Time in the New Year

The arbitrary dawn of a new year inevitably jumpstarts our pursuit of manufactured promise, those dreams, resolutions, and vices that, with the studied fall of the minute hand, we are somehow empowered to realize, implement, and correct. The New Year, now two days old and aging at a constant rate, seems to be the most peculiar event regularly celebrated by human cultures, a saturnalia dedicated to time.

Brian Greene, in an evocative piece for the New York Times, outlines the cost of our adherence to a linear, Newtonian conception of time, and concludes that the price is measured in the reliability of our perceptions. Discussing the theory of general relativity, he points out that should we happen to hover in the near vicinity of a black hole for a year, upon our return to earth a million years would have elapsed. Similarly, persons separated by light years (billions, in this case) would be unable to agree, perceptually, on when a given event had occurred. Our clocks are only as good as the places we consult them from. Greene ends his fascinating and succinct route through relativity and quantum mechanics by suggesting that, though “the power of convention and experience” continues to hold sway over our daily lives, we all have a choice to make about perception, and what science tells us is beyond.

Reading his article reminded me of a passage in Paul Churchland’s small book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. In that work, Churchland argues that if on a starry night we venture outdoors and tilt our heads while concentrating on some simple ideas about the mechanical behavior of planetary bodies in our solar system, we would begin to notice that the world is turning, and we are falling down its side. Churchland continues in this vein for some time, arguing that knowledge of basic science is potentially set to change the very baseline of our perceptual reality.

But all this is beside the point. It is not just that intuitive experience regularly and consistently trumps theoretical knowledge, that our notion of time is probably closer to Aristotle than to Newton, that our understanding of the mind is Plato’s, and so on. Instead, I think the more salient question is whether a scientized perceptual attitude could be in any way relevant for the coping of human beings? On a Kantian account of reality, for example, does knowledge of science augment our capacity for reasonable behavior? Given the incredibly small differences Greene admits obtain on Earth, would we do better to know that the principles of physics are constantly at work in an unseen background, contradicting the norms of our experience? And in a consequentialist world, would these same principles lead us to evaluate the outcomes of our actions differently? The answer is no. How could they?

American pragmatism, and the American spirit of commerce and practical coping, clearly disavows metaphysical speculation at the most propitious of times, never minding the slog of day-to-day existence. We are dependent animals, clever but limited, and the gems of physical wonder that Greene extends for our cognitive enjoyment are just that, a pastime for the idle. At their most nefarious, such thoughts can lead to the sort of confusion that undermines rather than enlightens. The idea underlying this is simply the familiar one that there is no use in doubting that which no sane person would deny (i.e. that I have a body, that there are other minds, etc).

In short, thinking of time as the new year begins its race towards itself, on to a never-ending (in our lifetimes) successions of thresholds that promise to annihilate the past in the resplendent crucible of an open future, it is perhaps better to think about how, in our ordinary experience, we manipulate time to aid self-deception. Jon Elster’s discussion of hyperbolic time discounting, for instance, strikes me as a far more relevant theme for reflection in these newborn weeks of January than the foundational tenets of 20th century physics. Not to mention, of course, the startlingly different conceptions of time held by other cultures. Among the Telefolmin, a Papau New Guinean people studied by the anthropologist Dan Jorgensen, time is conceived as a finite substance, subject to entropy, something that drains out of their society like water from a leaky dam. Thinking about the human conception of time, in its uncontrolled variety, will begin to tell us something about ourselves, and how we deal with the movement towards death (Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode) that inevitably approaches as we stave off the next moment only to embrace the one that follows.