It is a sign of our times that a green haired, eye-shadowed non-binary person wearing a dress with hairy legs sums up the position of establishment scientists for the BBC more succinctly than many of them ever would or could. The establishment, as ever, is likely wrong…
We are prisoners of our minds and the passage of time. With the exception of sleep, we experience every second of every minute of every hour of every day, whether we want to or not. Think of how much easier life would be if we could simply turn off a part of our brain while we’re at work, cleaning the house, on an airplane, or any of the thousands and thousands of mundane tasks we would prefer not to do, but simply have to. Many of us might wish for this ability when dealing with other people as well, family members we would prefer not to converse with too closely, an obnoxious worker at a store, or as Shakespeare himself put it in Hamlet, “Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns, That patient merit of th’unworthy takes.” For better or worse, however, we cannot: Consciousness must be experienced relentlessly, or not at all. Likewise, many of us have also wished that we might manipulate time in our favor – fasting forward to the end of the workday, pausing a moment, or even rewinding a period entirely either to live it again or make another choice, but we cannot do that either. No one in the entire history of the world has ever made a moment last any longer than the vague definition of a moment in the first place. Our experience of time might seem fast – time flies when you’re having fun – or slow – when we are stuck in traffic, for example – but time itself moves forward regardless. In this regard, we might say that time is even more of a tyrant than consciousness, for it continues whether we are awake to witness it or not. You do not get out of bed in the morning to a world that hasn’t changed from the previous day. Even if you were to lock yourself in a room and block out everything from the outside world, the room itself would be slowly changing in ways you couldn’t see. Dust will be settling. Bacteria will be living, dying, and replicating. Mites and other small critters we cannot see will be doing the same, and your body will be aging right along with everything else. Time will be moving forward, the past gone, the future being discovered vague moment by vague moment.
These are two of the most immutable facts of our existence, so much so that they are rarely talked about, nor do many consider why this might be so or if there could be a connection between the two. Does the nature of time define the nature of consciousness or vice versa, or alternatively, is there no connection at all between the two and any similarities are purely coincidental? It might surprise you to learn that – to the extent science provides an answer at all – modern physics, or at least most modern physicists, would place consciousness above time in these questions, and conclude that consciousness defines the nature of time. This might be more accidental than intentional, because time itself is not treated as anything particularly special according to our latest science, and most physicists would probably not state it so plainly, but the conclusion is inevitable. Frequently, time is relegated to the status of being merely an illusion, some quirk in our perception of an underlying reality where everything happens everywhere, at once. This might sound exceedingly strange, but the same is true of everything else we observe according to physics, up to and including the entire universe. Nothing, in fact, is considered very special, the universe merely one out of an infinite number, where our perception of everything is merely some huge cosmic coincidence and does not reflect any underlying reality. Recently, the BBC accidently made this point plain when they posted a video on Twitter arguing that reality is “queer.” It is a sign of our times that a green haired, eye-shadowed non-binary person wearing a dress with hairy legs known as “Glamroo” (sp?) sums up the position of establishment scientists more succinctly than many of them ever would or could. Ms. Glamroo informs the audience, in all seriousness, that “Reading about quantum physics has really helped me understand my queer identity. Quantum physics is a beautiful, strange, and glorious sect of physics that looks at the subatomic particles that govern our world.” Unlike traditional physics that is based on fixed and “resolute answers,” “quantum physics reveals that there is no fixed reality” and “what’s happening on a subatomic level contradicts what we are seeing happening in reality. It’s showing us that reality is itself a construct and what’s going on internally on a subatomic level belies what we’re actually observing.”
If you subscribe to this view, you must conclude that consciousness somehow dictates the experience of time – and everything else. That is, some mechanism in our minds, some act of perception, or interaction between the observer and the observed, is not merely responsible for perceiving reality, but instead for actually creating it. There are variations around why this might be so – from reality splitting into different universes, to time as an illusion as mentioned earlier, to other more obscure ideas – but the fact remains that somehow perception is special, above and beyond everything else, and therefore, because we perceive the world via consciousness, consciousness itself must be forcing its will on reality, not the other way around. This is what they mean when they claim reality is a construct, at least partially assembled by our own consciousness, though to be sure the degree to which consciousness does the construction varies based on your interpretation. In the multiverse theory for example, formerly known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, it is the universe that does the splitting and consciousness is not necessary involved in a direct manner, except for the fact that it too must split. In other theories, however, such as time being an illusion or, presumably, Ms. Glamroo’s view, consciousness takes a more primal role in constructing reality, if not the primal role. Admittedly, this view does have some appeal in the sense that none of us observes reality directly. Everything we see, hear, smell, and touch is mediated by our senses and the thousands of thousands of unconscious processes our brains undertake before we perceive reality. We can assume that you and I do not perceive things the exact same way, nor do we react to them in the same way. It is also true that we do not perceive the fullness of the world around us. There are wavelengths of light outside our ability to see them and translate them into color. Likewise, there are sounds outside our ability to hear, though some animals can sense things we cannot. Therefore, when we look at a flower, we are not looking at everything about it, merely what our senses are capable of discerning. A flower looks quite different to a honeybee given they can see into the ultraviolet spectrum while we see nothing of such a short wavelength.
