Four Paradigms of Time

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” – Saint Augustine

“In the underlying microscopic world you can run forward and backward in time just as easily one way as the other…If you want to know why notions of cause and effect work in the macroscopic world even though they’re absent in the microscopic world, no one completely understands that.” – Sean Carroll

We tend to become more conservative as we age, resisting new ideas that may be necessary for societies to flourish in a changing world. Numerous techniques and substances exist that can encourage neuroplasticity and creativity. Many of these methods – yoga, meditation, cold exposure etc. – seem to work by moving our attention out of conceptual thought so that our awareness bypasses our frontal lobes to affect deeper brain structures associated with regulating stress, proprioreception, and even our sense of self.

Obviously, though, how we think also influences open-mindedness. Using thought to question previously unquestioned assumptions about the nature of reality is a powerful way to emphasize the wonderful strangeness of the world and the importance of not living dogmatically. For this reason I would like to present a few mutually compatible ways of thinking about time. We have conceptualized time as an inexorable sequence of events, running from a defined past into a perpetual and indeterminate future, but it can be conceptualized in a number of other ways.

Paradigm I: Time in Western Society

We think of time as a series of contained events that cause future events to occur. This view ascribes a spatial character to time. We think “backwards” and “forwards” in time, we think of different time “scales”, and we imagine that the past or future could be different, just as objects can be re-arranged spatially within the three-dimensional present moment. This paradigm is encapsulated in the analogy of time as lines of dominoes falling.

Paradigm II: Accumulation

This paradigm views the present not as some event caused by the past, but as inseparable from the past, a kind of an accumulation of history. The past is contained in the present, just as the atoms that were once brewed in stars are now contained within our surroundings. Information content accumulated throughout the past now exists in the present. This paradigm can be analogized through imagining a painting whereby brush strokes laid down are wholly inseparable from the painting as a whole.

Paradigm III: Alan Watt’s Wake

We see the past as causing the present, but the present can also be seen as causing the past. The past would not exist were it not for the present that preceded its becoming the past. For instance, I am writing the words on this page in the present moment, which has caused them to exist in the past.

Paradigm IV: Pull of the Future

Drop a coin. Absent counteracting forces, it can’t help but fall, every time. It’s as if a future energy state is pulling on the present. Our capability to make predictive models about events that haven’t yet happened suggests some level of inevitability to the future. And our many imperfect predictions are a sign of our ignorance about how the world behaves, rather than an indication that multiple futures could exist. Only one future can exist – even though multiple ways of thinking about the future exist – because the future becomes the present, which becomes the past, and neither the past nor the present can be different than they are in any given moment. It is easier to view the past as causing the present (as opposed to the future causing the present) because of our perspective. Our experience grants us knowledge to integrate into our models of causation, and this empirical knowledge can only come from the past (well, really inductions about the past made in the present). But the future also influences the present, as physicists have long claimed and recently begun to demonstrate.

The principle of least action applies to physical descriptions of our world on large and small scales, and describes a universe wherein natural systems follow spatial paths that maximize or minimize the difference between kinetic and potential energy. Nature invariably behaves according to paths of least action, and this principle can be represented by a simple analogy. Imagine that a ball sits atop a mountain. A rutted path has been carved into this mountain to allow the ball to roll with less resistance, and the ball indeed rolls down this path when pushed. Now, not only is the ball’s behaviour determined by the digging of the rut in the past, but it is caused to roll in a manner determined by the path that lays in its future. The past influences the present just as the future influences the present. Although we are privy to the application of the principle of least action only in limited circumstances, it appears to be a fundamental aspect of reality. Imagine that little ‘ruts’ run between the present and the future in an immeasurable number of ways, along which the present flows. These ruts apply to human actions; past/present behaviour strengthens evoked neural pathways, along which future electrical impulses more easily travel.

We are hardwired to think about time and notions of cause and effect in a certain manner not because such thinking is conducive to truth, but because of how it related to survival. Perhaps our thoughts and feelings about time are rooted in selection pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had to make a variety of predictions about the future based on empirical knowledge discerned from the present, suggestive of behaviour of prey in the past. And although many such selection pressures now exist in our past, their influence is felt in the present.