October 2, 2023

    It's time that I express myself here and now about time, here in Kailua, Hawaii at 1:07 AM  on the second floor of my home typing on this keyboard and looking to see the words while correcting typing errors , grammar, and spelling. My computer is smarter these days so errors are easily seen and corrected. As I reread these few sentences time has entered the vocabulary and is my subject of this post. Time is now but now an instant is experienced vicariously since I'm a living organism. My vicarious experiences are captured in my mind through reflection and attention to the now. If I am totally absorbed in this experience I cannot type but remain inner focused on the flow. Meditation may be a tool to explore what I'm after here. In meditation you let go of the evaluating, judging, analyzing functions of mind and become aware of now without filters. Is this possible actually? The meditation practice has been studied in the laboratory with the blessing of the Dalai Lama. The hippocampus becomes activated and the changes in the hippocampus in meditation adepts is quite unique leading to growth and supporting the evidence for neuroplasticity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/.  There is other research that shows that the practice of meditation increases alpha waves and reduces beta wave on the EEG records of those meditating https://psychcentral.com/health/meditation-brain-waves#meditation. For those adepts theta waves increase with a feeling of bliss and being at one with everyone and everything.  So here's some physical evidence that a process called meditation which focuses on the now as aspect of unfiltered time changes brain functioning over many sessions (time). I recall in the 1980's going to a Werner Erhard seminar on meditation where I sat on a straight back chair very close to my partner for the session who I did not know before the seminar looking into his eyes for up to thirty minutes without moving. I became aware of the other person, his eyes, my reactions are interesting when evaluating and emotional aspects become objects of your attention and there is a flow from the here and now to other memories, concerns, distractions, etc. which when I am aware of these distractions from the task of being here and now brings me back so I can experience a flow of time. 

     Sarah Manguso wrote a delightful book of reflections Ongoingness the End of a Diary. From an early age she kept a daily diary which seemed to me an obsessive action in which she described her reflections and activities of every day. She did not seem to gain much except to become aware of the subject and experiences of time. Her exploration of time in this short brief book is very interesting to me. She becomes aware that what is important in understanding time is to know that forgetting is very important. To record her diary she had to choose what to leave out and forget. "My behavior was an attempt to stop time before it swept me up. It was an attempt to stay safe, free to detach before life and time became too intertwined for me to write down, as a detached observer, what had happened. Once I understood what I was doing, with each commitment I wakened slightly more from my dream of pure potential." "My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I’ve known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word — soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death." It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget."    Her relationship to her daily diary writing and her conceptions of time changed when  she gave birth to her son. "I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son’s life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world."  She changes her view of time. " The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears." "The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me. Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity."

    I've become a fan of Jorg Luis Borges. His thoughts about time disturbed him but bear some attention. " In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) to metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, in which I myself do not believe, but which regularly visits me at night and in the weary twilight with the illusory force of an axiom." "A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream." "Behind our faces there is no secret self which governs our acts and receives our impressions; we are, solely, the series of these imaginary acts and these errant impressions." "Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment." "Behind our faces there is no secret self which governs our acts and receives our impressions; we are, solely, the series of these imaginary acts and these errant impressions." "Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment." 

    On April 6, 1922 in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein lectured about how clocks in objects at various speeds moving toward or away at various fractions of the speed of light have different times. Therefore for example a person in such a ship may age slower or faster. "Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity posits that space and time affect each other, and that the speed of light will change the conditions of the observation of time for any observer." " Bergsonian time speaks of a “human” duration to things. These constitute a “vitalist” time in the sense that they mark subjective durations to life. Time is experienced differently at different moments by different people. Beings experience time when they escape the spell of the clock, which can’t measure time in exact terms precisely because it’s already within the duration of time itself. Thus, there is time of learning, of training, of common knowledge, but also there are different times of emotions, time that dissolves while something pleasurable is happening, and time that is restored, monolithic, and heavy when we’re subjected to waiting." (https://www.faena.com/aleph/einstein-vs-bergson-the-struggle-for-time) To Bergson time was a more felt experienced duration. A living sentient entity experiences time the Elan Vital or life force is crucially involved with the evolution of the universe. Consciousness has a sense of the past and future according to another philosopher Edmund Husserl. "Husserl argued that the study of consciousness must actually be very different from the study of nature. For him, phenomenology does not proceed from the collection of large amounts of data and to a general theory beyond the data itself, as in the scientific method of induction. Rather, it aims to look at particular examples without theoretical presuppositions (such as the phenomena of intentionality, of love, of two hands touching each other, and so forth), before then discerning what is essential and necessary to these experiences." (https://iep.utm.edu/husserl)

