Introduction

In Part One, I suggested that the "future" is the timespace we are always in and that what we are lacking is not access to it, but an awareness of it. I posited that an awareness of the future would take the form of "memories" rather than the form of our self-conscious perception of the "present". It is possible that our problem is one of recognition, that we have "future memories" but don't know them for what they are, just as one may mistake anxiety for hunger, or lust for love. Perhaps what we need is a template of the possible forms of future-memories so that we might recognize them when they occur.

To this end, I am presenting the work of six authors who have each, in their books, articles and/or web postings, offered a way of looking at time-consciousness that might be useful as a template.

The Issue of Whether the Future Exists in Equilibrium

Richard Shand has created an extensive archive of websites dealing principally with science and history, which can be reached through the homepage Underground Streams. The work I consider comes from a survey of the literature, posted under his science node. Shand has placed together excepts which concern the question of whether the future is--by its nature--even knowable. "Knowledge" is only perception of difference, so that knowledge of the future--whether as memory or in any other form--is only possible if there is a future which is in some perceivable way different from the present.

If the future is a state of equilibrium, where all difference has disappeared, then we can't "remember" it because we can't perceive it, any more than we can perceive the body temperature water in which one floats in a sensory deprivation tank.

One definition of entropy is equilibrium at the lowest level of order. If you think of the Universe (or Time) as a giant see-saw, then movement (i.e., transformation) can happen in two "directions". If you have a closed system which is in a state of greater order (and therefore has lower entropy) it will move to a state which has less order (and therefore higher entropy); that is the see-saw with the order "end" up and order flowing "down" (or out). Conversely, if you have autopoietic systems (e.g., life) creating greater order/organization/information/complexity, then the see-saw teeters the other way, with the entropic end "up draining" raw material into the neg-entropic end, which is "down".

Whichever "end" is "up," both of these models suppose a "final" state of "balance", i.e., "equilibrium". Once this is supposed, the debate becomes one of "how?" Is equilibrium "deterministic" or "dynamic"?

A deterministic model presupposes that a "closed" system is truly possible. Therefore, a local increase of neg-entropy, or autopoiesis, at one spacetime "requires" a balance of an equivalent or greater entropy elsewhere. The appearance of increased organization is an illusion of locality. The autopoietic entity is blind to the metalevel critique which includes itself and its environment. Even given the "greatest" environment, e.g., the whole Universe (or Metaverse, or Multiverse, if one believes in the "many-worlds" solution to entanglement and bifurcation), Time presents a dimension "outside" of Space in which entropy can be discharged. Thus even a greater degree of "order" in the whole Universe now, might result in greater entropy elsewhere or elsewhen.

Shand, in the first section of The Cosmic Computer, "Information Processing and the Quantum," quotes Henri Bergson:

"The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres - this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. And past-present and future shrink into a single moment, which is eternity." [Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution]

Like Whitaker's critique of those who erroneously attribute an implicate ontology to Maturana and Valera's cognitive biology, Shand proposes that "quantum consciousness" too must be understood only as a system of knowledge rather than a definition of our state of being. Quantum consciousness is, at its least what we know, and at most how we know, but not what is, "The appearance of consciousness determining quantum events may be more the result of the way we process information than any psycho-physical mechanism "actualizing" the universe."

What differentiates living beings, therefore, is their ability to turn the random raw material of Time and the Universe into "meaning".

The Cosmic Code Hyperlink Boxes

Determined Time vs. Dynamic Time

The issue of equilibrium is also treated by Peter Coveney in his article "Chaos, entropy and the arrow of time," which forms the last chapter of Nina Hall's book Exploring Chaos (1991). Coveney, a physical chemist, was, at the writing of the book a "programme leader" at the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Center. He posits that models of entropic movement toward thermodynamic equilibrium are not useful in discussing living beings because the thermodynamic model is deterministic, and the oscillation of living systems in and out of steady states is dynamical.

Peter Coveney, Chaos, entropy and the arrow of time For isolated systems that exchange neither energy nor matter with their surroundings, the entropy continues to grow until it reaches its maximum value at what is called thermodynamic equilibrium. This is the final state of the system when there is no change in the macroscopic properties - density, pressure, and so on - with time. The concept of equilibrium has proved of great value in thermodynamics. Unfortunately, as a result, most scientists talk about thermodynamics and entropy only in terms of equilibrium states, even though this amounts to a major restriction, as we shall soon see. . . . The remarkable conclusion is that equilibrium thermodynamics cannot, therefore, describe change, which is the very means by which we are aware of time. . . . In reality, all processes take a finite time to happen and, therefore, always proceed out of equilibrium. Theoretically, a system can only aspire to reaching equilibrium, it will never actually reach it. ... It is only by virtue of irreversible non-equilibrium processes that a system reaches a state of equilibrium. Life itself is a non-equilibrium process: ageing is irreversible.

