Sunday, April 8, 2012

Arrow of Time

There are some serious scientific theories that conjecture that time is not a property of the multiverse but is a dimension of a bubble belonging to our human world created by human consciousness. In this view, the arrow of time is our perception of entropy in which order is dissipated and the universe runs down.

Another way to consider the arrow of time is our perception of the growing complexity of an evolving universe, including of course human development. Then the measure of time is not entropy, but syntropy (a word I found first used by the French Jesuit scientist and poet, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).

But apparently even the laws of thermodynamics, including entropy, and the laws of complexification need not be laws for all of reality and certain theories, yet to be verified or falsified can do without time as part of the ultimate explanation of reality.

I can't really fathom this, but there is a lot in theoretical physics that has been verified that I struggle to understand. But just think that if time is a sort of illusion (and some Buddhists have taught this for centuries), what does this mean for my aging and eventual death. And what does it mean for the "singularity" when a further evolved homo sapiens sapiens becomes immortal?

I think it leads to the "eternal now" which we are at this moment, in this time, place, community.

There are three kind of time: chronos: ongoing progression or regression; mythic return: circular, recurring, revolutionary; and kairos: momentous, this moment--which I think takes primacy. It is in this moment that I/we are in touch with past, future, here, with each other in the whole of reality. This moment with you is the foundation of all meaning in secula seculorum.

Hold me.

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