Imaging future qualia

It’s just gone ten, but outside it is already 25°C. The kittens are back from playing outside. Kwińcia is asleep on my kitchen table next to my laptop (below). 

Wiktor, Dorian and Memphis are asleep in the cat tower, and Mars is asleep on the windowsill. The sun shines; I feel its power. A fly buzzes around the kitchen.

Kittenhood passes all too quickly. Within a few months, the five kittens will have lost their intrinsic kittenish cuteness and will rapidly be turning into normal adult cats. And sadly, for reasons of feline management, I will have to get the two girls sterilised, as dealing with 12 cats plus another ten kittens this time next year would be beyond my abilities and would stretch the budget.

So this is the last summer during which I can rejoice in the presence of kittens – like, ever. The last summer in which I can stretch out my hand and stroke the innocent softness of kittens as they sleep.

Summer will pass. Right now, the front door is open, the windows are all ajar, the trees are beautifully green and the sky is blue. But πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei: everything flows. By December – or, who knows, January? – there will be snow, lots of it, covering bare trees and dead vegetation. But there will also be those blue-sky days, with hard frosts and the stark beauty of winter. There may be fewer sunny days in midwinter, but they will happen.

Can I imagine the forthcoming winter? By then, my five kittens will have become adolescent cats, the same size as last year’s litter, who by winter were already larger than their mother. Both Wenus and Céleste are petite for adult cats. How will the kittens’ faces have changed? Can I imagine that transition?

Autumn will come: shorter days, more grey skies, leaves changing colour and then falling, leaving skeletal trees through which the horizon becomes visible. I cannot yet feel its approach; the late-summer heatwaves are bound to come. But I can imagine the first intimations of autumn, especially those clear mornings: dew-flecked spiders’ webs in the garden, wet shoes, chilly air, golden leaves, apple trees and grapevines full of maturing fruit. All of this, less than six weeks away.

I have this blog, now in its twentieth year, so I can go back in time and see my emotional responses to the changing seasons: but always looking backwards rather than forwards. We can project ourselves into the future on the basis of past experience, but the qualia will never be exactly the same twice. I ask myself whether we can dream into the future. [For me, these are exceedingly rare.]

Not only does the Earth spin on its axis and orbit the Sun, but the entire Solar System proceeds around the Galaxy at about 7.32 billion kilometres a year. The Earth circles the moving Sun somewhat like a point on an obliquely mounted propeller (although the geometry is not quite as neat as this analogy suggests).

In six months, the Solar System will have travelled about 3.66 billion kilometres farther along its roughly 227-million-year orbit around the galactic centre. During the same period, the Earth will have travelled about 470 million kilometres around the Sun — half its annual orbital journey of 940 million kilometres. For every kilometre the Earth travels along its solar orbit, the Sun carries the Solar System nearly eight kilometres along its galactic orbit.

Relative to the Galaxy, the Earth will therefore be about 73.2 billion kilometres farther along its path in ten years. Time travellers returning to the coordinates they occupied ten years earlier would materialise somewhere out in interstellar space rather than back on Earth.

Nothing remains where it was. At the cosmic scale, worlds and stars are ceaselessly in motion; at the quantum scale, position itself is not definite. From the quantum to the cosmic, nothing is ever simply where it once was.

But qualia memories – consciousness taps into something intangible, something for which physics has no formula. Intangible yet instantly familiar. From another time – and a very, very distant place.

This time last year: 
Aesthetics of New Asphalt

This time five years ago:
Samsung Galaxy phone camera vs. Nikon D3500

This time eight years ago:
Karczunkowska viaduct takes shape

This time nine years ago:
My father's return to Warsaw, 2017

This time ten years ago:
My father's first visit to Warsaw in 40 years

This time 11 years ago:
What's worse – unemployment, or a badly-paid job?

This time 12 years ago:
A return to Liverpool

This time 14 years ago:
Too good to last (anyone remember OLT Express airline?)

This time 15 years ago:
Poland's Baltic coast as a holiday destination

This time 17 years ago:
The Warsaw they fought and died for?

This time 19 years ago:
Floods, rainbows and hope