Rebecca Goldstein on How Relation Changed the Flow of Existence – The Marginalian

“The hour, when it has penetrated into the nascent space of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times the length of its clock,” Virginia Woolf marveled at the incredible elasticity of our perception of time, which modern psychologists are only beginning to understand. Almost a century later, Sarah Manguso – our Woolf – faced a similar dilemma in imagining the pleasures and dangers of the inevitable progression of time. However, despite convincing our intuitive sense that time is a variable taken written by a bag of taking things that we think and things that we have felt that we call personal, there remains the powerful nature of time as a measurable, visible, tangible reality – and the separation between these two ideas of time is one of the most frustrating but most interesting things to exist.

Totally amazing Incompleteness: The Proof and the Paradox of Kurt Gödel (public library), philosopher Rebecca Goldstein – who also explored the most intimate aspect of our confusing relationship with time, the mystery of what makes you and your friend the same person – recounts how the emergence of modern physics in the twentieth century, especially Einstein's theory of relativity, changed our perception of time as a meaningful experience.

Goldstein examines the persistent imperfection of our understanding of time, which was a concern of Gödel and Einstein:

Despite popular distortions, to some extent motivated by the vague connotations of the word “relativity,” Einstein was… On the contrary, in his interpretation, the theory of relativity offers a realistic interpretation of time that is strikingly different from our perception of time. The great yawning chasm between “beyond” and “here” has widened even more, from the Einsteinian point of view, since absolute time – the time defined in the equations of the theory of relativity – lacks the very feature that seems to give an important stab to our self-reflexive experience of time: its immovable flow, ultimately illuminating all the way to our death yesterday. Is there anything we know more intimately than the passing of time, the passing of each moment?

And yet, Goldstein points out, Einstein's physics actually calculates rather than ensures this precise consistency of human experience of time:

The nature of the truth that comes out of Einstein's physics is more surprising than the shibboleth that is popular with undergraduates: everything is related to the ideas of reason. In Einstein's physics, there is no passage of time, no direct flow from a fixed past and an uncertain future. The temporal part of local time is as static as its spatial parts; Physical time stands as physical space. Everything is laid out, the whole spread of events, in the immobile four-dimensional space of time.

Time, then, is not a feature of the outer world – the universe “out there” – but the guiding compass of the inner world. (One is reminded of Henry Miller's meditation on the art of living: “How one directs oneself in the present depends on one's failure or infection.”) Goldstein captures this well:

The distinctions we make between the past and the present and the future – a distinction that is fraught with emotion and without which we cannot even begin to define our inner worlds – have only relevance. inside those inner countries. Objective time, as seen in relation, cannot support the distinction between past and present and future. Or, as Einstein said [philosopher and Vienna Circle member] Rudolf Carnap, “the experience of the present means something special to man, something really different from the past and the future, but this essential difference does not exist and cannot be realized within natural science.”

Einstein himself expressed this with striking precision in a letter of condolence to the widow of his longtime friend, the physicist Michele Besso:

In leaving this strange world, he has preceded me again just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For us physicists who are convinced the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.

Ultimately, these illusions are a direct result of the stories we buy into, which in turn are a direct result of the power structures that control the stories we call reality. In that sense, in fact, they are not absolute but related to the basis of our constructed beliefs. Goldstein considers a general shift in the theories of our time to be merely a symptom:

The necessary imperfection of our systematic systems of thought shows that there is no immutable foundation upon which any system rests. All facts – even those that seemed certain to be immune from possible revision – were produced. Indeed the very idea of ​​pure truth is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not rooted in reality. Instead all true thought is rooted in our minds, which are themselves unsuspecting forms of organizational influence.

Imperfection it is an absolutely mind-expanding read. Fill it with Goldstein on the paradox of identity, Thomas Mann on how time gives meaning over existence, and the psychology of why different events warp our sense of time.