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Frederick Turner
The Need for Time
Time, goes the old joke, is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at
once. Like many jokes, this one has a fairly large grain of truth. If two states of the same
object are allowed by the universe, such as being red and being green, or being in one
place and being in anotheror if two objects, such as two fundamental particles of the
same mass, spin, and charge, can occupy exactly the same state and placethen major
problems arise. Either, in the first case, the principle of identity is violatedis it one
object or two?or, in the second case, there is not room in space for both objects at once
(in physics, this problem is known as the Pauli exclusion principle). In a universe of pure
space, without time, the laws of science could not exist because identity and location
could not be reliably established.
Time gives the universe a way of connecting different states of the same object (first it
was red, then it turned green; first it was in one place, then it was in another) and of
spacing out events and objects so that they do not get in each other's way (first one atom
was there, then another). Further, if one of the states of an object has to exist if the other
is to exist, time provides an order of events. The tree cannot exist unless its seedling has
earlier existed, nor the seedling without the seed; whereas the seedling could exist
without the tree but not without the seed. Time is whatever space a logical scheduling
problem requires for its solution.
We can actually study situations where time almost doesn't exist. In the tiny and always
minutely brief world of quantum mechanics there is so little time that identity and
location do indeed lose a good deal of their clarity and indeed their distinction from one
another: a particle can exist in a state of superposition, in which two different things are
true of the same object, and it can exist very tenuously in two places at once. But for
objects with more solidity and persistence, time is necessary not just tautologically for
them to exist "in" but also as a way of resolving paradoxes of being and location. Another
place where time almost doesn't exist is in black holes, where it is only their slow leakage
and eventual unlocking that prevents paradoxes such as that information can be destroyed
(a contradiction of identity) and that two things can be in the same place (black holes can
be almost infinitely dense with matter).
The Problem
The Enlightenment description of time, which is familiar to us alland which even after
ninety years has not been replaced in our intuitive imagination by relativity theory, let
alone other modifications of itsounds like the simplest way of providing the "spacing
out" and scheduling function that is so important to the universe. What it says is that time
is very like a spatial dimensionsay, lengthextending out in a straight line, and that
everything in the universe at any given moment is at the same point on that line; what is
on one side of us is the past, what is on the other is the future, and where we all are is the
present.
But wait: all is not well here. When it comes to the "passing" of time, the familiar model
begins to get complicated. The present moment moves along the line in a futureward
direction providing each point in it with an infinitesimal moment of realityor, in the
opinion of some physicists and philosophers, the whole line is always already real, and
our consciousness moves along the line, like a spotlight, giving us the illusion of
encountering a new future and leaving behind a dead past. But the space analogy has
already begun to break down. Our experience of space doesn't necessary include a
"passing of space"; there's no necessary point of maximal existence along a line, or
maximal human attention to it, and there's no place on a line that all of the universe is at.
And if either reality or our awareness moves along the line, in what time is it moving?
How fast? How many miles per what? Can it accelerate? how could we tell the
difference between slow and fast? and if we can't, how could we tell if it had or hadn't
stopped altogether? what does "move" mean if there's no discernible distinction? Is there
a second time in which reality or awareness moves along the line of the first time? Then
why not a third time in which the reality of the reality or the awareness of the awareness
moves along the second? And so on.
If the whole timeline is already there, moreover, then the future is merely awaiting its
actualization or our attention to it, and cannot be changed. So we are bound to the rails of
fate and such fundamental values as morality, freedom, responsibility and creativity are
illusions. This reflection might be bearable for a philosopher who preferred truth to
moralistic wishful thinking, if it did not also imply that the philosopher's own cogitations
are part of the same clockwork, and the feeling that something must be logically true is
too, so truth is also an illusion. And there is no way of checking whether such an
automaton is correctly calibrated, so as to verify that the illusion of truth coincides with
its reality.
Equally problematic is the direction of time. Space doesn't have a preferred direction. In
space one can get from London to Paris and from Paris to London, but whereas one can
get from A. D. 1980 to A. D. 2001 in time, one can't, as one could with space, get a return
ticket. Nineteenth century thermodynamics showed that thermal and energetic events in
the universe always went one waytoward the increase of entropy. You can burn a log but
not unburn it, you can let perfume diffuse out of an open bottle but not suck it back in
again, you can turn work into heat and heat into work but only if you pay a tax or interest
of work energy on the exchange each time. But then the study of biological metabolism
and evolution seemed to show that living systems can feed upon the flow of the increase
of entropy, like paddlewheels in a torrent. Without violating the Second Law of
thermodynamics, a tree can turn ash (soil) and smoke (atmospheric CO2) and heat
(sunlight) back into a log, and a rose can suck chemicals out of air and soil and make
perfume. So not only can time possess at least two directions, different kinds of
organisms can take different directions.
