About Time

                Ever since I took a course called ‘Physics for Poets,’ I’ve read theoretical physics books and articles.  In a recent article trying to summarize some of Hawking’s work, the concept of time was discussed.  The article restated the claim that nowhere in Super String Theory does the concept of time exist.  It is not one of the 11-14 dimensions that physicists think describe the universe.  I had heard that before, but the next claim really stopped me in my tracks.  The article said time was a function of biology, that it only really exists in that realm.  If so, then ‘life’ as we understand it is primarily about time.

                It may even be fair to say that life is time, that all we mean when we say that something is alive is that it exists in time.  To exist in time means that the process of living is necessarily a transient process.  As long as we experience time, we are eventually going to die.  That may not be palatable to Silicon Valley billionaires and other egomaniacs, but biology is a process of decay.  To be human is to be limited to the dimension of time.  Time creates reflection – it’s what allows us to have a sense of process and movement.  I think time is the root of all consciousness, although the scale of time can be manifested in almost infinite ranges.

                I have written about the quandary of trying to tell what consciousness is.  It is clearly not just a human characteristic.  We have too much evidence of animals and even plants possessing what can only be called ‘conscious’ reactions.  Even brainless earthworms show the capacity to adapt to the density of the soil they are tunneling through.  Everything that experiences time experiences the process of becoming – it is part of an adaptive (what physicists would call a dissipative) system.  These systems are both conscious and overlayered with indeterminate events.  That is, unlike nonliving systems that can be closed and adequately defined by the information collected about them (theoretically it would be possible to everything about one of these systems and render it completely predictable) living systems ‘wobble.’  If you knew everything there is to know about the system up to the moment, it would still be impossible to absolutely predict what comes next.  That doesn’t mean anything can happen, because the system still has properties that define its horizon of the possible, but with those boundaries there is an element of the unknown.

                Consciousness is the expression of that process.  A poem can be written in one form but read and interpreted in multiple forms.  When we have talked about aesthetics in our tradition we have spent too much time on the form and not enough on the process.  I am becoming what I read.  The process of interaction with the world is a becoming – it is still an open question what happens next.  The kind of aesthetics that throws an army of labels out in front of the encounter hoping to normalize and neutralize it, defeats the purpose of the encounter.  As we all have experienced with any painting, poem or song that we love, every reading is a new discovery, some subtle and some radical.

                We can create machines that can learn without this process, but we cannot follow them into that realm.  We shouldn’t want to.  Immortality is the absence of time – which means it is the absence of life.  Embracing time is to understand timelessness.  We exist on this small band of a larger wavelength.  We help tune and direct that band with our actions because they express our consciousness.  Being in the world is being temporary.  Joy is riding on the wave of becoming.