'Time' in Different Cultures
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this video, I explore a few anthropological and philosophical views of time, considering the ways in which two cultures might view time very differently. I only dent the topic here, and would highly recommend Alfred Gell's book 'The Anthropology of Time' for a more thorough analysis.
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Simon, year 2046: "so, I have an academic background in anthropology, neuroscience, history, botany, rocket science, philosophy and quantum physics. However, I *don't* have a formal background in linguistics so please take what I say with a grain of salt..."
then proceedes to give us the most watchable presentation covering that exact field without flinching
This is already pretty close. 😊
i think its nice that he is clear about it and doesnt pretend to be an authority even implicitly
the alternative is that one git who recently stopped doing youtube who would always say "i'm not a linguist, i'm a physcist, but let me give you my opinion on.." and then in the next video "i'm not a physicist, i'm a chemist, but let me " and then "i'm not a chemist, i'm an anthropologist" and what he actually is is a computer scientist or something.
@@antimatterhornor Jordan Petersons “I’ve thought about this for a long time”. Wow. Well done dr Peterson.
we're all simoning through the roper of time
so true
Love this comment ❤
Or are we Roping thru the Simon of time?
You always apologizing for waffling, while I'm here enjoying every bit of it
it's still part of the simon roper experience™ so i won't complain lol
👍🙏
I enjoy waffles. Not sure about waffling.
👍👍
To me, his style of communicating in these videos makes me feel like we are just hanging out and chatting about different topics. I love it.
I think educated Western people have (at least) two models of time: the one that we experience, and then the one, derived from physics, which we don't experience, but which we 'know' is 'really what's happening'.
EDIT: Actually, you could argue three. The subjective experience of time going quickly or slowly---"it took forever"---the idea that that's only subjective and, actually, time moves at the same pace for everyone--"well, I meant, it was probably only fifteen minutes but it felt like forever"--and then the model of physics were time doesn't really move at all.
BERGSON??!
Chronos vs kairos
Reading this, it occurs to me that even though we might describe time as linear in our culture, our experience of time is not really linear at all. It's more like an expanding awareness that only goes in one direction and fades out gradually at one end. I'm thinking of it as a search light which points in a single direction, toward the past. In everything illuminated by that searchlight, we are free to dart back and forth, but we cannot experience anything outside of its light, or 'behind it'.
@@denniscarr9234 If you haven't heard of it, I would look up light cones in special relativity! Sounds a lot like what you're talking about
Good point. Modern scientific thinking about life is based on abstract concepts which they call ‘real’, while ancient man was more concerned with actual experience of life and called it ‘real’. We can argue if (and to what degree) these two are mutually exclusive.
Millions of Jacobs just got to see and hear millions of Simons. A very satisfying experience.
Millions of Carolyns are now laughing at the millions of Jacobs' comments. Very satisfying indeed.
In my masters research I ended up reading quite a bit of anthropology on the Maya people of Mesoamerica who tend to view time as cyclical rather than linear, so I'll try and explain it a bit here for anyone who's interested in a slightly deeper look at what this type of view looks like in one group. That with the proviso that I am a from the west and not Maya, and have not done fieldwork myself so this is based on my best understanding of the secondary literature (edit: and also a reading of the Popol Vuh, based on dennis tedlock's translation and heavily informed by his analysis and explanation of its content and its contemporary relevance). Also, these kind of ideas vary from person to person, eg a Maya-identifying person who lives in an urban area might have a view of temporality more familiar to westerners.
While in the west we tend to think of people and objects as self-contained things which would continue to be what they are in a vacuum, the Maya tend to see things in a more relational way, so for example a person's existence is partly defined by and dependent on the people around them and their relationships with them. This also applies to worlds/realms/whatever you want to call them, including the physical world, that inhabited by the gods, that where dreams take place, etc. As a result of this things in one world can cause events in another in ways that humans can't perceive. For example, in the Popol Vuh (sacred text of the K'iche' Maya) there is a story in which a woman proves to her mother-in-law, who has never met her, that she is indeed her relation by harvesting corn from the garden which then regenerates presumably by the gods' will. It wouldn't be unusual to a Maya person to say that the woman telling the truth directly caused, in the most literal sense of causation, the corn to regenerate despite nothing in the way of what we in the west would see as empirical evidence, because this understanding of causality is based on the fact that some things, such as the relations and interactions between different worlds, are just fundamentally unknowable to humans.
This same logic of causality applies to cycles of time, which are separate yet interconnected. Something which happens in one time cycle can potentially directly cause or affect something in another cycle due to the relations between those cycles which are imperceptible to humans. This is why dream interpretation is one way of producing knowledge about what might happen in the future for some Maya people, as the signs in a dream (usually to be interpreted by a 'daykeeper', sort of like a shaman) are linked in imperceptible ways to events in different 'worlds' i.e. including the physical world and in different time cycles.
I realise this properly seems a bit strange coming from a guy with a hardcore ned flanders pfp lol but hope its interesting to anyone who wanted an example of a different way of understanding time.
I once had a most interesting discussion with a gentleman who had studied philosophy at a university in Lima, Peru,for many years. He was part Aymara himself, which gave him a particular interest in the philosophy of this group. He said they see the present,past and future as existing at the same time, though the past and the future are invisible to those of us who are in the present. He said the Aymara live with the presence of those who have died and those who are yet to be born all around them, though invisible and untouchable. I wonder if that might make for a reassuring world view.
@@dorteweber3682 that's interesting, the same is true in terms of ancestors for the Maya - its not uncommon for them to speak or act as a collective, rather than individual, and that can include ancestors. Saw the other day a video about some Maya people reviving a precolumbian ball game where one guy spoke about how when he plays it he feels as if his ancestors are with him or something along those lines.
When i hear about changing something in one cycle it can change something in another i have to think of climat change. (:
@@dorteweber3682 From the perspective of a life-long Catholic, since God is eternal and in Him there is no past and future (His name He revealed to us is I Am) and He permeates everything in all the worlds including this one, I agree that past, present, and future are not separate. In the most earthly sense, you see people that have features of somebody 3 generations ago. I know it's genetics, but for me, it is a very visual example of past, present, and future being one, not separated.
You're appropriating Mayan culture by not having personal experience as a Mayan and speaking on their behalf in order to have something to compare to the subject of time in this video. I doubt you're aware of this because Westerners tend to think they're entitled to anything that's been colonized by the West but you would d better in the future to step aside and encourage a Mayan person to speak on their own culture. I'm an Indigenous person from North America and this always bothers me because our perspective is always appropriated and it ends up just being another Eurocentric person claiming to speak for us without any true understanding.
I had a Persian language teacher who grew up in Iran and then completed her PhD in Linguistics in Canada. She maintained that time passed more quickly in Canada and the US than in Iran, and that this wasn't a perception unique to her but that other Iranian people she knew had mentioned the same thing. When I tried to clarify what she meant by asking if it was simply that the faster pace of life in the West made it seem that way, she said she didn't think so, that the phenomenon was the same for Iranians who stayed at home all day as for those who went out into the rat race everyday...