In the twentieth century, relativity theory showed that the universe is not all at the same
point in the line; a present moment is not something simply given to the universe, but
rather something rather fuzzily earned by twoway communication among objects and
events that puts them in synch with one another. An "insynch" region is called an
inertial frame. Some parts of the universe are in different inertial frames from others and
our present knowledge of them is necessarily of their past, while other parts of the
universe are over our event horizon and we can never know them. And if we cannot know
them, the proposition that they exist and share our present moment is a purely
metaphysical and unscientific notionunless we improve our model of time.
More recently still, quantum theory showed that the state of knowledge that exists about a
particle partly determines its nature and identitydisturbing enough, but more so if we
reflect that one can only know about something after it has happened, since even the
fastest messenger, light, has a finite speed. This means that knowledge must somehow
retroactively affect what it is knowledge of; so the presentpoint on the line can be neither
the spotlight of awareness (we are aware only of past events), nor the place where reality
momentarily condenses (since it is busily condensing previous realities).
So the Enlightenment timeline description ends up by being not so simple after all, and
worse still, it is full of contradictions. It was contradictions, after all, that we needed time
in order to resolve, and if our account of time just introduces more of them, we are worse
off than we were before. (If it strikes the reader that I am sliding back and forth between
the universe's need for ordered time in order to exist coherently, and our need for ordered
time to explain the universe with, that slide is entirely intentional: for after all we are part
of the universe, and any problem of ours is thus a problem of the universe's as well. This
little move or slide is going to be important later on.)
Evidently no simple description of time will do. It looks as if we may have to settle for a
description that is at least not contradictory, and let the complications fall as they may.
Certainly we will have to abandon the timeline concept; which means that we will have to
be very skeptical about clocks (analog ones which wind the timeline onto a dial, or digital
ones which map it onto the line of natural numbers) and calendars (which winch it onto
the larger pawls of months and years).
An Emerging Solution
A new view of time is emerging from a variety of disciplines. However, this new
conception is as yet fragmentary, divided among schools and disciplines often at odds
with each other. I shall here treat it as a unity rather than as a collection of competing
hypotheses, because I am convinced that in this case to demand the kind of elegance we
expect of a scientific theory, that complex details and phenomena can be reduced to a
single simple principle, would be a mistake. If time is, as I will argue, precisely the
principle of complexification, we should expect any true theory of it to be a messy Rube
Goldberg contraption rather than a graceful piece of abstract geometry.
We can summarize the new timeconception under six propositions:
1. Time is complex and concentric.
2. Time is generated by objects and organisms and its local properties vary accordingly.
3. Time is evolving and emergent.
4. Time is branchy and thus free.
5. Time is looped and nonlinear.
6. Time is selfpruning and thus providential.
Complex and Concentric
Like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, time is a nested hierarchy of temporalities. This
idea has been ably synthesized by the International Society for the Study of Time and its
founder, J. T. Fraser. Human time contains the more primitive times of animals and of
living organisms in general, which in turn contain the time of matter with its
electrochemical and crystalline clocks; and mattertime contains the cruder time of
quantum particles and light, out of which all things are made. When brain scientists
began to investigate human consciousness, the experience of the self as a simple and
single being was revealed as an illusion, one marvellously constructed, to be sure, by the
nervous system so as to establish unitary command, but actually composed of a huge
range of neural mechanisms. Likewise our experience of time as a simple flow is a fine
neural achievement, a sort of Michael Jordan arabesque that looks so easy from the
viewer's end.
Generated by Organisms
Time is not a medium or container within which things happen: it is a property generated
by the things themselves, individually and together. J. T. Fraser coined the term
"temporal umwelt" to describe this idea. The animal ethologist Jacob von Üxkull used
the word "umwelt" to mean the world as it appears to a given animal and as an animal can
affect it, according to what senses and limbs it possesses. A blind mole has an umwelt
that involves digging but not seeing: a hawk one that involves seeing but not digging.
Atoms are sensitive to the four forces of physics but to nothing else and cannot, for
instance, respond to a goose's mating dance or stalk prey or be offended by a slight or
even individually exert gas pressure. Humans can extend their umwelt by machines like
airplanes and bulldozers and instruments such as telescopes, radios and oscillographs.
The temporal umwelt of an organism is whatever kind of time it needs to experience
things and to do things. Our complicated human sense of time includes its present
moment, its continuity, its before and after, its past and future, its futureward direction, its
memories and prophecies, its anticipation of death, and its conscious freedom, illustrated
by its branched verb tenses (as in such sentences as: "If you had invested in Microsoft you
could have retired three years ago and would be able now to choose whether to live in
France or Hawaii", which implies several branchpoints of decision and alternative
timelines).
