Einstein taught us that time not only mutates, performing its own unique rite of passage by varying its rate of passage, but distance contracts as well—a totally unexpected phenomenon. Someone zipping toward the galaxy’s center at 99.999999999 percent of lightspeed experiences a dilation effect of 22,360. While this person’s watch ticks off one year, simultaneously, 223 centuries elapse for everyone else. The roundtrip involves a mere investment of two years, though a disheartening 520 centuries elapse simultaneously back home. But from the traveler’s perspective, time has passed normally but the distance to the center of the galaxy has changed to a single light-year. If one could travel
at
lightspeed, one would find oneself everywhere in the universe at once. This indeed is what a photon of light must experience if it were sentient.
All these effects deal with relativity, the comparison of your time perceptions and measurements with someone else’s. It all means that, at minimum, time is incontrovertibly not a constant, and any such item that varies with changing circumstance cannot be fundamental or part of the bedrock reality of the cosmos in the way that lightspeed, consciousness, or even the gravitational constant appear to be.
The demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective experience, a fiction, or even social convention, is central to biocentrism. Its ultimate unreality, except as an aid and mutually agreed-upon convenience in everyday life, is yet one more piece of evidence that calls into serious doubt the “external universe” mindset.
Even as a convenience, a biological mechanism, one might take a step back and ask what is this controversial entity that is being sliced up and contemplated. Einstein used the concept of space-time to demonstrate how objects’ motions can make sense consistently, regardless of frame of reference, and regardless of the distortion of space and time induced by speed or gravity. In doing so, he found
that while light itself has a constant speed in a vacuum under all circumstances and from all perspectives, things like distance, length, and time have no immutability.
In our efforts to structure all things, sociologically and scientifically, humans place events on a time and space continuum. The universe is 13.7 billion years old; the Earth 4.6 billion. On our planet,
Homo erectus
appeared a few million years ago, but it took hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture. Four hundred years ago, Galileo supported Copernicus’s assertion that Earth revolves around the Sun. Darwin uncovered the truth of evolution in the mid-1800s in the Galapagos Islands. Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in a Swiss patent office in 1905.
So time, in the mechanistic universe as described by Newton, Einstein, and Darwin, is a ledger in which events are recorded. We think of time as a forward-moving continuum, flowing always into the future, accumulating, because human beings and other animals are constitutional materialists, hard-wired, designed, to think linearly. It’s the day-to-day keeping of one’s appointments and the watering of plants. The sofa my friend Barbara once shared with her husband Gene while he was alive—reading, watching television, cuddling when they were young—stands in the living room among bric-a-brac collected over the years.
But instead of time having an absolute reality, imagine instead that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the vinyl record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.
If Barbara could access all life—the entire vinyl record—she could experience it non-sequentially—she could know me, who she
notches on time’s arrow as fifty in the year 2006, as a toddler, a teenager, an old man—all now.
In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (one of his oldest friends) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
That time is a fixed arrow is a human construction. That we live on the edge of all time is a fantasy. That there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the Earth is an even greater fantasy. Space and time are forms of animal understanding—period. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. So there simply is no absolute self-existing matrix out there in which physical events occur independent of life.
But let’s back up to a more fundamental question. Barbara wants to know about the clock. “We have very sophisticated machines, like atomic clocks, to measure time. If we can measure time, doesn’t that prove it exists?”
Barbara’s question is a good one. After all, we measure gasoline as occupying liters or gallons, and shell out cash for it on the basis of these quantifications. Would we ever be keeping this sort of meticulous track of something that was unreal?
Einstein shrugged off that issue, simply saying that, “Time is what we measure with a clock. Space is what we measure with a measuring rod.” The emphasis for physicists is on the
measuring
. However, the emphasis could just as easily be on the
we
, the observer, as this book squarely places it.
But if the clock thing seems like a stumper, consider whether the ability to measure time in any way supports its physical existence.
