About Time

It cannot have escaped even the least observant individuals how glaringly prevalent the virtual world has become - and how precipitately digital technologies let it become that way. Our society has become a veritable technopoly – within which culture has not been forfeited so much as warped, particularly our experience and interpretation of time and space.

Today the world has about 5.6 billion mobile phone users - or 80 per cent of the total population. I know this because they are all stalking me. It has become impossible for me to walk down a supermarket aisle, or cross the street, without having to weave my way through throngs of people all gazing and stabbing their fingers at these gizmos. From schoolkids and students, workers on building sites, taxi drivers and young mothers with toddlers to elderly men in suits, they are glued to a screen that allows them to thumb instant messages, organise a liaison, check the time or the weather, watch a favourite YouTube clip, share a photo on Facebook, play Angry Birds, or monitor Google maps to get them to a location they just passed - if only they would glance up at the street numbers for an instant!

Children, some barely out of nappies, seem to be the most afflicted by this uniquely contemporary disorder. My 5-year-old son looks for his iPad the moment he wakes up and would keep it by his side - if he could - until he falls asleep at night, or the battery needs charging. The ears of our teenage daughter seem to be permanently welded to two buds that terminate in a cellphone, which accompanies her everywhere. As far as I know she even takes this accessory to the shower with her. As her tête-à-têtes stop and start quite arbitrarily, without any sign as to their on-off status, we tend to resort to hand signals if we need to attract her attention. We are totally in the dark regarding the substance of her constant exchanges, or even the identity of the "friend" to whom she chats at 2am in the morning. The only clue as to the extent to which she is immersed in this alternative world arrives as a bill in our mailbox at the end of each month. Other than that her virtual presence remains a carefully guarded secret to which we are not privy. Or at least, being smart parents, that is the illusion we are at pains to preserve!

Seriously though, for many people the wired world has become more "real" than life itself - a hybrid world we happily inhabit from dawn until dusk. Each year we spend more and more of our waking hours online - scrolling, chatting and reacting to these flickering displays - irrespective of whether we are in a meeting, shopping, driving, or seated at the controls of a 380 Airbus!

There is a downside. Slowly but surely this consensual addiction is ambushing our minds within a anesthetizing "present" that is proving irresistible to many. Life in this technological cocoon is a synthesis of transitory sounds, images and text messages - many of them trifling, yet indiscernible from others of even less import. Our sensation of time deforms as a result. The past happened a moment ago. We need only wait a few seconds for the future. The only phenomenon that really matters, because that is what we absorb, is a mish-mash of micro-events encountered as the "here and now". And as these experiential clips tumble into each other in a mad scramble to change their status from what is to what was, any distinctive resonance quickly fades. Thus memory becomes nonchalantly divorced from authentic meaning.

This bizarre bifurcation of perceived space and time also permits at least two distinct personae to manifest: a corporeal one where our tangible presence is evident to those in close physical proximity to us - the other pure avatar, a version disconnected from ambient corporeality. We can be present in either state, or both concurrently.

In the former we are limited by the laws of physics. These laws deny us the capability to move from place to place using the kind of instant transportion devices beloved by generations of science fiction writers. But in our avatar state(s) we can be in multiple places at the same time. We can communicate instantly with anyone, wherever they are - effectively transcending our corporeal nature. This spatial ambiguity has become commonplace. I can convene a video-call with my team, who are physically scattered across Asia, from my yacht anchored off the Maldives. Yet by switching off the video I could be anywhere in the world. Who would know unless I divulged as much?

Additionally, the World Wide Web allows my avatar existence to be permanently present to those who are also online. I can be physically engaged in a Centre for the Future board meeting while my online presence, simultaneously, inconspicuously, allows me to translate a Mandarin phrase into English, change a flight reservation, transfer money between my bank accounts, purchase a book from Amazon, and text my PA to cancel a luncheon appointment.

There are more profound uses for this technology. Surgeons can use composite scans to turn their patients into three-dimensional avatars, for example. Critical manoeuvres in brain and spinal surgery, where there is no room for error, can then be conducted with unprecedented precision. Patients with previously inoperable tumours can be treated using this technique.

All of which is marvellous - at the level of instrumental and automated transactions. But in terms of meaningful communications, greater numbers of interactions seem to be facile, frivolous and condensed. And so I wonder about the provisional nature of it all - the negative impact on our ability to perceive and comprehend granular detail, to distinguish trivia from salient information, to respond adequately and at speed to looming physical dangers, or to imagine and plan for the long-term.

What is lost when everything is so ephemeral and in a constant state of flux? How does our neuropsychology react and adapt? Is memory detrimentally affected? Would we know if it was? What about behavioural traits? Is the capability to empathise, for example, reduced by abbreviated attention spans? And what impulses guide relations when everything else is so provisional?

As we read this sentence, we believe this moment - right now - is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is palpable. However much we may remember the past, or anticipate the future, we live in the present. Of course, the moment during which we read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. Consequently it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open (until it becomes present) and that the past is fixed (because it has gone). As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives depends on it.

Yet as obvious as this way of thinking is, it is not reflected empirically. Science does not tell us which events are occurring right now. Indeed physics deems the perception of time passing from one present moment to another an illusion - an artefact invented by our psychology. Moreover, if the present moment does not exist, then neither does the flow of time. If each moment is equally real, the future can be no more open than the past; the past no more true than the future. The notion that time is emergent from an enduring cosmological reality reflects a metaphysical predisposition that accords well with Eastern mystical traditions. The only valid alternative is a proposition that time is real - the only aspect of reality directly experienced which is fundamental and not emergent.

To become a little more granular.... We usually think of time as having three distinct elements - past, present and possible. This device allows us to sort things out in our minds more effectively. But it is only a construction. The past is an assortment of memories that are reassembled and interpreted differently each time we bring them to mind. Without a time machine we cannot actually experience past memories. We can only remember them through a simulation of the experience. There is no objective thing that can be called the past. It resists any form of measurement. Our only contact with it must of necessity occur in the present.

Similarly, the future is a mental construct we hold from the perspective of the present. We cannot experience future possibilities unless they manifest as the present. Until then they remain fantasies. We can project what possibilities may occur but there is no objective thing we can call the future. It cannot be measured and our only contact with it is by way of the present. An expanded now. Now there’s a thought…..