Can time be thought about as non-linear ? We discuss Flux and Stasis, object and boundary, language and our indirect touch with the world as a basis for our fabricated reality
Time is probably the most enigmatic concept for man, it contains the question of death and the miracle of being alive, the state of being organic and the state of being aware. Side by side we have history which is the form of the past in the shape of text and language.
I begin this contemplation with two fundamental concepts of western culture: change and statics, identity and change, flux vs. stasis. These concepts were explored by Heraclitus and Parmenides around 500 BC, they both were pre-socratic philosophers. Their ideas continued to heavily influence Classic philosophy as a basis for elaboration and some of these basic ideas made a return with modern philosophy.
Further reading : Plato & Parmenides, Nietzsche & Heraclitus
The basic principle of human cognition can be argued to be based on these principles of unity and plurality. Identification can only be made where one object stop and the other one begins, definition is only achievable through a demarcation, a boundary. We can talk about how one can define himself, how one defines objects in space, words and objects with syntax, 1+1=2.
Times as a concept of change
How do these concepts relate to our concept of time ? we experience the present to be in an eternal state of change, in theory we relate a state of stasis only to ideas, and we don not find it in sense experienced reality. For example we find stasis : if we break the concept of motion into parts like in the paradoxes of Zeno, if we think about death, if we think about any spaces between bodies, of course it is a concept of much bigger investigation.
I would like to investigate one specific model of time, which might be a radical one. In this model we challenge the traditional conceptualisations of future and past and put emphasis on the present, and why ? because is some senses we can use this to develop other concepts that could be very useful for us. This would not be an attempt to determine what is true but only to bridge some concepts together to get more coherent. The aesthetic aspect of it is interesting.
The Past
We start by realising that the past for us is always defined by our memory, it is a second hand product, we never view the past directly. We have a high degree of certainty only about physical causal processes, assuming we are using correct physical laws: for example carbon dating (reverse casualty) and contrary to that, we can never fully trust history and/or our own memories, which is like a coping a paper repeatedly in a coping machine. The link to the past is always accessible to us only through the present through cognitive processing and therefor it can be considered an illusion and explain why I would like to be suspicious about it.
There is the philosophical model which Emanuel Kant established, in which reality for us humans is only a product of our perception, the reality outside our cognition, ‘ding an sich’ / thing as itself, is unknowable, to say : cannot be assigned with values.
Our cognition, arguably mistakenly, sees time as a linear process that flows from the past to the future. Understanding causality, cause and effect, give us the ability to predict the course of movements of bodies in space. We get the notion of continuity and linearity of time, the past is connected to the future through the present.
how time is encapsulated within space
So, modern physics views time as wrapped within space. It means that space and time are not two different elements but are actually one. The relation between objects in space -is time, which is movement. So movement is how time expresses itself in space which has a direct link to the property of bodies themselves. Whats does that mean ? the mass of bodies itself, pre-determines a relation of what we call gravity. Gravity is a force which to us is know a-priori, in principle a-priori means prime, nothing is underlying gravity, is it not open (so far) for further human investigation. Science up to this point recognized four of these a-priori forces. Kant related a-priori to come from beyond human perception.
What the analytical philosophy of the early Wittgenstein and Russel suggests is that the a-priori is a logical necessity, meaning : a force like gravity is a logical necessity, it is itself the way we see the world, our perception projects time as flowing through motion, it is the concept of change itself together with casual determination.
The ability to predict then becomes the ability of one person to know how his mind or perception is working, the particular way we humans see the world. One object can posses only one property of space : it can be only at one place and have one speed at a certain point of time.
The world, reality, cognition, phenomena
Colours are a good example of a phenomenon which is caused by this principle, because seeing colours is a cognitive phenomenon not physical per se, which is determined by the wavelength and therefore frequency / speed of photons which is determined by our perception.
