time against which arbitrary processes can be
differentially graphed and metered. Such a depiction was introduced
by the Frenchman René Descartes in the first half of the 17th
century. It was called analytic geometry, and it depicted
time and the dimensions of space as straight, mutually perpendicular
axes. In analytic geometry, any set of numerically-scaled space and
time axes associated with any set of properties or attributes
defines a coordinate system for assigning numbers to points,
and simple processes appear as the graphs of algebraic functions. A
few decades later, Newton and Leibniz independently discovered a new
kind of mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus, by which to
numerically quantify the rates of such processes. These innovations,
which laid the foundations of modern science and engineering,
suffice to this day in many practical contexts. Even though
garden-variety analytic geometry was technically superseded by the
Theory of Relativity – which was itself constructed on an
analytic-geometric foundation - it gives a very close approximation
of relativity in most situations.
Unfortunately,
the conveniences of analytic geometry came at the price of mind-body
dualism. This was Descartes’ idea that the self, or
"mind", was a nonphysical substance that could be left out
of physical reasoning with impunity. For some purposes, this was
true. But as we saw in the next-to-last paragraph, the relationship
of mind to reality is not that simple. While the temporal grammar of
physics determines the neural laws of cognition, cognitive grammar
projects itself onto physical reality in such a way as to determine
the form that physical grammar must assume. Because the form
of physical grammar limits the content of physical grammar,
this makes cognition a potential factor in determining the laws of
nature. In principle, cognitive and physical grammars may influence
each other symmetrically.
The
symmetric influence of cognitive and physical grammars implies a
directional symmetry of time. Although time is usually seen as a
one-way street, it need not be; the mere fact that a street is
marked "one way" does not stop it from being easily
traveled in the unauthorized direction. Indeed, two-way time shows
up in both quantum physics and relativity theory, the primary
mainstays of modern physics. Thus, it is not physically warranted to
say that cognition cannot influence the laws of physics because the
laws of physics "precede cognition in time". If we look at
the situation from the other direction, we can as easily say that
cognition "precedes" the laws of physics in reverse
time…and point to the strange bidirectional laws of particle
physics to justify our position. These laws are of such a nature
that they can as well be called laws of perception as laws of
physics.
Before
we get to the final word on time, there is one more aspect of
physical grammar that must be considered. Physical reasoning
sometimes requires a distinction between two kinds of time: ordinary
time and cosmic time. With respect to observations made at normal
velocities, ordinary time behaves in a way described by Newtonian
analytic geometry; at higher velocities, and in the presence of
strong gravitational fields, it behaves according to Einstein’s
Special and General Theories of Relativity. But not long after
Einstein formulated his General Theory, it was discovered that the
universe, AKA spacetime, was expanding. Because cosmic
expansion seems to imply that the universe began as a dimensionless
point, the universe must have been created, and the creation
event must have occurred on a higher level of time: cosmic time.
Whereas ordinary time accommodates changes occurring within the
spacetime manifold, this is obviously not so for the kind of time in
which the manifold itself changes.
Now
for the fly in the cosmological ointment. As we have seen, it is the
nature of the cognitive self to formulate models incorporating
ever-higher levels of change (or time). Obviously, the highest level
of change is that characterizing the creation of reality. Prior to
the moment of creation, the universe was not there;
afterwards, the universe was there. This represents a sizable
change indeed! Unfortunately, it also constitutes a sizable paradox.
If the creation of reality was a real event, and if this event
occurred in cosmic time, then cosmic time itself is real. But then
cosmic time is an aspect of reality and can only have been created with
reality. This implies that cosmic time, and in fact reality, must
have created themselves!
The
idea that the universe created itself brings a whole new meaning to
bidirectional time, and thus to the idea that cognition may play a
role in the creation of reality. As a self-creative mechanism for
the universe is sought, it becomes apparent that cognition is the
only process lending itself to plausible interpretation as a means
of temporal feedback from present to past. Were cognition to play
such a role, then in a literal sense, its most universal models of
temporal reality would become identical to the reality being
modeled. Time would become cognition, and space would become a
system of geometric relations that evolves by distributed cognitive
processing.
Here
comes the surprise: such a model exists. Appropriately enough, it is
called the Cognition-Theoretic Model of the Universe, or CTMU
for short. A cross between John Archibald Wheeler’s Participatory
Universe and the Stephen Hawking-James Hartle "imaginary
time" theory of cosmology proposed in Hawking’s phenomenal
book A Brief History of Time, the CTMU resolves many of the
most intractable paradoxes known to physical science while
explaining recent data which indicate that the universe is expanding
at an accelerating rate. Better yet, it bestows on human
consciousness a level of meaning that was previously approached only
by religion and mysticism. If it passes the test of time – and
there are many good reasons to think that it will - then it will be
the greatest step that humanity has yet taken towards a real
understanding of its most (or least?) timeless mystery.
And
so the circle closes. Time becomes a cosmogonic loop whereby the
universe creates itself. The origin of our time concept, the self,
becomes the origin of time itself. Our cognitive models of time
become a model of time-as-cognition. And the languages of cognition
and physics become one self-configuring, self-processing language of
which time is the unified grammar. Talk about "time out of
mind"!
And
all this because of a little garden slug.
©
2001 by Christopher Michael Langan (All
Rights Reserved)
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