We experience "slowness" and "fastness" of time in two different ways. One is how quickly the time seems to go by in the moment, and on the other is how we remember it. And they are often opposite each other -- e.g. most people are more likely to have a lot of memories of the significant times -- the time that also seems to fly by -- and much less memory of the boring stuff where times seems to drag.
I would be curious to know in which of those two senses your teacher and others who experienced this are referring to.
Since our memories keep track of the passage of time as experienced, people with Alzheimer's etc. must experience time backwards - they forget the more recent past and re-experience events from the further back past, so for them are they feel like they are moving forwards in time. It is very sad that dementia patients re-experience bereavement every time they 'learn' that their spouse or parent has passed away
I wonder if is not a blessing for some
Do our memories keep track of the passage of time? Your mind might but I'm sorry to tell you that mine doesnt. I wonder if ayone's does. Talking with my sisters and brother about our childhood we not only remember or forget different occurrences we have different ideas about when something happened. My mother prided herself on having a perfect memory, (she didnt) and told of something happening when she was 6. A family history link confirmed the occurrence but the recorded date made my mother 8. Funnily enough she was 8 when her younger sister was born. Both occurrences were the sort one would recall. So her memory didnt keep track of time either.
baldric is looking absolutely drippy
Baldric’s dead 😱
@@GraemeMarkNI no he's just occupying a different space in time than we are
@@GraemeMarkNI Baldric is odin in human form.
I think an explanation of your final question of why a person experiences the current moment at any given time can be as simple as saying that within the memories structurally encoded in the brain, there are depth cues, the way there are with vision, like how distant things are small, parallaxed with other objects, and sometimes even blue-shifted. Old memories often appear in our brains fuzzier, with more recall difficulty, and only recalled with outright intention, compared to what they “ought to be” given their importance relative to modern events. We perceive ourselves to be in the present for many of the same reasons you perceive yourself to be where you’re standing when looking over a vast landscape.
Ooooh I like that. That was a sexy answer.
They must, given that I'm seeing comments about this 20 minute video ten minutes after it's posted
You can change the speed setting of the video. They've just set it to x2
iirc Jorge Luis Borges has written a story about someone experiencing time backwards. I highly recommend his writing to anyone who's interested in these kinds of things.
Philip K. Dick has a novel about all of society experiencing time backwards.
In T.H. White's retelling of the Arthur saga, 'The Once And Future King', Merlin is said to be living backwards in time. So that when he first meets Arthur (nicknamed Wart at that point in time), after about half an hour he asks him: "Have I told you this before?" And Wart answers: "No, we've only met half an hour ago," Merlin says: "So little time to pass as that?" and 'a tear ran down to the end of his nose. '
This explains why Merlin can know the future (but not, apparently, the past - or very well, in any case).
The difference between seeing a photograph and seeing Simon in person is more than a mere matter of a third dimension due to binocular vision. I think that there are a lot of us who would enjoy the experience and offer to buy him a beverage of his choice and then listen while he unloads randomly profound thoughts.
That jar Simon is using to support the phone is beautiful.
A "differing perceptions" question I've wondered about. When thinking about past events, I have a strong sense of "order" (which happened first) and a moderate sense of relative "duration" (which lasted longer) but I personally have zero sense of "interval." So for example if you ask me to tell you about something that happened "20 years ago," I would have to do the calculation and convert the question into "things that happened in 2004," and then I could tell you my son was born in 2004. Similarly, if you ask "how long ago did you move into your house?" I have to remember the year and then calculate it. If I don't remember the specific date, I will think about whether it happened before or after other events that I do remember the dates of. Based on conversations with people, it SEEMS like some (most?) people actually do have a direct sense of interval - that they have some intuitive sense of what "two hours ago" or "twenty years ago" means. Assuming that's the case, I'm wondering if this lack of "interval" is associated with my ADHD - it makes sense, because I'm aware of time within a single "attention session" but can't track time across "sessions." Curious if others have this same lack of interval, and if so, whether they also have ADHD? If there is an association maybe it could be leveraged as a diagnostic marker?
Yes and yes. I’ve had to do this even to calculate my age for most of my life (ever since I grew out of the ‘I’m five AND A HALF’ stage 😂). Whenever a form or person asks me how old I am, I need to remind myself which year I was born, which year it is now, has my birthday been or not and then calculate the difference to be able to give an answer. Apparently many people just remember their age as a distinct number, and keep up with every yearly change to that number (leaving aside here any emotional issues that may result from societal pressures making people wish those regular updates weren’t a thing).
This sounds similar to what I, and a significant number of other autistic people, have: time blindness.
It can manifest in different ways, but the past gets very blurry for me. There’s very little sense of how proportionately distant things are. Memories get kind of jumbled up because they’re not naturally delineated by time.
I’m also bad at estimating how long things will take or sensing how much time has passed, so I’m perpetually running late.
At 22:50 you bring a very interesting point related to existentialism. If you've ever heard of the idea of the "self" or "being" as the "uninterruption of conciousness" and that ones self "dies" upon the interruption of conciousness -- ex: StarTrek-esque teleporter, one millisecond you are vaporized, another you "appear" somewhere else -- did you "die" during that fraction of a second your conciousness was interrupted? This can be taken further where does one self "die" upon sleep? Your conciousness is halted, you sleep, upon wake your concious self becomes reconstructed, seemingly no different than the teleporter. --- This ramble here is because from what you postured where your conciousness is being "emerged" every billionth of a second, is one self not then dying every billionth of a second? What is the self at this point? Is everyone, everywhere, a "different person" every billionth of a second? :) enough crackpot rambling for me, Cheers
I think you’re getting to some thing which is similar to the with the notion that there is no self. There is just this eternal recreation of the self. One can become another person.
This is what I think too, consciousness is the glue that holds us together as an organism rather than just a collection of millions of cells. It creates the illusion that we are a personality, we tell ourselves the story of who we are, but it’s a chimera.
Well, its not like your brain stops doing things as you sleep either. Your neurons continue to fire, your brain continues to process inputs from all over the body. I really don't know enough about neuroscience to know exactly how your brain 'falls asleep', but I can say that regardless, I've always had a deep fear of losing consciousness for this reason. I'm pretty used to sleeping, but I still have my wisdom teeth as I can't handle the existential dread of unwillingly losing consciousness and regaining it.
@@Hinotori_joj I know how you feel, I once read that although the brain continues to be fairly active during sleep, anesthesia causes the nearest simulation of death while being alive. Most brain activity halts under anesthetic, but not completely. We aren’t dead, I suppose we’re temporarily switched off.
philosophy of self is really interesting
Lovely to see you Simon. Hope your health issues are getting under control. I’ve spent a huge amount of time reflecting on your previous video and have been very concerned for you. Very best wishes and thanks for this fascinating video. ❤️
the film 'Arrival' tackles this question, definitely worth checking out if you haven't seen it. Linguistic sci-fi
Awesone fiilm. The book /novella it is based on is even more of a mind melter.❤
@@mollydooker9636 ah yeh I have the book, been meaning to read it
Yeah. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis. I think fiction can provide interesting metaphors
@@AbAb-th5qe I thought that one had long been dismissed by linguists?
