The Future of Time - How Covid and globalisation could shape a new perception of our oldest companion
By closely examining the deja vu phenomenon, I formed the idea that Time may be a tool humans use to connect Thought. If true, then deja vu may be serving an extraordinary evolutionary purpose, in that it could be providing us with an early hint of how we’ll understand and even perceive Time in the future.
Out of curiosity, I recently decided to investigate a phenomena many of us have experienced at some point: deja vu.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been a great deal of empirical research done due to the phenomenon’s ephemeral nature.?
What I did find was mostly based on field reports, which compels researchers to speculate what the cause of deja vu may be.
Some of these conclusions seem quite logical from a 20th Century perspective.
But what was missing, and why I thought it timely to take a fresh look, was an investigation into why this phenomenon might be happening at a species-wide level.?
What I discovered was something very different to what I set out to find, as it gave me an insight into how the Western perspective of Time is based on a strand of more archaic understandings of Time, and how that thinking might already be in the process of renewal.?
To give you some background into what I do: I am what might be roughly described as an evolutionary phenomenologist, in that I analyse ideologies, behavioural patterns or human-related phenomena from an evolutionary perspective.
Such phenomena might be the focus of one or more areas within the fields of physics, computer science, economics, sociology, anthropology or biology.?
Although I do take into account what individuals involved in those specific fields currently surmise about a particular phenomenon, my role is to take an agnostic, multifield position on any ideology or paradigm to better examine the phenomenon afresh, as an outsider with a macroscopic perspective might do.?
This means I first try to ignore what the ‘current consensus’ or status quo on a particular subject is within one field, even deeply ingrained ones.
By starting with a blank ideological slate, I then try to understand how and when that consensus was formed to determine whether that view might still be helpful or has become unhelpful to human progression.?
Where a new paradigm might be visible, I try to formulate it in a way that helps our understanding of ourselves as a species within Nature in the 21st century from a macroscopic level.
As such, by the end of this piece I hope you will have an entirely new understanding of Time and how our understanding of Time generally shapes:
With that little preamble out of the way, let’s deep dive into the future past of deja vu.?
What is deja vu again?
The first known empirical attempt that I can find to measure deja vu occurred in 1884, when psychiatrist Henry Osborne ran a survey at Princeton University to understand what he called ‘illusive recognition’.
It was one term used to describe the feeling at the time. Others were “sentiment of pre-existence”, “phantasms of memory”, “sensation of reminiscence” or “fallacies of memory”.
It wasn’t until the mid 1890s, a period when scientific interest in memory dysfunctions, or paramnesias, was at its peak, that the term ‘deja vu’ became de rigueur.
Since then, the phenomenon has rarely been studied experimentally. When it is, it is usually done with artificial struts such as hypnosis or electrical stimulation to trigger responses.
Even the empirical studies differ when it comes to guessing how many of us experience it, ranging from 60% up to 97%. Most guesses settle on a figure of about two thirds of the population.
This is shorthand for saying: “we don’t know, but apparently most of us experience it”.
There is still the possibility that less than half of us know what it is, as early studies thought, or that everyone experiences it eventually.
In case you haven’t ‘yet’, I’ll try to explain my mental process when it occurs.
Imagine you are driving along on a highway, or sitting in a cafe, and quite suddenly you have the feeling that what you are experiencing has happened before.?
Not in the sense that it is similar to a previous occasion, but exactly like a previous occasion, with every movement, gesture and thought flowing as if it is an exact one-to-one repetition of a previous one, even if you have never been in the cafe or that part of the highway before.
The first thought sensation I have is: ‘Ah, this has happened before’. This is rapidly followed by the awareness that: ‘No, this is deja vu’.?
The third step, and I am not sure if this is common in others, is for my mind to try to ‘race’ towards the end of the brief experience in the vain expectation that I will be able to predict what will happen before it actually does.?
This never happens, the dreamlike feeling passes, and the more familiar perception of reality settles in again. Overall, the feeling is like precognition or recalling a dream.
I may have experienced it a dozen times in my life, possibly more, and it can occur during banal moments or doing something new, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.
I have noticed a mild increase in heart rate when I try to race ahead but otherwise there are no physiological effects.?
