Time isn’t real

But you better treat it like it is

I’m writing 100 Essays in 100 Weekdays.

This is 51.

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Reality, Brained

There are a lot of good theories about how the brain might be less of an observation and thinking machine and more of a filter.

We already know reality is this extremely complex, rich, impossibly huge thing, and we can’t possibly hope to navigate through it unless we can focus our very, very limited attention on it in certain ways, so one of the brain’s main jobs is to help us see and experience less of what’s there. To take the firehose and throttle it down to your girlfriend’s shower.

Like, say, time

Time probably isn’t real, in the sense that there is no cosmic clock keeping track of how many hours you spent on tvtropes.org when you were in college. Or, more accurately, if time is a real then it probably doesn’t “move” in one direction. There’s a whole body of psi research and parapsychology that suggests causality can be reversed under certain specific conditions, but getting into all that is beyond the scope, here.

I just want to point out that one of the ways our brains likely filter reality for us is by forcing us to think of time as linear. Another algorithm the brain runs to limit our perception of reality in useful ways.

This, of course, begs the question of why it might be useful to only see time going one direction. For that, we can probably look no further than our own biological bodies and what it takes to keep them alive.

But even beyond that, we all have to learn that the best way to live is to stay present, which means letting go of regret and anxiety (things that belong to the past and the future). And we all also obviously need to be able to rely on unidirectional causality. We couldn’t get through a single day if we can’t count on walking over to the light switch and flipping it it to turn on the light. If you can’t be reasonably sure one thing will follow another, you’re paralyzed.

Brains aren’t built for quantum reality. So they use the construct of time to parse it.

Which is really good, actually

While it can be spiritually useful to ponderize time as a two-directional thing, it’s even more useful to remember to lean into the construct that our brains rely on -- this thing, then this thing, then this thing -- because this is how we participate in whatever might be the cosmic fullness.

You can imagine that everything, everywhere, already exists (all at once), or you could concede that we really truly don’t understand how the universe unfolds in creation. What we do understand is that in our own small one-at-a-time lives, when we do a thing, something happens. And when we do another thing, something else happens.

This is our corner, where we do our things. It’s not, and it can’t be, a description of everything, but it’s how we scratch our little marks into whatever really is.