Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: We’ve discussed time before. This excerpt expands on these topics, drawing mostly from our own world’s philosophical thoughts on time. Thus, thought it is an excerpt from an fictional setting, where a fictional character speaks on fictional topics (the butterfly), most of the text isn’t fiction. Personally I find being able to do such things rather interesting.
So, time, time is actually pretty interesting because, to just be frank with all of you, we have no idea what time actually is and how it works.
Like space, let’s say? Still a bit nebulous, but we know way more about space than we do with time. And because we know more about space, we can do more with space. You might not even think about it that much, but we have developed pretty efficient ways of dealing with… oh, you know, higher dimensions? Fractal space? Alignment? Those things? I’m sure some of you here can do those tricks, yes?
Exactly.
But then we ask what we can do with time, and it’s… not that much, really. We can track time? To some extent, at least. We could track time a lot better if time actually flowed equally at all times and in all places, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I do say that in a very wishy-washy way on purpose because we’re not sure.
See, it might be that time flow is entirely subjective. Or it might be that actually there is a universal cosmic clock, and it’s actually the way things move through space that changes. So it’s less about the velocity through time, so to say, and more about the velocity of things through space that then makes us see time differently. Because we are bound to the speed of physical processes when awake, we think. We might not be.
Is that likely?
We don’t know!
But if I just stood here in front of you shaking down what we don’t know about time, we wouldn’t get far. So let’s look at things that we do know. We know that out of the two main philosophical models of time, Presentism and Eternalism, the former is wrong, and the latter is correct in some way. We can at least say that much.
(inaudible question from the student)
What’s that?
(inaudible question from the student)
Ah, yes, of course, it’s really simple really. Presentism says that only the current moment exists, and it’s just this one thing that evolves, and our perception of time comes only from us remembering what things used to be like before they became what they are. But that doesn’t mean they somehow exist, like on an additional temporal dimension. Now, while we know that Presentism is wrong, it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make about time, oddly enough. I say oddly because it’s counterintuitive to human experience.
But then there’s Eternalism, and at face value, that says that the future and the past exist alongside the present. That would imply some kind of temporal dimension, at least one. Actually, in the way, humans think about it… yes?
(inaudible question from the student)
Yes, exactly, there’s a third option, and that’s also the way people most naturally think about time. The present exists, and the past exists, but the future doesn’t yet exist because it’s waiting for us… so to say. But that’s nonsensical. If that’s the case, you are still in the past of a future you that is located… let’s say, further along. And you can continue doing that up until the end of time, and you just get back to Eternalism. Oh, I should mention that this is also called Nofuturism or, and I have no idea how someone got away with introducing this name, the Growing Block Universe Theory Of Time.
But excuse me…
I was going to say something.
Oh, right, existential dread. Humans experience existential dread thinking about the possibility that they don’t have free will, whatever that is.
(inaudible question from student)
Is it? So you can define what it is, then?
(inaudible answer from student)
Oh, yeah? And what does that mean? Because I actually have no idea how your explanation differs from just reiterating the name of the… thing. You know, free will, power to act without constraints of fate or necessity. And I should say here, young man, that’s the dictionary definition. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it.
So because I can’t just start randomly levitating 5 feet off the floor, does that mean I don’t have free will? What is a constraint of fate? Necessity?
Even if all that’s true, what if I’m a deterministic, ontological machine acting upon the state of my local physical surrounding? Do I have the ability to ah… act without the constraints of fate or necessity? How do I know if I am or am not a deterministic machine?
(laughter from students)
(inaudible answer from student)
Yes, I know you didn’t think it through. If it was that simple, I wouldn’t have spent the last 80 years of my life trying to figure out what any of this means.
(question from student)
No, I still have no idea what’s going on, but…
See, I have a better idea about what I don’t know, and I’m less likely to simply assume that the first thing that comes to my head is correct. Because that’s how humans operate sometimes. We hear “free will”, and we make up an idea in our head about how we feel we know what that means on some primal, intuitive level.
But you should never trust your intuition on matters of philosophy, much less so on matters of science. That’s an easy way to deceive yourself, and from there, having convinced yourself already, move on to misinforming others.
But ah, I shouldn’t be too tough on you youth.
(question from student)
Time travel? Well, if time travel was possible for us humans, would that mean someone from the future where we understand time travel could go back to right now and reveal to us the secrets of such an awesome power?!
(moment of silence)
(laughter from students)
Maybe it will work someday… but yes, our understanding of time travel is so poor it’s not just a case we don’t know it’s possible. It’s more so that we have no idea what it means to do so. And before one of you gets the idea to try and correct me, think back to what I said about intuition and consider. Do you actually have some idea of how time travel works, or have you, possibly in this very moment, intuited how you feel it should work?
Exactly.
It’s not that simple.
(question from student)
Ah… yes… her. The butterfly. She’s… well, to be honest again, we have no working theory on how she can do that. She seems to exist on a completely different axis of time to us if such a thing is even sensible to say. See, for her, time appears just as linear as to you or me. But when we compare our experiences of time, it’s like she goes back and forth, future to past to future to past, seemingly randomly.
We have no idea what implications that holds about time.
Like, for example, does that possibly mean that free will doesn’t exist after all?!
(laughter from students)
Well, in any case, let’s return to the core topics of this lecture. Now tell me, does anyone here know what the A series and B series are?
Excerpt from a lecture by Kyriakos Katsaros, 2003
“You don’t understand time, and that’s alright”
Esoteric Musings... 