How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence

11 | That there is no dedicated sensory organ that detects time

might suggest that the passing of time is a psychological phenomenon.

There is no mechanism to go wrong. We can have a fragmented sense of self, but no one has ever had a fragmented sense of time. Our subjective perception of it, however, causes time to tick variously. Physical time ticks regularly, subjective time ticks fast or slow depending on our age, the emotions we experience, whether we are in pain, or in love, or just bored. Dostoevsky writes of the condemned man’s last night in which each moment stretches into eternity. Is that why we fear death: because at the last, the moment of death never quite ends?

To think is to be in time. What we cannot do is think ourselves into the future. Our inability to find the future except by waiting for it to arrive in time suggests that consciousness itself is based in time.

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always either too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Mary Crawford, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

If we knew how long a night or a day was to a child, we might understand a great deal more about childhood … It may be that, subjectively, a childhood is at least equal in length to the rest of a lifetime.

John Berger, A Fortunate Man

Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable regret.

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), philosopher, reporting a conversation he had with Einstein

12 | The physicist Julian Barbour uses quantum mechanics to explain the illusion of the forward movement of time. The universe is a heap of frozen moments that exist eternally. Each of these moments is some quantum configuration of the universe. One moment may appear to us to come after another, but it is only because the second moment contains a memory of the first moment. The passing of time is an illusion. The second moment does not come after the first moment in time (time does not exist). The first moment is not the cause of the second moment (there are no causes).

We do not die in time, there is for each of us a small heap of frozen moments that is eternally our life.

Barbour’s theory shows how the probabilities of quantum mechanics can be interpreted physically. Some of the configurations of the universe are much more likely than others. Time is the illusory ordering of these groups of more and more likely configurations.

13 | The arrow of time describes a universe that becomes more and more disordered, which means that looking backwards in time the universe must have been more and more ordered in its past. And so he arrow of time predicts that at its beginning – if it had a beginning – the universe must have been as ordered as it could be. But we also believe that the universe was very hot at the Big Bang – around 10

degrees. Hot usually implies disorder. How the universe could have been so hot and so ordered is a mystery.

14 | Our only human access to the past is via atoms. Becoming smaller and smaller, we leave everything behind. All the edifices, all the things of the world crumble into atoms, into electrons and protons as we spiral down towards the Big Bang. They are us but not we.

15 | i Given the means, we humans could travel as far into the future as we care to. Come the day that we work out how to travel at speeds close to the speed of light we will for the first time know from experience, rather than theory only, what it is to leave earth-home. For now, because we live here together on the same planet we are united under a single clock.

I imagine myself travelling for long ages and at great velocity out into the galaxy. I have to learn to bear my homesickness. One day I decide to return home. The more I accelerate to hurry back, the greater the aeons of time that will pass on earth as I draw near. The lives of generations of human beings will have been breathed in and out, bones long crumbled into dust, reabsorbed into the biosphere and refashioned. Ice caps melt and refreeze, mountains lower and rise. The Himalayas have been a work in progress for fifty million years, and still they continue to rise; but even they one day will have been rubbed or convulsed once more out of existence if I travel far enough forwards in time. And I will return to what? Perhaps to some brutalised civilisation that has lost the past knowledge of long-forgotten golden ages. Or if I am fortunate, I might accidentally land in some new golden age of elevated beings beyond my imagining. If Julius Caesar

had had the power I have been granted, we might see him return tomorrow, full of amazement at the world he left behind. With the right means, we might travel as far forward in time as we wish, but only at the expense of leaving behind forever those who do not travel with us. For the first time in human history our human-scale clocks will not all tick together, here, where we live huddled together, in our living-room earth.

ii Children know how to make time machines. Put things in a box and bury the box. Wait.

iii No Penelope awaits her time-travelling Odysseus. When this Odysseus returns home the palace walls have long since fallen. The dog that waited out its life died centuries before. Only the lead-lined box survives, carefully buried and mapped, which with shaking hands Odysseus opens.

iv There have been few human space travellers to date, but even amongst that small number a significant proportion have returned traumatised. Humans can go mad sailing alone across the oceans; how would even the most robust of us fare if we were to travel to other planets around other stars?

16 | For Lee Smolin the flow of time ‘is not an illusion. It is the best clue we have to fundamental reality.’ Smolin characterises the eternal laws of physics as ‘excess metaphysical baggage’. He believes that the pursuit of eternal laws of nature has hampered cosmology in recent decades, and that mathematics is part of the problem – because mathematics looks like evidence of something eternal and unchanging in the universe.

In place of eternal inflation Smolin has posited a theory of cosmological natural selection to explain how the universe got going in time. He reconceives the universe as if it were some kind of organism. Everything in the universe is evolving at every scale into genuine novelty. In a universe in which everything is laid out eternally and unchanging, innovation is impossible. In Smolin’s model every instant that happens in the present is a chance for something genuinely new to occur in the universe’s history.

Smolin believes that at the quantum level the deeper reality is time, not space. He thinks that one day we will understand how space emerges out of some deeper order based in time.

I think it likely that space will turn out to be an illusion … a way to organise our impressions of things on a large scale but only a rough and emergent way to see the world as a whole.

Lee Smolin

SECTION 10 (#ulink_62d6adff-01be-5d55-bfb7-1b9b16d887b3)

On things (#ulink_62d6adff-01be-5d55-bfb7-1b9b16d887b3)

1 | Human beings like to make things, but when the universe makes things what are they? Being in the universe calls the thingness of things into doubt.

2 | i Our best scientific thinking tells us that reality is only as it seems to be because it rests on the foundation of a deeper reality in which separation and location are meaningless concepts.

ii What happens to radiation in an expanding universe is that it appears to become a landscape in which there are things. The appearance is compelling. The illusion of separate things is what the world looks like from our perspective, at human scale. That things are an illusion does not mean that they do not exist, but that they are not what they appear to be.

3 | Experiments impose a degree of artificial isolation, but nothing is truly isolated except perhaps in human imagination.

He said that if we examine the various ideologies that tend to divide humanity, such as racism, extreme nationalism and the Marxist class struggle, one of the key factors of their origin is the tendency to perceive things as inherently divided and disconnected. From this misconception springs the belief that each of these divisions is essentially independent and self-existent.

The Dalai Lama, on a conversation he had with the physicist David Bohm (1917–92)

In a mirror

we see from our reflection that there is no inside nor outside, and so ‘things are freed from their thing-ness, their isolation, without being deprived of their form; they are divested of their materiality without being dissolved’.

From the Atamsaka sutra, known as the mirror teaching, attributed to the Indian mystic Nāgārjuna of the second century AD.

‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ – but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), The Waves

We don’t know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties.

Lee Smolin

The world is the totality of facts not of things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosopher

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself.

Henry James (1843–1916), writer

We seek the absolute everywhere, and only ever find things.

Novalis (1772–1801), German poet and philosopher

We are tormented with the opinion we have of things, and not by things themselves.

Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, paraphrasing the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus