A Sense of Progress in Time

a sense of progress in time:

"you might think, or rather like to think, that the world is stable, that history proves that progress is true, that time moves in a linear fashion, much like the timeline on a historical chart, but you might be wrong. there is that one idea of time which we entertain that time really is linear, the arrow of time and all that."

"but if that isn't the case, what is? the future seems different from the past. we learn from our mistakes, and so on."

"the essence of the theory that time is linear which infects everyone is that the future really is different from the past, in short that time is endless change different from the past, to infinity perhaps, or even that there is some catastrophic end to time, that everything must freeze or something like that, whereas that can't be the case. imagine a world like that, maybe i see red and blue today, but from tomorrow i will never see those two colours again, i will see completely different new colours, and the same again the next day, the past is irretrievable and life is violent change all the time."

"so what you're saying is because we experience the same things again, that we can take it for granted that some things are constants, that actually that the past repeats itself? we actually go back in time for a repeat?"

"exactly. which is a relief, don't you think? but it's not a repeat as a whole, i mean, imagine your own space in your own world, wherever that is, as mapped out with something like Cartesian coordinates, one axis goes out forwards from your body, one axis left and right, one up and down, sitting down to your computer, assuming you sit in exactly the same position and look at the same pixel of the taskbar on the computer screen in front of you at two different times, you may see the same shade of blue of the pixel for those exact coordinates, but of course everything else is different, your thoughts at the times, maybe your legs are crossed differently, etc. the point is we get localized repeats but as a whole, as in eternal return, perhaps never."

"your theory is that what seems like physical motion is an illusion, that actually everything is fixed in space and that each thing that makes up the stuff of reality can repeat?"

"yes, imagine if we were blind. motion wouldn't seem so real then, would it? so if time at the level of each discrete particle that makes up the stuff of reality, or least bit of matter, if you like, is merely a collection of changes in state, the question is whether this is finite or not. of course, if it were infinite, it would suggest that time would be continuous, would it not? however i posit that time is discrete. the question is how finite is the number of states that could exist?"

"so a simple discrete particle may only have a dozen or so states and it would look like it was leaping back and forth between them? there's the state at the start of time and it's like it's moving away from that and then coming back and then away again or something like that. but if the number of states is finite we'd end up repeating later sections of time as a whole surely, if not the start of time itself?"

"i guess so. though perhaps the time each state lasts could be variable. i think what gives progress meaning is the sense that things are getting better or rather even, that bad things have stopped. i came up with some of these ideas years ago, for example, in the 1990's but it is only recently that i've written about them, so it's like an idea popped into my head in say 1993 and then faded and came back in further thought again and again over the years but it's only now that this idea and others fully matured and manifested in this blog post."

"i used to believe a lot of things that now seem just wrong. so progress, in the positive sense, is that an idea becomes bigger and bigger until it manifests in a greater way. progress in the negative sense, it's that we stop believing in falsity. i can't stop thinking, are we more or less susceptible to false beliefs? it's so easy to be crazy. and it's frightening when we suspect we are. like relationships with people, what if we're completely mistaken about someone and their emotions or intentions?"

"it happens, but it's easy to make too much of it, i think. i am me and you are you, and we're all alone in a sense. connection brings a sense of immediacy that perhaps isn't that real. of course we have real neighbours in space and that doesn't change. it's all well and good to think about time, but space may be more important."

"like who your real neighbours are and what are they like? i mean, it's fine perhaps some of us live in a Matrix-like world that is Earth and maybe we "meet" real people in it, but what if the two people who do so are like 4 billion light years away from each other in reality? how does that work? it may seem like someone i meet is 4 feet away from me, but actually is light years away in real space and is just a hologram, in effect, to me. a real long distance relationship."

"you wonder how that works, is speech rendered accurately as to sound, or is there some guesswork in the system at either end?"

"and people are shocking. like you have in your own mind what people are like, but maybe that's just the people actually near you and people far away you meet are different, not what you're used to."

"the thing is, hoping to know everything about reality is like hoping to know all other people, it's not going to happen. the other thing against materialism, apart from the external world being an illusion, is that it makes everything seem non-personal. when i think of space i think of areas of personal spaces, beyond my neighbour is perhaps someone else who i only connect with through my neighbour."

"like what is the maximum degree of separation in reality? it could be over a thousand degrees! and what if two people a thousand degrees of separation apart got married in the matrix of Earth? wouldn't everyone in between know about it? or maybe the connection between them is secure?"

"but the signal, assume it's good, they might never know, perhaps. and maybe we're not aware of the communication traffic going on through us. but you never know, they might be a famous couple in the news."

"well it's always seemed like we weren't that alone here, maybe we live in a densely populated zone or we're somewhere in the middle of space. i imagine someone at the very end of space might think either that he or she were completely alone and living in solipsism or that there were only a few other people that existed."

"or that we are in a lonely area of space but that connection is great."

CLEARCHARGE