Coveney therefore favors using the "dissipative structures" described by Prigogine and associates.

Peter Coveney, Chaos, entropy and the arrow of time Ilya Prigogine, a theoretical physicist and physical chemist at the University of Brussels, was among the first to tackle entropy in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In 1945, he showed that for systems close to equilibrium, the thermodynamic potential is the rate at which entropy is produced by the system; this is called dissipation'. Prigogine came up with a theorem of minimum entropy production, which predicts that such systems evolve to a steady state that minimizes the dissipation. This is reminiscent of equilibrium thermodynamics; the final state is uniform in space and does not vary with time. Prigogine's minimum entropy production theorem is an important result. Together with his colleague Paul Glansdorff and others in Brussels, Prigogine then set out to explore systems maintained even further away from equilibrium ... The Glansdorff-Prigogine criterion makes a general statement about the stability of far-from-equilibrium steady states. It says that they may become unstable as they are driven further from equilibrium: there may arise a crisis, or bifurcation point, at which the system prefers to leave the steady state, evolving instead into some other stable state. The important new possibility is that beyond the first crisis point, highly organized states can suddenly appear. ... Such dynamical states are not associated with minimal entropy production by the system; however, the entropy produced is exported to the external environment. As a result, we have to reconsider associating the arrow of time with uniform degeneration into randomness - at least on a local level. At the 'end' of time - at equilibrium - randomness may have the last laugh. But over shorter timescales, we can witness the emergence of exquisitely ordered structures which exist as long as the flow of matter and energy is maintained - as illustrated by ourselves, for example. . . . How a non-equilibrium system evolves over time can depend very sensitively on the system's microscopic properties ... A myriad of bifurcations can carry the system in a random way into new stable states. These non-uniform states of structural organization, varying in time or space (or both), were dubbed 'dissipative structures' by Prigogine; the spontaneous development of such structures is known as 'self-organization'. . . .

If "time" is construed as the manifestation of the thermodynamic properties of a system (i.e., its movement either toward disorder, or toward self-organizing); "time" is therefore "movement-through-time". One model of why we don't have future-memories might entail the same sort of complementary indeterminacy in thermodynamic systems as exists in atomic ones. Just as the degree to which we can know how fast a particle is going (its momentum) limits the degree to which we can know where it is (its position), likewise, Coveney posits, the degree to which we know a being's thermodynamic state (i.e., its "internal age"), is the degree to which we can't know its dynamic state (i.e., its "relational age"). This is exactly the conundrum expressed by Einstein's Twin Paradox; however instead of one twin being in a space ship speeding at lightspeed, each twin is in a self-referential, inertial locale, but each can only measure one attribute with exactitude, either how fast he is going, or how fast he is aging. If he attends to his "internal age" he perceives the flow of time always within the umbra of the present. If he attends to his "relational age" he may perceive either past or future through a suspended state of "timelessness." Therefore, in order to experience future-memories one would have to give up one's perception of the passage of time.

Peter Coveney, Chaos, entropy and the arrow of time The standard way of attempting to derive the equations employed in non-equilibrium thermodynamics starts from the equations of motion, whether classical or quantum mechanical, of the individual particles making up the system.... Because we cannot know the exact position and velocity of every particle, we have to turn to probability theory... to relate the average behaviour of each particle to the overall behaviour of the system. . . . In joint research with Maurice Courbage, [Baidyanath] Misra and Prigogine discovered a new definition of time for K-flows consistent with irreversibility. This quantity, called the 'internal time', represents the age of a dynamical system. You can think of the age as reflecting a system's irreversible thermodynamic aspects, while the description held in Newton's equations for the same system portrays purely reversible dynamical features. Thermodynamics and mechanics have been pitted against one another for more than a century, but now we have revealed a fascinating relationship. Just as with the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, where knowing the position of a particle accurately prevents us from know its momentum and vice versa, we now find a new kind of uncertainty principle that applies to chaotic dynamical systems. This new principle shows that complete certainly of the thermodynamic properties of a system (through knowledge of its irreversible age) renders the reversible dynamical description meaningless, whilst complete certainty in the dynamical description similarly disables the thermodynamic view.

