Chapter 22: Time and Human Experience

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Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take a stack of challenging sources, strip away the jargon and give you the essential transformative knowledge.

Today, we are undertaking a deep dive into the very substance of reality, wrestling with something so fundamental, so universal that we use it constantly, yet we cannot define it without immediately losing it.

We are talking about time.

It's the ultimate ungraspable ground of being, isn't it?

As Alfred North Whitehead, one of the great process philosophers, put it, the way we treat time and space, they're not sideshows.

No, not at all.

Their treatment must color the whole subsequent development of the subject.

I mean, if you get time wrong, you get everything that happens in time wrong.

I think that captures the philosophical weight perfectly.

We really have to start with this humbling realization that the greatest minds in history have, well, they've struggled with this.

St.

Augustine gave us that classic unanswerable question, didn't he?

He did.

What, then, is time?

Exactly.

He says, if no one asks me, I know what it is.

If I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.

And that inability to explain it is precisely the point.

Even Isaac Newton, the man who gave us absolute space and absolute time, he refused to define it in his Principia.

He just assumed everyone knew.

He just assumed it was well known to all.

He needed to treat it like a fixed container for his mechanical universe, but intellectually he knew defining it was treacherous.

That intellectual sidestep is fascinating.

It's the moment you try to pin the flow down that it just slips away, and all you're left with is a static diagram.

Which brings us to Schopenhauer.

Centuries later, he captured that haunting, inescapable quality of it.

What did he say?

Schopenhauer, writing back in 1819, called time and space the omnipresent nothing.

They're the only things we literally cannot think away.

We use this incredible analogy.

Oh, the one about the hand.

That's the one.

The hand can let go of everything except itself.

Time isn't something external to us.

It's the very condition of our experience, completely inseparable from the consciousness that's doing the experiencing.

And that really sets our mission for this deep dive.

We aren't trying to offer some definitive, final definition of time.

Instead, our goal is to see more clearly what current beliefs about time are likely, well, fundamentally mistaken.

Especially in modern Western culture.

Right.

The claim we're interrogating today is pretty provocative, that the view of time as a measurable, disposable thing, a commodity to be managed, is a delusion that actually thwarts a truly fulfilled life.

And we can trace the roots of this delusion.

I mean, the entire historical debate about time, is it real flow, or is it a static illusion?

It all centers on what we call the nexus of hemisphere correlates.

Okay, so our experience of time is divided.

It is, because our two brain hemispheres process reality using radically different modes of attention.

Let's unpack this core distinction then, because it sounds like it's the Rosetta Stone for this whole discussion.

What characterizes the left hemisphere's approach to time?

The left hemisphere, or the LH, operates mainly through representation.

It pulls the world out of its context and turns it into a map or a diagram.

So consequently, it deals in stasis, it focuses on isolated points in time, and it's always striving for predictability and systems that are closed and certain.

It's the analytic mode.

Exactly.

Necessary for grasping and manipulating the world.

And the right hemisphere, the RH?

The RH deals with the experience itself, the context, the relationships, the continuity.

It perceives flow and duration.

It embraces uncertainty and the openness of the future, recognizing the world is perpetually in motion.

So the RH is the better witness to reality.

We'd argue it is, because it processes the continuous complex world before the LH jumps in to carve it all up for utility.

So we're not just saying both takes are equally valid here.

We are making a stronger, what you call an asymmetrical claim.

Absolutely.

We're arguing that the RH take must be prioritized.

Because when the left hemisphere encounters something that defies its tools,

something continuous, seamless, and unmeasurable, like true duration, its tendency is just to deny its existence.

So the claim that time is an illusion is?

It's a classic example of this LH blindness.

It's projecting its own inability to grasp flow onto reality itself and saying, well, it must not be real.

And we see the pathological result of this denial in some pretty stark clinical and philosophical terms.

We do.

When that sense of flow ceases entirely, you see the issues that underpin Zeno's paradoxes, the whole philosophical problem of motion, and you see the painful phenomenology of schizophrenia where time literally stands still.

So ultimately, we're contrasting two coherent but conflicting views that will guide our discussion.

View one is the modern left hemisphere mode.

Time is a quantifiable thing or commodity.

Frozen, spatialized, sliced, and fragmented, a resource to be managed.

And view two, the right hemisphere mode.

Is time as a process of becoming?

As duration, something that must be deeply inhabited and experienced,

seamlessly integrated with purpose and consciousness?

The difference really is between calculating a resource and living a life.

That brings us to our first major critique, which is really a critique of language and

The problem of reification.

The moment we try to conceptualize or talk about time, we inevitably step outside of the lived experience.

And turn it into a spatialized object, a thing.

We make time into a noun.

And by turning it into a noun, we place it outside of time, immobilizing it.

You've frozen it into a diagram.

That's the very essence of the left hemisphere's analytical process.

I mean, since the LH prioritizes discrete, graspable things, if time is no thing, the LH quickly concludes it must be nothing.