But human temporality is only the outermost shell of a series of simpler temporalities.
Next down is biotemporality, the time of nonhuman life, which lacks much of the higher
machinery but retains a direction, continuity, a present moment, and a past. Next down
(or in) we find the temporal umwelt of molecular matter, which possesses continuity and
a direction (given by the increase of entropy) but no present moment, past, or future.
Deeper still is the temporal umwelt of atoms, which possesses continuity but no necessary
directionno earlier and later. You can run the movie of atoms moving about and
bouncing off each other forwards or backwards without a discernible difference or
violation of scientific laws, whereas if you did the same thing with an energetic chemical
reaction or the diffusion of a gas (or a vase falling and breaking) there would be clear
absurdities. Simpler still are quantum particles, which don't even possess temporal
continuity: each occupies its own little fragmentary and eternal spot of time. We humans
are made up of all these levels and can experience the lower ones in our feelings of
animal lust, roller coaster rides, mystical trance, dream, sleep, and death.
Different organisms at the same hierarchical level also differ in their temporal experiences
and capabilities, but in ways that are more easily translatable into each other than across
levels; animals of different species can understand much of each other's behavior, but
atoms cannot understand animals. Human science is the art of such translation.
Evolving and Emergent
If time can be hierarchically nested, and its nature contingent upon the local system where
it is studied, a further implication follows. Time itself evolves. As we have noted, time is
that which enables the universe to sort and space out different states of a system so that
they do not coexist in a paradoxical violation of identity. Time enables a tree to be a seed,
a seedling, and a mature tree in order rather than all three at once; and it gives the rule for
what order those states should take. The order in which temporalities are nested is also
the order in which they appeared; the more complex and elaborated following the less
complex and rudimentary. Higher more complex temporalities evolve out of lower
simpler ones. And this principle is robustly proved when we look at the order in which
the objects and systems that comprise the universe made their evolutionary appearance.
In the big bang, only elementary particles existed, with their rudimentary temporality.
Soon afterward, when the universe cooled enough for them to exist, atoms appeared, with
their characteristic of temporal continuity. Molecular matter followed, with its
characteristic tendency to become more thermally disordered over time. Then life, with
its present moment, its genetic or neural memory, and its ability to make order out of
entropy. Finally, humans, and their panoply of tenses and their awareness of freedom and
death.
There are several measures by which we can guage this evolutionary process, some
simple, others less so. For instance, the universe begins very hot and at very high
pressure; naturally it expands and so do the systems that make it up. As it gets bigger, its
density decreases, like an exploding gas or liquid; and firstyear thermodynamics tells us
that an expanding gas or liquid must cool. As the universe cools, new forms of order
crystallize out, like frostflowers forming on a windowpanefirst gravity, then the strong
and weak nuclear forces, then electromagnetism, then coherent matter, then crystals, then
living organisms, and finally ourselves. Each new form of order differs from its
predecessor by being more reflexive, selfreferential, selfmaintaining, and self
replicating: a wave of energy merely reproduces itself as it flees its point of origin at the
speed of light; matter is energy that uses part of itself to bind itself into a stable knot that
can occupy a single location; life is matter that contains a replicable DNA record of itself;
human culture is life that knows itself neurally and can breed itself into new forms. This
increased reflexivity is identical to an increase in temporal complexity: the more
conscious and selfreferential and selfordering a system is, the higher its temporal
umwelt.
The mechanism by which this series of emergences occurs is becoming familiar to chaos
theorists: it is selforganization in complex farfromequilibrium situations, crises
sometimes known as bifurcation points. An ordered system spontaneously appears as one
of a number of ways in which a stressed (in technical terms, a damped, driven)
environment solves its energybudget problems; this process in isomorphically similar to
the emergence of equilibrium solutions in the context of both zerosum and nonzerosum
games. You can observe this happening when a pan of heated water adopts a rolling boil,
thus solving the problem of how to transfer heat from the bottom of the pan to the air. A
hurricane is a larger version of the same thing, and the Great Red Spot on Jupiter a larger
one still. The frostflowers, and crystallization in general, provide another example, with
the stress this time provided by cooling rather than heating. The bodies of mature
animals and plants are the unimaginably complex emergent answer to the problem of how
to find the most parsimonious solution to the turbulent interaction of all the proteins their
embryonic DNA has specified.
Branchy and Free
The branchiness of things as we now conceive them stands in marked contrast to the iron
rails of unique linear deterministic cause and effect as conceptualized by the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries. There is not one line of necessity. The
universe is now increasingly coming to be seen as an open system, with freedom as a
constitutive principle. Though we can still see the causes by which some situation came
to exist, we are also aware of other plausible outcomes, and we know that some situations
are hugely and irreducibly unpredictable, and that all events are unpredictable at some
minute level of exactness. Humans are no longer seen as unique in being freeeverything
is, more or less; our uniqueness is now that we recognize and can to some extent control
that freedomeven, as we bind ourselves with promises, freely corral our own freedom
and prune our possible futures.