The Function of Cascades

The question remains of how the present and the future effect each other; does one determine the other, or are they actually oscillations of an entangled whole? Whether one posits a linear, or a chaotic, "unfolding" the question of how is merely one of mechanism. Nevertheless, the process of mulitple-streaming cascades (as distinct from their simplest exemplar, the two-pronged bifurcation) permits a metaphor of mutual structural coupling between the "stream" or "flow" of "time" and the topography of "timespace" that creates a fertile "field" for speculation.
Pearson's reading of Deleuze shows how a "morphogenic" model moves back and forth amongst philosophy, biology and cultural studies. One must remember that, in this post-Einsteinian age any spatial model (i.e., morphology) must be understood in terms of a constructed meaning of "space" that is multi-dimensional spacetime.

Deleuze's Morphogenic Model Hyperlink Box

"The way the molecules interact in time and in space..." must be understood in terms of Bateson's description of cybernetic systems; given certain logical restraints all other variations are possible. Whether or not they are probable depends on an ever narrowing range of specificities. This is what is represented by a "cascading stream" model. Each "choice" (i.e., bifurcation) along the way is a systemic response to a trigger that may come from the outside environment, or, the being's own internal structure. Thus the axis of "movement" that informs the way that flies "smell" with their antennea and snakes with their darting tongues is morphologically reconfigured into the movement of inhaled air past the nasal hair within human nostrils.

One is tempted to consider what the appropriate structures of "future perception" might be. Perhaps one can "taste" ones future-memories in some mirrored parallel of Proust's madeleine. My initial experience of artichoke came close to that: the taste all at once discomfortingly strange, and yet strangely familiar, as if I were "remembering" coming to like the flavor.

The Decoherent Phase Space and Transactional Supercausality

If time does not "flow" in a single stream, but rather cascades in a complex, multiply-bifurcating, structurally coupled way, then its "landscape" begins to be a much more nuanced terrain than the one classically envisioned by metaphor. In fact, like a hologram, time might be a way of being where the "whole" is contained in each constituant quanta.

Chris King argues that the fractal nature of the brain's chemistry is as significant a factor of consciousness as is its quantum nature. King, an Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Auckland, is also a web archivist, collecting and cross-referencing writings on science, history and ethics, as well as posting his own research. In his posting of his article Quantum Mechanics, Chaos and the Conscious Brain also published in The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, he considers the implications of the brain's "fractal quantum non-linear" nature for consciousness. I, of course, am specifically interested in its implications for consciousness--or lack thereof--of future-memories.

King argued that the brain routinely oscillates from a "decoherent" state to one of greater coherance as part of its information processing. "The use of 'holographic' distributed wave forms is also consistent with studies in which phase decoherence occurs with unexpected stimuli, to be replaced by coherent states once the brain has developed a stable representation of the situation. An example is illustrated in Basar et. al. 1989. Here averaging of several EEG recordings to form an evoked potential of a randomly omitted regular stimulus displays decoherence when the pattern cannot be anticipated and coherence when the expected stimulus occurs. Chaotic systems can cohere through non-linear coupling."

This follows what Bloor (1976, 1991) said about the differential perception of expected and unexpected stimuli.
"Such a conception is entirely consistent with the psychological literature on what are called signal-detection tasks. This is the problem of detecting a signal from a background of noise, for example a faint spot on a blurred radar screen. The tendency to decide that a signal has indeed been seen is related in a lawful way to the known consequences of these decisions. Whether subjects actually perceive a signal depends on whether they know that it is important not to miss any signal or whether it is vital never to give a false alarm. Varying these parameters produces different patterns of perception and misperception. ... There is a trade-off between different sorts of misperception and this is a function of the social matrix of consequences and meanings within which the perception takes place." (P.27) I would argue that it's just this sort of socially-mediated trade-off that precludes our recognition of future-memories.

That the chemico-physical structure of the brain allows it to shift, not only from one "steady state" (i.e., the "basin" of one "attractor") to another in a dyadic bifurcation, but to "blink" in and out of coherence creates a condition (like Schrodinger's Cat's) where "noise" can be both "present" and "not present". Like the residual nature of the remedy whose trace is left behind in homeopathic dilutions, or T. S. Elliot's "Shadow," the "noise" of the decoherent phase is always virtually present. The "mind" does not blink "on" and "off" but is--simultaneously--both. The question of our subjective reading of the "state" of our consciousness is not an ontological one, but a perceptual one. We are both.

Quantum Mechanics, Chaos and the Conscious Brain Hyperlink Box

Simondon ("The Genesis of the Individual", 1992) as quoted by Pearson (1997) discusses this issue in light of the question as to whether dialectical development is the correct metaphor for ontogenesis.