What is peculiar is the slightly unnerving feeling of incompleteness, of mildly anxious expectation, similar to when you hear the second last note of a musical pattern and wait until it resolves into the tonic.
Except it doesn’t. You continue waiting, expectant, slightly uncomfortable, until the feeling passes and you go back to perceiving reality as you normally do.
This feeling of distortion, that something is ‘not quite right’, of glimpsing at a memory that never was, may be why many early studies concluded that deja vu is akin to a ‘system glitch’ or feedback loop as the brain tries to recalibrate memory with its simultaneous perception of reality.
One early idea, the optical pathway delay theory, can be summed up as follows:
“The first set of information from one of the eyes barely has time to reach the visual cortex before the information from the second eye arrives. The difference in time between the two inputs is so short that the first eye’s information is not encoded as an event of its own. When the second eye’s information is received and encoded as a separate event, a sense of familiarity comes with it. The individual experiences the oncoming information as being experienced for the second time, but cannot locate the source of the previously experienced event as it has not been encoded for memory.”
This suggestion was refuted when researchers O’Connor & Moulin, who have examined deja vu in successive papers, found that the blind can also experience deja vu.
A general lack of consensus across the board suggests, if we are honest with ourselves, that we don’t know what it is.
But it does seem that most of us experience deja vu at least once, and that when it is perceived, it is linked to our perception of time.
With these two points that I could accept as fact, I set out on my inner voyage of discovery.
What is deja vu again?
Firstly I thought, if most of us experience it, then I feel it should be treated as an evolutionary trait rather than an anomaly or error in perception.
Working on this assumption, that it was a trait, I tasked myself to figure out whether it was more likely a progressive trait, or a vestigial one.?
This means I wanted to know if the curious phenomenon was a remnant of our past, soon to slip out of our DNA because it was no longer serving a purpose, or a very early version of a brain function that might develop in the future.?
The third possibility, which came to me much later, was that it could be both.
To think of how both might be possible, consider wisdom teeth. Initially they may seem vestigial, in that before our transition into softer foods, we needed a third set of teeth to help us chew into older age. Now with better understanding of oral hygiene and longer lives, these teeth get removed to prevent overcrowding in the mouth.
But recent research suggests that the germination tissue out of which wisdom teeth emerge could be used as autologous tissue, which doctors can remove and store into an embryonic stem cell bank for the time when the donor's other teeth begin to degrade in old age.
While this may still be speculative, also consider how our recent understanding of the appendix has shifted from it being considered a vestige of our past to an essential reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria.
Such paradigm shifts emerge from increased understanding of functionality.
With my investigation, I was hoping to increase my understanding of deja vu’s functionality via an abductive or ‘intuitive’ approach, as inductive or deductive approaches are not really possible due to the fleeting nature of the beast.
The approach I use is to progressively ask myself a set of fundamental questions and then meditate over potential answers once I have an acceptable answer to the previous one.
In the case of deja vu, those sets of questions were:
When addressing the first question, I concentrated on what was actually occurring by reflecting on my personal experience of the phenomenon, which was that two distinct mechanisms were functioning simultaneously in the brain.?
The first was the ‘normal’ real-time perception of reality, while the second, running in lock-step with the first, was a kind of memory bank retrieval.?
Now why might that happen? A basic ‘reality check’ that the brain needs from time to time to reboot itself? Perhaps, but why does it occur so infrequently?
From this I concluded that it cannot be considered essential, but perhaps a ‘nice-to-have’.
But it could also be that those who never experience it are the more progressive, in that their brains don’t need the ‘refresher loop’.???
So I returned to the first question by looking at the two mechanisms at play: Why was I able to ‘see’ both of these processes at the same ‘time’, as it were. That thought intrigued me. Why indeed.
Could it be possible that everyone does experience deja vu, perhaps regularly, but we generally don’t have (or need) the ability to see that it is happening? Why this sudden ‘third person’ perspective of something that was inherently first person and discrete, namely memory and perception?
It was as if we have the innate ability to withdraw from two central processes to passively observe them, if only briefly and only once in a long while. What if that ‘distancing’, extraction or objectivity function was the heart of the matter?
