Transcript No Slide Title

EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF COGNITIVE
SYSTEMS
WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD
TIME AND CONSCIOUSNESS
ABSTRACT
Time and consciousness: Is consciousness in time or time in
consciousness? Of course, our question is what is consciousness but
first what is time? Time is an ancient puzzle. Parmenides said nothing
changes; Heraclitus said there is only change - you cannot step in the
same river twice. St. Augustine was puzzled: everyone knows what
time is until you start to think about it and then you do not know.
Bergson attempted to explain la durée; Karl Popper wrestled with the
subject in his recent Parmenides. It is startling suddenly to recognise
that everything is momentary: matter, the cosmos, the world, ourselves,
our brains. William James' specious present is exactly that - only an
appearance. In reality our brains have only the present moment; our
brains are instantaneous patterns changing from moment to moment,
formed from the collection of structures, ultimately molecules,
chemical elements, protons, electrons, quarks, which constitute the
neural material.
Our past is part of our present brain, the future we expect is part of our present brain.
Kant famously proposed that time and space are necessary forms under which sensation
and perception are accommodated in our minds, in our brains; we could have no
knowledge of the dingen an sich. Recently Anthony Quinton has suggested that Kant
left totally unexplained how, if we see only through time and space as arbitrary forms of
intuition, we in fact cope with reality. Kant, unfortunately for him, was writing before
Darwin; evolutionary epistemology (as formulated by Lorenz, Popper, Campbell,
Wuketits and others) proposes that the natural selection of brain processes has provided
us with practical concepts of time and space to allow us to manage reality. The
momentariness of everything and thus of ourselves means that we are inconstant
changing patterns, changing aggregations of material; we are not the same from instant
to instant. The cells in our bodies are continually dying; the constituents of the cells are
being replaced; the aggregations of electrons and protons which form us (perhaps the
patterns which electrons and protons themselves are) are travelling at incredible speeds,
as the world turns, as the solar system rotates, as the galaxy and supergalaxies turn.
What are the implications of this view of time for our understanding of
consciousness ? Physicists and cosmologists have their accounts of time,
space and spacetime; a theoretical physicist, Julian Barbour, has recently
argued that even for physicists time does not exist. But time and space as
forms of the understanding, with due acknowledgement to Kant, come
before any use physical scientists may make of them. Time and space
come before mathematics and physics. It may be that the idea of the
momentariness of matter, of the cosmos, can have important
consequences even for the most refined and elaborate cosmological and
physical theories (quantum gravity, spacefoam, superstring theory, Mbrane theory).
Is consciousness in time or time in consciousness?
The sudden shock of realising that there is only this moment
Like walking into a lamppost
The raw present (the lamp post)
Without preparation, without
context, without expectations
Banging one's head on the lamp-post
If the universe is momentary only, then what?
What is time ?
Some views :
Time is an ancient puzzle
PARMENIDES
Nothing changes
HERACLITUS
You cannot step in the same river twice.
The world is a whole, it is what it is and cannot turn into
something else. Change is illusory.
There is no substance or duration to things. Each moment is
an entirely new existence, which is succeeded by an entirely
new existence.
There is no moment, no inkling, no particle of time that the
river stops flowing. [Early Buddhist text]
The time that we observe in nature has no separate existence. It is
only a mode of being of concrete objects. We ourselves create
mathematical time. It is a mental construct, an abstraction
indispensable to the building up of science.
There is no independent, linear time as some kind of container.
[Dalai Lama]
ST AUGUSTINE (Confessions XI: 11)
Neither time past nor future, but the present only, really is.
quid est enim tempus? quis hoc facile breviterque explicaverit? quis
hoc ad verbum de illo proferendum vel cogitatione
comprehenderit? quid autem familiarius et notius in loquendo
conmemoramus quam tempus? et intellegimus utique, cum id
loquimur, intellegimus etiam, cum alio loquente id audimus.
For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can
comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in
speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly
we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of
by another. What, then, is time?
si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio:
If no one asks me, I know what time is; if I want to explain it to him, I don't know
what time is.
The momentariness of everything, of the universe and so also of
us, is not a new discovery, or a forgotten discovery
PAUL VALÉRY
La matière n'est que dans l'instant . . . Le temps est - l'éternel présent
[Cahiers II]
Matter exists only in the moment . . . Time is - the eternal present.
KANT
Time and space are necessary forms under
which sensation and perception are
accommodated in our minds, in our brains; we
can have no knowledge of the dingen an sich.
"Time is not an empirical conception. It is a
necessary representation, lying at the
foundation of all our intuitions.
If we abstract our internal intuition and take objects as they are in
themselves, then time is nothing. We deny to time all claim to absolute
reality".
