I was really not a philosophical child, but in what I later learned was a fairly typical experience, I remember, when I was around twelve, suddenly wondering if I could prove if anyone other than myself was actually real. I asked my best friend, Cora, if she ever wondered that -- if she ever had the feeling everyone she encountered was some kind of robot sent by a great experimenter to evaluate her actions and reactions. Cora was pretty put out that I doubted her "realness", assured me she was not a robot, and gave me the cold shoulder for the rest of the day. (Methought the robot did protest too much.) Not long after this, I had a grand epiphany and wrote out some fevered ramblings that I presented to my mother as my own unique philosophy: Since matter and space can be occupied and manipulated by humans, then time, as unalterable, must be God. Since only time existed before the creation of the universe, then the big bang was an explosion in time itself. Even the religious promise of heaven, of immortality, is simply the promise of more time; of literally joining the infinite. (I wish I had kept my manifesto, but these were the highlights.). I remember my Mom was impressed, if a little weirded out. In keeping with the eerie synchronicity that rules my life, it wasn't long after that that my mother called me out of bed one night to come down and watch a PBS show with her on the nature of time. I remembered being fascinated by the thought experiment of (some ancient Greek, maybe Zeno?) who proved that time doesn't exist at all because every moment is infinite in itself (as I remember, it was something about: If you drop a ball from shoulder high you think it will hit the ground, but first it must drop half that distance, but first it must drop half that distance, and the increments are halved infinitely-- meaning that it is impossible for the ball to ever reach the ground. Does human consciousness make sense of existence by linking together these infinite moments, merely giving the illusion of time flowing?) I watched with fascination, fitting everything into my personal theory until Einstein and Relativity were introduced. Deflated, I realised that not only had everything I thought been thought before by greater minds, but Einstein proved that time isn't an absolute, so it could no longer be my God. Years later, my Mom sent me Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but despite thinking myself predisposed to understanding it, like many others, I never finished it. Einstein's Dreams, while not actually about physics, is about philosophy, and is a much easier read.
Essentially, in this book we are introduced to Albert Einstein in 1905, just as he is on the cusp of redefining what we understand to be the nature of time. In order to get to his preferred theory, he must have imagined and discarded multiple others. With chapters dipping into selected nights from 14 April to 28 June, we are to imagine that we are experiencing Einstein's dreams and the alternate worlds therein. While I thought this book was going to be about Einstein's rejected theories for the way we experience time, it is actually a philosophical look at how we, the earthbound human beings we all are, would react to a world where time flowed differently.
Some examples:
In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future. Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colors beyond violet: the senses cannot conceive what may lie past the visible end of the spectrum. In a world without future, each parting of friends is death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without a future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. (Some) do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
I liked the contrast between these two worlds, one where everyone lives forever:
Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].And a world where everyone knows the exact moment where time will cease to exist:
In the last seconds, it is as if everyone has leaped off Topaz Creek, holding hands. The end approaches like approaching ground. Cool air rushes by, bodies are weightless. The silent horizon yawns for miles. And below, the vast blanket of snow hurtles nearer and nearer to envelop this circle of pinkness and life.I chose that last quote because it illustrates the poetic language that is employed by Alan Lightman, and that was something I didn't expect from a physicist, a professor at MIT. As philosophy, I was intrigued by the idea that immortality is more confining than looming death. Throughout, I liked the language, and especially the attention to detail in describing life in 1905 Switzerland. Yet overall, I was not exposed to anything especially new or life changing in the vignettes: here are nearly 30 possible alternate universes, but given some free time, anyone could add 30 more, imagining how the alternate passages of time would impact the average person. I liked this, but didn't love it.
As a coda, I would like to add that in the 30+ years since I asked my friend Cora if she ever wondered if anyone but herself was real, no one has ever proved to me that I am not the one, true, and singular consciousness of this world. I can accept that this fact is true for everyone else as well, but I can only prove that since I think, I am.
And a further comment on eerie synchronicity: So many times I've wondered about something and had the answer provided by the universe. I remember once wondering why the alphabet we use is arranged the way it is, like why aren't the vowels grouped together? It was likely less than a week later that I picked up a book on the Kabballah, and in it there is an explanation that the alphabet is arranged the way it is now due to Jewish mysticism and the numerology associated with letters. It also explained that there is no Jewish letter associated with the number 11 (a supremely unlucky number), and most especially, not with the number 22 as it is 11-11 (the most unlucky number of all), and like so many people I've known, that number has a strange history in my life. This is just one of innumerable examples of synchronistical events that have caused me to suffer from bouts of Magical Thinking and it does not disprove the childish notion that I am living in the center of this universe; that it is uniquely interested in me. I do hope everyone else feels this way as well.