Why would any species have the ability to simultaneously perceive both the present and an irreal past? Could this be linked to the way we perceive Time more generally? An internal Time processor, as it were, that apparently functions very well but may in itself be in a process of evolution?
Possibly. But then why? For what purpose? And come to think of it, how do we actually perceive Time anyway?
With that, I tentatively advanced to the next question by examining how we currently understand our old Father Time.?
Father Time, however, proved to be quite inscrutable.?
I spent several days researching the various ways Time is perceived, both from cultural perspectives as well as from within the realm of physics, happily writing what I hoped would be a mildly humorous summary that I ultimately had to delete for the sake of keeping this piece readable.
There are simply too many nuanced ways in which to perceive Time.
Even breaking it down into the following two schools of thought, both of which have been debated in various forms since the time of the Ancient Greeks, doesn’t do it justice, since it only gives a Western understanding of it and fails to capture the luminance of the many minds that have pondered it over the centuries. These are:
1) Time exists and brings us forward in a chronological fashion, or
2) Time doesn’t exist and is a tool of our minds we use to make sense of the world.
When broken down like that, Time starts to look a lot like God.
Curiously, the reason why we say ‘chronological’ in the West comes from the sickle-wielding god of the harvest Cronus – the Ancient Greeks’ version of Father Time.
And as an added side note for history lovers, Cronus donned a black cloak and ‘went goth’ in the European Middle Ages to become the Grim Reaper. We all have our phases, it seems.
Although mind-bendingly difficult at times, my investigative process into Time was nevertheless fruitful, because I gradually began to see a pattern emerging in the way Time is perceived in the West and how that perception shapes specific theories like the Big Bang.?
After several days of study, I concluded that Time is principally used as a tool:?
1) to measure spans between beginning and end states; and?
2) is particularly focused on the physical realm.
This intrigued me. Why the focus on the physical? Is that all Time is good for?
I returned to that original thought I had regarding the feeling of deja vu being a sense of anticipation, of incompleteness, as though one might be caught listening to the second last note of a song that plays on forever, never resolving into completion and permanency.
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I began to contemplate the connection of ideas associated with ‘incomplete thought’ and considered what its opposite ‘complete thought’ might entail.
During this period of contemplation, the image of a spider building a web appeared to me, as did the image of a circle forming as if drawn by a compass in the sky.
I am quite familiar with these noetic images now, as I recognise that they are clues for further contemplation. They spring from the subconscious, sometimes appearing at the edge of waking, other times in meditation or during walks in Nature.?
My process is to examine the images in context with the theme I am trying to work out, as though they were pieces in the puzzle. It usually leads to unexpected conclusions, as it did in this case.
What I deduced from the imagery, was that principles of ‘circularity’ and ‘connectivity’ bear some association with how deja vu might be linked to the way we perceive Time.?
Eventually I joined the dots: It was an awareness that by understanding Time as circular, or ‘aeonic’ instead of chronic, I would achieve some kind of progression regarding my attempts to understand the phenomenon of deja vu.
To put this another way: Chronic Time is the sequential and linear way in which we generally perceive, and therefore measure, Time.?
Aeonic Time, on the other hand, is both wavelike and cyclical.
Chronic Time can be used to measure fractions or segments of periods that may be considered ‘microscopic’, such as the span of our lives, or the life of a species.?
Aeonic Time is Time ‘writ large’, so to speak, or Time’s macroscopic form.
To depict this idea, this is what a linear segment of Chronic Time looks like to you and me:
And this is what a segment of Aeonic Time kind of looks like from the topological level:
I say ‘kind of’ because it is actually quite a poor representation. So I will try to flesh it out in words:
The image above attempts and largely fails to depict this progression from the microscopic to the macroscopic, stepwise, and yet also in parallel as the universe expands toward a new Big Bang, which roughly equates to the current Cyclical Theory of the Universe.?
Each ‘line’ represents an increasing level of complexity, up from the currently unknown levels of microscopia, through to a level of the macroscopic that may or may not exceed the universe as we currently understand it.
What the image does not show, because it is a jpg, is firstly time’s elasticity, meaning time is never static, but continually undulating into ‘ripples of time’ that work across all levels of complexity, and secondly, the fact that nothing in particular lasts the length of time except the universe itself.
