Time and Spirituality (Pt I): Lent 2024, Day 31

My thinking on the subject of time has progressed significantly since last Lent. I have grappled with the concept of the block universe, the notion that the past, present and future are occurring simultaneously. The corollary to this is that time is an illusion (and, to quote Douglas Adams, lunchtime doubly so). Physicist and philosopher Bernard Carr talks about the specious present – a present that's never really there, happening at Planck-time, so what we really have is the past and future separated by the shortest-possible sliver of 'nowness' that we're capable of experiencing.

That shortest sliver of can be described in terms of physics as the shortest possible unit of time, the Planck time (5.4 x 10^-44 seconds, the time it takes a photon to cover one Planck length, which is 1.6 x 10^-35 metres), or in biological terms, around a twentieth of a second (think of individual frames of a film perceived by our brains as moving pictures). So 'now' has come and gone; 'nows' continue to pass from future into past. There is, practically, no 'now'.

I wrote earlier this Lent about how the direction of time's arrow is said to be determined by entropy (leave an ice cube on a table at room temperature and it will melt; even if you freeze the room, you will never reconstitute the form of that ice cube). But at the same time that entropy is busy creating chaos, the Universe is creating complexity. The Universe could have been a uniform soup of evenly distributed hydrogen atoms – but isn't. Instead, it is galaxies, star systems, planets – and life. And before time – before the Universe was born – there was Consciousness (Big-C Consciousness, as opposed to the small-c consciousness that we individually experience). To Big-C Consciousness, time is irrelevant and meaningless. 

There can be no time without memory. 

And there can be no memory without small-c consciousness. 

And so, without consciousness, without a conscious observer to notice its passage, we cannot have time – we can only have a block universe, where all time is equally real, past, present and future, simultaneously. Spacetime without small-c consciousness shrinks from three dimensions modulated by the passage of time to four static dimensions.

The need for an observer to consciously experience the passage of time is like the conundrum about a tree falling in a forest with no one there to hear it – does it make a sound? The answer is, of course, no – because the experience of sound requires an ear to collect the vibrations of air, a brain to process the signals sent to it, and consciousness to be aware of this sound.

And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. This is how Big-C Consciousness, which I would take as the Divine, perceives the Cosmic Entirety.

Consider this – it takes eight minutes for a photon to travel from the Sun to you. And yet, from the perspective of the photon, travelling at the speed of light as it does, that journey is instantaneous. As is a journey of billions of light years from the most distant star we can observe. From the photon's point of view, there is no travel time; it is instantaneous. Neutrinos also travel at or about the speed of light; I have postulated that cosmic neutrino background (CNB, the universe's background particle radiation composed of relic neutrinos, may somehow act as a timeless carrier of Big-C consciousness. The CNB is a relic of the Big Bang; relic neutrinos separated from matter when the universe was around one second old. 

Here's how Big-C Consciousness, then, can perceive past, present and future, as one. Permeating through the Cosmos at light speed. (Tap in to Big-C Consciousness, and you too, feel the past and the future?)

And I have come to question the notion of an eternal afterlife lived in the blissful perfection of having achieved a teleological end-point. Instead of 'life everlasting', I have posited that at the precise moment of the final culmination of the journey from Zero to One – the Cosmos returns to its Zero state at Big Bang. And the cycle begins all over again.

But in a time-flat block universe, eternity is an instant, and that instant could last an eternity.

More tomorrow.

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