Time and Consciousness

I wrote two weeks ago about consciousness and spacetime; I'd now like to separate time from space in the context of consciousness.

A few recent podcasts, in particular Lex Fridman's conversation with Donald Hoffman, have reinforced my appreciation of consciousness as the fundamental property of the Universe. Consciousness, I believe, is not something that emerged as a result of the evolution of life, but something that sparked the Big Bang and drove evolution. Donald Hoffman posits that spacetime is a product of consciousness, and not merely something found within spacetime, here and there, exclusively on planets hosting sentient life.

I want to consider the nature of Time in the context of Consciousness. Stephen Hawking's well-known A Brief History of Time, and Carlo Rovelli's (better, in my opinion) The Order of Time. Hawking's approach is purely scientific - attempting to define time in an objective, empirical manner. Full of black holes and entanglement, the book is the approach of a mathematician and physicist anchored in the 1980s. The term 'consciousness' does not enter in to it. 

Rovelli has the advantage of writing 30 years after Hawking, and so his book is more up to date with recent scientific thinking. Rovelli's big insight is that entropy is the only way of telling the direction of time. A mouldy strawberry will never recover its prime. A strawberry in its prime can only rot - it will never return to its seedling state. Hence, the Universe can never run time backwards. Most reactions are reversibly -  entropy is not. Interestingly, entropy hardly figures in Hawking's book; its first mention is on page 102, and then mainly in the context of black holes.

There's objective time, moving from past into future at the steady rate of one second per second. But - as Hawking and Rovelli both point out - that 'objective' time can be distorted by gravity. From Einstein on, the Newtonian notion of time being fixed across the Cosmos vanishes. Instead, the notion of time as witnessed by an observer at one specific location in the Cosmos takes over.

So time is subjective, rather than objective? Subjective time - time as perceived by you or me. This time cannot be measured by a clock, it can only be felt. We all feel that time passes more quickly as you get older. This is because at the age of 50, a year is just 2% of the life you've experienced thus far, while at the age of ten it is 10% - so at 50, a year feels five times shorter than it did when you were ten. And here, I believe, entropy kicks in. We feel we're getting older, there's less and less time left. So we are more determined as middle-aged adults to get stuff done - pressure a child does not feel. [As an aside, if you stroke your purring cat for five minutes, and then feel guilty that you must leave it and do something else, remember - you've been stroking it for 20 cat-minutes. From the cat's subjective experience, of course.]

You can slow down time, subjectively. Assume the plank position - legs and back ramrod straight, propped up on your elbows. Before you start, open the clock app in your phone, place it on the ground in front of you, select the stopwatch function and press 'start' as you begin holding the plank. And hold. Minute, two, three... four... five? Time's dragging... every tenth of a second that passes seems to do so more slowly. While I'm holding the plank, I listen to podcasts - ones that grip my attention. I focus on what I'm listening to, rather than looking at the stopwatch. Or toggle between the two for an interesting effect of time passing slowly and quickly, simultaneously.

[British spiritual philosopher, Rupert Spira, says that the past is where our forgotten memories go. If you still remember something, it remains - as a memory - in the present. I like this concept.]

Subjectively, your consciousness looks forward in time to an event or events, whilst elapsed time is measured in memories. When did that happen - two weeks ago or three weeks ago? A diary, calendar - or indeed blog - is useful for recalling the objective moment in time, but subjectively, some events stand out more than others. Qualia memories that have a habit of resurfacing from the past. I lived (as I wrote the other day) in Coventry for two academic years, but two specific days stand out far more strongly than all the rest.

Non-local consciousness is a supposed phenomenon that gives rise to remote viewing. The US government's Project Star Gate (parodied in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney) is claimed to have had one major success to its credit - finding a Soviet nuclear bomber that crashed in the jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1979. This is an example of remote viewing across space, but another project the US government (allegedly) embarked upon dealt with remote viewing across time - the recruitment of 4,000 people who claimed to have the ability to see into the future to ask them to 'view' the year 2050 - from 1978 to 1991. What the experiment's organiser, Stephan A. Schwartz, was looking for was a consensus; salient points that featured across many of the remote viewings. Having predicted - or rather foreseen - the breakup of the Soviet Union and numerous pandemics, it seems they are on to something. [If this tickles your interest, here's a recent talk about it.]

My personal belief is that some of us do indeed have psychic powers to 'see' across space and time, but those powers are weak and they occur rarely across society. But collectively, there could be something in this approach.

The question is - to what extent is this intuition, to what extent educated guesswork, and to what extent a genuine supernatural power to peer accurately into something that hasn't happened yet? If the latter, then how does consciousness permeate across time? If, as some panpsychists claim, consciousness is uniformly spread across space - could it not also be said to be uniformly spread across time? 

And if consciousness exists simultaneously across time - what does that mean for notions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution? From this point of view - my long-held belief in a journey from Zero to One must be examined to consider whether we're at Zero and One at the same time - or is it neither and both? I suspect that the unfolding of the Universe is a one-way process that does indeed follow time's arrow from (imperfect) past to (perfect) future. There's only one way to find out... Live on, in curiosity, in observation.

One for me to ponder on for future posts.

This time last year:
Altered states - higher planes

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica