Time past and time future T. S. Eliot from Burnt Norton<\/i>\u00a0Stanza II<\/p>\n In 1937, The Philosophical Review\u00a0<\/i>published an article by Hermann Hausheer (HH) titled St. Augustine\u2019s Conception of Time<\/i>. It’s a lovely discussion of Augustine’s wrestling with the mystery of time, by a writer with great affection for the saint. He invites us to ponder, yet again, Time’s inescapable coils. Hausheer\u2019s sources are primarily from the book in which autobiography, as we still understand it, seems to have been invented \u2013 Confessions<\/i>\u2013 with some additional material from The City of God<\/i>.<\/p>\n Augustine\u2019s examination starts by laying out the conventional three-fold division of time into past, present and future, and finds stumbling blocks of paradox. For the past has ceased to exist, the future does not yet exist, and only the present is actual. The present, however, is itself a paradox. For, the present is an instant which can no further be divided into smaller particles\u2026 This time-particle or present\u2026being the only real time\u2026is diminishing to an inextensive point.<\/i>[HH, 593]\u00a0 The current moment, the present, the only realisation of time, vanishes to a mathematical concept, like the derivative of a function at a point which has no dimension, no extension in space.<\/p>\n Consider this. Out bushwalking, you are following a small creek upstream, and you have come to a waterfall pouring over a rock-face. At the base of the fall is a pool polished out over ages by the water. The falling water is not a curtain, but more like a heavy rainfall. The overflow of the pool forms the creek you have been following. You stand in the pool, in the way of the falling water, looking up into the cascade. As the water falls, bouncing off the uneven rock-face, it splits and scatters into random patterns of splashes and runnels, thrown earthward in motion-slowed, parabolic, gravitational ecstasy. Some scattering of droplets catches your eye and, transfixed, you follow its fall towards you, feel its splashes, and instantly have your attention seized by some successors. Water runs down your body, saturating you, and into the pool, which you feel encompassing your legs.<\/p>\n This cascade serves as a metaphor for time. The past is the water flowing down the creek, the future is the creek above, approaching the fall. You remember the creek that you followed, and you are aware that this pool of the present moment is outflowing into it, ceasing to participate in being the pool; becoming instead that which had\u00a0<\/i>encircled your legs, that which had\u00a0<\/i>fallen. You anticipate the approach of the water above; although you cannot see it, your expectation of it is vivid, and you are not disappointed. Somewhere between fall and outflow is the present moment. But where?<\/p>\n In those moments when your attention was focused on the falling drops, perhaps? Did time stand still? Hardly. The rest of the cascade may have disappeared from your awareness, but their flight towards you did not. And in an instant they disintegrated against you, only for some other aspect of the ceaseless sequence of changes, that you freeze in the word \u201cwaterfall,\u201d to captivate you. How can a \u201cmoment\u201d ever be isolated in this cavalcade?<\/p>\n According to my impeccable internet sources, time, in the view of quantum mechanics, is continuous. Some observers have postulated that time is discrete, but that view has generated no enthusiasm to date. Changes on a scale of femtoseconds (10-15<\/sup>) have apparently been experimentally observed and on the purely theoretical scale is Planck Time \u2013 the time it takes for light to travel one Planck length; about 5 x 10-44 <\/sup>seconds. Time mystifies even our mystifying physics. Nothing discovered since then transcends St Augustine\u2019s observations of sixteen hundred years ago.<\/p>\n \u2026Augustine presupposes\u2026that in reality [the present] is still felt as duration. In general he admits that the present has no extension in abstraction. It cannot remain for long as an indivisible instant; for, however small the extension in duration, the present instantly turns itself into a past which is no longer a future and a future which is not yet.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2026In its normal operations the human mind through memory in some measure transcends time, as, for example, when we apprehend as a whole a metre of a melody, though the individual notes and sounds are successive not simultaneous.<\/i>[HH, 504]<\/p>\n Under the torrent, within the torrent, our perception of our present is vivid and undeniable. Yet the moment\u00a0<\/i>of the present is the inisolable pointer twixt future and past: but all of our perception of “moment” is irrevocably situated in what is past. We have no access, except in expectation, to the future. Similarly, we have no access to the phantom “moment,” except in the pool of the immediate past. In the mind, we actively construct from this pool of immediate memories the certain sense of our momentary circumstances; our present. We manufacture tiny temporary coloured shards of the kaleidoscope of eternity, which begin to disintegrate even as we cobble together, from their remains and from the cascade, their successors.<\/p>\n Time past and time future When it has already passed, the mind creates our present. It applies the handbrake to the juggernaut of time, just enough. Nothing can stop it, but the mind slows it enough to give us our timely reality. If the mind could not transcend time in this way, we would have, and we could be, nothing, even as time itself is the elusive transition from what has yet to be to what has been; from not-yet to no-more.<\/p>\n We have seen the difficulties that the very fact of phenomenal consciousness presents to the bankrupt religion of our time, secular materialism (which I will call SECMAT, tipping my hat to HAZMAT.) To those, add this: to be conscious at all, we must, partially, conquer time.<\/p>\n How is Augustine\u2019s miracle of perceived duration achieved? How, that is, within the confines of a materialist conception of mind? That part of the brain that provides us with consciousness might be like an enormous shift register. A shift register is an electronic circuit into one side of which bits of data are fed as input, each bit then passing through the successive positions in the register until it emerges at the output side. The capacity of the register is the number of bits that can be held in transit from input to output.<\/p>\n Let us suppose that the brain is processing all of our “momentary” perceptions, thoughts, emotions, into a brain state that represents this instant<\/i>, independently of the things of the immediate past and our anticipations of the future, and it is fed into the part of our brain that provides the most immediate sense of now<\/i>. No sooner is this done, than the moment has passed and the sense of a new this instant\u00a0<\/i>is produced and fed into the same part of the brain. The old state must be shuffled down, “ageing” by being shifted farther from the this instant\u00a0<\/i>part of the neural circuit. Eventually, these “aged” partial brain states dissipate and fall off the circuit, but in the meantime they contribute to the conscious awareness of duration, of now<\/i>. Simultaneously, an anticipation of the future is generated, primarily from the contents of the this instant\u00a0<\/i>and “aged” brain states (because the actual future is invisible) and fed into the anticipatory neural circuits. They work in reverse. New remote anticipations are continuously being generated, while the more remote become less so, until the least remote anticipation passes through the this instant<\/i>, becoming the immediate past, but in the meantime contributing, too, to the awareness of duration, of now<\/i>, in the present. Something of the train of anticipations at each moment becomes actual, or the unexpected invalidates all anticipations, such that a new set of increasingly forward-looking anticipations must be generated. Out of this whole apparatus of current focus, immediate past, and anticipated immediate future is generated the brain state that gives rise to the conscious phenomenological sense of now<\/i>.<\/p>\n One must keep in mind that, in the SECMAT model, all of our conscious phenomenal experience, including our experience of the duration of now<\/i>, is, in actuality, a state of the brain. Most importantly, we cannot gain a sense of duration from the duration\u00a0<\/i>of states in the brain, for that would be a reflexive awareness independent of the brain states themselves, and, in the Godot landscape of the SECMAT imagination, there ain\u2019t no such a thing. What if we postulate another brain circuit whose function is to track duration? It\u2019s pointless \u2013 we have already described the putative time-focussed shift register, and that would be the clock that keeps track, in some way, of the passage of time. Postulating another monitoring function gets us nowhere.<\/p>\n So must we also keep in mind that all of the activities in the brain are as rigidly trapped in the riddles of time as is any other aspect of the time-wracked world. The dimensionless pointer of time sweeps as inexorably across the ganglia and the synapses as it does across our lived experience. The neurones, though, have only a state\u00a0<\/i>inexorably transitioning to another state<\/i>. Like the components of a computer, these tissues have no memory or expectation; no past and no future. They just are<\/i>, and are in transition.<\/p>\n If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the time-focussed shift register \u2013 the time register \u2013 functions a little like a computer with clock-triggered state changes, rather than those changing continuously.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say that the period of the clock is one millisecond, or some similar frequency that is just below the threshold of our perception of time intervals.\u00a0 At every such interval, the next state of the shift register is generated, complete with its phenomenological accompaniment of a sense of the duration of the moment.\u00a0 In this model, it would be possible for some malfunction of the time register to alter the brain state from tick to tick to a running series of incompatible pasts and incompatible expectations.\u00a0 The conversation of a person experiencing this condition would be incomprehensible to others, as that of his interlocutors would be incomprehensible to him; yet he would not perceive any incoherence in himself.\u00a0 We do not in fact see such incoherence, but the underlying assumptions of a SECMAT model cannot preclude it.<\/p>\n Here, though, the logical conundrum of deriving subjective experience from objective material becomes even more acute.