Time, Time and Time, Part Four: Is Time an Illusion?

Let me continue riffing on some of the ideas I planned to share at that “Time, Time and Time” forum. I didn’t manage to bring up this final idea, Idea 4, at the forum. This part has already left psychology behind and wandered into philosophy.

Idea 4: Is Time an Illusion?

Among the science-fiction stories about “time travel,” my favorite, besides Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, has to include Taizo Kobayashi’s The Drunk Walker (Zuibu Nan). If the time travel in Story of Your Life unfolds on psychological grounds, then the time travel in The Drunk Walker (Zuibu Nan) should count as philosophical.

In this novel, the protagonist damages the part of his brain responsible for perceiving time in order to save the life of his goddess. As a result, he is exiled from time. In other words, in the novel’s setup, time is a subjective perception rather than an objective existence. The foundation of time’s existence is the existence of the ability to perceive time.

As far as I know, psychology has no corresponding theory for such a wild premise. But some physicists and philosophers have entertained ideas that point in this direction.

For example, in Our Mathematical Universe, Max Tegmark proposes an extremely radical hypothesis: the essence of the universe is a mathematical structure. (Notice that this does not mean the universe “corresponds to” a mathematical structure; it means that the essence of the universe is itself a mathematical structure. Outside mathematics, there is no separate physical reality.) One implication of this “mathematical universe hypothesis” is that the universe is actually static, because in essence it is something like an equation.

So why, in a static mathematical universe, do we subjectively experience the dynamic flow of time?

It may well be because, in this universe, some kinds of matter can organize themselves into a very special structure. (See Our Mathematical Universe for the details; I can’t unpack them here.) This structure can generate subjective conscious experience. The flow of time, meanwhile, is some kind of illusion produced by subjective consciousness within this static mathematical universe. So the answer to the question above really lies in those two words: “subjective.”

This echoes Taizo Kobayashi’s setup in The Drunk Walker (Zuibu Nan). Perhaps the flow of time really is not an objective existence, but something that exists on the basis of subjective experience.

I admit, this hypothesis sounds extremely “pop-science.” It strongly suggests that consciousness may be a very basic component of the structure of the universe. That sounds especially like the sort of pop-science nonsense that eagerly mashes consciousness, Buddhism, meditation, and quantum mechanics together by force.

But actually, the relationship between consciousness and the essence of the universe really is a serious question that some contemporary philosophers are thinking about in earnest. We’ll explore this in the next article.

Notes

• This series, “Short Lessons in New Psychological Knowledge,” consisted of short popular-science essays and informal musings written back then to accompany material related to Zhichao Wei: Short Lessons in New Psychological Knowledge. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.