But the true reality, the continuous flow, is far more substantial than any static, discrete object.

Infinitely more.

I find your argument that time is not a noun, but an adverb.

Really clarifying.

It's not a thing, but a quality or aspect of being.

It's how things are, not what they are.

Yes.

The philosopher Friedrich Wiseman pointed out that all the confusion surrounding time largely stems from using the definite article in the noun form, the time.

We're just chasing shadows created by our own grammar.

So we should think of time as something we do.

As in, we are temporally extending, rather than something we hold or measure.

And this idea of extension, this connects directly back to Einstein's view of spacetime.

Exactly.

Einstein showed that objects are not merely in space, they are spatially extended.

We have to apply that same insight to the temporal dimension.

Objects are temporally extended, rather than existing in time as if it's some separate container.

And even the word itself.

Right.

The Latin word for time, tempus, it comes from a root that means to stretch.

The concept of extension is bait right into the idea of duration itself.

The modern obsession with material, measurable things, with thinghood, that seems to be the conceptual barrier here.

This is what Abraham Heschel attacks so powerfully in his book, The Sabbath.

Heschel saw that modern culture is just infatuated with things,

substances that occupy space, things you can measure, acquire, and own.

And this obsession, he argued, makes us spiritually blind to the reality of time, which he called thingless and insubstantial.

It's easy to be materialistic when all you recognize is matter.

And he found fascinating support for this critique in biblical Hebrew.

In the word davar.

Exactly.

The term davar in Hebrew, which eventually came to mean thing,

initially had a profoundly different meaning.

It meant speech, word, message, event, or business.

It was always describing a process, an affair, or a relationship.

So it never referred to a static, inert object.

Never.

Which strongly suggests a cultural worldview that originally prioritized action and relationship over fixed, isolated entities.

And that prioritization of process over object isn't unique to ancient Hebrew, is it?

It's reflected in the etymological shift of the word thing itself in our own languages.

Absolutely.

When we use the word thing now, we think of a physical object.

But in Old English and Old Saxon, a thing was an assembly, a conference, or a transaction, a process of deliberation.

Like the all -thing in Iceland.

Precisely.

Iceland's ancient parliament, the all -thing, retains this original meaning.

It's literally the assembly, a continuous, fluid process of governance.

The word fundamentally shifted from describing a process of communal affairs to describing a fixed, inert object.

It's incredible that a word could transform from meaning a consensual decision to a stapler.

The same pattern applies to Greek and Latin.

The Greek pragma originally meant action, or deed.

It's the root of pragmatic.

It was only later, largely through the categorization efforts of Plato and Aristotle, that pragma was converted into a concrete, real thing.

The foundation of Western abstraction.

Yes.

And similarly, the Latin res meant an issue or a matter of concern.

We still use res correspondence to mean in the matter of, not in the object of.

So the conclusion of this historical and linguistic detour is profoundly important.

Things as we think of them, as fixed objects, they're secondary.

They're products of focused left hemisphere attention that seeks to isolate and categorize events in time.

They're not fixed entities at all.

They're merely events occurring at a pace that is convenient for our perception.

And that convenience of categorization starts subtly, often with grammar.

The arrival of the definite article in languages like Greek, for instance, that's philosophically revolutionary.

It is, because it allows you to take an adjective describing an experience, a beautiful experience, and instantly abstract it into a fixed, capitalized noun, the beautiful or just beauty.

And that chromatical move instantly generates the Platonic dichotomy.

It splits the world into the messy, sensory, changeable realm of phenomena, and the idealized fixed abstract world of ideas.

And this split is not inevitable.

As you said, languages like Japanese, which lack that easy mechanism for creating abstract nouns, they never developed that fundamental philosophical dichotomy.

Their reality remained more seamlessly integrated, less prone to abstraction.

So if our grammar leads us to create these concrete nouns, we also create the illusion of permanence and separation.

But as we established, permanence is purely relative to the timescale you're looking at.

Absolutely.

The distinction between an object and a process is only a matter of speed.

We see a candle flame as a process because it changes rapidly.

We see a granite mountain as an object because it changes slowly relative to our lifespan.

But on a cosmic or geological timescale?

That mountain erupts, erodes, and flows like a viscous liquid.

The boundaries between objects are just boundaries of convenience imposed by our perception.

Fundamentally, everything is flow.

So if reality is flow, the left hemisphere, in its need for utility and analysis and fixed points, has to impose stasis.

Julian Jaynes described this as the inevitable spatialization of time required for consciousness.

Jaynes argued that consciousness, operating in the LH mode, it can't deal with raw duration, but diachronic.

It has to convert duration into the synchronic side -by -sideness or a spatial arrangement just to process it.

It takes time, abstracts it, and views it as a spatial line or a series of immobile points.

It removes it from time itself.

And language is the chief instrument of this spatialization.

Language, the LH mode of Operation Parks -Lance, it compels us to spatialize.

We talk about long or short periods of time, importing spatial metaphors to describe temporal extent.