@@user-je8pn4up7r I'm not aware that it has been. But then again I'm not a linguist. It would make sense that it wouldn't apply universally. You can't fly just by talking in terms of flight.
In some tellings of Arthurian myth, Merlin is said to have lived backwards. The "first" meeting with Arthur is bittersweet because that marks the last time he will see him, and the "last" is merely an old wizard who has forgotten his friend, except from Merlin's standpoint, he hasn't learned of Arthur yet.
Also see: The novel _Backwards_ set in the Red Dwarf universe (multiverse??), where - as one in-passing point - Lister, stuck on a reverse time version of Earth, becomes fed up (unfed down?) of not being able to choose what he's going to uneat each day because that decision is made by his future/past self uncooking the food later/earlier because he's bound by the retro-causality that exists there.
You might enjoy Tenet by Christopher Nolan. It is an action movie unfortunately, but it's based around the idea that they can reverse the flow of time.
you read my mind in the end with your suggestion of a constantly instantly reborn consciousness and what makes "now" now. every one of your videos feels targeted to where my curiosity about language and culture goes, and the way you think about this is another breath of fresh air. i see it as: we are a miraculous confluence of accidents, in other words, we are not "supposed" to be here. a proton holding its shape is just as random and inevitable as hearts and brains and mouths building themselves out of it all, and we understand it by telling stories and singing songs of what we perceive and remember and dream. hope this contributes and im not just sounding like a crackpot
Every billionth of a second, backwards and forwards. I think I'm just starting to think. Don't stop this channel. Whatever that means.
he's back!!
That description right at the end there is, imo, a very concise and well-put description of the experience of being thrown into a time-oriented conscious experience. 🐦 Love listening to your musings, Simon.
That was fun. Glad to meet you, Simon.
I love everything about your demeanour, such a pleasure to listen every time!!
I’m not sure if I’m too late to comment here, but Eugene Vodolaskin’s “Laurus” is an incredible novel that explores time from the perspective of medieval Eastern Orthodox hagiography. The author is a scholar of the period and the novel gives a unique insight into perceptions of time in different cultures
I love mulling these questions over and your videos!! 🤠💜
When speaking about the mug and 4th dimension - the best way I've found to explain this concept is likening it to long exposure photos of car taillights, where you see the actual physical history in space. We can imagine it if given an example like this.
Wonderful study. Thank you, Simon!
Re: Pritchard and the Azande, special relativity says that no two events can unambiguously be in a before/after relation in all reference frames unless there is, at least potentially, a causal connection from the one to the other. Our (western) intuition of time assumes the existence of a universal clock that does not in fact exist!
how different, from a physics perspective, are the reference frames of all humans though? As far as I know, no humans have experienced speeds or gravities that alter the perception of causality on a noticeable scale. With that said, can two events be unambiguously in a before/after relation in my reference frame, and if so, would it really be different for other people?
@Hinotori_joj I can't answer this question, but I wanted to note, and I think this is the place to do it, that the question of simultaneity comes up here, not just before/after. This is easier to think about on our very small human scale and also on a very vast hypothetical scale. In the immediate world, we know that we can't experience things exactly at the same time as one another because of the speed of light / limit on the instantaneousness of transmission of information, differences in position in space/motion as observers etc. On a very large scale, if you imagine two conscious beings experiencing life on worlds millions of light years apart, simultaneity becomes even weirder a thing to pin down (more or less what sjswitzer1 is noting, I think, though I don't really know what I'm talking about). I thought about this during the example of the car and spilling water(?) happening at the same time.
18:00 reminds me of the character from "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. And it was a painful experience for those who surrounded that person.
😮 interesting insight! Love the analysis and understanding overall
I think you're fantastic, Simon. thank you
I really like how you described the idea that we only have the sensation of being at one particular point in time and that - perhaps necessarily - creates the illusion of moving through time. You got me to think about this and the idea that "time is an illusion" in a much clearer way than I had before. Thank you! :)
Preceding the mid 1800's, time was handled on a local basis, with communities sharing an independent notion of when exactly now is and how events fold outwards from there. One could figure out the time of day by when certain birds sing, how the sun arcs overhead, the shadows it then casts, the rains, the weather, the resulting harvest, the reigns and deaths of royalty. Perhaps, they could look up at a big clock on a tower in the center of town, fixed to the regional time. During the 19th century however, scheduled steamships and trains required time standardization in the industrializing world. This new time was invented in 1848, where it was initially referred to as railway time, reflecting the role the new geographical interconnection of far off places by train played in its adoption. It was initially adopted in England and spread from there.
Reactions were highly mixed, and often violent - one of the first instances of domestic terrorism occurred in 1896 when Martial Bourdin set off a bomb on his way to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London in a suspected effort to destroy the site to which standardized time is set. Some felt that they were being robbed of some of their daylight, or that they were being compelled to abide by a timing system that was contrary to nature. The calendar, like patchworks of fields, square after square, had parceled up the minute, day, month and year into an exact, omnipresent order. It came to form the temporal architecture of labor in the coming centuries, and imperceptibly shaped lived experience until no human could afford to live off of it. Its implementation globally was a colonial effort, and saw much resistance across the world as different notions of time continued in place or at odds with the standardized time (such as Bombay Time). Marxist historian E.P. Thompson chronicled a new “inward notation of time,” as it was uncoupled from the cycles of nature and converted into a commodity. Where the rain patterns, tides, and hours of sunlight once governed the village’s and family’s labor on the land, the factories turned to the clock, the tolling bell, and fines to regulate the wage laborer’s day, erecting a new wall between something called “work” and “life.” Workers were synchronized at a great cost to the species: the arcadian dream of bodies healthily aligned to the planet’s rhythms.
The project of standardized time reached a completion in 1972, when all of the major countries of the world adopted a form of time based on that first imagined by the railroads over a century earlier. Coincidently that same year, the first picture of the entire earth was taken from space, "The Blue Marble". The human world was now unimaginably small and moving unimaginably fast and the engines (like planes and trains and cargo ships and automobiles), that fueled standardized time, were soon revealed to be the likely cause of the destruction of the earth in the rush of it all. The internet came about, and a whole new meaning of instantaneity that challenged even the rush of global time came about, one where events across the world could be perceived and experienced in a near complete relative simultaneity. At that point the world found itself tangled up in what seemed to be the quickly approaching end of time, marked by 24/7 news and glitching seasons and speed, speed, speed. A swerve at the end of an age of acceleration.
Old writings from some thoughts on the social design of time, and a sort of primer to thoughts on the future of keeping time. Happy to share more bits and pieces and research, since its just a rich and nuanced topic. Love your thoughts of a linguistic view of annotating time, would love to see more videos from you on similar lines of inquiry.
