Time may be like a chord not a scale
I heard there was a secret chord / that David played and it pleased the Lord. — Leonard Cohen.
I heard there was a secret chord / that David played and it pleased the Lord. — Leonard Cohen.
For decades, Einstein’s contributions to physics have provoked philosophers to question everything they know about time, space, and reality. Even Einstein couldn’t keep up.
Einstein is frequently credited with the idea that the past and future all exist “out there” somewhere. There is some evidence that he may have believed that, certainly in later life. He did believe that free will is an illusion and our lives are predetermined.
Philosophers who take Einstein’s time to an extreme and posit a static four dimensional universe where time is no more special than space are sometimes called Eternalists. Yet, many Eternalists want to have their cake and eat it too, sticking to a “Block” time but also refusing to give up the concept of the passage of time. Indeed, Carlo Rovelli, who supports a “multi-fingered” version of time where each point in space has its own time, has criticized Eternalists for being unable to come up with an explanation for the flow of time. Many Presentists, those who believe in the non-existence of the past and future, consider this a serious blow to Eternalism.
Yet Eternalists fail to take heed and correct their beliefs because, let’s face it, time does seem to flow.
Eternalist and mathematical realist, Max Tegmark, in Is Time Fundamental?, repeats this belief with an erroneous analogy:
life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD…; there’s nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there’s all this drama unfolding in the movie. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t yet exist, and that things are changing. But all I’m ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories.
Based on this analogy, Tegmark assumes a flow of time which brings the whole Eternalist program down. The DVD player exists outside of the time represented on the disk, implying either an additional dimension or some form of consciousness dualism. If there isn’t now a second time dimension, then the alternative is that our consciousness must exist outside of time, playing the DVD of our lives back to us. Thus, we have a consistent, non-corporeal identity or soul, very Platonist and certainly in keeping with Tegmark’s other Platonist ideas.
Are all Eternalists Platonists? No.
That is not the Eternalist concept of time at all.
Slavov proposes that we should look at moments in time as being more like particular frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Each exists apart from the other, but they are all connected within a single waveform.
If this is so, then we don’t actually flow through time at all. Rather, each moment in our lives is like a different tone in a chord that is played all at once. Our experience of time flowing is simply the recognition that one tone is higher or lower in frequency than the other. Yet, we cannot through evidence say that one tone comes after another as well as higher like a scale. Given that frequency represents time in our analogy, adding another dimension of time is an unnecessary extra degree of freedom.
The chord analogy is very different than the Tegmark DVD analogy, which is not unique to him. There is not some pianist outside of time playing the scale, knowing the whole score at once but imposing their own flow of time on the music, choosing the tempo and so on. From our perspective as musical notes, we cannot say that the pianist did not press all the keys at once because we can only “hear” ourselves being played one note at a time. In other words, we can only be aware of one moment at a time.
This analogy has powerful philosophical implications. If the four dimensional universe is created all at once, like a chord being struck, then we all exist at the moment of creation, for all moments are the first moment. Likewise, if we are like chords rather than scales, the moments of our lives, while interconnected, do not flow one after another but from low to high. They only seem to flow yet it is an illusion of our memories which only exist at the present moment.
This naturally implies that there is no free will because all the notes have been struck. The future is not yours to decide for it was created at the single point of creation just as the past. Creation is not a beginning but an all.
This perspective also rescues Eternalism. (Those who have read my articles know I have come out strongly against Eternalism for various reasons, but far be it for me to reject a philosophically consistent position entirely.)
Still, you may ask if you should live your life differently because of this information. Even if I was “fated” to give you advice, perhaps you were fated to take it…or not.
The only difference is perhaps to reject the concept that you are a person flowing through time. You are and you aren’t. That is to say that there is a causal relationship between past you and present you and there will be with future you. You can’t reject that entirely. On the other hand, your identity is not actually unique across different times. Each note is a separate you. Each moment in time is only causally related, just as each note in a chord is separate from the others, only related by its position on the staff. There is nothing to stop you from changing who you are because you are not the same person now that you were a moment before. You can harmonize your future even if your past was dissonant.
Slavov, Matias. “Eternalism and Perspectival Realism About the ‘Now’.” Foundations of Physics 50.11 (2020): 1398–1410.