And this spatialization creates the dominant Western linear representation of time.

The arrow.

The arrow flying irreversibly from past to future, which is the engine for the myth of progress and constant forward movement.

And you contrast that linear arrow with circular time.

Circular time, which you find predominantly in Chinese, Indian, or Native American societies, is the time of the body, of generations, and of the natural world.

Seasons, cycles, birth, and decay.

It connects us to the cosmos.

It does.

It makes our relationship to the world porous and allows us to dwell deeply.

Linear time, by contrast, is highly individual, abstract, and buffered.

It keeps the world at arm's length.

And yet we take pleasure when we see the triumph of that flow over our attempts at stasis.

This is why old surfaces stone, wood, are so beautiful to us.

That aesthetic pleasure is profound.

It's the realization that process is substantial.

It is the victory of memento mori over the static monument.

I mean, think of Proust's incredible description of the church at Cambrai.

He didn't just see a stone building.

No.

He saw time at work softening and sweetening the memorial stones, making the marble flow like honey and drown the violets carved into it.

The rigid fixed monument of human effort yields to the continuous vital movement of nature.

Stone is changing just very, very slowly.

That makes the flow feel substantial, not merely abstract.

And this loops us back to the relationship between movement, time, and space.

Right.

Movement requires both time and space.

Time is fundamentally inconceivable without movement and change.

They aren't empty containers waiting to be filled.

They are realms of potential.

Meaningful only in relation to a conscious being that inhabits them.

And the moment we view them from the outside.

Through the lens of representation, time loses its single, crucial dimension, duration.

This freezing is the unavoidable treachery of the LH intellect.

While we're critiquing the philosophical dominance of this spatialized linear time, we have to acknowledge that over the short term, linearity is a necessary tool for survival and communication.

Oh, absolutely.

You need linearity to talk about yesterday and tomorrow.

But the mind's habit of spatializing time is so strong that even the direction of that line is culturally relative, which just proves how arbitrary our map really is.

It is stunningly arbitrary.

In Western culture, the past is behind us and the future is ahead.

We walk into the future.

But look at the Amara language in Peru or Malagasy speakers.

For them, the future is explicitly behind us.

Because you can't see it.

Exactly.

And the past is in front of us because it is visible to the mind's eye.

That is a fundamental reversal.

We just assume the future must be in the direction of sight, yet these cultures prioritize the visibility of memory.

Why would you project the unseen into the space you are facing?

The seen, the past is what's immediately available.

Or think about the Chinese time axes, which are sometimes vertical, above and below, in addition to horizontal.

Maybe related to their script direction.

Potentially.

Or the Pormpura Aboriginal community in Australia, whose time direction adheres only to the East -West axis of the sun, completely independent of where the speaker is facing.

And the Yipno people in Papua New Guinea provide the most beautiful, embodied example of non -Western time direction.

The Yipno live in mountainous terrain, and for them, time flows uphill toward the river's source.

The past is downhill, toward the mouth of the river.

It's literally topographical.

It is.

If you want to talk about the past, you gesture downhill.

If you talk about the future, you gesture up the slope.

These aren't abstract concepts.

They are embodied movements tied to their landscape.

These rich examples show us the incredible flexibility of the human mind in mapping time onto space, but they confirm that the mapping must occur, regardless of the cultural details.

And we have neurological evidence supporting this mental mapping.

Studies, often with patients who have right hemisphere damage and suffer from left hemineglect, suggest the past is mentally represented in the left hemispace and the future in the right.

So damage to the RH can actually prevent them from recalling past events.

Yes, while their future plans might remain intact, the mental timeline is spatial.

Yet, despite the complexity of time, space always seems to win the conceptual battle in our imagination.

It does, because space is simply easier for the intellect to handle.

I mean, children use spatial adverbs like here and there, months before they grasp temporal adverbs like now and then, and the ultimate tragic proof of the pathology of spatialization is found in schizophrenia.

Where the LH's drive to represent fixed space completely trumps the RH's experience of flow.

Time is so aggressively spatialized that static spatial adverbs tend to replace the fluid temporal ones.

The patient loses deray.

Which brings us to Henri Berkson.

He seems to be the great philosophical architect for understanding this loss of flow.

He dedicated his life to articulating the essence of time that is lost the moment we try to measure it.

Berkson is critical here, and we need to clarify his most famous distinction, temps versus

deray.

When I first encountered this, I was taught it was just clock time versus subjective time.

You know, waiting for the dentist feels slow.

That's a massive oversimplification.

It is.

It completely misses his revolutionary point.

So what is the crucial, authentic distinction between temps and deray?

Temps is time that has been measured, broken down, and therefore spatialized into a succession of abstract points.

That's clock time, a consciousness -independent framework.

Deray is time as lived, experienced, and felt.

It is a seamless flow, like a melody.

In deray, moments interpenetrate.

You can't isolate them with abstract thought.

So the act of representing deray as points on a line destroys its essential continuity.