"I see upon the countenance of the reader signs of dissatisfaction mingle
with contempt. The present work is not intended for popular use".
"Before Kant, one might say, we were in time; now time is in us".
[Schopenhauer]
Kant left totally unexplained how, if we see only through time and
space as arbitrary forms of intuition, we in fact cope with reality.
[Quinton]
Evolutionary epistemology explains that natural selection of brain
processes has provided us with practical concepts of time and
space to allow us to manage reality .
KONRAD LORENZ
"I am a disciple of my old colleague from
Konigsberg, that is, of Kant, and I am trying to
translate his categories in biological terms under
the form of innateness.
"The cognitive apparatus is itself an objective reality
which has acquired its present form through contact
with and adaptation to equally real things in the outer
world ..
The 'spectacles’ of our modes of thought and perception, such as
causality, substance, quality, time and place (the Kantian categories)
are functions of a neuro-sensory organisation that has evolved in the
service of survival.
What we experience is a real image of reality, albeit an extremely
simple one, only just sufficing for our practical purposes".
Our bodies, our senses, our minds, our consciousness, our
language, our words, have evolved to make it possible for us to
interact with and survive in the world.
So we should not lightly reject or suspect the senses, the minds,
the words we find ourselves, with in attempting to understand
the universe and our existence in it.
KARL POPPER
The World of Parmenides Essays on the Pre-Socratic
Enlightenment 1998
Human experience does not perceive real life as
simply a uniform progression along some
imaginary line extended in space, but rather a
continuous flow. The real world is one of
continuous becoming or process.
This discreteness is not real. So-called discrete
elements are only apparent when we have a need
to pluck them from our continuing experience.
We may appear to ourselves as things but we find that we are processes.
Impressive empirical evidence for Parmenides' views in the field of
quantum mechanics.
PHYSICS ?
One view:
The 'great task' of physics is to provide, as completely as
possible, a coherent description (a model) of all those
observations on and in the Universe which exhibit a
deterministic or causal or repeatable characteristic.
Physics is not concerned with whether I exist or whether a
'real' world exists beyond my sense-perceptions. What
physics is concerned with is that part of all observations and
knowledge which can be expressed in mathematical terms.
But time and space as forms of the understanding,
with due acknowledgement to Kant, come before
any use physical scientists may make of them.
Theories of everything ?
Current theory-building to unify gravity and quantum mechanics is
producing fundamental change in conceptions of time and space.
At the ultimate 'so far' levels of physics, the identity of particle and
wave, or at least the difficulty of distinguishing particle behaviour
from wave behaviour no longer appears mysterious.
It is just that without realising it we are approaching the final reality
of physical existence - the unending play of different patterns within
an ultimately stationary material reality, which exists at a scale of
magnitude many many times smaller than anything we have so far
been able to approach.
JULIAN BARBOUR
Even for physicists time does not exist.
Time is an illusion. The phenomena from
which we deduce its existence are real, but
we interpret them wrongly.
The crisis in QM has deepened since the
discovery by John Bell in 1964 that the
collapse mechanism requires us to believe that
a measurement in one part of space can result
in an instantaneous change of the system in a
distant part of space.
String theory developments ?
Fundamental particles are not dimensionless points but onedimensional lines.
The wiggling superstrings, which were at least vaguely possible to
visualize, have been joined (and possibly supplanted) by even
more abstract entities: membranes, or "branes".
A 2-brane is a two-dimensional surface, like a bedsheet, stretching
across a three- dimensional space. A point is a 0-brane, and a line
is a 1-brane. One can have 3- branes, 4-branes, 5-branes, all the
way up to 9-branes: nine-dimensional surfaces inside a 10dimensional world.
Quantum gravity suggests that our world canvas not only has
texture, but a foam or sponge-like structure, so that intervals
or durations cannot be infinitely subdivided.
The space we inhabit takes on the features of a quivering jelly
[Paul Davies]
Empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent
physics. The electromagnetic field fluctuates. Virtual pairs of
positive and negative electrons, in effect, are constantly being
created and annihilated, and likewise pairs of mu mesons, pairs
of baryons, and pairs of other particles.
New Scientist 19 June 1999:
Quantum foam: Is the fabric of the Universe a seething mass of
black holes and wormholes? "How come the quantum? How
come existence?" John Wheeler begins and ends his
autobiography with this question.
"Before the second superstring revolution, life was simple. We believed
that everything in the universe, quarks, photons, gravitons, electrons,
and the rest, were all made out of strings. We no longer know what the
fundamental constituents of the theory are. Strings and D-branes
appear equally fundamental. Perhaps they're all made from something
even more fundamental.