A logical necessity for us is how reality takes form in our mind, it is how we evaluate reality. When we talk about colours we are more referring to our cognition than referring to what we call physical reality. Mass and speed which is energy is in essence only one thing that makes all physical reality, while in our mind it expresses itself in so many other ways. One basic principle of energy is producing a range of cognitive phenomenons in the human mind.
The essence of life is the present and only through myth their secret appear through the shape of time, past and present
Thomas Mann, Jospeh and his brothers
I tend to relate science and modern physics to materialism, because they deal only with materials or energy and their properties, but does not discuss cognition or phenomena. In the beginning of last century there was an attempt to combine science with other fields of study like language, logic and psychology. In professional terms we can say that until the end of the 18th century there was a clear distinction between analytic a-priori sciences like math and logic and synthetic posteriori like physics and psychology. The first being independent of experience and the latter is dependent on experience and empirical measurement. Both types of knowledge sources are typologies that Kant coined in 1787 in his ‘critique of pure reason’.
Many philosophers since the end of the 18th century have criticised Kant. Some did not accept his model of the ‘ding an sich’ and some just offered interpretations or reviews of his method. The question of such a thing as a-priori became very relevant.
Further reading: E. Husserl, F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, Phenomenology, Existentialism and Analytical philosophy.
Language as a windows for the world
The 20th century is unique regarding philosophy, because of the emphasis on the subject of language. The discussion about language is more elaborated in other articles in this website. The late Wittgenstein tried to show that language is the foundation underlying our thinking even to the extreme conclusion that the analytic a-priori is also structured by language.
Further reading : Willard Van Orman Quine – Two Dogmas of Empiricism
1+1=2 ?
When asking ourself about the rules of math, let’s s first bring as an example the Greeks invention of their own geometry, the Euclidian geometry. To try to be concrete it is not that this geometry is wrong but it does relate to human logic and not to the physical world. Within Euclidian geometry two parallel lines never meet, within our three dimensional reality they will. As long as we relate Euclidian geometry to our human logic it cannot be refuted and the reason for that is related to language : The basic assumptions underlying the language of Euclidian Geometry have the power to build a coherent system within itself, within the boundaries that it set up for itself.
So we can come to the conclusion that every syntaxial system has some basic axioms that are rarely undermined. In the Euclidian example we talk about “two parallel lines never meet”. The word parallel itself includes the definition of “never meet” and therefor this sentence in not really saying anything, it is not relating to anything. Another way to look at it would be, as the early Wittgenstein would encourage us to, is to say that we got the “not meeting” term from talking about people and we mistakably assign it to lines. Enchanted by words we invent metaphysics, we then get confused by sign/symbol conflation and therefor we are busy with statements and theories that hold no useful information over the world.
I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
F.W.Nietzsche
In this Nitzschean way of thinking there is no point of talking about true or false. Language builds a system which is used to communicate, its measured not as a mirror image of the world but rather as what people who are using that language are able to refer to.
Science and logic have the ambition to never have this confusion of sign/symbol. It means that through math or the project of G. Frege’s Begriffsschrift which is a concept notation, they are meant to develop a language which is basically error-free.
Here we come back to Heraclitus, which together with Parmenides founded our western Ontology. The two basic elements is change / becoming or stasis / being. becoming is formless and ever changing while being is formed and fixed. Our perception of reality is in a state of ‘becoming’ while our cognition forms elements which is of ‘being’ in nature. Our cognition takes place within the world, and through senses and cognition assigns logic and value that are not an inherit trait of whats out there.
Our existence is a state of constant paradox, the world makes sense to us only because we make it something that it is not. what is it to us then ? not the world but a human version of the world, processed by sensual data and then formed in the pattern of words. The world is not accessible to us other that in object oriented conceptualisation.
