(State of CI: No, the blog's not broken. I disabled comments on this one. I'm also still on the river, unless the rattlesnake-catching was successful, in which case I'm probably at a hospital in Utah. Anyone who thinks it's awful that I'm joking about this can check out the most recent Bubblegum Psychology Today.)
The Trafalmadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains…it is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. ~Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse –Five
I’ve been thinking about the nature of Time ever since I was a little kid and started thinking about traveling through it to meet George Washington and things like that. I don’t know exactly what Time consists of, but I do have a few ideas.
I believe Time exists in a sort of space, on some plane not included our three dimensions. The Earthling vision of time is as a line on the conventional XY graph, a very straight line – beads on a string. In this vision, time travel is completely impossible since there is no “past” to return to and no “future” has been created. The line is a ray existing only up to the present, and the future is an infinite plane of points, of which only one will occur. This vision is what muddies up the concept of free will – if time is a straight line, then only one thing will ever occur, regardless of the infinite possibilities. You have complete control until the present, and once things occur, they become inevitable. Here time is like a zipper, one very tiny line moving at a steady pace, obliterating every other possible point on the Y axis as it passes the X point. The only way for time travel in this version to occur is if every passing moment repeats itself over and over, suspended on that line, hovering in fourth-dimension space like a broken record. Thus, travel into the past would be possible, but travel into the future would not, and the traveler would have no power to change anything, as the line had already been drawn. It would be like re-watching an old movie. I work with this version of time to live in the commonly shared reality to do things like go to school and relate to other people.
"Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene...there isn't any particular relationship between all the messages...when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is so beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we [Tralfamadorians] love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once."
There’s also the personally experienced Time – every moment individual to the awareness of its existence. Here every person has their own string of beads that doesn’t connect to any others, and the present is nowhere but where they themselves are. Every one is directly straight like Earthling Time, but may become tangled or crossed with another, and all go in the same direction suspended in the same space that is shared Time, where fate is housed. Here Time travel is tricky since one may only move along his/her string of beads, but it is intensely connected to everyone else’s, and probably only possible in the individualistic “unstuck in time” sense of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Then there’s my synaesthetic Time, existing of its own substance but within the space we also exist in, a rolling, moving, round and colored sequence suspended in our world and cycling through. Here “traveling through Time” makes as much sense as “traveling through toaster” or “traveling through speech”. It is comparable to (my) thought; substance immaterial existing in space material. It’s visual and concrete. This is how I see and understand clocks, calendars, schedules and sometimes other people when I get frustrated.
"If you know this," said Billy, "isn't there some way you can prevent it? Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?"
"He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way."
Other versions allow for time travel, future predictions, and parallel realities. Time may exist on a plane beyond the Z axis, meaning it runs alongside our reality but is not made up of the same stuff as our reality. This version allows for belief in a God who exists outside of Time, supremely eternal and wholly unaffected by Time. It allows for time travel by moving around in the space Time exists in, not by moving around in Time. Here, Time is a large plane like the Rocky Mountains with our reality running like a thread through it or along it, borrowing and diluting its substance to make a line of seconds and minutes and hours to organize things in our dimension. This allows for parallel realities, threads that branch off or double back. Because Time exists in space, it can assume shape, creating cause-effect webs, new realities, and moving over to make a space for God. Moments spread out and interact with other moments, and none are more valid or more present than any others. The moment we are on is one point on the big plane, with Time stretching out all around us. This Time can be stood back from, seen, understood, manipulated. This allows for free will and time travel because it is a less restricted version. Time travel is possible here but it would take some serious human invention, since it would involve moving outside of our linear reality. We can stand on top of the Rocky Mountains because we’re made of the same stuff they are, but to move in the space that Time exists in we would have to change our fundamental nature somehow – become water in order to truly move within the ocean. To imagine this, flip space and time around. You can stand in one place on the floor, but the rest of the floor still exists even when you're not standing on it, because it exists in space and time, like we do. If time existed in its own space, it would be like the floor, with every part of it existing with its own nature simultaneously.
This version of Time is so beyond our understanding and our human limitations, and I think it’s this break in perception that frustrates theology and cosmology and quantum physics and all that. We as people invented linear time so our watches would mean something, and then we applied this Earthling construct to things that aren’t limited like we are – God, or the universe. Trying to understand those things in our terms of Time is like trying to understand color in terms of sound. Applying our human perception of Time to things not bounded by it is like trying to find the factory where stars are made (I mean human Henry Ford assembly-line factories, don't say "nebula") or trying to figure out how God breathes. That’s why I think the whole Creation debate is meaningless – we’re trying to place God somewhere on that XY line when He’s the graph paper and the pencil too. It is this version of time that I see as analogous to the human mind – infinite, existing in space, characterized by its relationships and connections.
It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of these diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earth doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
Recommended Reading
Wake Forest University: The Nature of Time
Timeless Reality: The View From Nowhen
New York Times: Time in the Animal Mind
Vice Magazine: "Time" is exchanged/turned into art within a Mexican prison(Caution: photo of a guy in underwear; possibly not-nice sidebar links.)