Transductive Unity Hyperlink Box

According to King, it is this fractal-quantum structure of our brains that allows us to participate in the transductive handshake across time.

Chris King, "Quantum Mechanic, Chaos and the Conscious Brain", Journal of Mind and Behavior One way of explaining quantum non-locality is through a hand-shaking space-time interaction between an emitter and its potential absorbers. The transactional interpretation does just this by postulating an advanced wave travelling back in time from the [future] absorber to the emitter. This interferes with the retarded wave, travelling in the usual direction from emitter to absorber to form the exchanged particle. Because both waves are zero-energy crossed phase waves, they interfere destructively outside the particle path but constructively between the emitter and absorber. The emitter sends out an offer wave and the absorber responds with a confirmation wave. Together they form a photon, just as an anti-electron (positron) travelling backwards in time is the same as an electron traveling forwards. Although the transactional interpretation is completely consistent with quantum mechanics, it leads to some very counter-intuitive ideas. When I see a distant quasar, in a sense the quasar radiated the photon I see long ago, only because my eye is also here to perceive it. In a sense the quasar anticipated my presence and, despite its vastly greater energy, it may not be able to radiate without the presence of myself and the other potential absorbers in its very distant future. This would imply that non-locality is observer dependent in a way which prevents any single observer having access to all the boundary conditions and hence logical prediction of the outcomes. This would prevent the universe from being computationally or deterministically predicted, but it would not prevent quantum non-locality from displaying relationships in which future states had an influence through being boundary conditions. In the transactional interpretation, wave function collapse corresponds to a collapse of a transaction between all potential emitters and absorbers to a single transaction between the emitter and the selected absorber. Although this hand-shaking interaction looks "random" to the observer, it may really be a complex system interaction manifesting the principle of choice, which varies in a pseudo-random manner because it is linked to many other space-time states of the universe. Because it has boundary conditions involving future states of the system, it cannot be predicted from the initial conditions and temporal determinism fails. We are left with a description in which correlations in wave-particle reductions operating in a manner consistent with quantum computation schemes may display an indirect predictive feature, which is unavailable to classical systems, because the initial conditions are insufficient to determine the quantum outcomes. I denote this transactional supercausality, or transcausality. The use of phase coherence in central nervous processing is essentially similar to making a quantum measurement through beats, the basis of the uncertainty principle. Phase coherence could thus provide globally the space-time relationship implied by the transactional interpretation.

King offers the metaphor of the use of phase coherence as the mechanism to allow for consciousness. "The use of phase coherence in central nervous processing is essentially similar to making a quantum measurement through beats... Phase coherence could thus provide globally the space-time relationship implied by the transactional interpretation." But in this "handshake" we have a continuous loop--albeit a one-sided Mobius strip. We precipitate the "future" which actualizes and appears to us (between the beats) right on schedule. What I want to know is, what is the role of decoherence, ("...and what i want to know is / how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death") especially as I suspect it has to do with the "dark sea" of unknowing that Bateson identified, "All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints--is noise, the only possible source of new patterns."

Quantum Jumps Between Quantum Histories

The problem with the "anthropic" notion of transcausality, it that it begs the question, "why this future?" Why not any of the others? Or, all of the others. This is the debate between the advocates of the "many worlds" model of quantum indeterminacy, and the "violation of non-locality" school (a debate worthy of a Borges story, alas). Each time the quasar can radiate--or not, each time the blue-green algae can supplant their anaeorobic predecessors--or not, both waves "collapse", both "choices" happen, both futures unfold. Or not. Perhaps all "futures" (and therefore "future-pasts") are not equally likely. Perhaps there is "spooky action at a distance" and somehow one particular future "jumps through the beats" to us. Matti Pitkanen, of the Department of Physics, Theoretical Physics Division of the University of Helsinki is developing a "Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness".

Matti Pitkanen, Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness 1. Moments of consciousness as quantum jumps between quantum histories In TGD General Coordinate Invariance forces [us] to identify quantum state as an entire deterministic quantum history rather than a time'constant snapshot of single deterministic history. This solves the age old determinism-nondeterminism paradox of the standard quantum measurement theory since the nondeterminism of the quantum jump is now outside the realm of the geometric spacetime and the subjective time development defined by the sequence of the quantum jumps has a priori nothing to do with the geometric time development. Moments of consciousness are identified as quantum jumps between the quantum histories. This means giving up the idea of continuous stream of consciousness as well as the idea that consciousness is a property of the quantum state. In this manner one avoids the basic paradoxes of the dualistic and materialistic theories of mind.

