Nicholas DiBiase
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Poster: Nicholas DiBiase @ Thu Jun 10, 2010 6:31 pm
I was talking last night with Chris Young from Integrum; the discussion turned to spirituality and Zen practice. Young has been doing Zen for a while and is a Buddhist. I became interested in Zen in college primarily because of Zen koans, which are short questions or dialogues whose apparently irrational answers are designed to make one conscious of one's own mind and the way our habits of perception influence, and indeed distort, our ability to experience truth. I mentioned to Chris that I was kind of thinking about experimenting with some other aspects of Zen even though I don't agree with much of what I thought Buddhism to assert.
I didn't have time to go into the real particulars of my viewpoint in our convo, and I think this is an interesting topic, so I'll give a brief rundown here.
Particular among the disagreements is that, whereas I thought Buddhism had as a tenet the assertion that time is cyclical and unending, I hold that time is static. That is to say, that change does not exist and that everything – 'past' and 'future' included – exists all at once. Since time is generally understood as a way to measure change, my assertion is essentially that time does not exist.
Furthermore, since I hold that all events and instants exist concurrently – right now – this also means that reality is deterministic. This may sound weird coming from me, a big physics buff and fan of quantum mechanics (which is a physics worldview stating that all things behave probabilistically). But in fact, just because each instant carries with it a specific set of probabilities (known to physics kids as “wave functions”), that doesn't mean that the outcomes of those probabilities are indeterminate. See, if instant “A” is the setup with probability wave function Q, and instant “B” is the observed outcome where the wave function of Q collapses and we see which of the probable results is realized, both instants “A” and “B” can exist at the same time without negating the probability function in “A.” Even from a traditional quantum-mechanical perspective, as long as we don't look at “B” before we look at “A,” nothing weird happens to Q. But what I'm saying is that there is no “before.” “A” and “B” simply are. This is a reality of predetermined probabilistic outcomes.
You can think of it like an animated movie. When we watch the movie “Aladdin” on a VCR, we perceive that we're seeing a sequence of events, a flow of images and words that is in constant motion, heading toward a conclusion. But the reality of “Aladdin” is that there is a big pile of animation cels sitting in a box over at Disney that includes every instant, from “start” to “finish,” that we perceive as we watch the movie. If we could go over to Disney's vault, we could open that box and pull out cels from any arbitrary point in the movie, without having to look at them in a sequence as we do when it's played on tape. That's because all of the cels, all the instants, exist already. We could even pick up the whole box and see them all at the very same time.
Clearly, there is some mechanism by which we perceive that change occurs, but whatever that is, it's like the VCR in my example above. It's some kind of intermediary between the objective reality (a big box of instants that are already configured and exist concurrently) and our perception (that there is a flow or series of changes which we experience in a sequence, suggesting time).
Boing! Sounds crazy, right? But in fact, it's strongly suggested by Einstein's ideas of relativity and especially by the Minkowski spacetime “loaf.” This is what first turned me on the fact that time is static. See, one can simplistically think about spacetime as a “loaf,” like a bread loaf. Each instant in “time,” each realized configuration of particles, is a slice of this loaf. Now, relativity says that an observer moving really fast relative to another observer can go look at a faraway slice and then 'return' to their original location. For the fast-moving observer, only X amount of time will have passed, but for the slow-moving observer, much more time – like maybe x^2 or thousands of years more, if the other guy was travelling at close to the speed of light – will have elapsed. Effectively, the fast-moving observer has travelled into the “future.” This shows that one's position in the spacetime loaf is arbitrary and that configurations existing in the “future” for some observers exist in the “present” for others. The clear implication is that time is static – the whole loaf exists at once, and any point within it can be accessed according to the speed of the observer. So, if we could somehow see the loaf from the outside (we're inside it now), we would see that it is whole and exists in its entirety right now. All the slices are already there, we just can't see them all at once when we're inside it.
[Note : under our current understanding of physics, the fast-travelling observer example applies only to movement into the 'future.' Nobody has been able to figure out how to access the “past,” even though math symmetry principles suggest that movement should be symmetrically possible in either direction. This problem is called the “arrow of time,” and is the major physics and philosophy issue that dogs the hypothesis that reality is completely static. Another problem is that it appears nothing can exceed the speed of light. If time does not exist, neither does speed.]
The English physicist Julian Barbour, whose book “The End of Time” is the most popular serious treatment of this subject from a scientific perspective, had the useful idea of conceptualizing each cel or 'instant' of reality as a “configuration space” – a mathematical concept that can be thought of as representing the positions of each particle in the universe at that 'instant.' This makes it a lot easier for me to think about – all these cels or instants are just lists of particle co-ordinates that exist concurrently on a big stack of cosmic flash cards.
So there it is. Time does not exist. Can you dig it?
End note : Young enlightened me that Buddhism does not really hold that time is cyclical. That concept is what they call 'expedient means' to help students grasp the true nature of reality – nirvana – which, says Young, is timeless, unlike the rock band of the same name.
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