At the same time, there seems to me to be an obvious limit to this line of thinking. A variance in perception does not equate to the construction of reality. Each of us may see things a little differently, but we still see the same things and, further, these things persist over time. The subtleties of our unique perceptions and impressions aside, if I asked you to measure the dimensions of a chair, table, or other object, chances are your result would likely be similar to mine within some margin of error assuming we are using the same measuring device. Contrary to the claims of philosophers, you would not report a chair twice the size and weight, or some other set of dimensions entirely beyond length, width, and height. If you did, we would assume that a mistake was made, not that our minds had constructed two wildly different objects from the same underlying source material or that it would be impossible for us to agree on anything at all because of this discrepancy. Outside of thought experiments, a chair remains a chair, even if I might prefer a particular color or style, there are fundamental aspects to it we can agree on. This is broadly true of reality at large, where any differences in perception or perspective are completely subsumed by the uncountable number of things that are immutable for each and everyone of us. These include, but are not limited to the persistence of objects in space and time (as in things do not change into each other or start moving around, much less disappearing for no reason), the observable laws of physics (nothing simply floats away for no reason, anything dropped from the top of a building will shatter on the ground below), the features of the world around us (no one sees an ocean where I see a mountain, everyone sees the stars), and the passage of time in general from which no one and nothing can escape. In other words, for all our differences, everyone lives, everyone dies, and everyone walks the same Earth with no exceptions, not once, not ever. This is the reality we all share, and one that can be measured and agreed upon a very large extent. If we encountered an exception to any of this – or any other facets of our existence – it would rightly be called a miracle, something outside our usual understanding, some kind of mistake or trick, or we would claim the person claiming the exception was mad. It is difficult or even impossible to see why or even how this would be the case if reality were a construct or time was an illusion, rather than gleaned from some underlying truth, however impartially we may see it. There is no mechanism – at least none that I can think of – that would cause all of us to agree on major aspects of our existence if those aspects had no truth whatsoever. This does not meant the truth is what we think it is. Merely, that there are fundamental facts about our universe that are immutable for whatever reason. Putting this another way, how could it possibly be that we all agree on the vast majority of the particulars of our experience and yet somehow that experience is supposed to be constructed by each of us from an underlying reality that is nothing like the observable one, if indeed reality exists at all?
This brings us back to the original question. Contrary to the claims of physicists, it seems to me that consciousness has to be subservient to time, and one step further, that the nature of consciousness reflects critical aspects about how time works in general, namely that consciousness is grounded in and trapped by an all consuming present. The past is memory and can be summoned with various fidelity, but never experienced in its entirety. Moments come and go, but we are always in one moment and no other. No matter what we are thinking about, reminiscing upon, or planning, we are physically located in a specific space and time, albeit one that is always changing because time and consciousness, while we are alive at least, never stop. We can change our location in space, but even then only by obeying the various rules that govern our motion. We cannot change our place in time. It is difficult to see how the two could be so intertwined were it not for some deep underlying connection, one which might be as simple as consciousness experiences the reality of time in all its crushing weight and inexorable force. We can certainly imagine both a consciousness and a time that work differently, one where we could pause or rewind, especially when we can do that with a common camera, but we cannot do that in our own minds, much less the real world. In addition, there is a uniqueness to every experience, a complete inability to replicate one moment or sequence of moments that strikes me as fundamental to both. There are similarities in day to day and second to second, but each and every individual instant varies from the rest and try however we might, we cannot do the same thing and feel the same way twice. Once again, there is no reason why this should be the case and it stands to reason that this might truly be because each moment is inherently unique. All of this is admittedly speculative and I’ve certainly got no hard evidence any of it is strictly true, but the same can be said of most of physics today, which for reasons unexplained treats mind, body, and reality differently, rather than a part of a coherent, singular system, where one reflects fundamental aspects of the other. This is not meant to be some new age statement where we are one with the universe. On the contrary, there is one universe that we inhabit, and our perception of it reflects the nature of that universe and how we evolved to cope with it. If nothing else, considering these questions, why our experience of the world is so tightly bound to the world and constrained by the world, should help illuminate some of the many absurdities of our existence.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 
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