In this model there is neither "unfolding" nor "hand-shaking", there is no direct line from here to there, but a jump (through the void). It is only "after the fact" that we, as "story-builders" construct the "heresy" of continuity. Pitkanen suggests: "The problem would be to understand, why the contents of conscious experiences of the 'thinking' systems seem to be localized around a definite value of the geometric time." He proposes a model that would have pleased the Orthodox of Tlon, through each "jump" we carry "automatically construct[ed] self representations".

Matti Pitkanen, Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness Also multitime experiences with contents located around several time intervals are possible and could provide a fundamental model for memory with respect to the geometric time. Also a memory with respect to the subjective time determined by the number of quantum jumps could be realized with some additional assumptions about the nature of the quantum state. What is needed is that the quantum state automatically constructs self representations as quantum subsystems and that these representation remain more or less as such when the system itself performs a quantum jump. The replication of biosystem could correspond to the construction of these representations. Also the comparison of the recent representation with earlier representations is needed. This seems to require some kind of 'novelty detector'.

In this model the present (manifest as a conscious and self-conscious self) and a future are quantumly related (rather than deterministically, thermodynamically, chaotically, fractally or implicately). The nature of this quantum relation is one of "entanglement", such as the twin particles posited in the EPR gedanken experiment, and then verified by Bell and Aspect. Pitkanen posits that the "point particle" of this entanglement field is "alertness".

Matti Pitkanen, Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness 4. Quantum entanglement as alertness The natural interpretation for the quantum entanglement is as the counterpart of alertness or attentiveness not yet involving consciousness. Adopting this interpretation, strong NMP [negentropy maximization principle] in its real version simply states that the most alert subsystem is allowed to have a moment of consciousness. The intentionality of conscious systems can be identified as a quantum entanglement in time direction made possible by the classical nondeterminism of the Kahler action. Alertness defined in this manner correspond to a 'cognitive', measurable property of the system unlike consciousness which is the quantum measurement process itself.

Finally, Pitkanen offers a model whereby the definition of time itself is fluid, subject to enactment. In his example the person who picks up a pencil begins the action before making the decision to do so. The "past", "present", and "future" are therefore only when we notice them to be, we "wake up" perceptually, as it were, to the pencil in our grasp, only to interpolate a "memory" of our decision to pick it up. Pitkanen defines this as "a macroscopic quantum jump between two widely different spatial configurations and the corresponding histories", but speaks only in terms of alternate pasts and presents.

Matti Pitkanen, Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness: 3.3 Jumps between quantum histories at the level of brain In quantum jump between histories, the past of the system, defined in terms of the effective quantum average space time, also changes. There is evidence for this kind of change. In experiments in which the subject person decides to do something, say to take pencil from the table, neurological activity begins about one second before the conscious decision. The materialistic interpretation is that consciousness is a passive spectator and conscious experience is a by-product of a deterministic time evolution. The alternative interpretation is based on the assumption that the process of taking pencil into the hand is a macroscopic quantum jump between two widely different spatial configurations and the corresponding histories. The new history necessarily leads in a deterministic manner to a final state, where person has the pencil in his hand. Since this process must occur smoothly, the new history must differ from the old one already before the moment of decision so that the neurological processes begin before the moment of decision. This interpretation allows to deduce that brain is able to change its past in the time scale of order one second. A stronger conclusion is that the dimension for the region of nondeterminism is typically of order one second in time like direction and therefore corresponds to the subjective duration associated with a typical conscious experience.

But if the past changes "already before the moment of decision", so too, in a time-symmetrical world, ought the future. Perhaps the various models of "conscious-decision-as-the-quantum-trigger-at-the-bifurcating-railroad-track-switch" between possible futures is only after the fact. What if we were already in the future when we chose it?

Gaston Bachelard, "The Copernican revolution of the imagination", in Colette Gaudin, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, p.14 . . . It must be admitted that fright does not come from the object, from the scenes evoked by the narrator; fright is born and reborn ceaselessly in the subject, within the reader's soul. The narrator has not confronted his reader with a frightening situation; rather, he has put him in a fright situation. He has stirred the fundamental dynamic imagination. The writer has directly induced the nightmare of falling in the reader's soul. He rediscovers a primal sort of nausea that is related to a type of reverie deeply engraved in our inner nature. In many of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, we cannot fail to recognize the primal character of the dream. The dream is not a product of conscious life, it is the fundamental subjective state. In these stories, a metaphysician might see in action a sort of Copernican revolution of the imagination. Indeed, images can no longer be explained by their objective TRAITS, but by their subjective MEANINGS. This revolution is the equivalent of placing: dream before reality nightmare before tragedy fright before the monster nausea before the fall; In short, the imagination is sufficiently vivid in the subject to impose its visions, its terrors, its sorrows. If dream is a reminiscence, it is the reminiscence of a state preceding life, of a state of dead life, a kind of mourning before happiness. We might go one step further and put the image not only before thought, before narrative, but also before any emotion. A sort of nobility of spirit is associated with poetic fright; this nobility of the sorrowing spirit reveals a nature so primordial that is forever guarantees first place to the imagination. It is the imagination itself which thinks and which suffers. It is the imagination which acts and which is discharged into the poem. The notion of symbol is too intellectual. The notion of poetic experience is too experimental. . . . . The dynamic imagination is a primary reality. [From L'Air et les songes , pp. 119-20]