Looped and Nonlinear
As we have already noted, quantum theory makes the observer a player in reality, and
observation always takes place after the fact. Thus the future of an event can help
determine that event, so that now a weak "backwardintime" influence is added to the
strong "forwardintime" constraints of causality, thus closing a feedback loop and
rendering time nonlinear or looped. We are now observing the big bang in the form of
radiation that set out thirteen billion years ago, and thus in some very minute way we are
helping determine how the big bang happened. The physicist John Archibald Wheeler
has argued that since events require observers to transform them from mere probabilities
into actual realities, the only real big bang that could occur would be one which would
later bring about observers of it. This is not as radical an idea as its initial formulation as
the Anthropic Principle would suggest; even atoms are reasonable candidates for being
observers in the physical sense, and harmonics among quantum waves can bring about a
similar collapse from distributed probability to coherent nearcertainty. Nevertheless,
how something is observed affects its nature, as well as simply that it is observed; and
humans can observe in a variety of new ways, asking new questions of the universe to
which the universeincluding its own pastmust suddenly come up with an answer, never
having had the need to "make up its mind" on the issue before.
The more exciting implication of this nonlinearity of time is that observing beings in our
own future, or futures, must one day be observing us, and thus rendering what is
indeterminate about us definite and real. If we are faintly aware of this process going on,
that awareness would nicely correspond to such claims as prophetic inspiration,
conversations with angels or spirits, the voice of conscience, neardeath experiences,
divination, deja vu and other phenomena.
Selfpruning and Providential
Though physicists accept the parallel universes theory, they do so grudgingly; there is
something deeply cumbersome about all that foliage of timelines, and the problem
remains of where they all arewhy can't we see them? The only space for them is, after
all, spacethe same space that we occupy. Why doesn't their combined nearinfinite mass
crush our universe in an instant? If they are separate from us in space, how did they get
there? If a whole new universe branches off from some quantum event in my fingernail,
where does the energy come from to transport it trillions of light years away so that it
doesn't get in the way of this one? The universe does contain a lot of "dark matter" that
we can only detect by the influence of its mass, but it is only a small multiple of the
ordinary matter we know and love; there is room in that mass for some alternative futures
of past events, but not many. Again, the universe does have a quantum fuzziness at small
scales, such that quantum superposition and nonlocality can flourish; we can interpret
that fuzz as the penumbra of parallel universes hovering around this one; but at larger
scales that fuzziness is damped out.
How, to return to our former puzzle, can the foliage be pruned? If the universe is free,
how can that freedom be transformed from arbitrary randomness to definite choice? The
retroactive observerparticipant effect gives us a neat answer. The futures prune the past.
Later states of the universe, containing, we hope, more and more intelligent and
beneficent observers, are helping usand helped our predecessors in the living and
chemical and physical worldsto choose one future out of the many on offer. The future
is still not determined, that is, there are several possible futures, each with a probability of
less than one; depending on the level of their probability and their coherence with other
futures, they can weakly affect us by observing us, but only with our cooperation, and we
can abolish them or render them more likely by what we do. We thus live in a deeply
moral universe, where good and evil futures whisper their suggestions to us in the
quantum fluctuations of our synaptic junctions, and we must choose by our actions the
best futures we can.
The correspondence of this idea with the teachings of all human religions should be clear.
There is a (somewhat beleaguered) providence that can offer us grace or enlightenment if
we choose to accept it, our moral actions are important, and we are in relationship with
beings that we have always strangely represented as like childrenputti, cherubs, the fat
infantile Buddha, the Christ childas he called himself, the "son of Man", elves, spirits,
alien abductors, and so onbecause they are indeed our descendants. And if, after
billions of years, those beings all agree on their story and achieve a transcendent unity,
then the universe will have been all along the fetus of a gestating God, among whose
infant neurons, gradually wiring up the synaptic connections, we can count ourselves.
Conclusion
The reader will recognize that these last sentences are clearly speculative and poetic. But
the model of time we have possessed for over two hundred years will clearly not hold up
any more. The relationship between the past and the future can no longer be seen as like
a line, but more like a solid at least, a sort of expanding sphere whose innards are the past,
whose surface is the present, and whose outside is all the possible futures. Past is to
future as part is to whole; our ignorance of the future is the ignorance of the individual
brain cell about the huge and mysterious thoughts that it mediates and in whose
formulation it participates. As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, the universe is not
so much like a vast machine as like a vast thought. And Time is the milieu of that
thought.