Steven Savitt in an article What Bergson Should Have Said to Einstein (openedition.org) " Four caesium beam clocks flown around the world on commercial jet flights during October 1971, once eastward and once westward, recorded directionally dependent time differences which are in good agreement with predictions of conventional relativity theory. Relative to the atomic time scale of the U.S. Naval Observatory, the flying clocks lost 59 ± 10 nanoseconds during the eastward trip and gained 273 ± 7 nanoseconds during the westward trip, where the errors are the corresponding standard deviations. These results provide an unambiguous empirical resolution of the famous clock “paradox” with macroscopic clocks (Hafele, J. C. and R. Keating, 1972b). The root idea here is, I believe, that time, real time, is accessible to our consciousness whereas the quantity measured by clocks is some sort of derivative quantity or secondary shadow of genuine duration. I think this view is deeply mistaken. We humans are clocks, albeit not particularly good clocks compared to today’s best. We measure imperfectly what they measure far more exactly. We can experience what they measure in a way that, presumably, they cannot; but what we and they are responding to is one and the same, nonetheless. I cannot prove this, and it will not be possible to argue the point in any detail within the confines of this article."  Finally in What Einstein Meant That Time Is An Illusion What Did Einstein Mean By Time is an Illusion? Read More! (interestingengineering.com) ""People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Abihijit Naskar is quoted in this article " “Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.” 

    Finally I came across this article by Lee Smolin regarding his speculations about the evolution of the universe (and time) https://iai.tv/articles/lee-smolin-the-laws-of-the-universe-change-auid-2174 . Lee Smolin hypothesis is that in black holes there may be slight changes in the laws of physics. These change lead to an evolution of the universe. The laws of physics change. He suggests that time is fundamental not space and through time there is something like machine learning. Read the article for clarity and details. Before leaving his speculations I need to mention to my readers that the cosmological constant value first proposed then rejected by  Einstein is alive and the value in evolving black hole changes proposed by Smolin can change slightly effecting the value of this constant and therefore the evolving cosmos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant).  Here's a more wild speculative article for the geeks amongst us Cosmological natural selection (fecund universes) - Evo Devo Universe. As an aside, recent research indicates that the cosmos has quadrillions of black holes!  

    My grandson a high school student discussed with me his science project on subjective time. He spent a duration of time in his room and his mother then interrupted to have him estimate how much time elapsed. So far, he's finding he overestimates, underestimates, and is fairly accurate.

    Well thanks for spending this time with me.

Leonard 

P.S.

Oahu Tantalus mountain hike today down into Pahoa Valley and back up again Whoo! Subjective descent experience was quite stressful since I wore sun glass, it was overcast, and the bamboo thicket in the narrow very steep trail down gave me little light, on a rutted, muddy, somewhat meandering and steep muddy descent. My peripheral neuropathy of dulled kinesthetic muscle position sense heightened my sense of immediacy and anxiety and much caution were my motivation so this descent seems very long in time. There meandering up and down the slopes by the dry stream bed was done very carefully. The way back up was very challenging for the cardiovascular system. Only one rope assist. But this giant Albizzia tree was the perfect lunch spot. 

    Hike distance 3.63 miles, descent 871 feet ascent 871 feet, and time for total hike 4:05 hours.