\u00a0 How can an instantaneous brain state generate a sense of momentary duration; a sense we know to be true because all practical, intellectual and artistic endeavour depends upon it?\u00a0 Worse still, there is no such object as a time-atom; there is no objective present moment.\u00a0 Even the assumption of a millisecond clock for our time-register is a vast leap of faith.\u00a0 We turn away and whistle while a thousand microseconds, a million picoseconds, each with its infinite subdivisions, pass behind us.\u00a0 As Augustine wrote, it is the immaterial mind that remembers, that anticipates, and that creates the perception of the present moment.<\/p>\n Augustine could think and write with such clarity because he applied his mind and memory reflexively to his own experience of mind and memory, which he studied on its own terms. The supposed reductionists of our reductionist age do not so much reduce as minimise. They purport to strip their own minds of the very functions by which they perform this self-abnegation, foisting these functions onto what looks suspiciously like a tiny homunculus within the brain and his army of even tinier subordinate homunculi. Often the language used of bits of the brain is that of intention, perception, comprehension and the like, revealing the smuggling of subjective characteristics into some area or other of the brain. By the time these notions make their way to lay audiences, the subjectification is complete. The outcome is not clarity but obfuscation.<\/p>\n To be conscious is not to be in time<\/i><\/p>\n Consciousness is in the pull of the handbrake; the momentary slowing of the wheel that makes a little hiatus of perceived duration in the onrush of time, in which the moveable feast of now\u00a0<\/i>is celebrated; in which we have a moment to incorporate our anticipations and adjust our behaviour and our expectations accordingly, like a cat intent on the bird pecking through the grass. Consciousness is stolen from time. Consciousness is this very capacity to overcome, momentarily, the analytical certainty that the moment has no dimension, has no duration. Can this be the gift of stuff<\/i>, of bits of the material world? How? <\/i>That, again, is the question towards which SECMAT turns a deaf ear.<\/p>\n How is God\u2019s knowledge of our past, present and future traditionally reconciled with our own freedom of will? Time is one of God\u2019s creatures, so He is not restricted by it as we are. All events in time are present simultaneously to Him. We, on the other hand, have been given life in time. Isolated from our fellows in our consciousness, and isolated from the future, we, we alone, write the ongoing story of our moral life. God knows the whole of that story, observed from a vantage point outside time, but his timeless knowing does not diminish our freedom, for which time itself was created.<\/p>\n Yet we are not entirely restricted by time, as we have seen. Consciousness, without which we could have no awareness, requires a measure of the transcendence of time.\u00a0 It is, as Augustine says, the mind that achieves this. In achieving it, the mind gives us a glimpse of eternity; of timelessness. Through the normal experience of consciousness, we know that one aspect of eternity \u2013 the gathering together of our very recent past, our temporally localised past, into an immediate now<\/em>, is possible.<\/p>\n There are circumstances in which the qualification of \u201cvery recent\u201d is not required. The saying, \u201cMy life flashed before my eyes,\u201d is well-known. Perhaps not so widely known is that the phenomenon known as \u201clife review\u201d occurs in more than 10% of near-death experiences (NDEs), when those are associate with cardiac arrest. Such life review is also reported during life-threatening events which do not involve loss of consciousness, so it is probable that a great many people have had such an experience. These occur in highly compressed time frames, such that the comprehensiveness of the experience is incompatible with our normal understanding of duration.<\/p>\n In both of these circumstances, we are privy to the experience of atemporal\u00a0<\/em>appreciation of events occurring within the flux of time.\u00a0The one circumstance is exceptional in the extreme; the other is a necessary consequence of our consciousness, a thing so ordinary, so normal, that we do not perceive how extra<\/em>ordinary it is. In both, we are granted a glimpse of life in eternity, a shadow of God\u2019s atemporality.<\/p>\n Could it be that the first stage of our introduction to eternity is the extension of this gift: that the atemporality of our normal consciousness expands to encompass the whole of our life; that our life review becomes part of our consciousness of now<\/em>?\u00a0 This much we can imagine by virtue of the gifts already given to us. But as to the nature of time and experience in our resurrected bodies, who can imagine?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n<\/em>Allow but a little consciousness.
\n<\/em>To be conscious is not to be in time
\n<\/em>But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
\n<\/em>The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
\n<\/em>The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
\n<\/em>Be remembered; involved with past and future.
\n<\/em>Only through time time is conquered.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Allow but a little consciousness.
\n<\/em>To be conscious is not to be in time<\/em><\/p>\n