An Experiment with Time

 J.W. Dunne's 1927 pseudo-scientific classic, An Experiment with Time, is plainly the work of a crank. But thank God for the cranks, I say. Without them showing up periodically, we would all remain trapped in our straightforward and all-too-readily explicable common sense model of reality, and no one would ever say anything interesting. 

And Dunne is certainly saying something interesting. He leads us toward an intrinsically preposterous outcome, but he does so by stages that seem so reasonable and cautious that one gladly takes his hand and walks with him on the journey, purely for the intellectual pleasure of it. Those who don't want the destination of the journey spoiled should stop reading here and go look up Dunne's book instead. 

All others will know that Dunne's basic idea was that the dreaming mind has the ability to range in four dimensions over the past and future of one's life. He claims to have discovered this by empirical means. Starting with his own dreams—which he describes as having the character of premonitions—he comes to believe that they record the jumbled residue of future events in exactly the way in which dreams are (more commonly) experienced as involving a confused patchwork of past experience. 

Ultimately, Dunne did not limit his examples to his own experience. He expressly disclaims any unique ability to peer into the future. Instead, he claims we all have this ability—and we simply haven't noticed it, for the most part, because we tend to forget our dreams upon waking, and we haven't made a practice hitherto of recording them, in order to search for resemblances to our waking life in the future, once we go on to experience it. 

When Dunne proceeds to lay out the results of recruiting other experimenters, however—the output is distinctly underwhelming. Dunne, of course, claims otherwise. He thinks his results are dispositive. But go and read that final section of the book, and tell me if you are convinced by examples like a sort of half-canoe-shaped structure appearing in both a dream and in waking life. 

(Of course, the structure is quite strange and unique in the dream—it has wheel spokes embedded in it! And the analogue glimpsed in waking life is just like it—well, except—Dunne concedes—without the wheel spokes.)

But it's really where Dunne proposes the logical underpinnings of his theory that he becomes genuinely interesting—and it is no doubt this section of the book, more than his autobiographical records of numinous experiences—that won him the respect and attention of major scientific writers in his era such as Arthur Eddington (plus the fact that Dunne was himself a respected aeronautical engineer). 

Dunne seeks to explain what he at first concedes is a seemingly extraordinary empirical reality—namely, his claimed ability to dream about the future. He points out that such an ability, "supernormal" as it may appear, is actually consistent with our standard mental model of time as simply a fourth dimension of space. 

From the standpoint of the four-dimensional model of space-time, after all—it is actually the fact that we can only travel in one direction through time, and only see one point in time, while we range freely through the other three dimensions, that is the strange thing, and which needs accounting for. 

But is Time a fourth dimension of space? We tend to talk about it as if it were. Dunne points out that humans almost universally—and from a very young age—talk about Time as having length. We picture it as a road down which we proceed at a more-or-less constant pace—and always in the same forward direction. 

There is admittedly some confusion in our everyday metaphors as to whether we ourselves are making progress through a fixed dimension of time—or rather, we are standing still, and time is rushing toward us, creating only the illusion of movement (like those people in old movies who pretend to be driving cars, but who are really sitting stationary while a roll of film plays behind them). 

A friend and I encountered this difficulty the other day when we had agreed to "push a call back by an hour"—and then discovered too late that we had meant opposite things by this. 

After all, moving a call forward by an hour could mean that we are moving it forward in time's journey—as in, it would occur an hour later. Or, it could mean that it would rush at us an hour ahead of when we were first expecting it—as in, an hour earlier. And so, likewise, pushing the call back could mean either we were delaying it, in its onrush (making it happen later); or that we were pushing it to a prior point on the road of Time's journey (that is, making it happen earlier). 

Whichever metaphor we prefer, however—we tend to agree that we occupy a present (or "specious present," if you prefer) point in the time-dimension, and that we are viewing a succession of time-states in a particular order. 

Moreover, we agree that—in ordinary experience—we cannot reverse or jumble up that order of succession (except in the sense that our psyche can form images of the past through the faculty of "memory," but we all agree that in such moments our minds are divorced from our present sensory experience, and hence we are not "really" reliving past time). 

But here, Dunne points out something about this common spatial metaphor for time that perhaps no one else has ever noticed. In order for us to move through (or, at least, look through) successive time-states, that movement—like any movement—has to occur through Time. We must be traveling through Time's journey at a certain measurable speed. But this speed can't be the same sort of speed that is measured by Time in the three dimensions of space. It must be a different sort of speed—a speed through Time—which would require a sort of second-order Time to measure. 

And so, in Dunne's words—there must be a sort of "Time behind Time." And since this second-order Time could also be conceived through the spatial metaphor of length, then it in turn must have a third-order Time dimension by which it may be measured—and so on to an "infinite regress," as Dunne puts it. 