It destroys its essence.

He wasn't arguing the clocks were wrong, just that they were telling a radically incomplete story about a secondary reality.

And Berkson was a giant in his time, but he was sort of eclipsed, wasn't he?

He was.

He won the Nobel Prize.

His influence was profound.

But he was ahead of his time, anticipating the breakdown of classical physics with the rise of quantum mechanics.

And his theory of direct perception was strongly opposed by mechanistic biology.

And of course, there was the famous 1922 debate with Albert Einstein in Paris.

That debate is often framed as a clash between the philosopher of flow, a Heraclitus, and the physicist of stasis, a Parmenides.

But they're better viewed as complementary.

So Berkson wasn't disputing the technical findings of relativity.

No, not at all.

He wasn't questioning that clocks measure relative rates based on velocity.

His argument was that relativity related only to clocks and measurement, making its description of time radically incomplete.

Time, as the condition of consciousness, remained untouched by purely scientific formulation.

And now, a century later, modern physics is lending support to Berkson's intuition.

It is a remarkable vindication.

Einstein's preferred model, the static block universe, where all time is equally real, it just cannot be reconciled with quantum mechanics.

Quantum physics deals with processes and inherent unpredictability.

So the reality of flow and continuous change, Berkson's core argument, actually aligns better with modern quantum field theory.

It does.

Louis de Broglie, a pioneer of quantum theory, explicitly argued that relativity pushed the spatialization of time to its extreme limit,

but it couldn't interpret quantum phenomena, which probe more profound strata of reality.

Berkson saw that the measurement itself imposes the fixity.

Exactly.

De Broglie recognized that Berkson's earlier work, Time and Free Will, anticipated the key insights of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg on wave mechanics by 40 years.

The fundamental act of measurement in quantum physics locating a particle, a point in space, necessarily excludes motion.

It turns the wave function, the flow, into a discrete particle, the stasis.

Berkson's philosophical framework gives us an almost perfect pre -neuroscience map of the two hemispheres.

He spoke of two forces in consciousness, intellect and intuition.

And this distinction maps estochically well to the LH and RH.

Let's start with the intellect.

This is the left hemisphere mode.

Its prime directive is utility and survival.

It interacts best with inert matter.

It sees the world not as it is a continuous flowing hole, but as separate static pieces frozen in time.

The cinematographic representation of the world.

That was his famous phrase, a rapid succession of still frames that mimic motion but lack true flow.

So the intellect's entire purpose then is to reduce the messy reality of qualities to predictable quantitative differences and to reduce time itself to manageable space.

Correct.

It takes the unique and reduces it to the repeatable.

Now consider intuition.

This is the right hemisphere mode.

It is direct experience.

It sees the world as undivided, experiencing the seamless flow of de ray.

It's life itself.

It's life itself.

And it is, by its very nature, inexpressible in abstract discrete words.

Only the continuous holistic forms of expression art, poetry, music can even approach it.

So the LH intellect is fundamentally incapable of truly understanding life or intuition because its tools, isolation,

abstraction,

measurement.

They inherently miss the point of a continuous process.

The intellect isolates things because isolation is a prerequisite for utilization.

The very word object, objectus means thrown against.

It's something thrown against us for grasping, measurement, and utility.

The world is catalogued not for metaphysical truth, but for survival and action.

This philosophical insight is beautifully reinforced by physicists themselves when they critique their own tools.

I'm thinking of Lee Smolin's critique of what he called the spatialization fallacy.

Smolin states that the fallacy of a spatialization of time is confusing the representation, the LH's map of motion, with time itself.

We have confused the diagram for the reality.

Timelessness in mathematics are properties of these representations, not of real motion.

Motion requires time.

So the LH tendency driven by utility works upon the phantom of duration, believing the phantom is the real thing.

That's it.

Let's focus on Bergson's insistence that flow is substantial.

He claimed that the essence of Duret is to flow, and change itself is not secondary, but real and substantial, elemem substantiel.

This is the critical ontological reversal.

If flow is substantial, then Zeno's paradoxes just collapse, Zeno's arguments that the flying arrow must be motionless at every instant or that Achilles can never catch the tortoise.

They only work if you atomize reality into distinct separable chunks.

So atomism applies only to the LH's map.

Exactly.

If you impose stasis, if you stop time's flow to find states or snapshots, you destroy time's very nature, because time is flow.

Bergson argued that movement must have priority over the things that move.

Right.

The things are simply abstractions, conveniences pulled out of the continuous movement.

As Schopenhauer also pointed out, time consists in nothing but movement, without anything that moves.

There are changes, but there is no fixed, static substratum underneath that change.

Movement does not imply a discrete mobile.

It doesn't.

We can't know the dancer from the dance.

That Yates analogy is perfect here.

It captures the indivisibility of flow and subject.

It does.

Our customary post -Cartesian philosophy sees things as primary.

They provide the substance that stands under the phenomena.

Bergson reverses this.

