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Just what is "time"? Spengler declared that no one should be allowed to ask. The physicist Richard Feynman (1988) answered, "Don't even ask me. It's just too hard to think about." Empirically as much as in theory, the laboratory is powerless to reveal the flow of time, since no instrument exists that can register its passage. But why do we have such a strong sense that time does pass, ineluctably and in one particular direction, if it really doesn't? Why does this "illusion" have such a hold over us? We might just as well ask why alienation has such a hold over us. The passage of time is intimately familiar, the concept of time mockingly elusive; why should this appear bizarre, in a world whose survival depends on the mystification of its most basic categories?
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Time in Science
I'm not a scientist but I do know that all things begin and end in eternity. —The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis
Science, for our purposes, does not comment on time and estrangement with anywhere near the directness of, say, psychology. But science can be re-construed to shed light on the topic at hand, because of the many parallels between scientific theory and human affairs.
"Time," decided N.A. Kozyrev (1971), "is the most important and the most mysterious phenomenon of Nature. Its notion is beyond the grasp of imagination." Some scientists, in fact, have felt (e.g. Dingle 1966) that "all the real problems associated with the notion of time are independent of physics." Science, and physics in particular, may indeed not have the last word; it is another source of commentary, however, though itself alienated and generally indirect.
Is "physical time" the same as the time of which we are conscious; if not, how does it differ? In physics, time seems to be an undefined basic dimension, as much a taken-for-granted given as it is outside the realm of science. This is one way to remind ourselves that, as with every other kind of thinking, scientific ideas are meaningless outside their cultural context. They are symptoms of and symbol for the ways of living that give rise to them. According to Nietzsche, all writing is inherently metaphorical, even though science is rarely looked at this way. Science has developed by drawing an increasingly sharp separation between inner and outer worlds, between dream and "reality". This has been accomplished by the mathematization of nature, which has largely meant that the scientist proceeds by a method that debars him or her from the larger context, including the origins and significance of his/her projects. Nonetheless, as H.P. Robinson (1964) stated, "the cosmologies which humanity has set up at various times and in various localities inevitably reflect the physical and intellectual environment, including above all the interests and culture of each society."
Subjective time, as P.C.W. Davies pointed out (1981), "possesses apparent qualities that are absent from the 'outside' world and which are fundamental to our conception of reality"—principally the "passing" of time. Our sense of separation from the world owes largely to this discrepancy. We exist in time (and alienation), but time is not found in the physical world. The time variable, though useful to science, is a theoretical construct. "The laws of science," Stephen Hawking (1988) explained, "do not distinguish between past and future." Einstein had gone further than this some thirty years earlier; in one of his last letters, he wrote that "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion." But science partakes of society in other ways concerning time, and very deeply. The more "rational" it becomes, the more variations in time are suppressed. Theoretical physics geometrizes time by conceiving it as a straight line, for example. Science does not stand apart form the cultural history of time.
As implied above, however, physics does not contain the idea of a present instant of time that passes (Park 1972). Furthermore, the fundamental laws are not only completely reversible as to the "arrow of time"—as Hawking noted—but "irreversible phenomena appear as the result of the particular nature of our human cognition," according to Watanabe (1953). Once again we find human experience playing a decisive role, even in this most "objective" realm. Zee (1992) put it this way: "Time is that one concept in physics we can't talk about without dragging in, at some level, consciousness."
Even in seemingly straightforward areas ambiguities exist where time is concerned. While the complexity of the most complex species may increase, for example, not all species become more complex, prompting J.M. Smith (1972) to conclude that it is "difficult to say whether evolution as a whole has a direction."
In terms of the cosmos, it is argued, "time's arrow" is automatically indicated by the fact that the galaxies are receding away from each other. But there seems to be virtual unanimity that as far as the basics of physics are concerned, the "flow" of time is irrelevant and makes no sense; fundamental physical laws are completely neutral with regard to the direction of time (Mehlberg 1961, 1971, Landsberg 1982, Squires 1986, Watanabe 1953, 1956, Swinburne 1986, Morris 1984, Mallove 1987, D'Espagnant 1989, etc.). Modern physics even provides scenarios in which time ceases to exist and, in reverse, comes into existence. So why is our world asymmetric in time? Why can't it go backward as well as forward? This is a paradox, inasmuch as the individual molecular dynamics are all reversible. The main point, to which I will return later, is that time's arrow reveals itself as complexity develops, in striking parallel with the social world.
The flow of time manifests itself in the context of future and past, and they in turn depend on a referent known as the now. With Einstein and relativity, it is clear that there is no universal present: we cannot say it is "now" throughout the universe. There is no fixed interval at all that is independent of the system to which it refers, just as alienation is dependent on its context.