I think you're being a bit pessimistic, as well as conflating a tool that was used to destructive ends as an inherently destructive tool. Fast travel did in fact _necessitate_ consistent and universal time, and also brought with it quick access to medical attention which saved lives, transport of ideas and access to education, transport of food which drastically lessened the problem of malnutrition. And now, with the progressing of communication technology, more and more people are aware of the state of the world, yes it's overwhelming sometimes, and too much of it is controlled by large entities with goals separate from any persons, but without it, many people still would not know about the destruction of the world, or any number of other important issues, people who now are taking action to oppose these things would not have had the chance to even decide to. The technology that is used to destroy and oppress also aids in resistance. Or, at the very least, in an otherwise very alienated world, it's nice to be connected to one another as it ends.
Disclaimer: I'm not a philosopher, and have never studied philosophy at all.
I have known quite a few people who were not experiencing time sequentially or (always) in a forward direction. As a specific example: my grandmother, in her last years, not infrequently became what I thought of as 'lost in time'. I remember her telling a nurse that her name was Florence Daniels - and the nurse thought she was confused as to who she was, since that wasn't her name. Because I was there at that time, I was able to say that it WAS her name - until she was 15 years old and took her her husband's name. She wasn't confused about her identity, she was confused about WHEN she was.
I've known quite a few people this has happened to. They go looking for people and places long since lost, they lose (sometimes temporarily) later memories so that they don't known their spouse or children, but are able to recognise or recall things from long ago much more clearly. Sometimes they 'jump about' through time, moving forwards or back, although never ahead of my 'now' as far as I know.
Usually, these have been older people - but not always. Certain medications and drugs can have a similar effect. The 'now' in which they exist is not the same as my 'now' - and an hour later they may have moved forward in time, or actually gone back further into the past.
Whatever the cause of these states, the person's experience of time may be far from sequential and always moving forward in a linear way. Or so it seems to me.
The example about Nuer ontology is interesting. The Western cultural concept of a global linear timeline where events can happen simultaneously doesn’t really match physical reality. One of the big ideas of general relativity is that causally unrelated events genuinely are unordered, and not simultaneous, since their apparent order depends on their motions relative to an observer. Causality is more fundamental than the apparent arrow of time.
As for backward time, I’m not sure if you’re already aware of temporal deixis and retrocausality, but if not you might like to learn about them.
Time deixis describes spatiotemporal analogies like “look forward to sth.” or “put sth. behind you” and is famously different across cultures. Supposedly we have Ancient Greek examples of referring to the future as behind you-because you can’t see it yet.
Retrocausality is the idea that if an event must happen, then it “causes” those events in its past that were necessary to lead to it. In other words, you can think of causation as pushing into the future (“X surely happened, therefore Y is happening”) and retrocausation as pulling from the past (“X is happening, because Y will surely happen”). I don’t know how much anthropological research has looked at this, but my sense is that it’s a pretty normal way of thinking about visions, omens, and other foretold things.
The illusion of simultaneity as illustrated by the ladder/barn pole paradox seems to have avoided discussion by philosophers for the last century.
I empathize with your grandad about finding yourself at the top of the pyramid of generations. This is why we older folk get interested in genealogy, because if we don't preserve family history it will be lost to the younger people, and (in my case) there are so many aspects of European and North American history that have shaped our family. It's also why the old people in a culture strive to preserve oral tradition and lore.
I personally think our continuous perception of time could arise from just unordered temporal slivers of consciousness with memories linking them, making it feel as if the recent moments came “before”. It wouldn’t matter what order the conscious slivers were experienced in, nor would it be possible to ever find out that order.
This really resembles a linked list data structure, where it doesn’t matter where in memory (the order) a value (a conscious experience) is stored. The illusion of unidirectional time comes from each value’s link to the next (or previous for the sake of analogy with retrospective memories) one, not what order the values are stored at.
Edit: Finished watching the video and found out we basically have the exact same idea
“….and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain are one and the same force, for the joy I had just experienced included also all the pain I ever had felt, or ever could feel. . . .”
Algernon Blackwood ~ the wood of the dead.
I believe there is an Amazonian tribe that “looks ahead” to the past and the future is “behind them” in the sense that you can “see” the past but the future is unknown. Like a person walking backwards.
Hawking addresses the "backwards memory" idea in A Brief History of Time and determines it to violate the laws of physics, especially of thermodynamics. Because encoding memory is an entropic process, memory must necessarily run in the same time-direction as the grand-scale flow of entropy. It's not that we can only remember time going in one direction, it's that the concept of memory is necessarily tied to the direction that time "flows."
Great chat!
Another great video!
I was glad you brought up the Piraha. Their view of time is utterly fascinating, as neither cyclical nor linear but more amorphous, fluid, shifting, and transient; hence their obsession with flickering flames. I've just started your video and so I don't know what you cover. But if you haven't looked into it, read about linguistic relativity. Daniel Everett's son, Caleb Everett, has written multiple books on linguistic relativity.
From a different perspective, you might also check out "Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America" by John Putnam Demos. In early America, cyclical time was still dominant in the culture and public mind. The American Revolution was originally called that because the colonists, in cyclical time, were expecting a return of a previous era, if nostalgically romanticized and so distorted.
They were demanding the rights of Englishmen. But the rights they were thinking about in the colonies was a unique situation that hadn't previously existed. Instead, they were demanding a return of something that to a large degree had never before existed. So, a desire for a return transformed into radical revolt toward creating something new. Revolution, an astrological term, was redefined.
Apologies if someone already mentioned this, but I think that any such discussion must involve consideration of the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. entropy (disorder) statistically always increasing over time. That's what distinguishes time going forwards and backwards.
This just made me think about words in different languages and how they can be discussed.
Take Spanish for example. They have two different words for "to be". Ser and estar.
We could describe that as two different concepts of being, and therefore Spaniards perceive the world differently to English speakers, and the evidence is their many different words for being/existence.
Or just that the Spanish have different words to explain the same phenomenons, and perceive them the same, they just use two different forms of the word to explain something depending the circumstance.
I think its the latter and not the former
May I suggest Carlo Rovelli's "The order of time", which doesn't answer what time is, but does offer some more physical perspectives that weren't mentioned in this video
Very interesting video!
This makes me think of how brains "timestamp" memories - i find even quite recent memories difficult to locate in time, unless it involved a specific occasion, school year, or something and I wonder if you could ever convince someone that any of those "floating" memories were actually of events yet to happen. Thinking how the brain stores the order of memories, I'm not convinced it actually does and I can imagined it's possible for a lifetime largely devoid of dateable events to become very muddled, or at least feel quite "temporally flat" - either "now" or "then"
I understand exactly what you mean. For me, past events have relative order but there’s no over-arching absolute order. I suspect most people do have at least some sense of absolute order, though, and wondering if they’re therefore puzzled by what you mean.
This actually has a scientfic name: confabulation.