Reality is the ever -moving continuous experience, the flow.

Things are secondary, static products of perception that supervene on the flow, not the other way around.

He used the musical metaphor extensively to help us grasp this continuous, indivisible reality of experience.

He called consciousness the continuous melody of our inner life.

Think about listening to a melody.

You get the purest impression of succession and continuity.

The moments interpenetrate.

The continuity is what constitutes true duration.

And if you analyze that melody into distinct notes.

Slices or atomic points.

You are imposing spatial images, the LH mode of operation, and you have lost the musicality, the essence of the flow.

And the brain is doing this division for a very specific reason.

Utility.

The brain, particularly the LH, selects and isolates only the part of reality that interests us for immediate action.

We classify, label, and atomize things for utilitarian purposes.

The necessities of action restrict our field of vision.

We get a distinct perception from what is actually a wider canvas.

But the great artist, Bergson noted, perceives that wider canvas.

The artist's faculty of perceiving is less adherent to life, meaning it is less tethered to the utilitarian needs of grasping and surviving.

The artist sees the connections, the background, the context, the flow.

That is the right hemisphere mode perceiving the world, not as a catalog of objects, but as a continuous field of relations.

So the ultimate goal of philosophy, according to Bergson, is to temporarily divorce our attention from utility.

It is turning this attention aside from the part of the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning it back toward what serves no practical purpose.

It's a momentary detachment from the demands of action, allowing us to see the flow as the substantial reality that underlies our convenient categorization of things.

If flow is the substantial reality, then the opposite stasis and fragmentation is the philosophical starting point for some serious delusion.

We can trace its modern philosophical origins to Descartes.

Right, because he deliberately excluded the holistic relational understanding provided by the RH.

So his radical focus on the analytic intellect meant he was forced to view time as composed of static, self -enclosed, irreducible atomic points.

Which forced him into seeing reality as a jettering sequence of static moments, as William James so vividly described it.

This leads to the precarious belief that the thing which endures may cease to be at any given moment.

It sounds horrifying the world is constantly being replaced by an identical but separate photograph.

Abstraction generates a world that dies and is born anew at every instant, always on the verge of nonexistence.

And that profound philosophical difficulty experienced through pure LH abstraction is replicated tragically and nonmetaphorically in the clinical phenomenology of schizophrenia.

Explain this parallel.

How does the loss of flow manifest clinically?

The loss of the integrating power of time is central to schizophrenia.

It leads to what Minkowski called morbid dualism.

The synthesis between mind and body breaks down as the static world of concepts and fixed percepts replaces the dynamic world of lived experience.

So patients lose the continuous thread of life.

Resulting in profound alienation and incomprehension.

You mentioned the testimony about faces constantly changing and becoming unrecognizable.

Because the continuity over time is gone, there is no integrated process.

Everything becomes a substitution of one static percept for another.

A loved one's face, changing slightly, becomes alien and unrecognizable.

But the most devastating symptom related to time is sight still stand.

Time stand still.

What do patients describe?

The testimony is harrowing.

One patient reported, time stand still is never ending, I live in emotionless eternity.

Another would watch the clock.

The pendulum swung, the gears ticked, but the hands never moved forward.

The feeling is that the past, present, and future have been wiped out.

Leaving only a static, terrifying, immediate present devoid of motion or meaning.

So when the dynamic aspects of life weaken, there is a corresponding overgrowth of the fixed and rational.

Precisely.

The psychiatrist Thomas Fuch noted this characteristic imbalance.

A weakening of the dynamic aspects of life and a corresponding hypertrophy.

An overgrowth of the fixed, rational, and geometrical elements.

If time fails to integrate, the LH seeks to anchor itself in what is static and measurable.

And the patients explicitly articulate this desire for immobility.

Yes.

The patient who said, I love immutable objects.

Stone is immobile.

The train passes by an embankment.

The train does not exist for me.

I wish only to construct the embankment.

That is the ultimate spatialization of time in a clinical setting.

By focusing solely on the fixed, rational, and unmoving the embankment, the patient denies the reality of motion in life.

The train.

And we have measurable data supporting the hemisphere bias here.

Indeed.

Schizophrenic patients show significantly lower activation in right hemisphere regions that are critical for time perception.

They struggle to follow the flow of events, fail to predict event order, and lose the capacity to accurately judge duration.

It's the LH's rigid, fixed representation of time dominating and extinguishing the RH's capacity for seamless, lived experience.

Okay, let's reverse that perspective.

If reality is flow, then everything comes into being because of motion.

And reality must be forever evolving, constantly creative, moving forward into newness.

Time is not just duration.

It is creation.

And this stance immediately challenges deterministic philosophy.

William James suggested that trying to reconstitute reality from fixed concepts is always retrospective and postmortem.

Well, the LH deals only with familiar, static representations.

It can only assemble permutations of what is already known, the same facts just rearranged in different orders.

If we are trapped in static concepts, true novelty and imagination are impossible because everything must be predictable.