Indeed, in Bachelard's "Copernican revolution of the imagination" it is not only fright, that "does not come from the object," but is "born and reborn ceaselessly in the subject", but all meaning. This is what he means by, "images can no longer be explained by their objective TRAITS, but by their subjective MEANINGS." Thus "placing: dream before reality; nightmare before tragedy; fright before the monster; and nausea before the fall...". The Copernican revolution of the imagination places the objective world within the subjective world-making.

Pitkanen also treats this "subject - object" split in discussing two kinds of quantum jumps: in the first the subject (I) experiences the sensation of going from here(now) to there(then), but, in the secondChaving lost "subject-object" distinction--the time-traveler only experiences "timelessness," just as the riders in Einstein's "self-referential, inertial locale" fail to experience their passage through space.

Matti Pitkanen, Topological Geometrodynamics inspired theory of consciousness 3.4 Two kinds of quantum jumps and mystic experiences As already noticed one can clearly distinguish between two kinds of quantum jumps. a) The ordinary state function reduction corresponds to a quantum jump which does not change the value of the subjective time. . . . b) In the second type of reduction, the value of subjective time changes ... The basic distinction between these quantum jumps is that in the first quantum there is division of the Universe into subsystem and external world and negentropy maximation principle governs the quantum jump. Sensory perceptions which involve always subject-object division should correspond to this kind of quantum jumps. In the second type of quantum jump there is no division: entire universe performs the quantum jump although 'I' can be localized still. This is very reminiscent of the states of consciousness described by mystics. For instance, Krishnamurti again and again emphasizes the disappearance of the distinction between observer and observed in these states of consciousness. Since subjective time flows everyone of us is in fact performing quantum jumps of second type and what is needed is to cease quantum jumping of the first kind. . . . The second method [of enlightenment] is to perform extension of subsystem defining the 'I' so that reduction [of the 'I'] becomes unnecessary: one feature of personal development of mystics is the gradual extension of self to include objects of external world. The ultimate extension of self over the boundaries of 'I' to Self is in accordance with the possibility that quantum jumps of second type can involve arbitrary large regions of spacetime. Mystics associate the feeling of 'emptiness' and 'timelessness' with the enlightened states. Perhaps this is what should be experienced, when nothing changes in the quantum jump. This state of pure consciousness might perhaps correspond to the limiting case of quantum jump for which the change of subjective time approaches zero and S-matrix describing transition amplitudes becomes unit matrix so that only 'forward scattering' is possible. To me the gradual realization of these rather precise analogies have been a rather shattering experience. As a theoretical physicist I have strong tendency to trust on rational thinking as a unique way to understand Nature. It is amazing meditative practice has produced essentially the same theory of consciousness, which seem to forced by Quantum Theory. To mention one amusing example, Buddhist tradition has emphasized the momentary nature of conscious experience and there is even estimate for the number of moments of consciousness per unit time: the estimate is of same order of magnitude than obtained from Penrose-Hameroff theory!

It is important here to note that Pitkanen is clear on the metaphoric nature of the language involved, and, one hopes, on the metaphoric constraints of discussing mysticism in physical terms and/or vice versa. Thus when he writes, "Mystics associate the feeling of 'emptiness' and 'timelessness' with the enlightened states," he is not saying that emptiness and timelessness are enlightenment (or vice versa), only that these are the words we have with which to describe the ineffable reality.

Also interesting is his notion "Perhaps this is what should be experienced, when nothing changes in the quantum jump. This state of pure consciousness might perhaps correspond to the ... case of quantum jump for which the change of subjective time approaches zero ..." I am here at my desk writing on my computer, just as I was a moment ago, only now--relative to that moment ago--it is the "future (of that moment)", and yet I experience both this moment and that previous moment as "now". Might this be a case of "nothing changing in the quantum jump (from that past to its future)", or a case where "subjective time approached zero"?