Time is thus robbed of the autonomy and objectivity it enjoyed in the Newtonian world. It is definitely more individually delineated, in Einstein's revelations, than the absolute and universal monarch it had been. Time is relative to specific conditions and varies according to such factors as speed and gravitation. But if time has become more "decentralized", it has also colonized subjectivity more than ever before. As time and alienation have become the rule throughout the world, there is little solace in knowing that they are dependent on varying circumstances. The relief comes in acting on this understanding; it is the invariance of alienation that causes the Newtonian model of independently flowing time to hold sway within us, long after its theoretical foundations were eliminated by relativity.
Quantum theory, dealing with the smallest parts of the universe, is known as the fundamental theory of matter. The core of quantum theory follows other fundamental physical theories, like relativity, in making no distinction in the direction of time (Coveny and Highfield 1990). A basic premise is indeterminism, in which the movement of particles at this level is a matter of probabilities. Along with such elements as positrons, which can be regarded as electrons moving backward in time, and tachyons, faster-than-light particles that generate effects and contexts reversing the temporal order (Gribbin 1979, Lindley 1993), quantum physics has raised fundamental questions about time and causality. In the quantum microworld common acausal relationships have been discovered that transcend time and put into question the very notion of the ordering of events in time. There can be "connections and correlations between very distant events in the absence of any intermediary force or signal" which occur instantaneously (Zohar 1982, Aspect 1982). The eminent American physicist John Wheeler has called attention (1977, 1980, 1986) to phenomena in which action taken now affects the course of events that have already happened.
Gleick (1992) summed up the situation as follows: "With simultaneity gone, sequentiality was foundering, causality was under pressure, and scientists generally felt themselves free to consider temporal possibilities that would have seemed far-fetched a generation before." At least one approach in quantum physics has attempted to remove the notion of time altogether (J.G. Taylor 1972); D. Park (1972), for instance, said, "I prefer the atemporal representation to the temporal one."
The bewildering situation in science finds its match in the extremity of the social world. Alienation, like time, produces ever greater oddities and pressures: the most fundamental questions finally, almost necessarily, emerge in both cases.
St. Augustine's fifth century complaint was that he didn't understand what the measurement of time really consisted of. Einstein, admitting the inadequacy of his comment, often defined time as "what a clock measures." Quantum physics, for its part, posits the inseparability of measurer and what is measured. Via a process physicists don't claim to understand fully, the act of observation or measurement not only reveals a particle's condition but actually determines it (Pagels 1983). This has prompted Wheeler (1984) to ask, "Is everything—including time—built from nothingness by acts of observer-participancy?" Again a striking parallel, for alienation, at every level and from its origin, requires exactly such participation, virtually as a matter of definition.
Time's arrow—irrevocable, one-direction-only time—is the monster that has proven itself more terrifying than any physical projectile. Directionless time is not time at all, and Cambel (1993) identifies time directionality as "a primary characteristic of complex systems." The time-reversible behavior of atomic particles is "generally commuted into behavior of the system that is irreversible," concluded Schlegel (1961). If not rooted in the micro world, where does time come from? Where does our time-bound world come from? It is here that we encounter a provocative analogy. The small scale world described by physics, with its mysterious change into the macro world of complex systems, is analogous to the "primitive" social world and the origins of division of labor, leading to complex, class-divided society with its apparently irreversible "progress".
A generally held tenet of physical theory is that the arrow of time is dependent on the Second Law of Thermodynamics (e.g. Reichenbach 1956), which asserts that all systems tend toward ever greater disorder or entropy. The past is thus more orderly than the future. Some proponents of the Second Law (e.g. Boltzmann 1866) have found in entropic increase the very meaning of the past-future distinction.
This general principle of irreversibility was developed in the middle decades of the 19th century, beginning with Carnot in 1824, when industrial capitalism itself reached its apparent non-reversible point. If evolution was the century's optimistic application of irreversible time, the Second Law of Thermodynamics was its pessimistic one. In its original terms, it pictured a universe as an enormous heat engine running down, where work became increasingly subject to inefficiency and disorder. But nature, as Toda (1978) noticed, is not an engine, does not work, and is not concerned with "order" or "disorder". The cultural aspect of this theory—namely, capital's fear for its future—is hard to miss.
One hundred and fifty years later, theoretical physicists realize that the Second Law and its supposed explanation of the arrow of time cannot be considered a solved problem (N=82eman 1982). Many supporters of reversible time in nature consider the Second Law too superficial, a secondary law not a primary one (e.g. Haken 1988, Penrose 1989). Others (e.g. Sklar 1985) find the very concept of entropy ill-defined and problematic, and, related to the charge of superficiality, it is argued that the phenomena described by the Second Law can be ascribed to particular initial conditions and do not represent the workings of a general principle (Davies 1981, Barrow 1991). Furthermore, not every pair of events that bear the "afterward" relation the one to the other bear an entropic difference. The science of complexity (with a wider scope than chaos theory) has discovered that not all systems tend toward disorder (Lewin 1992), also contrary to the Second Law. Moreover, isolated systems, in which no exchanges with the environment are allowed, display the Second Law's irreversible trend; even the universe may not be such a closed system. Sklar (1974) points out that we don't know whether the total entropy of the universe is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stationary.
