It is important for me that, as I point out in the next section, the phenomenon of time capsules is very widespread in the physical world, and is not restricted to our mental states and experiences. In addition to my caveat at the end of the previous section, I should emphasize that I am not claiming consciousness plays some remarkable novel or extraphysical role in the world. Unlike Roger Penrose in his best-seller The Emperor’s New Mind, I am not suggesting that there is any ‘new physics’ associated with mental states. There may be, but that is not part of my time-capsule idea. However, I do believe we have to think carefully about the role of consciousness in the picture that we form of the world.
First, all knowledge and theorizing comes to us through the conscious state. If we want to form an overall picture of things, we cannot avoid allotting a place to consciousness. It is necessary for completeness: we have to consider ‘where we stand’. This is closely related to a second factor. Viewed as a physical system, the brain is organized to an extraordinary degree. It is vastly more complicated and intricate than the air we breathe or the star clusters we see through telescopes. There may not be any locations anywhere in the universe that are more subtly and delicately organized than human brains. There is not merely the brain structure as such, but also the distillation of accumulated human experience and culture that we carry in our brains. But this very organization may be giving us a distorted picture of the world. If you stand, like Turner bound to the Ariel’s mast, in the tornado’s maelstrom, you might well suspect that the universe is just one great whirlpool.
The lesson we learned from Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo is here very relevant. They persuaded us, against what seemed to be overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Earth moves. They taught us to see motion where none appears. The notion of time capsules may help us to reverse that process – to see perfect stillness as the reality behind the turbulence we experience.
Stand, as 1 have with a daughter, and look at Jupiter against the winter stars. Every clear frosty night we stood on the utterly motionless Earth – as it appeared to our senses – and watched through the winter as Jupiter, high in the sky, tracked night by night eastwards against the background of the stars. But then Jupiter slowed down, came to a stop, and went backwards in the retrograde motion that so puzzled the ancients. Then this motion stopped, and the eastwards motion recommenced. In all this Jupiter moved, not us. We could see it with our eyes. Seeing is believing. But what did Copernicus say? We must be careful not to attribute to the heavens (Jupiter) what is truly in the Earth-bound observer. I could persuade my daughter that the motion of the Earth, not of Jupiter, gives rise to the retrograde motion. To interpret events, we must know where we stand and understand how that affects what we witness. But we observe the universe from the middle of a most intricate processing device, the human brain. How does that affect our interpretation of what we see?
EXAMPLES OF TIME CAPSULES
As a first example, we can stay within the brain but consider long-term memory. A game we sometimes play at Christmas brings out the importance of mutually consistent records held in structures. Fifty events in recent world history are written down on separate cards without dates attached. Players are divided into teams and given the cards jumbled up. The challenge is to put them in the correct chronological order. The only resource each team has to attack the task is their collective long-term memories, which every good realist (myself included) will surely agree are somehow or other ‘hard-wired’ into their brains. How each team fares depends on the consistency of its members’ recollections – the records in their brains.
This example shows clearly that all we know about the past is actually contained in present records. The past becomes more real and palpable, the greater the consistency of the records. But what is the past? Strictly, it is never anything more than we can infer from present records. The word ‘record’ prejudges the issue. If we came to suspect that the past is a conjecture, we might replace ‘records’ by some more neutral expression like ‘structures that seem to tell a consistent story’.
The relevance of this remark is brought home by the sad examples of brain damage that takes away the ability to form new memories but leaves the existing long-term memory intact. One patient, still alive, retains good memory and a sense of himself as he was before an operation forty years ago, but the rest is blank. It is possible to have meaningful discussions about what are for him current events even though they are all those years away, but the next day he has no recollection of the discussion. The mature brain is a time capsule. History resides in its structure.
After our own brains, the most beautiful example of a time capsule that we know intimately is the Earth – the whole Earth. Above all, I am thinking of the geological and fossil records in all their multifarious forms. What an incredible richness of structure is there, and how amazingly consistent is the story it tells. I find it suggestive that it was the geologists – not the astronomers or physicists – who first started to suggest an enormous age for the Earth. They were the discoverers of deep time, which did start as conjecture. And it was all read off from rocks, most of which are still with us now, virtually unchanged from the form they had when the geologists reached those conclusions. The story of the antiquity of the Earth and of its creation from supernova debris – the Stardust from which we believe we ourselves are made – is a story of patient inference built upon patient inference based upon marks and structures in rocks. On this rock – the Earth in all its glory – the geologists have built the history of the world, the universe even.
What is especially striking about the Earth is the way in which it contains time capsules nested within time capsules, like a Russian doll. Individual biological cells (properly interpreted) are time capsules from which biologists read genetic time. Organs within the body are again time capsules, and contain traces of the history and morphogenesis of our bodies. The body itself is a time capsule. History is written in a face, which carries a date – the approximate date of our birth. We can all tell the rough age of a person from a glance at their face. Wherever we look, we find mutually consistent time capsules – in grains of sand, in ripe cherries, in books in libraries. This consistent meshing of stories even extends far from the Earth and into the outermost reaches of the universe. The abundances of the chemical elements and isotopes in the gas of stars and the waters of the oceans tell the story of the stars and a Big Bang that created the lightest elements. It all fits together so well.
For me, two facts above all stand out from this miracle of nature. If we discount the direct perception of motion in consciousness, all this fantastic abundance of evidence for time and history is coded in static configurational form, in structures that persist. This is the first fact, and it is ironic. The evidence for time is literally written in rocks. This is why I believe the secret of time is to be unravelled through the notion of time capsules. It is also the reason why I seek to reduce the other hard and persistent evidence for time and motion – our direct awareness of them in consciousness – to a time-capsule structure in our brains. If I can make such a structure responsible for our short-term memory – the phenomenon of the specious present – and for the actual seeing of motion, then all appearances of time will have been reduced to a common basis: special structure in individual Nows.