Finally, it is interesting the regularity with which "Western" scientist are drawn to the analogies/metaphors of the "East" in order to discuss these things. "To me the gradual realization of these rather precise analogies have been a rather shattering experience. ... It is amazing meditative practice has produced essentially the same theory of consciousness, which seem to forced by Quantum Theory. ..."

Victor Mansfield, a Buddhist member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Colgate University, addressed this very issue in his working draft of an invited talk at the Physics and Tibetan Buddhism Conference.

Victor Mansfield, Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics A more fruitful dialogue between Buddhism and science can occur when comparisons and connections are done at a more philosophic level. For example, here I have tried to focus on emptiness, the philosophic heart of Buddhism, and make connections with questions of comparable philosophic significance in physics. If the connections mutually illuminate both the physics and the Buddhism, without trying to reduce one to the other, then our understanding of both disciplines deepens. In the present example, the erroneous assumption of a thermodynamic system being completely isolated from any form of external interaction was a critical error. This error could have been avoided if the philosophic principle of emptiness were more widely understood and appreciated in the scientific community. Physics is always done in a philosophic context. In the case of classical statistical physics and thermodynamics, it was done within Cartesian dualism. Although Descartes' vision helped both physics and western philosophy, it has also hindered us in more ways than we can count. I suggest that the principle of emptiness, if more fully appreciated within science, could actually further the scientific enterprise.

It is therefore within the context of wishing to help my understanding of both the physical and philosophical understanding of what causes us not to remember the future that I wish to explore Mansfield's remarks about "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics."

Victor Mansfield, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics" Now how does all this relate to the Middle Way notion of time? As I mentioned above, if phenomena inherently existed then they would of necessity be immutable and impotent, unable to act on us or we on them. Since, in truth, phenomena are fundamentally a shifting set of dependency relations, impermanence and change are built into them at the most fundamental level. That the carrot exists in dependence upon causes and conditions, its whole and parts, and on our attribution or naming is what makes it edible, allows me to experience it and be nourished by it. More important for impermanence, these defining relations and co-dependencies and their continuously shifting connections with each other guarantee that all objects and subjects are impermanent, ceaselessly evolving, maturing, and decaying. In short, emptiness and impermanence are two sides of the coin of existence and therefore transformation and change are built into the core of all entities, both subjective and objective. In this way, the doctrine of impermanence is a direct expression of emptiness/dependent arising. Because I lack inherent existence and am most fundamentally a kinetic set of shifting experiences, with no eternal soul, as we normally understand it, then "Time is the substance I am made of." Borges' compact sentence seems like a Middle Way aphorism. Being substantially of time guarantees my continuous transformation and death. Indeed, time "is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." These philosophic truths of emptiness and impermanence are central to Buddhist practice, and I return to them later. Now let us turn to physics and its view of time.

If Mansfield holds that "all objects and subjects... are ceaselessly evolving" then he may agree with Ed Fredkin that the "future" can't be known before it arises because "There is no way to know what the future is any faster than running this [the universe] to get to that [the future]." The future--in which we-in-the-present are embedded--is a null set; a future of extreme emptiness, an equilibrium of complete entropy. Only as we actualize (e.g., enact, act-into-being) the eternal now does the moment exist. Only in hindsight, when the "future" thus created is the remembered past do we give to the moment the attribute that it once had been the future-moment. We can only now, on Tuesday, "remember" that last Sunday we "knew" that Tuesday was the future.

Mansfield goes on to debunk the notion that the attribute of "time" resides either in an object or a subject. He tells the story of how his wish for freshly squeezed, organic carrot juice caused him to grow a garden and confront the Buddhist belief that "all suffering is caused by desire."

Victor Mansfield, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics" While reifying carrots, I simultaneously reify the one who desires carrots and consider him as inherently existent too. Out of the seamless flux of experience, I falsely impute or attribute inherent existence to both the subject and its object of desire and thereby spin the wheel of samsara. In this way, perception is a double act that simultaneously generates a false belief in inherently existent subjects and objects, gentleman farmers and their carrots. My carrots take 70 days to harvest time. Our belief in the absoluteness of time or its independent existence appears in the view that this time is something intrinsic to the carrot. As long as the growing conditions are normal, it does not matter how this time is measured or who measures it. It has an independent or absolute nature. However, let an astronaut take the same seeds and grow them in a space ship traveling at 90 percent the speed of light relative to the Earth. Then relativity theory tells us that the days to harvest (as measured by an Earth-based observer) would be 161 days. ... Only in a reference frame at rest with respect to the observer (the rest frame) is the days to harvest 70 days. Relativity emphatically states that no value of the days to harvest time is any more real or intrinsic than any other. For example, if the astronaut looked back at my garden she would correctly measure my time to harvest as 161 days. Since time intervals depend directly upon the relationship between the object and the observer, they are essentially relational. We cannot consider time independent of a particular reference frame. In Middle Way language, it lacks independent existence. If the seed manufacturers were devotees of relativity they would state on the package, "The time to harvest is 70 day only in the rest frame. For other reference frames consult the graph on the back."