And physics, particularly quantum mechanics, has finally moved beyond Laplace's mechanical, fully deterministic universe.

Quantum physics fundamentally introduces unpredictability into the system.

Identical radioactive atoms decay at different unpredictable times.

Identical conditions do not lead to identical futures.

And this inherent unpredictability.

As physicist David Oliver put it, is a source of novelty, creativity, vitality.

It's why free will is compatible with physics.

Time is real and the future is genuinely open.

Bergson formalized this openness by distinguishing between two kinds of potential.

The first, which is the LH view, is the actualization of pre -existing potential.

It assumes all possibilities already exist, just waiting to be chosen like finding every possible chess game in a vast cupboard.

And the second?

The second, which Bergson championed, is true creation.

Nothing pre -exists.

The creative act, like Wagner writing Gooder Demeru, is a perpetual creation of possibility itself, not just reality.

Possibility isn't a thing waiting to be actualized, it's the absence of hindrance.

And this creative flow demands a reevaluation of the now.

The spatialized view sees the present as a dimensionless point, but flow requires the present to have dimension.

The present is never an instant.

It has to be thick.

Consciousness seamlessly straddles the immediate past and the immediate future.

My entire personal, cultural, and even evolutionary history is present right now, embodied in my physical being.

And my body is also anticipating the future.

At an embodied cellular level, acting toward outcomes.

This is the concept of paleology purpose influencing the present.

Bergson encapsulated this dimension with the term elasticity of the present.

He described the present as thick and furthermore elastic, stretching backward indefinitely depending on where we direct our attention.

The memory of what happened five seconds ago is still part of your present experience.

When we cease to attribute immediate interest to a memory, it falls back into the past.

So the undivided present is the perpetual present.

Which includes the entire past history, not as static simultaneous parts, but as a continually moving cumulative flow.

As Erwin Schrodinger profoundly observed, the present is the only thing that has no end.

This thickness fundamentally argues against the symmetrical timeline view that the left hemisphere loves to impose.

The past and future are asymmetrical in quality.

They're entirely different entities.

The past is always growing, having passed through the filter of being present, acquiring embodiment, richness, and meaning.

It's the realm of context and integration, a right hemisphere concern.

And the future.

The future is always diminishing as the present expands.

It's a theoretical projection, general, disembodied and quantifiable, a left hemisphere concern.

And this bias is reflected in clinical mood states.

Mania, which is LH dominant, is obsessively oriented toward an open, grand future.

While melancholy, RH dominant, is fixed on the regretful, embodied past.

So the crucial linkage we've uncovered is that the flow of time is intrinsically shaped by value and attention.

What matters to us alters how quickly or slowly time seems to pass.

Time is not a uniform quantity.

That explains the strange memory of depression.

It feels agonizingly slow in the moment because you're acutely focused on its passage, yet retrospectively it feels incredibly short.

The retrospective shortness is due to emptiness.

There was nothing meaningful or novel there to remember, no complexity of experience to file away.

And this helps us understand that common question.

Why does time speed up as we get older?

It's not a change in the universe, it's a change in our attention.

That's it.

Let's break down the three primary factors.

The first is affect.

In youth, the future is an infinitely open vista, constantly long for, which makes time feel slow.

We're impatient for what's next.

In age, the future is often feared, while the accumulated meaningful past draws us back.

That tension makes the present feel too fast.

The second factor is absorption or flow experiences.

Children are masters of flow.

They are fully absorbed in play.

Their experience of time is implicit.

Adults layer their experience with objectification and measurement.

In true flow experiences, where skill meets challenge, whether it's making music or performing surgery time, effectively stand still because consciousness is entirely integrated into the action.

And as we age, we lose that capacity.

We often do.

We become time -sick, feeling time as a fretful traveling companion.

And the third factor is conformity to expectation.

Novelty slows time down.

Unaccustomed to sense.

A new job, a weekend away in an unknown city, it seems to last longer.

Familiar routine speeds time up, compressing weeks into blurs.

Since everything is new to a child, time is slow.

And since most of life is routine to a working adult, time speeds up.

This is a potent argument for mindfulness, which forces us to attend to the present moment as if it were entirely new.

The moment we overlay experience with expectation and routine, we are relying on clock time, the LH's mechanism of measurement.

This brings us back to Smullen's critique that physics itself is reliant on a convenient fiction.

Smullen noted that all established theories of physics rely on the fiction of dividing the world into a changing system and a fixed, unchanging background.

The external clock.

The absolute ruler.

This Newtonian paradigm is incredibly useful for small, isolated parts of the universe.

But it falls apart when applied to the universe as a whole.

Because the background, the clock and ruler, isn't static either.

In other words, this system of measurement fundamentally misrepresents all of reality that is not encompassed in the system itself.

Exactly.

The human element confirms this.

As Tim Parkes observed, if there is one thing that is not a reliable measure of human experience, it is chronometric time.

Subjective, lived time is the most real time can be.

Clock time is merely a useful, restricted aspect.

