Neuroscience, Buddhist philosophy, and quantum physics on the illusion of the past, present, and future
There are a few ways of looking at the past.
One is to see time as being like a road down which we are traveling. The present is wherever we are on the road and the past is “back there” behind us. It’s still there but, somehow, we aren’t.
The other way is to think of time as a process and, rather than being “back there”, it is simply gone.
The third way to look at time is as being like any other dimension. Time itself is an illusion and we are like a string of paper dolls, stretched out along the road. We aren’t moving at all and our perception of motion is a function of the different memories that appear in the brains of each of the dolls at each moment. We can’t know that we actually experienced the moment before simply because we remember it. This is the perspective on time that Albert Einstein introduced us to.
Some interpret time in General Relativity this way but that is not strictly necessary. Local time, what I would read on a clock at my own location, need not be interpreted as a dimension but could be a process that occurs at my location. Relativity answers the question of how that process appears to other observers relative to me, but says nothing about how it appears to me.
A fourth way, which is the subject of this article, is a quantum interpretation of the second perspective. Quantum physics, as we know it, tells us that the past can’t actually disappear, ever. That is because of a principle of quantum time evolution called unitarity. One interpretation of that is that information is always conserved. This is not the case in classical physics.
Suppose we consider time to be a process rather than a dimension, and suppose further that process is unitary. Then, the answer to where the past is isn’t “gone” or “back there” but “here”.
In other words, the past (and the future for that matter) exist within each moment but are not manifest. The past is not manifest in the same way that an encrypted message isn’t manifest. The information is all there but our minds don’t know how to read it. An anti-unitary process acts like a decryption device so we can read the past.
A recent experiment that made headlines was able to evolve a quantum system in an IBM quantum computer backwards in time by applying an anti-unitary transformation. If we can evolve quantum systems back in time, then that means that all those past states must exist in the present.
Buddhist thought suggested this concept 1000s of years ago by labeling the past as the “no-longer-happening” (’das-pa), the present as the “present-happening” (da-lta-ba) and the future as the “not-yet-happening” (ma-’ong-ba).
Buddhist belief is that a Buddha is able to perceive all of these at once, their consciousness permeates everything. Our attachments and emotional blockages prevent we unenlightened beings from perceiving these and so we are stuck in a present of our own making.
A being who is fully aware of their entire quantum state, assuming unitary evolution is a true law of the universe, would, presumably, be able to perceive all times as if they are real, that is, not conceptualizing or representing them as in a memory, but perceiving them directly by applying unitary and anti-unitary transformation to them.
Consider that we, even when perceiving the present moment, do not truly perceive it. Schopenhauer’s classic work “Will and Representation” explains this in terms of the Will, which is our perception of reality, and Representation, which is how we recreate reality in our minds.
Buddhist philosophy is likewise deeply concerned with this phenomenon because it is in representing things that we become one step removed from reality and stuck in our own suffering by attachment to things that, in themselves, only exist as representations in our heads.
In other words, by perceiving the world directly, without representation, we come to understand the artificial divisions that our minds create between people, things, self and the world, and so on. It is not that the divisions are invalid, but they are an impediment to letting go.
Neuroscience has discovered that this dichotomy exists within the brain itself. The most accessible treatment of this dichotomy which dispels many of the right-left brain misconceptions in popular culture is The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.
In this work, he explains how the right side of the brain presents the world to us while the left side represents it. In the history of the human race, he argues, the right brain has been the master, responsible for big picture, gestalt thinking while the left brain is the emissary, going out into the world, slicing it up into pieces and delivering results to the right brain. With the advent of civilization and writing, however, the left brain became more and more dominant as representation overtook presentation as the most useful perspective.
Rather than having a clear hierarchy and unified function, the left brain rebelled against the right brain and cut it off from the real world. It did this by changing the world itself. Increasingly, a world dominated by nature became a world of human representation: buildings, writing, and human made objects, all of which were given purpose and function by the left brain.
Consider the room you are in. First off, you are probably inside a room unless you are reading this outside. Even if outside, you are probably surrounded by artificial things. Only when you get out into nature, deep into it, away from books, phones, and other artificial objects, do you find yourself away from the world the left brain has made.
In that world, you still have representations such as plants and animals, your conditioned brain insists these are distinct beings, but you also can also directly perceive the world as an interconnected ecosystem, one that you are a part of. This gestalt (holistic) perspective requires that the individual parts be ignored in favor of the whole.
Western thinking has for centuries seen nature as a collection of resources. Trees for timber, animals and plants for food, rocks for tools and building material, lakes and rivers for water sources, and land for agriculture. All of this is left brained, representational thinking.
It ignores that the ecosystem, the interconnectedness of trees, plants, animals, rocks, and water. Each goes into the other and so all are one. Likewise, none has a specific purpose or use in that ecosystem. They simply take on a role engendered by evolution anti-teleologically (without a priori purpose). There is no distinction between them.
Even the word “interconnectedness” doesn’t get at the heart of gestalt thinking because it suggests a graph of relationships between individuals. The reality is that the plants, animals, water, rocks, and land are not distinguishable individuals at all. They each are in a process of becoming the others and so all are being in oneness.
This way of thinking is not new. It is not an outgrowth of the environmentalist movement which is stuck on the concept of interconnectedness rather than oneness. It is part of our ancient roots as living as part of the world and not hovering above it, exploiting its individual elements and managing their interconnected components.
The same is true of the past and future. The oneness of the present with the past and future is not simply a philosophical statement but a reality that our western representational way of thinking cuts off, making distinctions between what exists now and what was and what will be.
While classical evolution such as Newtonian mechanics suggests interconnectedness of two moments, unitary evolution of fields suggests oneness. Nothing is lost or gained and everything is in a process of becoming everything else.
What you perceive as the present, therefore, is like a single plant on the forest floor. While it may appear to be an isolated individual, it has no independent existence. It contains the entire forest, all of life itself in fact, with it.
The past, present, and future, therefore, are illusions in the sense that they are all different scramblings of the same message rather than different messages. Nothing really changes. Everything becomes everything else.
Knowing this to be true, that all times and all things are one, only distinguishable in our minds, helps us to let go of our sense of loss at the past, fear of the future, and to recognize that what we owe to others, including the non-human world, is exactly what we owe to ourselves.
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