A brief aside here: According to the modern, Einsteinian sense of Time, there can be no motion through any dimension without Time. Time is thus not an absolute, but merely a means of measuring motion. Moreover, according to Einstein, the obverse implication of this notion of Time is that if all motion in the universe were to cease, Time would come to a stop as well. 

Here, however, we encounter a certain difficulty. Suppose we were to occupy a universe kept at absolute zero, in which all motion had ceased. According to Einstein, Time would also be at a stop, in such a universe—since Time is nothing other than motion through space. 

But, in such a world, would the frozen, motionless objects in that universe still "exist"? If we are inclined to say yes—that something can still exist, though frozen and motionless—then we seem to be importing a more old-fashioned notion of Time as an absolute dimension—the dimension in which things "exist" for longer than an infinitesimally small "instant" or point along the time-line. 

It does us no good to play semantics and try to distinguish, say, "duration" from Time. If we believe that objects of some sort would "endure," even in a frozen universe—then we seem still to need some concept of Absolute Time, which exists independently of motion. 

We start to realize that the notion of "absolute Time" may indeed be one of those inescapable categories of the mind, just as the Kantians thought it was, that we simply can't reason our way past, since it is an a priori of all reasoning and all experiencing. 

But if we are in fact a point traveling along a timeline in the quasi-spatial dimension of Absolute Time, then the question still remains: why do we only ever seem to travel in one direction—toward the "future"—through that dimension? 

Dunne's answer is somewhat unclear, but it appears to be the following: During our waking life, we are constantly surprised and therefore riveted to the present by a constant succession of new sensory states. So, when we are conscious, our attention remains fixated on the present, because that is the center of the most interest, where all the exciting sensory inputs are occurring. 

This is why—in Dunne's view—we are able to range more freely into both the future and the past when we sleep, because we are deprived of the usual sense-inputs of present experience, and our attention wanders over the whole timeline of our life in both directions. 

But a moment's reflection will show that Dunne's response (if I have paraphrased it accurately) merely begs the question. He says that our attention is riveted to the present because it moves through a series of exciting sensory-inputs that succeed each other in a fixed order, and therefore keep our attention focused.

But what we are trying to understand is precisely why they follow that fixed order in the first place. Why does this sensory "present" exist at one point on the timeline at a given moment rather than another; and why does it not move about, except in a single direction—forward, toward the future—at an apparently fixed rate of speed? 

Dunne argues forcefully that his concept of an infinite regress of Times follows ineluctably from our ordinary spatial metaphor for Time. And perhaps he is right. But perhaps this merely shows the deficiency of our ordinary spatial metaphor for Time. 

Dunne would scoff, at this point. He says that our spatial metaphor for Time is universal. Even the "man-in-the-street" is familiar with it. Even the infant learns it in his cradle. 

But perhaps it is not actually so universal as Dunne believed. Anthropology has revealed the existence of cultures that conceptualize Time quite differently. The Aymara people of South America are said to deploy a different spatial metaphor that reverses the directionality of our own. Reportedly, they picture the future as something that is behind human beings (because we cannot see it), whereas the past is in front of us, because we can look at it and see it growing over time. 

This conception of Time comes closer to the one that Van Veen articulates, in his lecture on Time at the end of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor. He ultimately concludes that both the future and the present do not exist; they are illusions. The only thing that is real is the past, he observes, and the human experience of time is not actually a "journey" down a foreordained road; but is actually just the conscious process of watching the past grow over time, through the constant, daily supply of new memories. 

This is the view of Time that Dunne associates with Henri Bergson; and he rejects it out of hand. He accuses the theory of being unparsimonious and of multiplying entities unnecessarily—since it requires a sort of continual creation ex nihilo. 

But is this constant creation and growth of "the past" and of "memory" any stranger than the no less mysterious prior existence of a fixed timeline, down which we journey in only one direction (for reasons hitherto unexplained)? And does the Bergsonian/Van Veen/Aymara theory of time not rescue us from the even less parsimonious notion of a literally infinite series of times? If Time is not a motion through a quasi-spatial dimension, after all, then it no longer has a speed. Hence, it no longer requires a "Time behind Time" to explain it. 

But if Time is not related to motion, but is rather absolute, then must we jettison Einstein and the Theory of Relativity? Or, if Time is merely the constant growth of the past, are we not still thrust back on a notion of a "time behind time," if only to measure the rate of growth? 

Having reached this point in the argument, I should perhaps say with Van Veen—when he came to criticizing Einstein—"I think I had better back out of this passage." In other words, he had the grace to admit when he was out of his depth; and I should perhaps aspire to the same. 

But perhaps all the muddled state of our theories of Time has served to prove is that we are inevitably thrust back time and again onto a conception of time as an absolute quasi-spatial dimension—even though such a theory immediately proves to be riddled with errors and bizarre implications. 

And so, perhaps, this discussion of philosophy, like so many others, serves merely to show, as David Hume put it, "the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them."