Given his background, Simon would probably have some very interesting insights here.
it seems that the consciousness of self starts every morning as the memory kicks in again to define and reorganise that self. Is self the memories of experience stored electrochemically in the brain? Nice vid Simon.
it's interesting how at the end you effectively do exactly what you started the video with;
a person from a Western culture would see the tree branch fall on a person's head and say "that happened because the tree branch was rotting and the person walked underneath it" but the Isando would say there has to be a reason that the branch fell at the same time that the person was walking under it
then at the end you say "why am i me rather than somebody else? well somebody has to be me, so i don't think that's that perplexing a question." but it seems based on your description that the Isando would find that to be one of the *most* perplexing questions, as presumably they would find it necessary to explain why it's YOU - of all people - that you are, rather than somebody else
Loved the intro. Goes to show the cutting edge of thought is never in one place.
Also, the examples of the subjectivity of colors is interesting because it begs the question of how(or whether or not) the emotional associations with colors come about. The level of depth at which these attributions are made seem to me to be of concern. If the reference is truly to a superficial stratum outside in the physical world, the experience of sensation such as color made indeed have a superficial interpretation corresponding in the brain. But if the reference to color is made by concession of a correspondence that is beyond the depth of the ratified spacial model itself. This dynamic does indeed supply additional parameters to the question at hand, being that of the strength and hardness of time as a measurable and further structural dimension, having space the object of its run-through.
In the Lindy beige video "the white headhunter" he describes a shipwrecked character who lives with a tribe of Pacific Islanders who view time in almost exactly the way you describe. They think of the future as something which is behind them.. I hadn't thought of it until what listening to you but your way of describing the hypothetical psychology of a person oriented towards the future is actually a good description of this way of thinking. The future something which is unknowable could be thought of as something which you are walking away from in the past which you see is something in the direction of which you're heading. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts if you get a chance to watch the video or look at the book that he was describing from. Thanks for posting the video and sharing your thoughts. Cheers!
And a lovely garden it is. I recognized a few European plants there. Plantain, blackberry. Was that poison ivy?
I love the topics. My mind scurried down paths of Rene Girard and Kurt Vonnegut and his Tralfamadorians.
And there are some very scientific minds that think consciousness is primary and not generated by brain matter at all. The brain is just a radio receiver.
No poison Ivy in Britain or I think anywhere in Europe. Not the sort of plant one would import though many American plants are now proscribed eg Skunk Cabbage and Gunnera because they escape and conflict with our eco system and don't get me started on Rhodedendrons ! An alternate time frame where the 'explorers' from Europe refrained from importing plants would be good to live in
ps European Ivy is proscribed in USA because it is invasive
@@cadileigh9948 Ha! Too late for that. We have a terrible problem with English ivy and privet in the southeastern states.
I take it the European Ivy you're talking about is like our native poison ivy? (Toxicodendron radicans)
In response to the Azande causality, I've always believed that creating/assigning meaning is just something humans do, not only to benefit themselves and make their lives more beautiful but for the benefit of the entire planet. Oaks are magical and sacred trees that sustain biodiversity. Rivers were once sacred too. Both of these resources have become invisible and unimportant because we've forgotten our stories about them. Even Life has become a "system"(computer analogy). Data alone can be remembered but will never be internalized or made personal. When we eat from the land, it becomes important to us in a way that can't be replicated through any other means. If we believe the sacred hawthorn is keeping us alive, we feel much more strongly about someone cutting it down and internalize the landscape that sustains the hawthorn. The lack of these assigned connections may ultimately lead to mass extinction and death.
Simon would make a great uni lecturer. Full attendance from me anyway!
An interesting part of how we perceive time is the physical location of the past and future. Most languages see the future in front of us and the past behind us. However there are some exceptions. Aymara speakers see the past in front of them and the future behind, while Mandarin speakers conceptualise time along the vertical axis.
My own personal sense around our western conception of time is that it is just a bit of very old poetry to help us account for the fact that we experience a discontinuity of consciousness due to sleep. We live in this kind of ever-now and yet we still need to account for the ways we can observe causality to generally flow even if some of us include layers that others do not (and vice versa). Which brings me to another conclusion - I don't think our cognition is actually some ghost in the machine but rather is a sensory apparatus that has been positively selected for in order to help us account for the ways that energy becomes entangled, disentangled, and reentangled as it does. Because of that the future and the past for me are not this kind of solid ahead and behind respectively (or the flip of that for some cultures) but they are there to either side of me and they help me navigate the 4 dimensional structure of that ever-now like I were a tightrope walker with those giant poles they use to balance. I should make clear that these are not academic understandings but rather the musings of a mild psychotic and I recognize my phantasms are my own.
As for the person in your thought experiment who experiences causality in the opposite direction I fully expect they could exist. Because whats actually going on with the thing we call time must be an amalgam of all human experience of it (and things further yet that we can't experience because we are only very small and also not small enough), and so the boundary of human experience must then encompass individuals with very unique and bizarre empirical experiences indeed.
Thinking in higher dimensions requires developing techniques beyond our built-in, superbly optimized, method for parsing the 3D space we inhabit. In fact, we parse 4 dimensions (at least), but we experience the progression of time (illusory or not) as a series of stills. As you point out, anything else would become a blurry mess. I had to learn to think multidimensionally as an act of self-defense. What I needed did not politely stop at a mere 4. I found that it was necessary to abandon the familiar, visual-style representations. Doing this was not easy, but I did it well enough for my purposes. To acknowledge your fascination with how brains work, I do not know the extent to which the final method "looks like" our usual visuospatial mechanisms, but it certainly started there.
For example, you can obviously think in four dimensions because you can describe what would happen if your visuospatial perception were not separated along the time axis. It's just that the multi-D thinking happens in a different way.
1:20 Even in Western cultures we have the idea of people being jinxed, i.e these things happen to them. On ships there was the idea of people who were "Jonahs" i.e who brought bad luck to the ship and crew.
i think that we can look at consciousness as being fundamentally quite similar to more specific aspects of consciousness, for example:
perception of color is part of conscious experience, we have no control over it and it arises as an output (experience) resulting deterministically from an input/cause (in the condition of being in the world within an unimpaired apparatus of biological sensibility, a body)
along that line, seeing color is akin to smelling fragrances and so on, but more counter-intuitively the experience of emotion, of thought, of aboutness and attention, actually all conscious qualia would then be *of the same kind*, meaning that the perception of time is as real and as determined by physics as the perception of color. so too the perception of self, of will, of desire. this doesn't offer an alternative answer to the question "could someone experience time backwards" except to say that all experiences, in every range of articulation, are possible only as a result of the causal power of all total and imperceptible reality filtering, as it were, through our embodied medium.
it is a great project to attempt to discover facts about that ultimately imperciptible total reality, that is science in a nutshell, especially considering our limitations. but as for me, i don't know enough about the only partly perceptible 4th-dimensional aspect of the universe (time) nor enough about any potential (intuitively imperceptible) higher dimensions, nor frankly even of these 3 dimensions we amble around in comfortably, again, i just don't know enough to say whether the variety of extant conscious experiences, or the past and possible future instances of consciousness, show any potential for that ability/occurrence.
i wish i had been more timely, i'm really interested in hearing whether this maps onto what simon said at the end of the video
For a novel about a person's consciousness scanning backward, see "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis. The character's memory isn't reversed from his perspective (he remembers his past, our future, beginning with his death and progressing to his birth). Nothing changes about how he acts.
the one thing that really made me understand time was entropy.
over time, the particles in the universe move from structures that are less likely to happen randomly to ones that are more likely to happen randomly.
time is just this change. it's not something that causes this change, it just *is* the change.
so if one does not imagine that the mind is like the soul--some immaterial thing sitting outside the physical world--then it's not possible to have a mind experience time backwards.