We've made an enormous amount of progress in the past few years, but
now realize the greater depth of our ignorance". [Steven Giddings]
DAVID BOHM
Wholeness and the Implicate Order 1980
The notion that reality is to be understood as a process is
an ancient one, going back at least to Heraclitus, who said
that everything flows. The best image of process is perhaps
that of the flowing stream, whose substance is never the
same. On this stream, one may see an ever-changing
pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which
evidently have no independent existence as such.
Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its particles,
including those constituting human beings, their
laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be
understood
as a single undivided whole.
What we perceive through our senses as empty space is actually the plenum,
which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The
things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can
be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and
sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.
Time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of
moments.
The atom . . . can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined
cloud, dependent for its particular form on the whole environment,
including the observing instrument.
The paradoxes of Zeno now seem to be open to more straightforward
explanation: the arrow is not a persisting object travelling through a
persisting substance, air; it is a pattern in relative translation through a
patterning of the substrate, which is interpreted as the molecules and
atoms which appear to form air.
And similarly the earth in not travelling through an insubstantial ether;
it is a deformation, a pattern, of the universal material substrate, of the
same nature as the light which also is a patterning in the universal
material substrate.
The individual atom is a pattern which persists as a wave
persists. Michelson and Morley assumed that the river and its
banks were different in character. The river was flowing but so
also were the banks.
Neither space nor time as substrates through which something
moves are real.
EVERYTHING IS MOMENTARY
Change in the universe like shaking a kaleidoscope
Recognition of the momentariness of everything seems to lead to
a cosmic kaleidoscopic system, changing patterns in an
unchanging substrate, instantaneous change, a result which
resembles processes hypothesized in quantum physics.
The idea of the momentariness of matter, of the cosmos, can
have important consequences even for the most refined and
elaborate cosmological and physical theories (quantum gravity,
spacefoam, superstring theory, M-brane theory).
WILLIAM JAMES
Whilst we think, our brain changes, and, like
the aurora borealis, its whole internal
equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change
... from one relative state of equilibrium to
another, like the gyrations of a kaleidoscope.
The present moment of time. ... Where is it,
this present? It has melted in our grasp, ...
gone in the instant of becoming.
The only fact of our immediate experience is ... the specious present.
There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement that of
the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity
goes from an arrangement to a re-arrangement.
Perception that there is only the instant for ourselves and for the
whole of the material universe: matter, the cosmos, the world,
ourselves, our brains.
Our brains have only the present moment The past is our present
brain/mind The future is our present brain/mind.
Our brains are instantaneous patterns changing from moment to
moment, formed from the collection of structures, ultimately
molecules, chemical elements, protons, electrons, quarks, which
constitute the neural material.
The aggregations of electrons and protons which form us (the patterns
which electrons and protons themselves are) are apparently travelling
at incredible speeds, as the world turns, as the solar system rotates, as
the galaxy and supergalaxies turn.
Patterns (but not bodies) apparently in transit across the material
universe.
A pattern is a peculiarity in the material universe.
Really this is not such an extraordinary supposition. We are formed of
massive aggregations of cells, which cluster in a way which suggests
that they form a persisting unity, but 'in reality' the cells forming us are
disappearing and being replaced all the time.
We are a specious unity - but that is good enough.
The components forming the cells are also changing all the
time - the larger structures and ultimately the atoms which
form them are moving out and being replaced - so that a cell
also forms a specious unity.
A wave is a specious unity, a
pattern manifested in a substrate,
water. No water molecule remains
within the same wave or even
from moment to moment in the
same position within the same
wave. No atom forming the water
molecule persists within the same
wave.
If we or an 'object' as a pattern sounds as though we, or 'objects',
are not real, then for us and 'objects', we and they are as 'real' as
the other persons or objects with which we interact
In just the same way as a wave interacts with another wave or
with some 'fixed' 'material' 'object' such as a balk of timber.
A wave is real to another wave. A ripple recognises a ripple. A
wave is real to the pebbles on which it beats or the timbers it
strikes against.
We, and every 'object' in the universe, are
being instantiated from moment to moment
in the stationary substrate which is the
universe
MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM
We are more remarkable than we realise -- but
not particularly special.
POSTSCRIPT January 2009
But where does this leave the problem of the
relation of time and consciousness?
Consciousness includes, beside thoughts and
images, our perceptions of the physical world as
well as awareness of our body and bodily
sensations.
This all-inclusive consciousness goes to form
the ‘specious present’, a priori organised in
terms of space and time, with its richness as
the product of the progressive evolution of the
brain’s memory systems and of its capacity for
representing the world through language.
With acknowledgements to Max Velmans’ Understanding Consciousness 2000
Routledge
Objective time remains a process of replacement of one
universal equilibrium for another from moment to
moment; objective duration (the problem Bergson
wrestled with) does not exist but subjective duration is
an aspect of the Kantian a priori, the innate structure
of our mind.