BTW you would be welcome to join us for our inaugural lunch next Tuesday – the details are in the chatroom.

Time slows the faster one travels but only relative to a stationary observer. For the traveller time proceeds at its normal pace. Thus a clock travelling at speed will tick more slowly than one that is stationary, or travelling more slowly.The traveller also appears foreshortened in the direction of travel but this is not how the traveller feels.

mishari:

Feynman’s diagrams illustrating Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) show electrons moving backwards in time as they recoil from an emitted photon. But this leads to all sorts of philosophical questions about our ability to envisage the mathematics that describe the universe. What is metaphor and what real? Some say (many physicists included) that physics is metaphor all the way down.

It was Bohr who said that, ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.’

I hope you are right about the progress of neuroscience but my fear is that identity and memory, which I think will prove to be a large chunk of how we view ourselves, will not yield to reductionism. Perhaps what makes us who we are is irreducible – in other words everything in the brain contributes something. I know that studies have been carried out on how a damaged brain affects personality but I am not sure of the results.

Another thing occurs to me. We are really a mulitplicity of people. Everybody who I have ever encountered has a different perception of me and that is reflected to a degree in who I am to myself. So (leaving the free will argument to one side) I say something that I can see has a negative effect on person A, so I amend my behaviour accordingly.

I can only ever be a distinctive personality at one instant in time (which does not exist) everything else is generalisation. I behave and feel differently now than I did before reading your post, than when I was eight years old, than yesterday afternoon before I learned the football results etc.

We often talk about basic personalities meaning, I suppose, those things that we cannot amend. Perhaps we must distinguish between genetic inheritance and learned behaviour but this also feels like a false distinction.

Causation is a tricky area – a minefield when one tries to nail it down. This might again be something we have developed as an intellectually useful tool – without a belief in causation, for example, there would be no morals and, possibly, no human race.

I think personality (if we think generally) and perception are inextricably linked but in what way precisely I am not sure. How I perceive the world must have a profound effect on how I feel, behave and appear to others.

I doubt that neuroscience can help much on the nature of time, but perhaps something of use on the perception of time and may be something (eventually) on the nature of identity, which I think must incorporate time and causality (what I was some time ago causes what I am now).

I certainly do hope that neuroscience will have a great deal to offer in our understanding of the nature perception, how we build up a picture of the external world and how memory works. Perhaps more will be revealed about what determines personality and how personality interacts with perception and memory.

In brief the hope is that Neuroscience will be able to provide objective evidence for issues for which such evidence is currently not available.

I am intrigued by your suggestion of time actually running in the reverse direction to our perception of it.

I certainly agree that the perception of time is governed by our mental equipment. This might be as a consequence of evolution. Has any work been done about the time perceptions of other lifeforms, particularly the higher mammals? I have no idea but I suspect that if it were possible to understand this we would find that no other animal has any real concept of time, at least in terms of past, present and future.

I have said before that I cannot see how time can exist independently of our perception of it. Memory, as you say, is our only window on the past and that is entirely dependent on our (subjective) intellectual make-up. The future does not exist as it has not yet occurred and there is no evidence that there is an instant which is neither past nor future. Even Einstein, whose theories have much to say about time, doubted that it really existed.

I had not thought about the proposition contained in your last paragraph but it makes sense. Epistemology (and to an extent formal logic) strike me as being the least satisfactory philosophical disciplines. I am not so sure that a study of the brain’s capabilities will yield much information about the nature of time.

Neuroscience might tell us a bit more about how memory works. We might also derive some sort of idea about why time is important to us as a species through anthropology and the study of evolutionary biology. But I am not sure that we can go much further than that.

The question is whether it would be possible to disprove this topsy turvy construction?

JB Priestley was greatly influenced by the writings of JW Dunne, who suggested that the linear nature of time is an illusion produced by how we think.

According to Dunne, past, present and future are only apprehended in sequence, because that is how mental perception works. He puts forward an alternative position in which past, present and future are simultaneous.

I think (I have not read his writings directly) Dunne compared time to a book. The pages can only be read one at a time, usually sequentially, but not necessarily, however the book is present in a sort of omni-time. He was interested in dreams: he said that dreams are not restricted by the sequential nature of time.

This idea was certainly useful to Priestley, whose ‘An Inspector Calls’ and ‘Time and the Conways’ are fruitful products.

TS Eliot in the Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (Burnt Norton)

Some versions of Determinism (particularly religious D) would seem to agree with this kind of concept.

For myself it is the limitations upon how we can conceptualise that is the most interesting aspect. I really do think that Philosophy is ultimately subservient to an analysis and understanding of how we can and do think (part of Neuroscience). I realise that there is a circularity here, but any approach that states that Philosophy or Epistemology must sort out what and how we can have knowledge is much more of a dead end.