The drawer in which we keep our socks never somehow gets more arranged, with matching pairs increasing their frequency no matter how long we rummage through them. Disorder happens naturally. And if this really is physical or mathematical evidence for a “direction” or “arrow” of time, then time is real.
Arrows of time are not taken lightly in physics. Stephen Hawking once argued that if the universe ever stops expanding and begins to collapse, the arrow of time would point in the opposite direction and physical processes would reverse themselves on every level. Presumably we’d never notice anything amiss, since our own mental workings and brain functions would be running backward, too. In any case, Hawking eventually decided that reversed time couldn’t happen, and he changed his mind as if to demonstrate the process.
We have no other hard evidence for time except for Boltzmann’s second law of thermodynamics. But this entropy is no small thing. It’s pretty inarguable. Is there any way out that can make us not seem like naive pleaders as we build our anti-time cathedral?
Fortunately, yes. Although many casually use entropy as an argument for time, Boltzmann himself didn’t see it that way. Entropy, he argued, is simply the result of living in a world of mechanically colliding particles where disordered states are the most probable. Because there are so many more possible disordered states than ordered ones, the state of maximum disorder is simply the most likely to appear. Put another way, entropy is merely a matter of things slamming into other things in the here and now. No arrows exist. Randomization is a present-moment process. Sure, we humans can always peer at a dynamic scene, look away for a while, then look again, and things will be different. But different scenes, the fact of change, and randomization itself are not the same thing as time.
Boltzmann essentially said that a state of order in which molecules just happen to all move at the same speed and direction is the most improbable case we can imagine. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics is merely a statistical fact. Any gradual disordering of energy is like shuffling a deck of cards. What we called “order” when the deck was purchased, with each suit arranged in ascending array, was a special case. The act of randomization requires no ghostly magical external entity.
So if time does not actually exist, what do we experience in everyday life? We need to know before tackling the ultimate scary time-consequence, the apparent end to life. But more importantly, we need to know who experiences what, where these adventures take place, and how our lives unfold.
QUANTUM GUYS WRECK
THE POOL TABLE
5
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee,
“if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be;
but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Most people believe that there’s an independent physical universe “out there” that has nothing to do with our awareness of it. This seeming truth persisted without much dissent until the birth of quantum mechanics. Only then did a credible science voice appear, which resonated with those who claimed that the universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe.
Until then, this whole business was deemed a murky issue more appropriate to philosophy than to science. Yet the relationship between the physical world and consciousness, so redolent with the subjective aromas of cultural norms, has actually vexed and fascinated science for centuries.
On the face of it, consciousness or perception seems wholly different from the atoms, forces, and cause-and-effect machinations of the cosmos. If today one tried to unite them all, one’s initial tendency would be to give primacy to the material universe and then to try to find a way in which consciousness sprang from it. For example, the brain is made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles—all known entities—and it operates by an electrochemical process whose nature is no longer mysterious. If our awareness is merely some sort of subjectively felt spin-off of all this, then it could indeed be incidental and secondary to the modern world’s self-operating model of reality, in which case you wasted your money purchasing this book. Science would have gotten away with exactly that model, had it not been for a little niggling matter that arose just over a century ago: quantum mechanics.
Basically—and this goes back more than two millennia to the days of Aristotle—an early issue was whether consciousness fundamentally belongs to a realm separate from the physical world. It wasn’t a preposterous idea. Believing so allowed those who wanted to explore things like free will, morality, spirituality, and (later) psychology to have one arena to themselves, whereas those dealing with the hows and whys of the physical cosmos had another. The two didn’t need to muddy the same waters.
If there was any connection or commonality between the two realms—of consciousness and the physical world—it was that the gods or the one God was universally assumed to have created both. This is why treatises on individual behavior, as well as the discoveries by “Natural Philosophers” like Newton, who successfully uncovered the logic and consistency for all physical motion, routinely cited the Creator. The practice only vanished during the past century. These days, neither your therapist nor your physics teacher is likely to bring up the Deity.
Even as late as the seventeenth century, René Descartes declared that two totally different realms inhabited the cosmos: mind and matter. He had his own good logic for saying so, because in order for mind and matter to interact, there must be an energy exchange. And no one had ever observed any object’s energy either shrink or grow simply because it was being observed. Naturally, if our minds do not affect matter, the reverse must also be true. And if the universe’s total energy never changes (which is true), then it seems to leave no room for one or more separate consciousnesses to have any energy at all, which implies that consciousness doesn’t even exist.
But it does, as Descartes illustrated with his most famous maxim. So from that point forward, scientists pretty much left consciousness alone. When halfhearted efforts to unite everything occasionally arose, they were always based on the primacy of the random and inert material world that presumably gave birth to awareness somehow. (This was sometimes called physical monism.) No one tried traveling the obverse route by attempting to argue that the material universe might arise from consciousness. This absence couldn’t be faulted. Consciousness was and still is perceived as almost ghostly— how could mere perception move a rock, let alone create a planet?
Thus the choice was clear among thinking people. The verdict in modern science was, and still is, stick with the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. For centuries they’ve been regarded as inherently separate—or, in the view of a growing majority, consciousness somehow arises from an as-yet-undiscovered mechanism within material bodies, such as the structure or chemistry of the brain.
The motive behind asserting a duality between mind and matter was both noble and logical. Aristotle, desperately wanting to figure out how things work and desiring to uncover the physical rules of the cosmos, felt that removing the error-prone opinions of individual observers could only improve things. In short, he fought for objectivity. This essentially maintains that everything in the world is separate and independent from our minds. Isaac Newton very much liked this idea, too, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, his three laws of motion helped cement what we now call classical physics.
In France at around the same time, René Descartes was fully on board with this assumption of material realism, or causal determinism. (Those fancy terms merely refer to our standard model of the universe as provided by Newtonian physics. It’s simply the idea that all objects have mass and influence upon each other. Without the “pull” of all these myriad moving objects, everything else would remain at rest, or else continue traveling undisturbed, and we’d see no changes unfolding.) Remembering the harrowing travails of the likes of Galileo just a few decades earlier, Descartes figured that this assumption of material realism would let science proceed with the greatest safety and minimal interference from the Church. Let the Church have that other realm—of mind, consciousness, individual spirit, morality, societal rules, religious