Despite such aporias and objections, a movement toward an "irreversible physics" based on the Second Law is underway, with quite interesting implications. 1977 Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine seems to be the most tireless and public advocate of the view that there is an innate unidirectional time at all levels of existence. Whereas the fundamentals of every major scientific theory, as noted, are neutral with respect to time, Prigogine gives time a primary emphasis in the universe. Irreversibility is for him and his like-minded fellow believers an over-arching primal axiom. In supposedly nonpartisan science, the question of time has clearly become a political matter.
Prigogine (1985), in a symposium sponsored by Honda and promoting such projects as Artificial Intelligence: "Questions such as the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or the origin of matter, can no longer be discussed without recourse to irreversibility." It is no coincidence that non-scientist Alvin Toffler, America's leading cheerleader for a high-tech world, provided an enthusiastic forward for one of the basic texts of the pro-time campaign, Prigogine and Stenger's Order Out of Chaos (1984). Prigogine disciple Ervin Laszlo, in a bid to legitimate and extend the dogma of universally irreversible time, asks whether the laws of nature are applicable to the human world. He soon answers, in effect, his own disingenuous question (1985): "The general irreversibility of technological innovation overrides the indeterminacy of individual points of bifurcation and drives the processes of history in the observed direction from primitive tribes to modern techno-industrial states." How "scientific"! This transposition from the "laws of nature" to the social world could hardly be improved on as a description of time, division of labor, and the mega-machine crushing the autonomy or "reversibility" of human decision. Leggett (1987) expressed this perfectly: "So it would seem that the arrow of time which appears in the apparently impersonal subject of thermodynamics is intimately related to what we, as human agents, can or cannot do."
It is deliverance from "chaos" which Prigogine and others promise the ruling system, using the model of irreversible time. Capital has always reigned in fear of entropy or disorder. Resistance, especially resistance to work, is the real entropy, which time, history, and progress constantly seek to banish. Prigogine and Stenger (1984) wrote: "Irreversibility is either true on all levels or none." All or nothing, always the ultimate stakes of the game.
Since civilization subjugated humanity we have had to live with the melancholy idea that our highest aspirations are perhaps impossible in a world of steadily mounting time. The more that pleasure and understanding are deferred, moved out of reach—and this is the essence of civilization—the more palpable is the dimension of time. Nostalgia for the past, fascination with the idea of time travel, and the heated quest for increased longevity are some of the symptoms of time sickness, and there seems to be no ready cure. "What does not elapse in time is the lapse of time itself," as Merleau-Ponty (1945) realized.
In addition to the general antipathy at large, however, it is possible to point out some recent specifics of opposition. The Society for the Retardation of Time was established in 1990 and has a few hundred members in four European countries. Less whimsical than it may sound, its members are committed to reversing the contemporary acceleration of time in everyday life, toward the aim of being allowed to live more satisfying lives. Michael Theunissen's Negative Theology of Time appeared in 1991, aimed explicitly at what it sees as the ultimate human enemy. This work has engendered a very lively debate in philosophical circles (Penta 1993), due to its demand for a negative reconsideration of time.
"Time is the one single movement appropriate to itself in all its parts," wrote Merleau-Ponty (1962). Here we see the fullness of alienation in the separated world of capital. Time is thought of by us before its parts; it thus reveals the totality. The crisis of time is the crisis of the whole. Its triumph, apparently well established, was in fact never complete as long as anyone could question the first premises of its being.
Above Lake Silviplana, Nietzsche found the inspiration for Thus Spake Zarathustra. "Six thousand feet above men and time...," he wrote in his journal. But time cannot be transcended by means of a lofty contempt for humanity, because overcoming the alienation that it generates is not a solitary project. In this sense I prefer Rexroth's (1968) formulation: "the only Absolute is the Community of Love with which Time ends."
Can we put an end to time? Its movement can be seen as the master and measure of a social existence that has become increasingly empty and technicized. Averse to all that is spontaneous and immediate, time more and more clearly reveals its bond with alienation. The scope of our project of renewal must include the entire length of this joint domination. Divided life will be replaced by the possibility of living completely and wholly—timelessly—only when we erase the primary causes of that division.
- While we're lost in our heads.. Don't know. But I'm lazy too, probably because I just don't want to do the things I'm meant to be doing, or something, but I completely get you...
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