So Einstein was overly dismissive to claim that the time of the philosophers does not exist.

He was.

And this is also the right place to clarify Bergson's often misunderstood concept, the ill en vita.

It's often mistaken for a magical substance.

It's essential to rescue it from that.

It is not an external energy source.

It is the spontaneous drive inherent in consciousness towards something that is valued.

It's the intentional arc, the effective directed energy required for continuous pursuit of a goal.

It's the dynamic element that allows us to be creative, active beings.

So the clock, like language or money, is an abstract, ideal symbol running parallel to the real world.

It is a construct of the intellect that offers a standardized reference point.

But it only has meaning when it cashes out in rich, lived experience.

Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that time is fundamentally not regular.

All pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

To quantify time, to see only clock time, is to miss the richness of quality.

The tyranny of measurement also manifests in our linear idea of causation.

A precedes B.

This is an LH construct that works beautifully at an intermediate scale, like simple mechanics.

But it quickly breaks down at the lowest, quantum, and highest organismic scales.

This linear chain of cause and effect is just inadequate for describing complex reality.

To see its failure, we have to look at quantum entanglement.

Which defies the notion that a cause must precede an effect in a simple spatial chain.

It does.

You have two separated particles, once linked, that instantly reflect changes in the other, seemingly faster than light.

Conventionally inexplicable.

If you assume linear causation and local causality, yes.

But the conclusion, supported by Berkson's view of continuous flow,

is that we are likely mistaking the particle for a distinct entity, instead of seeing it as an aspect of a whole field.

So intervening at one point alters the entire configuration instantaneously.

It's like a Gestalt shift.

When a drawing flips from being two faces to a vase, the whole image reconfigures instantly, without a causal chain passing from one side to the other, or magnetizing an iron bar.

The system reconfigures as a unified whole simultaneously.

This idea supports the work of physicists like Feynman and Hibbs, who suggested motion is continuous but not differentiable into distinct particles.

It aligns perfectly with Berkson, who anticipated the need for non -differentiable motion in a matter field.

The idea that static discrete events are stitched together by linear causation results in a Frankenstein world.

As philosophers Angem and Mumford argued, a world unfit for the continuity of living biological processes.

So linear causation is largely an artifact of the LH's capacity for shearing off context, pulling one arrow out of a vastly complex diagram.

Exactly.

Newtonian frameworks, so successful for describing small, isolated parts,

fail when applied to the universe as a whole.

Scale changes not just quantity, but the kind of phenomenon we're viewing.

And this complexity forces us to reconsider Aristotle's Four Causes.

We've become obsessed with the efficient cause.

What immediately precedes the effect, but what about the final cause?

The final cause, or purpose, is crucial.

The purpose of the horseshoe, to protect the horse's hoof, is why it was made.

The future purpose extends an influence back into the past, guiding the craftsman's efficient actions in the present.

Causation is not a simple linear chain.

This sounds almost like the mind -brain relationship itself, which you suggest might be a form of entanglement.

It's a compelling model.

We often struggle to say if the mind causes the brain, or the brain causes the mind.

Perhaps they're better considered as aspects of one and the same event.

Neither causes the other.

Their coexistence creates the phenomenon of entanglement.

It's a unified field, not a causal chain.

This notion of flow and feel brings us to the profound relationship between time and the infinite.

Berkson provided a beautiful definition of the infinite.

He did.

Anything that lends itself simultaneously to an indivisible apprehension and an inexhaustible enumeration.

Time and movement share this paradoxical quality.

And the ultimate infinite we contrast time with is eternity.

Is eternity simply the stopping of time?

That is the common, intellectual mistake, the LH's attempt to conceptualize infinity as stasis.

The theologian Alexander Schmemann offers a powerful corrective.

Eternity is not the stopping of time, but its resurrection and gathering.

The LH's fragmentation of time, its slicing, is the fall of eternity.

So to stop time would be to destroy the movement that constitutes the eternal.

They are not enemies or opposites, they're mutually dependent.

This sounds exactly like the complementarity principle we see in physics.

Oppenheimer famously affirmed this philosophical complementarity.

Time history and eternity timelessness are complementary views, neither reducible to the other, just like wave -particle duality.

And the poet William Blake gave us the ultimate metaphor for this required complementarity, holding infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Eternity then is not a measure or an amount, it's a quality, a way of being.

Perhaps it's best understood as an adverb, not a noun.

Even the moment which has no measurable dimensions is, as Kierkegaard put it, an atom of eternity.

Simultaneously unmeasurably brief and everlasting, always present, as the Zen master Degen observed.

This philosophical debate mirrors the physics debate on the reality of time.

We discussed the three main models earlier, can we review them and link them back to the hemispheres?

Let's do it.

Okay, the block universe sees all times as equally real.

Time is static and timeless, that's the LH static whole.

Then presentism, where only the dimensionless brief present is real, past and future don't exist.

That's the LH endless static bits.

And the growing block model.