Now we come to wonder about math, which is commonly used in science and therefor proved itself to be one most powerful descriptive tool we have to view the world. The basic syntax of math is 1+1=2. I am going to use the Euclidian geometry test case and claim that also in this case we have a Tautology because the number two is defined by two ones. Here we have again an endless circle of definitions which refers one another and in this way none of them really says anything about the other. To try to simply it, math is a language which it rules it based on its own syntax, once you accept it you cannot refute it.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Heraclitus
I will now offer an explanation for Heraclitus, which is a bit silly :
Imagine eating a chicken, where does the chicken stop and you begin ? Lets imagine that a chicken is living somewhere during the morning and at the same night you eat it, can you say that the chicken stopped being a chicken when it died ? how would you call it then ? We clearly have a problem of demarcation, a problem of identity, a problem of assigning static ideas to fluid dynamic situations.
That problem we take over to 1+1=2, can we really say about something that it is one ? can we say about two things that they are identical ? if we have a problem with these two you can argue that 1 and 2 can not referring to anything of reality but only to imagination, our conceptualisation. Then we might think that we can assign the single / 1 sign to the upper-structure : me, the universe, god, but can there be two me’s ? two universe ? two monotheistic gods ? its self definition rules out the use of single-object-conceptualisation. We are stuck in a syntaxial loop which does not allow us to more forward without making a compromise, which is to ignore the fact that signs are not referring anything of reality. I did not even mention the plus, the action of arithmetics.
Further reading : Lewis Carroll – What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, Bertrand Russell § 38 of The Principles of Mathematics. About the problem of induction and inference.
Time as a concept of single Present
The past can be only a projection of our a memory or imagination and therefor belongs to the present. Our mind has the power to change the meaning of our memory and therefore that past. We cannot hold evidence the conclusions about the physical casual past, which matches reality, as such that testify about the existence of past. The past is not accessible, but we can conclude about it.
Science as a materialist point of view defines history also through a logical analysis of the present. We can move back and forward with a string of casual events and therefore visualise the past. For example if we see fire then something started that fire. If we see rain then the clouds are the reason that it is raining. The ability to do this type of analysis demands a segmentation of time, meaning treating a defined duration in ‘time’ : a segment, as a static cognitive conceptualisation. In that segment there is a specific logical necessity : an object as a function of space. The functionality of space forces a logical necessity of a level of energy and spatial determinism, to say : location, speed.
Knowledge and certainty about the form of the world always comes from pre-supposition of statements. How they match with reality can only judged in matter of ‘scale’. The certainty always comes from a possibility of large scale segmentation conceptualisation and not from what we think, because cognition pre-supposes reality. Therefor its a good bet for certainty sake that science would target large scale segmentation – meaning in space and time, exploring space and time. What is really being explored is the shape and range of possible phenomena, when the world is a limited image inside our mind. The limitation on the shape of the universe is our senses and cognition rather than anything else, Therefor inventing technological tools only allows us to conceptualise more rather than picking up things from a hidden reality. The aim of science – varying object conceptualisation.
The meaning and value we give ‘things’ belongs always to the present. A belief in only one course of events is naive. Evidence is not reliable, our memory is not reliable and science can provide us with only an approximation of truth but never the truth itself, meaning we have no possibility of one accurate description of reality, language itself does not allow it. If the past is always personal and cultural, psychologic and moralistic, its open for alteration. By understanding that only the present exists we can be free in a way from the determination of the past, from the power that this concept has upon us. What we will do in the future in always determined by the past from the present point of view, a determinism we can break free from.
From a spiritual / non materialistic view, the boundaries that define the whole, the individual and the universe can be dithered. If a person sees himself as part of an aesthetic / spiritual history, then the events that happen do not apply to a specific time and a specific person. By a change of belief one is open to take part in an imagined history that would change the meaning of his existence.
If the universe is static, it is the mind creates the illusion of motion, of life, in order for the soul to exist, it condition to survive. The mind is free to make up which kind stories it can. The power of the will is the power of creation. Psychology is the field in which changing the meaning of the past can hold the power of changing the future.
Further reading : Nelson Goodman, C.G Jung, Freud
DISCLAIMER: I am aware of the fact that in the future I will be able to re write this article to be much more clear and coherent. Since the aim of this article is mostly about practicing writing and connecting fragments of information I learned, one should not take it to be as something that its not.