Yup, at least in the sense that it determines the "arrow of time" or direction of causality. Things are causal in one direction bc they're going from lower entropy to higher entropy, which is vanishingly unlikely if you look at it the other way (ie heat and sound spontaneously coming together in just the right way to launch an object you dropped from the ground back up into your hand).
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
-- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_
At the start, when Simon is describing seeing things in photographs, if you look at this video on a small screen, with brightness at the bare minimum, you can see a large dog's head emerge from all the objects on the desk to Simon's left (your right) aporox. during minutes 2:00-4:00
Hi Simon, this was a really interesting video!
Your intuitions about what time and persons are like seem to be quite similar to the ones in a philosophical theory of time called "Stage Theory". This was something I studied and wrote a bit about and I'm personally quite sympathetic to the view: I think something like it is right. If you want to read further into it, I believe Ted Sider and Katherine Hawley's writings are the way to go. Sider's "All the World is a Stage" is a great introductory paper, though it might require reading a couple of David Lewis's papers on philosophy of time, given that Sider assumes the reader has some acquaintance with them.
I like your shirts
E-simultaneity, consciousness, qualia and physicalism... this video's been a mini throwback to a level philosophy. all interesting concepts that i hadn't engaged with in a while :)
“The meaning of what I meant. You know what I mean.”
I'm still watching, but I'm already eager to comment because I had this "so true! so true!" feeling.
You're saying: "So if you're not exposed to photographs, your visual system just doesn't have the training that it needs."
I'm not a Pirahã person, but I'm blind from birth. And the sentence I quoted is totally true for us also, we need to be *trained* to recognize tactile images (I'm still quite bad at it, to be honest). If you ask a blind person, how does a cat look like? they would answer: a cat is fluffy, soft, warm, they have a head with pointed (probably) ears that can move, whiskers, clawed paws, and on and on it goes. So, if you show me a schematically drawn simple cat (a circle with two triangles for ears), I'd say U-hm… eeeehm… sorry, me does not understand. I mean, now after some experience (thanks to my wife) I'd probably say it's an animal, but nothing more. thanks for the video!
Hi Simon! Thanks for the video.
Just wanted to make a comment on how real or illusory the ordering of time is from a physical perspective.
Quick word of warning though - I switched degrees before I could finish in physics as an undergrad, and this may very well be a graduate or post graduate topic anyways, but I've done my best to present what I know of other people's work as best as possible.
From my understanding, almost all mathematical models contained within physics are entirely reversible when it comes to time - that is, similar to how you've discussed it, processes and events could just as well go forwards or backwards.
However, I believe the model that thermodynamics gives us, specifically looking at entropy, does give reason that events "travel" physically in one direction through time, and not the other. Or if you prefer, entropy causes time to go forward, but I'm less inclined towards that sort of causal framing of things.
An intuitive example of such a non reversible process might be putting a bunch of red marbles into a bag, then a bunch of blue ones, then shaking them up. You start with all the reds on bottom, and all the blues on top, but going forward in time you expect to see a bag of roughly evenly mixed marbles. Doing the same physical process but simply reversing time, however, would NOT give you back the separated colors.
In this sense, the ordering with time has to do with the consistent experience of the causal relationship between non-reversible processes.
Again, I'm not qualified to comment on how deeply that example reflects all the high level physical models out there, or precisely how these models relate to physical reality, but this does incline me to think that there at least is an ordering to physical time, even if our strictly linear and universal way of thinking about it as anglophones is by no means universal to how humans need reason about time. And anyways, even physics shows us how the idea that two different events, separated time, could be considered "simultaneous", is only mostly true within certain limits.
Thanks again for the video!
And yet, if you were to shake the bag of marbles an infinite number of times, then you *would* get occasions when all the reds were on the bottom and all the blues on top. And that eventuality, what is more, would occur an infinite number of times - as would every other possible combination. (Can't imagine how all that shaking would affect your perception of time, though!)
@@philroberts7238 Yeah! An interesting thought, though I can't say how it would relate to time either.
I’d suggest the Azande people aren’t thinking about the causality of the branch falling any differently than we do. If we weren’t thinking about the causality aspect at all, then the idea of “coincidence” wouldn’t make any sense. It’s not that we don’t need an explanation of the causality, but rather “it’s a coincidence” is our explanation.
Have you read (about) Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? He thinks about the dimensions of our perception at length, and convincingly at that.
As a comp sci student, I think of our brains kindof like giant AI and state machine (you're the neuroscientist so please tell me if im way off). The input it every nerve we have, and the 'Natural' Intelligence just processes each input, occasionally reading and writing to neurons that store state as inputs and outputs. In that way, I don't really think you exist or have free will, you're just the sum of the formation conditions of your nervous system and everything its ever experienced. I feel like I can boil down the experience of time to how your your neurons physically store their state. Many neurons are having their states changed every moment you experience something. Each time though, it will be a different set of neurons. As you continue to take inputs, some of those will get overwritten. The ones that didn't get overwritten that stored part of that memory will remain, but they will be missing bits, causing the memory to lose details. I think another important component of this is that similar experiences will be saved to similar neurons, causing things to blur together, whereas novel experiences will get saved to neurons that rarely get touched. Combining this with the idea another commenter mentioned, that your brain determines distance in time by the quality of the remaining memory, explains why im always like "that was X years ago!?" to cool things, but "that feels like forever ago" to mundane events, even if they happen around the same time. A good example of this is the start of covid which still feels recent, compared to my senior year of highschool, which feels like forever ago, despite them happening at the same time.
Einstein recognized the importance of spacetime but mere mortals have a great deal of difficulty putting it into a relatable sense. I won’t claim that I have any more insight than any other person, but I have had a recent epiphany. We talk of space in terms of three dimensions because that is the most convenient or practical way for us to describe the spacial relationship between things. Given X, Y and Z coordinates, or an origin, direction and distance, we can locate anything in space. But this system is a construct of the human mind, just as is maths and units of measurement. The universe is indifferent to the manner in which we humans measure and describe anything. I’m not saying that these are not invaluable to our understanding of things, they are, only that it trips us up when trying to understand the relationship between space and time as dimensions of spacetime.
I don’t know whether this is right or off the rails, but I think that there is only one dimension of space and one dimension of time and they can both be labeled ‘forward.’ We intuitively understand space as having dimensions and directions such as forwards, backwards, sideways, up, etc. But for any object in motion there really is only change of position and change of time. Only living organisms with sensory input can be third party observers of other objects. And since we are only able to directly observe things of a certain scale and only at certain relative speeds, we can’t see the equivalency. If we could see things clearly at the scale of particles and galaxies within a comfortable frame (like we can with a coffee cup and a car) and we could observe things travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light with the ease that we can observe a bird flying by, we would have a chance of possessing an intuitive understanding of spacetime.