Where the present and past exist, but the future is unreal.

That's more plausible, but it still relies on slicing.

The block universe view, often preferred by physicists seeking timeless equations, leads to the claim that time is an illusion, but it fails to account for the irreversible passage we experience.

Both the block universe and presentism are classic LH constructs.

Either the whole is static, or it's made of static bits.

A promising refinement comes from models by George Ellis and Roger Penrose.

Ellis suggests time is a primary entity, a growing volume of space -time.

And critically, Penrose suggests that space may be the emergent phenomenon, while time and its flow are more fundamental.

And the ultimate confirmation that time is not an illusion seems to come from the fundamental nature of physical reality itself.

Yes.

The best models we have, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, are fundamentally time -asymmetric, meaning irreversible.

Time is obstinately real and fundamentally creative.

Ildia Prigogine emphasized that nature achieves its most complex, beautiful structures, like life, through irreversible processes associated with the arrow of time.

The universe must be asymmetric in time.

Constantly generating structure and novelty.

This philosophical mistake, believing that what is timeless is real and what is time -bound is inferior, has damaging consequences for how we live today, leading to the modernist fantasy of defying time and embracing perpetual stasis.

We see it in the obsession with anti -aging, the focus on external quantifiable health markers and even the push for cryogenics, the ultimate denial of the flow.

But the most pervasive consequence is the idea of time as a quantifiable resource.

Which aligns perfectly with the left hemisphere's utilitarian measuring tendency.

Benjamin Franklin's famous dictum, time is money, established time as an exchangeable commodity.

Time becomes chunks that can be saved, wasted or, astonishingly, stolen.

I remember that report claiming time -theft chatting or long lunches was America's number one crime.

When time is a commodity, the result is that we rush our lives indiscriminately to pack more in.

We multitask constantly, reducing the overall value of each experience.

This frantic drive, the constant chasing of a phantasm, leads to poor quality work, failure to process deeply and a failure to be fully present in the moment.

We are constantly trying to defy the flow by optimizing it.

This is the philosophy that the slow movement resists.

You shared an anecdote about the Greek olive harvest that beautifully illustrates the loss of value when speed is prioritized over meaning.

Historically, the olive harvest was a process that took three days of shared, embodied, convivial work.

There was singing, laughter, storytelling, community -binding everyone to the land.

Now modern industrial equipment does the extraction in one high -speed, noisy morning, replacing that meaningful experience with mechanical, extractive labor.

And the critical question is,

what are we doing with the time retrieved, and was the lost communal experience not inherently more valuable to our collective well -being than the time saved?

The ancient Greeks would have found our obsession with productive work baffling.

They absolutely would.

They saw leisure, scoli, the root of our word school, as the purpose of life, not mere laziness or idleness.

Leisure was the cultivation of stillness, attention, and a receptive openness to what is without any utilitarian purpose.

The philosopher Joseph Piper argued that busyness is the true laziness.

A failure to engage fully with oneself and one's culture.

Leisure is the foundation of genuine culture.

And this failure to engage fully with life's flow, this right hemisphere deficit, is linked to a profoundly modern concept, boredom.

Boredom is not just restlessness.

It's linked to a failure to sustain attention and an inability to be attuned to life's flow.

It is a hallmark of right hemisphere deficit conditions like ADHD.

When attention fails, time feels interminable, endless and timeless.

The very condition Minkowski described as the loss of life's momentum.

So to circle back to where we started with Augustine, time is not the enemy.

The attempt to think it away is tempting only because flow is recalcitrant to left hemisphere language and rational thought.

But the integrated conclusion harmonizing brain science, intuition, and reason is that time is real, essential flow, and the absolute condition of existence itself.

We must remember Augustine's ultimate realization.

The world is not made in time, but with time.

This deep dive has been a powerful journey into recognizing our own limitations in perceiving reality.

Let's briefly recap the essential takeaways.

The core conflict driving all disagreements about time flow versus slices is rooted in our two asymmetrical modes of attention.

The right hemisphere sees continuous reality.

And the left hemisphere sees fixed representation.

And we must decisively prioritize the right hemisphere's view.

Time is real flow, inseparable from creation, its duration is asymmetrical, and leaves the future open and fundamentally creative.

The fatal mistake of Western rationalism has been believing that what is bound in time and change is an illusion and only what is timeless is true and real.

But time is not a tyrant or an external constraint imposed upon us.

It is the force field of individuation, freedom, and creativity.

Without time, there was no novelty, no meaning, no being, and no story worth telling.

And that leaves you with one final provocative thought inspired by the poet Rilke's reflection on impermanence and the divine creative act.

You, the individual, strive to last forever, to achieve permanence.

But could you possibly be used by the divine if you were not ephemeral?

Ask yourself this.

How do you truly know that the world that passes is inferior to an imagined world in which nothing passed?

Where would the value be if there were no creation, no loss, and no flow?

Thank you for diving deep with us today.

We'll see you next time for another Deep Dive.