Does Now Exist?

“The time for action is NOW!” he cried, and the people cheered. Someone called out to their leader from the crowd, “Sir, shall we convene in the public square in thirty minutes or so?!”

“Nay. Let us rest tonight and meet there tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.”

The way in which we perceive the passage of time permits us to feel that there is a well-defined moment, which we call ‘now’, that belongs neither to the past nor the future, yet depending on the context in which the word is used, part of the period we call ‘now’ can be seen to clearly belong to the period we call ‘the past,’ which is well defined; all completed events exist in the past, and to a period we call ‘the future,’ which we can only speculate about. If an event is what we are focusing on, information about when it takes place is secondary. If you mention an event in passing, and I ask the question, When will the event take place? you can respond in one of three ways, “Actually, it already happened,” “Actually, it’s happening now,” or “It will happen tomorrow” (or, any other time in the future). If we are focusing on time periods, then information about events taking place within those periods becomes secondary. I might ask you, “What did you do last night?” To this you might respond, “I sat on my front porch and drank wine.” If I call you on the phone and ask, What are you doing now?” you could say, “I’m sitting on my front porch and drinking wine.” Or, if I ask you, “What are you going to do tonight?” for the same activity you would say, “I’m going to sit on my front porch and drink wine.” In the second case, sitting on the front porch and drinking wine is only one of the things you are doing ‘now’; you are also talking to me, breathing, looking at your surroundings (if your eyes are open), as well as several other possible activities. Of course, when I asked you the question, What are you doing now? I only wanted to know which activity, out of all of the ones you were engaged in, was of primary interest to you at that moment.

‘Now’ exists for us as a somewhat well-defined period only in reference to events which have begun but are not yet completed. Events themselves are arbitrarily defined by us, and this compounds our confusion about the time we call ‘now.’ Without referencing any events, is there a way of identifying ‘now’? Of course there isn’t; there isn’t any such thing as ‘frozen’ time in our experience, so we shouldn’t think there exist fixed points on our usual notion of a timeline. Sure, there are approachable ‘limits’ that represent to us ‘snapshots’ in time, but if we mentally place our concept of a timeline (one-dimensional and continuous, starting from zero) directly above the positive-real number line, we are forced to admit that if we allow for stoppages along our timeline path of traversal, then the positive-real number line and the timeline become indistinguishable. Once we start traversing the timeline, we have to establish the rule that there can be no stoppages along the way until our trip is over. And if we were to add another timeline above the one we were traversing and allowed no stoppages on it ever, we would see that even when we ended our experiment on the first timeline (end of the trip), the traversal of the timeline above it would continue. So, if you tried to mark the moment ‘now’ by stopping the trip along the first timeline, you would be speaking falsely if you were to say, the time now is XX:XX because the second timeline (above the first), in which stoppages are not possible, is the truest representation of the 'reality' of time as we know it. 

Home is Where the Walls Are

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.                                                                               Friedrich Nietzsche

The individual mind is an open system, and all of its content comes from the world. That means various tribes have their hooks in you; experience shapes the mind and if you believe it plays the largest part in building your identity, you have to accept that you belong to each of them to some degree or another depending on their individual contributions. And, even if you declare yourself to be proudly not a member of this, that or another tribe, you remain susceptible to their influence, even if only slightly, if they had any role in creating you. The danger of the human tendency toward tribalist behavior, though, manifests itself most insidiously when we interact with others who hold many of the same deeply held beliefs that we do while we each in turn hold onto the belief that we are completely autonomous individuals. A sudden turn of events can quickly conspire to polarize thinking and drive the individual into the arms of the tribe, and the more fiercely independent we think ourselves to be, the more ashamed we feel at such times.

If you think you are a completely autonomous individual not susceptible at all to the calls of a mob, than you are in great danger of joining one.

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The Voices Within Are Voices From Without

The desire to belong to something greater than oneself is a longing found in humans everywhere, though it tends to be considered in a purely ideological sense. The notion of doing something for the ‘greater good’, for example, is often in the minds of those who profess such a desire. However, ask around and you’ll likely find many who'll claim they’ve never had a desire to be a part of something larger than themselves, and indeed some will seem concerned by what they mistakenly perceive as a dearth of empathy. However, when considering the concept in a more fundamental way, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that this desire is innate in all people.

Is not a union of two people, a partnership, something that can easily be perceived as greater than oneself? A person married with children can and often does consider the family as a whole to be more important than herself. Even one engaged in a loving relationship with another may come to express sentiments that reveal a sense of self-transcendence; it’s easy to recall at least one time in which a character in a romantic film gushingly stated, “My life would be meaningless without you,” to his or her lover. What about the quintessential loner, the intellectual type who is stimulated more by the ideas of poets and philosophers than the daily comings and goings of the people around him? He too experiences a sense of belonging to something greater, which includes not only the ideas but also the great thinkers who put them forth, as well as all of the people who have come to appreciate them.

Even if we have great difficulty in identifying with anyone in our midst, we can always imagine an ideal person to identify with and engage with while frequenting the coffee shops and bedrooms of our mind. Even the most cynical desire to connect with others. The individual human being’s mind, being an open system, is a product of and always remains connected to a global network of human minds. This global mind stretches not just across the planet, but across the whole timeline of biological history.

Scanning the spectrum of human experience usually results in a bombardment of noise, but when we engage in fine-tuning, rotating the dials in increasingly smaller increments, we come to detect coherent signals. We listen more carefully, and sometimes we lose ourselves.

And, when it becomes too much, we turn down the volume and come back to individuality.