Therefore, what should be shown is that certain lines converge at certain points where a species dies out or bifurcates out at others, branching into new species or subspecies.
Depicting all that in a static image is beyond my skill, but perhaps a talented mathematician and coder will be able to visualise it as an animation.
Now you might think this is all very clear to me. It isn’t. I am simply writing what I understand the imagery to mean and can very well be wrong in my interpretation. If someone can see a pattern within it that helps them in their work, then it has done its job.
That said, I can already see the main points where Aeonic Time differs from the Chronic.
Our understanding of Chronic Time currently assumes a certain extrinsicality from our endeavours on Earth. Meaning: We feel swept along on ‘the tide of time’, as though it were a force separate to us.?
Aeonic Time, on the other hand, is intrinsic, it is part of us because it includes all the molecules that are within us. It also assumes we are a bundle of compounds on the host of the earth swirling through space.
Put another way, by personalising Time from that of an individualist perspective, we submerge into the tide, becoming one with it. Simultaneously, we do have some say where and how that tide will flow and at what pace at a collective level.
This may sound like I am wading into mysticism, perhaps with a Doaist undercurrent.?
I initially thought that too upon rereading, until I caught myself and realised that no, my quaint Western mindset is making those semantic associations by default.
I always try to be careful when assessing phenomena not to slip back into any particular thought pattern or ideology, particularly dualist thinking that makes a distinction between the internal and external.
It's easy to do, because our understanding is shaped by language. When this happens, and I catch myself, I revert to the question: How could this interpretation of the phenomena help humanity evolve?
So, to make it clear: My goal here is to clarify how Time can be perceived differently to how it is, which is to say that Time may be perceived as a ‘Grand Connector’ rather than a ‘driver’.?
I do so because, in writing this piece, I can already see how a circular understanding of Time will very quietly become more prominent in the years to come, mostly because of the internet-driven globalisation of thought.
This paradigm shift will, in part, be gradually ushered in by the fact that most scientists in the world of today are not stemming from a Western, Greco-Christian background.?
They come from cultures where a cyclical concept of time is more ingrained, namely China, India and South America.
Geopolitical transitions aside, what is also interesting is how this subtle shift will affect all manner of fields. I will aim to outline those in future posts.
For now, I want to take you deeper into what Aeonic Time offers a study of consciousness and sentience. Because that is where Western science traditionally struggles due to its Cartesian mechanistic understanding of Nature (although there have been some recent inroads, particularly in the realm of quantum entanglement), and therefore where it needs the most help.?
To help with this next step, because it may appear complex to some, I am going to present a small insert from the earlier image.
In the image you will see two lines in teal and red, plus a short vertical pink one on the right.
What these lines are designed to represent is Time’s binding or connective functionality, and to demonstrate that Time need not be limited to measuring events or phase shifts in the physical space.
It’s connective functionality can also be seen in light of sentience in the non-physical space, which I will call non-space for now (although limitless space might be just as good a word for it).
Think of it like this: As I write this in May 2021, you read it in the future. My thoughts, which I convey to my screen via combination of action, technology and language, get carried through time to your mind, a kind of telekinesis in that you hear my dulcet tones in your head.
Your sentience has merged with mine through the workings of time.?
This process can work in either direction. I send my thoughts into the future via writing them down or recording them in some other manner, a process that might be described as ‘time-seeding’, while you harvest the thoughts of the past sometime in my future, or your present.
However, you send your sentience back in time to understand the gist of what I am saying.
This happens at every moment of every day. The bird chirping outside your window, even though you may not understand the data the bird is signalling to its neighbours and the wider world, is still a data flow emitted in the very recent past, the vibration or wave packet of which is carried at the speed of sound to your ear. Though you cannot understand it, Time has worked to connect the sentience of two species.
Here you will see that Time does not guarantee that sentience will be understood regardless of the way it articulates itself.
This rule applies for humans, in that we can perceive the hieroglyphics carved by an ancient High Priest some 3000 years ago, but require a different mental process to understand it, while we can generally understand Shakespearean English.
This also applies for other species in Nature. It has been found that the language of birds changes with time based on changes in their environment, for example, so that field recordings of 30 years ago are not understood in the same way by modern birds.?