As I said, I’m not an expert, and I imagine first year physics undergraduates might say that they get past this in the first few lectures, discarding it and jumping straight into the mathematics. It might only seem profound to me because of general ignorance on my part.
I very much agree with Kant (and later Schopenhauer) when he posites that time is a purely subjective phenomenon, meaning that it can not (by definition) exist outside of the subjective Phenomenal experience of the individual. The same goes for time aswell. The world as we perceive it exists only as a representation in the subject and time and space are part of the fabric making that subjective experience possible in the first place. Time and space as concepts presuppose subjectivity and objectivity, I.e Duality. In my mind space and time can exist only in the relation of a subject to its object. This becomes patently obvious when people “experience” states that for a “while” pull them out of the regular experience of duality and later speak of a “Union”, an experience of unified, purified etc. Being. Time and space are for “an instant” obsolete terms and all of the physical world becomes literally one. Space and time only matter in a dual frame of mind. so one might say that a purified subject (to speak in Schopenhauer’s term) cuts out space time and shows that they are merely modes of mind, not “objective” facts of the universe (Objective in the sense of mind-independent). And to this I should add that there can be no objective states of the visible universe “the world as representation” because it has being only in the experience of the subject. What lies outside of the visible, after Kant remains forever a mystery. Schopenhauer on the other hand argues that the “thing in itself” outside of space and time is the so called “will”. The primordial force behind everything.
If the laws of physics are independent of time direction, and it's theoretically possible to reverse all events by flipping velocity vectors of all the particles in the world, i wonder what consciousness would feel like in that situation. I think we would still feel like we're going forward in time, and we would have no idea that events are playing out in reverse. Because even though events E1, E2, E3 are playing out in reverse order E3, E2, E1, at the moment of E3 we would have memories of E1 and E2, at E2 we would only remember E1, so on until we get to the event of our birth and disappear. Imagine that!
I don't think it's the same kind of time reversal as the one Simon talks about, but still
A higher dimensional entity viewing all the spaces that an object occupies over time gets really interesting when you consider the creation and destruction of objects and how we define where an object begins and ends in space.
The demarcation of the edge of the cup is quite obvious through time as fired clay is rather inert to decay. You could chip a piece off the mug and trace that throughout time but could you also perceive the individual grains of clay, weathered from a rock millions of years ago, that went into forming the shape of the cup?
The position of tree seems rather consistent over many centuries but the leaves shed and oxygen produced are spread far and wide so much that they are no longer considered part of the tree. Another, interesting example is that sniffer dogs can trace the scent of a human for many miles as though we are crayons depositing dead skin along our path. The dog’s olfaction closer to the higher dimensional being that our visual perception.
Nice video
23:06 we don't experience our consciousness going forward, but rather all events passing going backwards, like old-school film in front of the projector light
It depends which metaphor of time your use: ego-moving or time-moving. Also, most cultures visualise themselves facing forwards with the future in front and the past behind, but a few cultures imagine themselves facing the past, blind to the future behind them, which seems a lot more intuitive when you think about it.
What your describing is called epigenetic memory, basically the inherent structure of your brain give rise to a form of precognition, more of an awareness of a probabilistic geometric eventuality. Subjectively it is one of the most fascinating areas of neuroscience, I believe the research now talks about it as geographical knowledge.
The idea you elucidated for me is liking to a person being born with a hard drive full of information but is missing the formatting that points the consciousness to a particular memory, as we go through life we experience and learn how to recall these memory's, or that some memories come more easily than others.. Brilliant work Simon!
If time was moving backwards, we would only notice it if we had a "forwards-oriented" understanding of time to begin with. You can't remark that things are happening backwards if you're in the same timestream as everything around you: you, your body, your neuronal activity, etc., would also be moving backwards. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around, but if time was moving backwards, I still think you'd experience it as going forwards.
Another interesting thing I think about sometimes is that people oftentimes distinguish, subconsciously, between the general timestream of the world and the "hypertime" their consciousness exists in. If you travel to the past in a time machine, that event still lies in your future, and once your journey is over, that particular one is now in your past, no matter how many times you go back to the same point in history. I think the linearity of time is something inherent to the universe, to one degree or another.
Intriguing video. I wonder how this would relate to linguistic relativity. Language does appear to have some bearing on perception (Living language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology, Ahearn, 2012). How we perceive is more subtle than how we think about what we perceive; but it is all bound together. Perception/conscious thought and thought/language and language/culture. Now I need to do some digging in the hope of finding some sources on the full range of those topics and how they relate to each other.
7:47, yes, In Hinduism there's this concept of "yug/yuga" (roughly translates to ages) which indexes the cycles of the universe you could say. I'm not Hindu so idk about them in detail but I think there are four yugs in total and we're living in the final and the worst one (they call it kaliyug). The previous three yugs were supposed to be the virtuous times. It sounds vaguely similar to how the Romans viewed their past haha
I remember hearing about a culture (I forget which) where the past was "in front" and the future was "behind". In other words, to them you are walking backwards into the future, because you can see the past but you can't see the future.
One culture that has this is the Maori of Aotearoa.
Crucially, in this context time is not linear, it’s a spiral. Simplified, it’s cyclical/seasonal with each cycle being slightly yet clearly different from the rest. And each cycle being directly connected to the one before and the one after it.
You might understand this as an elegant combination of cyclical and linear time.
And indeed, as we can only know the past, we walk backwards along this ever-expanding spiral. If we do so with open eyes we can avail ourselves of the immense wisdom woven into the previous cycles, stretching from our parents right back into the timeless void that everything arose from and unifying them. Rather than, say, forget history’s lessons in a generation or two, hashtag F4sclsm.
But I digress. When I first heard about this way of experiencing and understaning time in ANTH 101 it was like time finally made sense. Many turns of the spiral later it’s still the only one that I know of which makes sense to me.
(Polynesian cultures more widely have very similar conceptions of time, but I’m less familiar with those.)
Your feeling that consciousness is generated anew each moment is pretty much in line with Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy. It's a bit of a slog, but well-worth it once you grok some of his ideas. Very roughly, if I'm understanding it, time to Whitehead works as follows. It is not something physical, but rather a potential formed by the relationships of the entities involved. The past is what which affects us; the future is that which we will affect; the present consists of occasions that have no bearing whatsoever on one another. In other words, what we normally think of as the present would be the very recent past to Whitehead. (Your example of two things that to a Brit happened at the same "time" in different places with no bearing on each other would indeed be contemporaneous.)
Your person with the backwards consciousness is still kind of based on a block universe time in which we look at different areas in a different order. Whitehead's time, and perhaps other cultures' as well, don't accept a static block, and there are a million ways to have a non-block time, but they are no more or less plausible or interesting as block time. Thank you for the thought experiment and the video. I really enjoy your perspective on other cultures and your comparative philosophy, please keep it up!
