Somebody asked:

A question about time.

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I'm going to try and tackle your question in a roundabout way, because it's a pretty deep issue and I
can't pretend to answer it definitively, only to throw out some ideas that may abet your understanding.

Let me give you three situations to compare:

a. The earth revolves around the sun once a year.

b. A needle is standing upright on its point.

c. On a certain day in 1606, Ben Jonson visited his friend Bill Shakespeare at the latter's lodgings for
a drink and a chat. While they talked, Shakespeare would from time to time scribble a dozen or so
lines of verse on a sheet of paper. Jonson later wrote that it was the culminating scene of Macbeth.

Before I turn to an explanation of what these items purport, let me first attend to the notion of "the
womb of time", which is for all intents and purposes the core of your multilevel question, reduced to a
neat metaphor. Now think about this for a moment: a woman is pregnant; she bears a growing
embryo in her womb; and in the normal course of events this embryo would eventually see the light of
day and claim full existence in 'real time'. Terribly suggestive imagery! It insinuates into our minds that
a thing, to become an existent, temporally bounded entity, begins as an incomplete, rudimentary,
seedlike fragment of thingness; that it starts at a definite moment, call it seeding or what you will,
which puts a pattern of development in train with an issue to some extent pre-known and predictable.

So time, in this metaphor, is equated with a womb; but even though it is only a metaphor, the image
does carry a significant freight of fallacy. It suggests that the universe 'seeds' time with its future
contents once and for all, so that all objects and events are, in a sense, merely the specific occasions
of their own realisation and that they are determined ahead of actually occurring. In the Bible this
notion is expressed by another notorious metaphor: "It is written". Here the insinuation is that a "Book
of Eternity" exists and the passage of time represents the pages being turned.

Both these metaphors have virtually universal status; they are accepted, believed and repeated ad
infinitum as veritable truths, in other words as unexamined presuppositionsof our thinking about time;
and as such they infiltrate science, religion and philosophy as well. Yet I call the notion a fallacy, and I
do this on the strength of a scrutiny of its broader meaning in various contexts, where I find that no
account is taken of the elementary opposition between monodirectional, periodicaland hierarchical
principles in the organisation and propagation of events in the universe.

We might think of the "Book" as a program: it may assist with approaching the issues by comparison
with a well-known technology. The big bang would then figure as the moment when the program is
loaded and decompression inaugurated. Of course we must assume the program to be a self-starter,
so that it begins its work without external triggers; but we must also assume that a kind of "residual
electric potential" (gravity) comes in the same package with the expanding spatiotemporal shell, so
that the elements released in the decompression will begin at once to interact with it and among each
other.

At this stage it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that some very new ideas are actually quite old. All
the way back in 1821, physicist Simon Laplace wrote of an ultimate intelligence capable of
enumerating all the atoms in the universe and how, possessing a valid theory of gravitational
attraction, this intelligence would therefore be in a position to calculate the future trajectory of each
atom until its ultimate, terminal decay. Here is your idea again, couched in scientific terms. For such
an intelligence, however (this is me speaking now) a concept of time would be meaningless, for the
paths of this googolplex of atoms would be just a single immense but immobile and immutable graph.
And this, at length, brings us back to my initial points.

Would this Ultimate Intelligence (UI) have any trouble with seeing Condition (a) through from
beginning to end? None whatever, Laplace would say, and I have to agree. And to this day, physicists
are inclined to keep agreeing; I spoke to one of their number only a few weeks ago, and he repeated
this hypothesis to me and was very surprised to be told just how long ago it was first mooted!

But we are just coming to the crucial juncture: to a feature of this universe and the behaviour of its
objects of which Laplace knew nothing. Laplace's UI could not cope with Point (b). Now this might
raise eyebrows, but listen carefully. A needle standing on its point will obviously fall in line with one of
its 360 degrees of anglesbut which? This again is an enigma with a long pedigree, for which a
solution was worked out just before 1900 by Henri Poincaré (hence its diagrammatic
representation is called 'Poincaré Section'). The solution was that the problem is insoluble!
Given a 'fair' needle, i.e. without any bias, its support on a mere point creates an unstable equilibrium
in which the 'wobble' of a single atom may influence the direction of its fall. But which atom? Well,
even on a needle point there may be 100 million to choose from, but then you also need to find a
reason why that particular atom wobbled. I think you'll now get the gist of the problem!

Let me apply a neat contemporary slogan to the situation: "It does not compute." But of course this
translate exactly, word for word, into "It is not written."

Just for the heck of it, imagine that when it finally topples, the needle's bang on the table frightens the
life out of a microbe, which goes running for its dear life . . . and suddenly you begin to realise that a
lot of trajectories on the UI's graph are going to trail off in indeterminable wobbles of their own...

Actually this principle is so important, and yet so little appreciated, that it is apt to quote another
example. Let's fire a bullet at a shop window, point blank and absolutely straightline. We'll assume,
furthermore, that the convex end has been machined to absolute perfection and that the glass pane
has a perfectly regular lattice structure. Now given these conditions, the bullet would be repelled!
Why? Because (as an old philosophical principles states), in a perfect arrangement of elements, there
must be a sufficient reason for any single atom to yield first; but lacking such reason, none does (this
has been experimentally verified). The lesson here is that any action whatever relies on imperfections
to facilitate the occurrence of actual eventsbut what are imperfections other than more incalculable
contingencies, more unwritten leaves in the Book?

And so, finally, to Point (c). We see here an agency at work, creating something new in rather
unexpected circumstances. What this agency (Shakespeare) produced was not, however, a new
arrangement of old atoms, but a web of ideas spun out of material which cannot be said to have any
real existence at allcertainly no trace of it would be detectable to Laplace's UI. For the written text,
which might at first contradict me, is not after all the idea, but only its incidental token, that could
easily have been replaced by Ben memorising the text. What a paradox! Humans think and put down
their thinking on paper, but the moment another human picks it up, it's not the paper, but the thinking
they reconstruct. Now where on UI's chart, do you suppose thought atoms might be represented?

All right: time for conclusions.

Point (a) covers what's known as 'determinism'. It applies, as we saw, to those features of the
universe that are enumerable, calculable and mechanically predictable. The gross trends of such
structures are relatively easy to foresee, because they are governed in the main by periodicity.

Point (b) brings the fine detail forward, which evidently has a latent influence on the trend of gross
structures, and their intrinsic instability removes them from exact predictability. They are, however,
predictable as mass points over some lengths of time, because in the main they are governed by
hierarchicalorganisation.

Events of type (c) are strictly monodirectionaland unrepeatable. It is also a characteristic of such
events that they need not have any event-like or object-like consequences. Point (c), therefore, is the
only one of the three that has any genuine bearing on the problem. For one can state as a general
principle that the occurrence of just one event of Type (c) completely disqualifies the generality of
deterministic principles and reduces their validity to the status of 'special instances'. Moreover, that
same single occurrence puts paid to the notion of a "womb of time", for if the flow of time is thereby
shown to be monodirectional, then obviously there is no further point in pursuing the image of a future
in which Macbeth is already waiting for us. I suppose one easy way of comprehending this is, that we
can calculate even today millions of different solar and stellar positions and work out (barring
accidental intrusions of dark matter) what kind of window we have on the universe in 50 million years.
But not even UI himself, lacking knowledge of thought atoms, could have predicted Macbeth until the
day that it was actually written.

Jürgen Lawrenz