By now you’ve heard about the mass murder in Colorado.
Among those killed was a sports writer by the name of Jessica Redfield, who last night tweeted:
Of course we’re seeing Dark Knight. Redheaded Texan spitfire, people should never argue with me.Maybe I should get in on those NHL talks…
Ms. Redfield published a blog post on June 5th. Read it here.
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With tragedy comes theology, and Ms. Redfield’s post seems to focus on the “feeling” she had that purportedly saved her life in Toronto. Where was that salutary feeling during the “Dark Knight” screening? I’m sorry that Ms. Redfield is dead, but I don’t trust people’s testimony when they claim to have had a spooky “feeling” — especially if they’re implying that God or some entity was warning them away from danger. Teasing out the theological implications of why some people might be gifted with such a feeling while others are left clueless is a tangled, bootless task. It’s enough to say that life sometimes sucks and random shit happens.
Oh, I quite agree, Kevin, though Ms. Redfield’s post isn’t what I’d call theological. I just thought it rather chilling that her last blog-post was about narrowly missing being killed in a mass shooting.
Of all the extrasensory modalities, precognition has always seemed to me the most plausible, given the mysterious nature of the “passage” of time — which is arguably only a feature of consciousness.
I don’t know… I sense that Ms. Redfield was referring to something providential. Note the religious language (in italics):
“But I can’t help but be thankful for whatever caused me to make the choices that I made that day. My mind keeps replaying what I saw over in my head. I hope the victims make a full recovery. I wish I could shake this odd feeling from my chest. The feeling that’s reminding me how blessed I am. The same feeling that made me leave the Eaton Center. The feeling that may have potentially saved my life.”
That’s a pretty big “whatever.”
I tend to side with Stephen Hawking re: the passage of time occurring along a “thermodynamic arrow” that points only one way: entropyward. Does information flow “back” from the future to where we are in the present? I have my doubts. I have my doubts about most extrasensory phenomena.
If anything, I imagine a “bad feeling” might simply involve an intuitive extrapolation of events based on a subconscious collation and analysis of present sense-data. A brute example of this might be the gut-wrenching feeling right before you wreck your car: you know what’s about to happen. A more subtle “bad feeling” about an impending bank robbery or mass shooting might arise from an innominate perception of the ambient “signs” around the observer: heightened general tension, the feeling that someone or something is “out of place,” etc. Far from being information flowing backward through time, this intuition is rooted in present empiricism.
Your pardon if my phrasing — “[information] flowing backward through time” — doesn’t sound quite like what you’re talking about re: the passage of time being a feature of consciousness, but I’m trying to say that I think time’s flow is an objective thermodynamic feature of the cosmos and not a subjective construct. True: even by scientific reckoning, time flows in funny ways at the quark level and around black holes, but I don’t think time’s behavior is all that unruly at the anthropic level. It flows forward at a rate of one second per second, and nothing runs against that stream.
You guys may be interested in:
“From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time” by Sean Carroll
I recommend it highly.
Thanks, Henry. I’ll get hold of a copy. I think that the subjective passage of time is one of the two deepest mysteries — the other being the nature of consciousness, which I think is really just another aspect of the same puzzle. I, in turn, very highly recommend The End Of Time, by the physicist Julian Barbour.
Kevin, as you know — we’ve talked about this for years — when it comes to metaphysics, you’ll have a hard time finding a more hard-core materialist than me. I think that consciousness is something that arises when you get the right types of matter organized in the right way.
Nevertheless, I don’t think time “flows”. The thermodynamic arrow seems to me intrinsically no different from a block of glass that happens to be red at one end and blue at the other; in physical terms spacetime is such a “block” as well. That there is a thermodynamic “gradient” that is visible along one dimension tells us nothing, it seems to me, about our subjective perception of time “flowing”.
Indeed, Julian Barbour argues that not only does time not “flow”; in his view it doesn’t even exist. He imagines a vast configuration space, in which every possible arrangement of all the matter in the world exists timelessly. Some of these configurations will necessarily include arrangements of matter that can be concatenated with other states to make what we would see as a “timeline”; i.e. some possible states of your brain are such that they contain “memories” that can be mapped onto other locations in the configuration space. In this way the “flow” of time is reduced to a specific path that one can mark off in this space.
Barbour says nothing about consciousness — but one can see that in this model, among the infinite number of possible states of the Universe, there will be a vanishingly small subset that can be connected into a continuous, coherent Life Of Kevin, in which each configuration strung along this path has “memories” of the “previous” state.
It’s kind of like Borges’s Library of Babel.
So what “picks out” a particular path through this Vast state space? I can’t say. But because every possible state exists, some of those states will contain a Kevin with “presentiments” of other states that can coherently be seen as “future” states. None of this involves information moving backward in time, though, because there’s no such thing as time.
All that said though — who knows? Certainly not me. It’s all quite beyond my grasp, really. But I do feel that consciousness and the apparent flow of time are deeply connected, somehow, and that it’s likely that to understand one is to understand the other.
Barbour’s work sounds interesting, and almost seems to map neatly onto the metaphysics of Hua Yen Buddhism, in which all phenomena are completely and simultaneously interpenetrating (cf. the Jewel Net of Indra), such that a notion like time is a misperception of actual reality, or at least a label for something that doesn’t really exist.*
I squirm when I encounter any metaphysics that describes all possible states as having been realized, in large part because of what this implies about human freedom: if all possibilities are actual, then there are no possibilities, and hence no freedom. See my discussion of Philip Pullman, reposted on my tutoring blog here (I believe you had replied to the original post on Kevin’s Walk).
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*This was, in fact, a sticking point between Zennist Abe Masao and process theologian John Cobb in their attempt at Buddhist-Christian dialogue: Cobb thought that the intercausality of process theology was a good match for Buddhist intercausality, but Abe felt that, because process thinking requires a temporal component (prehensions, concrescence, etc.), it fails to correspond to the Zen conception of reality, in which past, present, and future states are all wrapped up in an instantaneous “now.” (This is only one Buddhist concept of space-time, of course; other strains of Buddhism are perfectly comfortable with process ontology.)
Well, more than that: In Barbour’s model, nothing ever even happens.
That’s very Hua Yen, too: all events are illusory. The cosmos is simply one big brute fact having the character of “already-is.” There are hints of this metaphysics in the Heart Sutra as well: “no arising, no ceasing; no old age and death, no end to old age and death; no attainment, no non-attainment…” — etc. (“Emptiness” is used to describe this state of affairs.)