I definitely have seen Daniel Everette talking about the picture thing with pirahã people. So you're not imagining that. If I come across it again, I'll try to remember to come back and say where
Very interesting!
For me there is a clear indicator that time moves in one direction and that is the existence of dissipative processes in nature.
You can shoot a snooker cue ball to several others, see in which directions those balls go and where they end, and in theory this can be reversed. If you'd be able to let those balls move in the exact opposite direction with exactly the same speed, they would meet just like before and the cue ball would end where it once was before.
But when I burn a piece of wood and it turns into ash, gas, light, heat etc. ... there is no way to reverse this process. It just can't be done. To me, such a dissipative process means that time travels (physically) in one direction.
There is a growing group of scientists convinced that we're living in a simulation. In discrete simulation systems as we know them, time is a snapshot of all the parameters describing the state of the simulated system at the moment. I'm still trying to get a sense of time being either discrete or continuous. We perceive it as continuous the way feel that everything in nature is continuous while there are in fact smallest particles and that makes everything in x, y and z axis discrete (no matter how small). I wonder if people in the far past were able to philosophize about time the way we are now... why not?
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
A lot of confusion arises because we attempt to apply inapplicable words to the discussion. Time does not move, and it certainly does not move forward and backward, but that language is what we've settled on as a culture as we try to conceptualize it. This results in such ideas as time travel, which again is a misapplication of language, and is really more wordplay than anything that actually can exist. It's like saying "what does green taste like?" Just because we can construct a grammatically correct sentence, doesn't mean that sentence has any meaning.
You might want to look at Philosophical Zombies - a similar but slightly more approachable thought experiment. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great section on this.
I have a red green colour blindness to a fairly strong degree. The only time I ever failed to distinguish between the two colours was in a red green colour blindness test.
Colour blindness is fairly evenly spread through the human population. Perhaps there is an advantage to have a few hunters with different colour structures
The question makes the assumption that causality as we know it is absolute and determinate.
Time as a dimension that you might view all at once like the Bayeaux tapestry. But then there is still a causal direction of travel
That needs some thought. Thank you.
But thank you so much for not dragging fake linguistics into it. I really appreciate that.
I feel like your idea that the experience of 'present' by a continually generated consciousness would only work if it was - as you say - "generated every billionth of a second". One would need a repeated instantaneous generation as opposed to a continuum of consciousness without anything to differentiate the present (otherwise one would experience their entire lifetime at once and not at multiple instances).
This kind of raises the question of the nature of conscious emergence (if it 𝘪𝘴 emerging), as well as that of the axis of spacetime and their divisibility. We are able to divide and segment time and space into metres and seconds, however both seem paradoxically infinite without division. For a conscious observer, what makes our experience of time occur at the 'rate' that it does, if time is infinitely divisible to any given resolution, why does it occur at this one? (ie: why does life not pass slower or faster?). I think to an extent it's limited by our brains ability to process information, which helps explain why we can feel like time passes faster or slower at times, as it is dependant on the brains processing speed we consciously observe.
While we can divide space and time, despite its infinite 'resolution'/'graduation', we cannot seem to do the same with consciousness, which posseses (in my eyes) a similarly infinite nature, though one different in quality to that of space and time. It is interesting how consciousness seems to interact with both these axis though, as not only is our experience of consciousness limited to a specific 'present' place in time, but also to a specific location in space - our experience of consciousness is body bound, just as its 'present' bound. So if consciousness exists within fixed points in both these places, at what level of resolution? It seems it must be infinitely fixed in both, and yet it also moves through them, place to place, time to time.
These seem like issues that trancend science, and cannot be solved or broken down by it, as the nature of these questions deals with immeasurability itself. I think in these lines of thought we really reach the end of what science can offer, and it benefits us more to analyse claims made about these things in philosophy or religions. This is not to say we should blindly go forth into ungrounded belief, but maybe that since for some reason things 𝘢𝘳𝘦 this way, we should ground our beliefs in our experience of reality that is given to us.
This is why time has been viewed almost universally as cyclical: all humans see time as "that which is the cause of change and is cyclical". The sun rises and sets and rises, winter turns to summer turns to winter, plants sprout then die then sprout. Reality manifests itself to us in these patterns so it makes sense why we would perceive them in this way. The greater question is 𝘸𝘩𝘺 reality occurs/maifests in 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 way, with these patterns. This is the lense from which we historically interpreted the world, and from which religion and ancient perception (as an intertwined understanding) came out of - why creation myths explain the world from the patterns we experience.
This was a lot of thoughts only generally focused on this topic, so I hope its not too convoluted.
If you are looking for a deeper understanding of how the structures and patters around us manifest, and why, and how they intertwine with historical religious understandings of reality, then I could not recommend the book "The Language of creation" by 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘦𝘶 𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘢𝘶 enough. It deals with this understanding of time as cyclical, and devles into how our modern understandings of 'time' and 'space' influence how we belive ancient cultures understood them through the lens of Genesis.
Thank you for your thoughts and video Simon, I have loved seeing how your channel has grown to query the nature of historical perception itself, and how it seems to have grew out of your own placing yourself in the perspective of older cultures through their language.
I wish you all the best in your journey through your experience of life - however it is shaped (linear, cyclical, or otherwise)! :)
Roper is my GOAT
If you're not a dualist and assume that consciousness is a product of physical processes (happening mostly in the brain), a consciousness going back in time is physically impossible. All living processes use a source of energy to produce work to sustain themselves and produce entropy as a necessary by-product. In other words, they feed on a low entropy initial state and over time they increase the entropy of the system to do useful work. Mental processes, including memorisation and information processing is a form of work, and therefore necessitates entropy production.
Why time goes forward and not backward is a big question in physics. In principe, going backward in time would not violate any physical laws. But the arrow of time we perceive is all about statistics: higher entropy states are more likely than lower entropy states, so the latter will evolve toward the former (and work - life, consciousness - can be extracted from those changes).
Now, the question remains: why has the universe started in a low entropy (extremely improbable) state? Nobody really knows, but given that life and consciousness would be impossible otherwise, a weak anthropic principle might be at play, i.e. there are many universes and only those that are capable of producing consciousness can be observed, or as the universe evolves over sufficiently long time, it will eventually find itself in a low entropy state from which conscious beings can emerge. If the latter were the case, you could imagine having a low entropy (LS) universe evolving toward high entropy universe (HS) in two opposite directions:
HS--->LS--->HS
The second arrow is what we see now. The question is whether the former is capable of sustaining life and consciousness going backward in time? In both cases the observers would perceive the passage of time the same way, no laws of physics would be broken.
Please note that my background in not in cosmology or philosophy but in chemistry, so please take the last paragraph with a pinch of salt.
another influence on cultural perception of time is the culture's practice of jurisprudence and justice within the culture. Western concept of time determines whether a person is guilty or innocent, the person turning off the tap after filling a glass of water in a different part of town cannot be the person who slammed the hood of the car at the exact same time.