Pretty Sure I'm Dead

Chapter 7 -THE STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT ILLUSION EXPLANATION

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

-Albert Einstein

Anyone who has tried to keep babies on a schedule is aware that time is subjective. When the baby starts crying, it does not matter what the clock says, in the baby's reference frame it is feeding time. 

A more objective view of the subjectivity of time is provided by the theory of relativity. The classic example often used is where a space traveler departs earth at nearly the speed of light and after experiencing only a few days of travel returns to find that several years have passed on earth. For the traveler who accelerated to the new reference frame, time actually slowed down. He aged slower, his clocks moved slower, even the electrons spinning around the atoms in his reference frame moved slower. At least that is how it would appear to us on earth. To the traveler, everything traveling at his same speed would appear normal, but everything on earth would have appeared to have sped up. Only the speed of light would be measured the same in both reference frames. The theory of relativity predicts this and it has been verified by numerous observations and experiments.  (BTW, my hero James Clerk Maxwell formulated the equations that also proved this, forty years before Einstein. For forty years, everyone assumed there was a mistake in the equations. That is how wrong and for how long people can be wrong sometimes.)

This chapter is not about explaining the theory of relativity. I just wanted to make the point that even in the rigorous world of physics, time is not an absolute metric. Just know that time is completely distortable. It is actually rather goofy.  It can be expanded, contracted, stopped completely (as on the event horizons of black holes), and even reversed (as one theory holds for anti-matter). Explaining this requires Feynman diagrams and more physics than I care to attempt to explain here.

Again, this is not about physics. In fact, for my purposes, you don't even have to understand or accept the possibility of physical objects moving oddly through a distorted space time continuum. I'm just mentioning it to keep your mind open to possibilities. What I really want to suggest is more on the order of the concept of consciousness independent of a physical body moving freely in any direction through time. After all, our consciousness is the only thing we can be certain is real. Everything else could be just an illusion. So, the path our consciousness takes through time and space is what really matters.

The concept of a consciousness moving backwards through time while its body moved forwards in time is not a new concept. In the Once and Future King by T. H. White, the wizard Merlin is described as living backwards through time. I assume Merlin experienced each twenty-four-hour day in a normal forward progression and then at midnight his consciousness along with his current memories go back to forty-eight hours earlier. Thus, one day at a time his consciousness proceeds from his death to his birth. At birth he remembers his entire life. At his death he remembers nothing. Again, I'm mentioning all of these diverse time related concepts in the hope of preparing your mind, expanding it to encompass philosophical theories that require a very flexible view of time, space, and existence.

Rather than thinking of time as a flow, think of it just like any other spatial dimension. We live in a four-dimensional universe (at least four) where the x-axis is forward and back, the y-axis is to the left and right, the z-axis is up and down, and the time axis is past and future. Every event occupies a unique place in this four-dimensional space-time continuum. A life is the trajectory of a consciousness through this continuum. We experience time as a flow because the trajectory of our consciousness with respect to time is always in the same direction. We just never go backwards, or stand still in time the way we do along the spatial dimensions.

The flow of time really is an illusion created by our consciousness. Thinking this way, we realize that, the dinosaurs, Queen Victoria and Justin Bieber all exist simultaneously. They just exist in different places in the continuum. Just because Queen Victoria is at a different point in time from me, does not mean she has ceased to exist any more than Justin Bieber ceases to exist because he is at a different point in space. This is roughly the view of the philosophical theory called Eternalism. I guess they call it this because every event is eternal. It reminds me of the Christian religious hymn the Gloria Patri, "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen, amen."

The implication of Eternalism is that everything in the space time continuum is fixed and immutable. There is no changing of the past or future. Everything just is and free will is illusory. This raises the question, "Is freewill necessary or even desirable?" An ancient Hindu aphorism asks, "What would you change in the world? The Lord of creation made it all. He left nothing out."

I actually don't believe Eternalism has to preclude all free will. It just has to preclude the freedom to change the physical world. One still has the freedom to appreciate an experience however you want. You can hate it, love it, be fascinated or be bored by it. Your feelings just will not affect any physical outcomes. For a different physical outcome, you just have to flit over to a different universe of the multiverse. Even if everything is predetermined in a given universe, your consciousness might have the freewill to flit over to another universe where things proceeded differently from that point giving your consciousness the perception of having affected a change.

I am open to the possibility that our consciousnesses can flit through time as well as across universes. Think of it as a free will multiverse eternalism. I'm not sure how much of our memories we take with us on our flits across time and alternate realities. Perhaps, we are all the same consciousness, just at different places in the continuum and carrying different memories.   In which case, we really should consider being nicer to the other manifestations of ourselves.

I suspect the forces that try to keep everything consistent somehow limit our memories of the future, alternate lives, and alternative universes. This keeps us from realizing we are simultaneously being born and dying, writing and reading on Wattpad, philosophizing about life and death, and already dead. So, maybe we all are already dead?  Pretty sure I am.  QED. 

Some would argue that without our memories, it is not really us that are flitting about. That we are no more than our memories. But like Merlin, I am remembering less and less as I get older and I'm not sure this is a bad thing. I think some memories are best forgotten. I'm not sure because I don't remember. I think it is best to live in the moment to appreciate and feel what is immediate and let everything else die. I have forgotten so much, lost so many memories, I must have already died several times. QED?  

These same people might also argue that our feelings of hate, love, fascination and boredom are no more than just artificial products of our memories and the chemical reactions in our current physical brain. In which case, I would point out that from the perspective of my conscious awareness, they are far more real than the physical world that may only exist because I perceive it. As I said before, our consciousness is the only thing of which we can be certain. Everything else may be an illusion, may not exist at all. Perhaps my consciousness is the only thing that is not dead. Did my proof just go awry?

Note added 9 March 2022 when I originally proposed this idea of a single universal consciousness enabling a freewill multiverse Eternalism, it was over two years ago, and I intended it more as a humorous possibility. Since then, the idea kept popping up in my mind. I realized this philosophy certainly makes it easier to do unto others as you want to be treated and as I get older, I can certainly better understand the actions of others as if they were my own actions. Perhaps the idea that others are just myself simply at a different point in the spacetime continuum and multiverse is not so crazy? And, just to keep this concept from being too lonely, let us include the possibility of more than one shared consciousness. Perhaps the ultimate proof of all this is the irony that I originally thought of it as a joke. Just as nature seeks a state of maximum entropy, we should all realize it also seeks a state of maximum irony. QED.