A Weird Cosmology - Part 1.1 - TIME

I intend to start wandering into a weird area called “what I think”. In so doing I hope to lay out perhaps a different way to see reality. I would expect that some people might find my thoughts: stupid, intellectual puffery, irrelevant, emotional, immoral, naive.... I have no idea. I don’t pretend that this represents a cohesive system of thought or that this represents latest scientific thinking. It doesn’t.  I believe that rationality as we define it in western culture is way overblown in importance - so if I am accused of being irrational - so be it.

What I am going to say is nonetheless an honest attempt to put down what I think. It is simply a theory of the nature of reality - and I am cool with that. All good theories are meant to be disproven anyway. But for now, its my working theory.

The first and perhaps gateway concept is: time isn’t what we think. We think of time flowing from the past to the future, and that we currently exist “now”. This is the “arrow of time” - it goes ever forward and never backwards.

Except that it doesn’t. Time isn’t an arrow - its closer to a string, or path. It exists always at once and what we think we experience is simply a point on that string. That point on the string, which we consider to be “now”, will exist forever, just as will all the other points on the string. Even though I say “forever”, in this view of time, the idea of forever does not exist. All time exists concurrently such that the only time is forever now. But again, there is no concept of forever.

One way to think of this is that time is simply another dimension, but one in which we as humans can only see at one point.  But otherwise its just another dimension. And does it just extend in one direction - like a string or line, or does it extend in all directions.? I think: all directions.

Strangely enough, my view of time is at least partly supported by the seeming opposite camps of science and religion. From the scientific side, the standard concept of time has been under attack for decades. To see a sample, look at the Wikipedia link to Eternalism  or this excellent site on the Arrow of Time or this link to a Scientific American article That Mysterious Flow by Paul Davis. I don’t want to go into all this scientific theory because there is a massive amount written on this out there and I understand very little of it. But if you want to explore the scientific side of the issue there is plenty to find.

From a religious standpoint, the idea of an omniscient god (God?) has always incorporated a similar view of time. If an omniscient god knows all points of the past, present and future in infinite detail, then they all exist concurrently. Our existence represents a time line and all points are equal.

If time is as I suppose, then why do we experience it like an arrow? Well I ask: If you experienced it any other way, would you be able to function in what we think of as reality? Would you be declared insane?  - no let me change that:  you would be insane! Or alternately you might not be considered conscious.

And there it is:  consciousness as we define consciousness depends on a particular perception of time. In fact, I would argue that consciousness could be defined as the subjective awareness of the passage of time. We see time as an arrow because that is a prerequisite for human consciousness. If we saw it in any other way, we would not be humans.  As a expansion to this thought, if something were to experience time in a different way, we would probably not recognize it as conscious.

Well that is a taste of my weird cosmology. I hope to continue it at a later time.