Here, again, the sentience of the past may be conveyed to the present, but not understood.
This is what I am seeking to show with the three lines.
This pink line, although not explicitly stated as such in the literature, is the focus of the field of emergence.
This is where an organism is observed to have “properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole”.
It is the subject of much of my work as a phenomenologist, as it is an area of science and understanding that has the most room for exploration and discovery in the next century.
By now you may be thinking, well, what is sentience??
Sentience, as I currently understand it, is that which propagates life in three dimensional space.
Due to its non-physical nature, its workings are still a mystery. This is partially why it has largely been left to the fields of biology, and to some degree mathematics, to explore, while being a mainstay of mystic insight, philosophy and theology.
But my expectation is that physics will increasingly converge with biology as it seeks to understand the puzzling realm of emergent, macroscopic behaviour. It appears I am not alone here.
This gradual convergence will be underpinned by a more global understanding that time is indeed Aeonic, although it may not be called that, and that ‘European’ or Chronic Time is just a fragment of that.
What also should be understood is that a cyclical understanding of time, in a very literal sense, is a natural one due to its intrinsic, holistic connectedness of the micro to macro.
Covid is driving a renewed appreciation and engagement with Nature, and the two developments of cyclicality and Nature awareness should be seen as complementary.?
If you are reading this article to this point, there is a very good chance that you have in some way noticed this, even at an unconscious level.
When one understands the historical influence this fragmented, or microscopic mode of Time perception has had on the Western mindset, one can begin to see why we have made gene-based or microscopic speculation for phenomena that are perhaps better studied with macroscopic or emergent lenses, such as why more boys are born than girls among humans; or why Big Bang theories get put forward before ‘Big Breathe’ or cyclical concepts that are equally plausible mathematically, and perhaps more so ecologically.?
These and further points I plan to touch on in the future.
For now, let's recap before we conclude:
I would like to go on to explain why Aeonic Time is wavelike due to Life’s natural flux between caution and curiosity. However, this is a post unto itself, as are all the practical implications that a circular perception of time will have on business (such as Matriculation Theory, growth capping, etc.) and society more generally.?
I was also looking forward to explaining why the concept is analogous to the spider’s web with its mix of adhesive and non-adhesive strands, as well as discussing the paradox of ‘comprehension loss’ over Time.
All that must wait. What is important to say now is that the aeonic concept is not new. Its roots are very old, and have remained alive in most sections of society outside the West.?
I say this, because whenever I deduce something abductively, I always google to see if others have had the same idea in the recent or distant past.?
I do this because one of my core assumptions about emergent thought is that someone else always has thought of something first due to an emergent process I call Hypersynchronisity, although that is currently an umbrella term I am in the process of refining into subsections.
When I googled Aeonic Time to see where the term had been used previously, I discovered that it has distinct Germanic roots. Both the phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius and theologian Jürgen Moltmann have employed the term in a similar sense, with Conrad-Martius also mentioning its waveform and renewal properties, and Moltmann alluding to its connective attributes between living creatures and memory, which is likely why I came to a similar conclusion by analysing deja vu.
This suggests to me that it is now timely to re-examine what these thinkers have to say about it, as their understanding, I am certain, will be much deeper than my cursory recent one.
You can also investigate Eternal Time, which is a much broader examination of the idea across cultures.
To conclude, I would like to say this new awareness of Time in its various guises also gave me insight into the true nature of deja vu. But until now, it has not.
However, if what I have written above makes sense to you, I will offer my own speculative thoughts that you can either accept or dismiss as I did with previous empirical studies:
I make the assumption that it is progressive not based on the fact that the empirical studies, which started in the late 19th century through to today, tend to show an increasing amount of people experiencing it.?
I would say this apparent progression is rather a result of inadequate or poor testing, with too few numbers to say for sure. But I don’t ignore the trend completely.?
Instead, I believe it is progressive because the functionality of simultaneously perceiving data perception and data retrieval hints at a higher level of cerebral processing that may be useful for the species, since it may assist collective action.?
But whether we reach a point where we discover if my assumption is true, is, as the German’s say, zukunftsmusik ... a question of time.?