Once we have corrected our false "belief in inherently existent subjects and objects, gentleman farmers and their carrots." and false "belief in the absoluteness of time or its independent existence [that] appears in the view that this time is something intrinsic to the carrot." and understand that both time and being are relative, Mansfield leads us to examine "the arrow of time". He reviews Boltzmann's gedanken experiment demonstrating entropy only to point out that "completely isolated systems, like the box of gas, can generate no directionality to time because of the time-symmetric laws governing the system."

Victor Mansfield, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics." Boltzmann then imagined a partition in the middle of the box with all the particles in just one half of the box. The other half is totally empty. To proceed further we need to understand the concept of entropy, or measure of disorder. The more disorder, the less knowledge we have about the details of the system, the higher the entropy. When the partition is removed, the overwhelmingly most probable configurations of the new equilibrium condition involve the gas spreading evenly throughout the box. . . . Through this reasoning, Boltzmann proved the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that any isolated system's entropy must either stay the same or increase. Therefore, when the egg hits the floor it is overwhelmingly likely to go to a state of greater entropy. What is more, the increase in entropy defines the direction of the arrow of time. Time advances in the same direction in which entropy increasesCwhat we call the future. This does not deny that there are local decreases in entropy, like the growth of a child, but the global entropy relentlessly increases with time. As we will shortly see, entropy increases, but not the way Boltzmann thought. . . . The basic difficulty, which can be seen in several independent ways, is that completely isolated systems, like the box of gas, can generate no directionality to time because of the time-symmetric laws governing the system. [Imagine a graph which] displays the entropy, S, of an isolated box of gas plotted versus time, t. We see that the random gas motions give occasional deviations below the maximum. Although it is unlikely, the random motions spontaneously generate states of greater order or lower entropy, which are then brought back to maximum disorder by the same randomization. This is like the shuffling of playing cards that, on rare occasions, puts them into states of greater order, with continued shuffling returning them to disorder. Now imagine the following experiment . . . We just patiently monitor the system until its entropy spontaneously drops to the value S1 or below at a time t1. If we choose S1 low enough, this could take a long time. The virtue of choosing a small value of S1 is that once it occurs, we know we are very likely to be near the bottom of a dip in the entropy curve, rather then part way down a larger dip. This is simply because the even larger dips are so much less likely. At t1, when the low entropy, S1, occurs, since we are very likely at the minimum of a dip, an increase in entropy with time happens in either direction. At time t1 + e , where e is some small time interval, the entropy increases. We consider this the future. However, the entropy also increases in the past at t1 - e. Therefore, the symmetry of the underlying laws of physics gives no directionality to entropy increase or time.

For those who have difficulty imagining Mansfield's graph (which didn't download--such are the hazards of three-dimensional hypertext articles being projected onto two-dimensional hard copy), he is positing a moment in time, t1 when both the moment before, t1-e and the following moment, t1+e have greater entropy; in other words to the degree that the second law of thermodynamics describes the future, the "future" of this moment of lowest entropy could be the moment before, or, the moment after. The implications of Mansfield's observation are interesting. Those cases of minimal entropy when the moment before and the moment after may equally be the "future" may either mean that the "past" we think we are remembering is an unacknowledged memory of a "future"; or, that they are moments of a remembered future erroneously interpreted as the past.

Given what we have considered so far I wonder if perhaps those moments of the "past" that we don't remember are the memories of a "past" that has now been erased by a "new" future with which we have become quantumly entangled in the present, thereby erasing our "previous" past, the one that was the past of a different future, no longer ours.

The loss of one's memories of a previous past from which one has become quantumly disentangled may explain the otherwise most peculiar phenomenen described by Amrit Sorli, a member of the Scientific and Medical Network, whose paper "A New Understanding of Time and Gravitation in Physics"; can be found in Richard Shand's science node, or at her own address: http://www.ompio.it/cong-e.htm

Sorli suggests that "time" does not exist as a material quantity (or quality) in the Universe, but only as a human construct.

Time and Gravitation in Physics Hyperlink Boxes