Clocks are rhythmic things, meaning that they contain processes that are repetitive. Humans use the rhythms of some events, like the ticking of clocks, to time other events like the rotation of the Earth. But this is not
time
, but rather, a comparison of events. Specifically, over the ages, humans have observed rhythmic things in nature—the periodicities of the Moon or of the Sun, the flooding of the Nile,
to name a few—and we then created other rhythmic things to see how they interrelated, to accomplish the simple purpose of comparison. The more regular and repetitious was the motion, the better for our purposes of measurement. It was noticed that a weight on a string some thirty-nine inches long will always make one return-trip swing in exactly one second; this length was in fact used as the first definition of a meter (whose very name means
measure
). Later came the useful tendency of quartz crystals to vibrate 32,768 times a second when stimulated by a small bit of electricity—it is the basis for most wristwatches even today. We called these manmade rhythmic devices
clocks
because their repetitions were so consistently even, though repetitions can also be slow ones, such as those found on sundials, which compare shadow lengths and positions caused by the Sun to the Earth’s revolution. Going the other way, more sophisticated than ordinary mechanical clocks, with their dials and wheels that unfortunately change size with temperature, are atomic clocks in which the nucleus of cesium remains in a specific spin state only when bathed in electromagnetic radiation with precisely 9,192,631,770 passing waves per second. Thus, a second can be defined (
is
officially defined) as being the sum of that many “heartbeats” in the nucleus of cesium-133. In all such cases, humans use the rhythms of specific events to count off other specific events. But these are just
events
, not to be confused with
time
.
Actually, all of nature’s reliably recurring events could be (and sometimes are) employed to keep track of time. Tides, the Sun’s rotation, the phases of the Moon are just some of nature’s most significant periodic occurrences. Even common, ordinary natural events could be employed to measure time, although not as precisely as clocks. Ice melting, a growing child, an apple rotting on the ground—almost anything would work.
Manmade events can be used as well. For example, a top spins around for a while then stops. One could compare that to the melting of a standard ice cube on a hot day and calculate the number of top spinnings to an ice cube melting, maybe twenty-four spinnings to one melting. We might then conclude that in every ice-melting
“day” there are twenty-four top spinning “hours,” and then devise a plan to meet Barbara for tea at two and a half ice melts or sixty top spins, depending on which “time piece” you each happen to have on hand. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that nothing is actually happening outside of the changing events.
People accept that time exists as a physical entity because we have invented those objects called clocks, which are simply more rhythmic and consistent than buds flowering or apples rotting. In reality, what’s really happening is motion, pure and simple—and this motion is ultimately confined to the here and now. Of course, we also retain time because a universally agreed-upon event (when all our individual timepieces say 8:00 p.m., for example) serves to alert us to
another
event, like the start of a favorite television show.
We feel as if we live on the edge of time. That’s a psychologically comfortable place, really, because it means we are still among the living. On the edge of time, tomorrow hasn’t happened. Our future has not been played out. Most of our descendents haven’t yet been born. Everything to come is a big mystery, a vast void. Life stretches ahead of us. We’re out in front, strapped to the engine of the Time Train, which relentlessly travels forward into an unknown future. Everything behind us, so to speak, is the dining car, business class, the caboose, and miles of track we can’t retrace. Everything before this moment in time is part of the history of the universe. The vast majority of our ancestors, about whom we haven’t the foggiest idea, are dead and gone. Everything prior to this moment is the past, gone forever. But this subjective feeling of living on the forward edge of time is a persistent illusion, a trick of our attempts to create an intelligible organizational pattern for nature in which one calendar day follows upon another, that spring precedes summer, and that years pass. Time in a biocentric universe is not sequential—however much our habitual perceptions dictate that it is.
If time is truly flowing forward into the future, is it not extraordinary that we are here, alive, for a split instant, on the edge of all time? Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the beginning of time. Now, stack time, like chairs, on top of each other,
and seat yourself on the very top, or—if you prefer speed—strap yourself once again to the front of the Time Train.
Science has no real explanation for why we’re alive now, existing on the edge of time. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that we are alive.
The persistent human perception of time almost certainly stems from the chronic act of thinking, the one-word-at-a-time thought process by which ideas and events are visualized and anticipated. In rare moments of clarity and mental emptiness, or when danger or novel experience forces a one-pointed focus upon one’s consciousness, time vanishes, replaced by an ineffably enjoyable feeling of freedom, or the singular focus of escaping an immediate peril. Time is never cognized normally in such thought-less experiences: “I saw the whole accident unfolding in slow motion.”
In sum, from a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in the universe independent of life that notices it, and really doesn’t truly exist within the context of life either. But let’s return to Barbara’s point: growing children, aging, and feeling most poignantly that time exists when our loved ones die constitute the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. They age. We all grow old together.
That to us
is time. It belongs with us.
This brings us to the sixth principle:
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would—by definition—have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic particles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious
observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
Sixth Principle of Biocentrism: Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
11
SPACE OUT
Ye Gods! Annihilate but space and time, And make two lovers happy.
—Alexander Pope (1728)
H
ow do our animal minds apprehend the world?
We’ve all been taught that time and space exist, and their apparent reality is reinforced every day of our lives—every time we go from here to there, every time we reach for something. Most of us live without thinking abstractly about space. Like time, it’s such an integral part of our lives that its examination is as unnatural as scrutinizing walking or breathing.