"I'll stop now, I'm out of time" --- too esoteric for publication

"I'll stop now, I'm out of time" is too prosaic to be a quotable statement, much less a meaningful title for an essay.  However, when I repeated it to the man who just said it, Oliver Pooley Ph.D,  at a colloquium of the philosophy department of UCSD, he laughed with me, since I was alluding to his just completed presentation which was an expansion of these words from his Oxford University web site. 

I work in the philosophy of physics and in metaphysics. Much of my research focuses on the nature of space, time and spacetime. I'm interested in the implications of physics for traditional philosophical questions, such as whether time really passes. (It doesn't.) I'm also interested in the ways in which work in general metaphysics can (and should) inform the interpretation of physics.

I dispute his assertion that time does not pass, in the sense that it is one of the thousands of allusions, metaphors, assertions in every culture and language of a reality that has been acknowledged by thinkers from "time immemorial."  My objection is not that work in general metaphysics should inform theoretical physics, but something quite different.  It is the way that such work impacts the deepest underpinnings of our culture, and can distort critical thinking about a most important characteristic of humanity.

Time, although grammatically a noun, is not an object, or even a process, but simply a word that is so intuitive that a child can and must comprehend it to survive.  This intuitive understanding of time is the bedrock of ancient concepts such as  "an ounce of prevention (earlier time) is worth a pound of cure." or more recently  "we can't wait until we learn about Iraq's WMD from a mushroom cloud."  Yes, both preventive medicine and preemptive war are based on a concept of time passing,  steps that must be taken in anticipation of a future that will be determined by such actions.

We desperately need a new idiom for evaluating both of these actions; the first to define our individual ontological essence, whether it shall be focusing on defeating our continuously declining mortal coil;  the second being whether our society shall be organized to pre-empt every organized assault, reflected in our ever expanding "war on terror."  This is about "time" what should be done now to affect future events, real pressing issues that requires the precision and scope of understanding that has been the province of philosophy from its earliest times in every incarnation.

Perhaps Dr. Pooley is unaware or ignoring how his work, and that of others, is presented to the public, as I have explored in my essay, Notes on Pop Cosmology and it's consequences.  In it I describe the clear message  popular Nova program sponsored by an agency of the U.S. government that the future already exists based on principles only understood by theoretical physicists-- even though the star, Brian Greene Ph.D,  presents it in the subjunctive, "could it be..." so he can claim  he's really not endorsing it.

Yet, for those who are shaky about reality, or want to have confirmation of their particular brand of mystic Predestination, or "it's all in Gods hand." it seems to give this viewpoint the highest level of scientific endorsement.  This connection between This link is the Nova Segment, The Illusion of Time, that posits that this belief that the future already exists is beyond the capacity of non physicist to understand. 

For those who choose to believe that they can impact the world even minutely, meaning changing the future,  perhaps as a school teacher, or by writing blogs, or by carefully explaining things to their own children, this type of intellectual distortion is ultimately demoralizing.  I suggest that for some, such perversions of science leads to a rejection of the entire enterprise- evolution, relativity and all. Careless exaggeration of theoretical physics has only one defense, another metaphysical belief that rejects all of science.  The religious connection that I make here is shown in the word "providence" with this interesting Wikipedia provided etymology.    "The word comes from Latin providentia "foresight, prudence", from pro- "ahead" + videre "to see". The current meaning of the word derives from the sense "knowledge of the future" or omniscience, which Christians believe is an attribute of God."  According to Professor Greene, it is a reality, amenable to eventually not being the exclusive province of God, but understood by those of his profession also.

I happen to know one such person where something like this happened because of an exaggeration of another scientific finding that was depicted as explaining how life began. He was a student at UCSD in the 1970s in the class of  Stanley Miller, who had demonstrated that the precursor amino acids of DNA could be created out of early earth atmosphere.  The student, Tom Cantor, asked him whether this truly did describe how life began.  When he was told that it did not, for this and other reasons he went down a different path, that was an embrace of creationism, his current endeavors described here.   

The tradition of Philosophy can be applied to the challenges of our era by asserting the ancient imperative to understand the world in a way that transcends the zeitgeist.  When this is too easy, when there is no one criticizing the activities of those who claim to be working in the tradition of philosophy, they are doing something seriously wrong.  They are working within the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and as such are making no real contribution or there would be outcries of condemnation for their disruption of commonly held values.

The very week that I went to this colloquium the philosophy department sponsored a discussion on ethics and values in education.  It openly challenged some of the truisms of our day, looking at the reality that there are those who will not become functionally educated for reasons that are beyond society's control.  It raised the suggestion that this period of required schooling could improve their lives nevertheless, which in other academic settings could never even be brought up.  Our zeitgeist claims that we can have a system where, "No child is left behind" ignoring harsh reality for political mythology.

This education conference was not distorting reality, but facing it.  Inherent to this discussion is the concept of time passing during one's years of education, a period that can never be recovered for the individual but is a future subject to being shaped by those who care enough to make the effort-and take the risk of shattering assumptions.  This is in sharp contrast to Dr. Pooley's colloquium where the one senior professor who suggested that this endeavor to reconcile anthropocentric time (that which I am defending) with rare physical phenomenon is misplaced-- was simply ignored.

Incomprehensibility does not equate to profundity, only the appearance of it to some.  The young graduate students who were pondering the paradoxes of time not passing for photons traveling across the galaxy at the speed of light, are not thinking about the searing problems of our day that have been reduced to partisan sound bites.  When they are awarded their doctorates for their contribution to resolving the irreconcilable, they will be able to answer queries about their occupation with, "I am a philosopher."

Albert Einstein knew what this generation has forgotten, that "ignoring reality is risky business" with unforeseeable consequences that we must never allow to happen.
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References:

Lee Smolin's, interview in  Livescience.com looks at the consequences of the Time Illusion Delusion

Smolin and Meck discussed the consequences of his idea, including what it means for our understanding of human consciousness and free will. One implication of the idea that time is an illusion is the notion that the future is just as decided as the past. 

If I think the future's already written, then the things that are most valuable about being human are illusions along with time," Smolin said. "We still aspire to make choices in life. That is a precious part of our humanity. If the real metaphysical picture is that there are just atoms moving in the void, then nothing is ever new and nothing's ever surprising — it's just the rearrangement of atoms. There's a loss of responsibility as well as a loss of human dignity."
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Stuart Kaufman in his "Edge" article.  BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED  while brilliantly exploring the value of God as an organizing universal myth,  states that predicting future complex ecosystems is "radically impossible."  In other words, "time" -as defined as that which separates the past from the future, is a reality.

But the failure to prestate the possible preadaptations is not slowing down the evolution of the biosphere where preadaptations are widely known. Thus, ever novel functionalities come to exist and proliferate in the biosphere. The fact that we cannot prestate them is essential, and an essential limitation to the way Newton taught us to do science: Prestate the relevant variables, forces acting among them, initial and boundary conditions, and calculate the future evolution of the system…say projectile. But we cannot prestate the relevant causal features of organisms in the biosphere. We do not know now the relevant variables! Thus we cannot write down a set of equations for the temporal evolution of these variables. We are profoundly precluded from the Newtonian move. In short, the evolution of the biosphere is radically unknowable, not due to quantum throws of the dice, or deterministic chaos, but because we cannot prestate the macroscopic relevant features of organisms and environments that will lead to the emergence of novel functions in the biosphere with their own causal properties that in turn alter the future evolution of the biosphere. Thus, the evolution of the biosphere is radically creative, ceaselessly creative, in way that cannot be foretold. I find this wonderful.