Out of Time, Out of Mind - 2003-01-03
I can look up at the sky to get some idea about the current weather. I can look down at the ground to see what I’m walking on. I can look in front of me to see where I’m headed. I can look behind to see where I was walking from. I can look to the left and the right, to see what’s on either side. I can recall the past to remember what has happened. But I can’t see or remember the future???
I can’t even say with 100% certainty that there is a future, since
the only idea of the future that I have is from my memories of progressing events and my constant anticipation of something going to happen next (as opposed to expecting everything to stop all of a sudden, or not having any expectation either way). It’s as if I’m standing still, in time at least, and my memories are streaming before me, like watching a movie. Regardless of what I think or what I do, when it comes to perceiving—just seeing what’s going on— I can’t help but to feel that it’s so passive.
How do I know there’s a future? I don’t, really. If there’s no future, what’s the present then? In a way, it’s just the most-recently remembered past, maybe in combination with that constant anticipation of something—anything—to come. I don’t expect to ever figure it out or arrive at any conclusions. It’s just that something doesn’t feel right when it comes to this remembering-the-past-but-not-the-future thing. If there’s no way to know that, I want to be able to learn why it would be beyond anyone’s ability to conceive it. Or at least why I can’t ever see what it’s about.
I guess I have at least an inkling of why it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to think about what it would be like to see time as a static thing. We’re able to grasp new ideas and ways of looking at things by comparing it to something else that we’re familiar with and matching any similar patterns. Our brains form connections to accommodate the new idea or viewpoint based on that. It’s not until we’ve formed enough connections that we finally comprehend something. Whether we’re aware of it or not, everything we think about assumes some kind of single direction in the way things occur. Most, if not all, things for us have a beginning and then something that comes after the beginning. Some of those things also have an end, or it’s assumed that all things that began at some point will end at another.
The concept of time, of one thing happening after another, permeates our thoughts. Even our language is based on it. Well, at least it’s that way with English, or any other language with tense. I still think that everyone with a normally functioning memory unconsciously assumes a flow of time, even if they don’t speak in any temporal tense. I believe it’s an integral part of what makes us see ourselves as whomever or however we happen to see ourselves. We are beings in time and to think otherwise sort of negates that.
If there is a future that’s already happened or is happening—or if the idea of things happening at all is some kind of illusion and from a higher point of view of everything, it’s more accurate to say that nothing happens, but that it only seems that way (like how the sun only seems to rise and set)—then how could we think of ourselves in the way we do? There’s the free will problem. Some would definitely object to the statement that everything we’re doing is predetermined. There may be ways around that problem by invoking a multiple worlds scenario, but even a theory that explains unpredictable possibilities can’t show that we’re masters of our own destiny. I don’t know if I can reconcile the idea of free will with the idea of timelessness. They appear to be mutually exclusive. Free will feels too subjective to really say anything in favor of it, other than that as far as I can tell I can “freely” make decisions about a lot of things. As for time, it makes more sense to think of it as a sensation, like with color, than to think of it a something that is still unfolding before us.