Henri Bergson provides an interesting discussion where he tells us:
Why, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of a cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the present instead of given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined at the present moment, and that if the number taken up by this success is something other than a number, if it has for the consciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, it is because there is unceasingly being created in it, not indeed in any such artificially isolated system as a glass of sugared water, but in the concrete whole of which every such system forms part, something unforeseeable and new. This duration may not be the fact of matter itself, but that of the life which reascends the course of matter; the two movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each other. The duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of creation which can find place in it. [“Creative Evolution”, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 1998, page 339]
I’m not sympathetic with Bergson’s vitalistic way of speaking, though his ‘dualism’ isn’t fundamentally at odds with modern understandings of the universe. It’s only his odd way of speaking that seems to be a problem. As I understand him, he’s claiming that there are two ways at looking at the one being of this universe, both looking at the same phenomena, one from a materialistic viewpoint and one from an ‘immaterial’ viewpoint. This is a needless complication, but, more importantly, he’s making a profound point in the quote above. I’ll digress for a short while before returning to that point.
I’ve tried to restore the Biblical sense that this world is a story being told by God — my views on this matter are actually stronger than those of the human writers of the Bible because I have a sharper concept of divine all-powerfulness than most of those writers. Modern physics and mathematics have helped me to sharpen my understanding of God’s all-powerfulness. There’s more to this and some of the more is discussed in my writings, but it’s important to keep in mind the nature of stories. True stories are morally ordered but there’s a freedom of movement in all but the most tightly scripted pagan tragedies. Even in those tragedies, there’s a sense to an outsider that freedom would be possible if the characters had some grasp of the concept. That sense is invalid in a literary reading of the Greek playwrights (and perhaps John Milton) but quite valid in efforts to understand pagan tragedy in historical and moral senses.
For now, I’m mostly interested in the main point that Bergson makes in the quote above — time would occur ‘all at once’ in a fully determined universe. I think his point is analogous to the claim made by some quantum physicists:
If there were 1,000 particles exactly the same, they would be the same particle.
Some sort of freedom of individual ‘things’ and also of individual points of space and time seems to be part of a universe of development, a universe of stories. There’s a specific phenomena, not yet fully understood, which may provide an example of this. A press release from the National Institute of Standards and the University of Colorado (1995/07/13) starts out:
Physicists in Boulder, Colo., have achieved a temperature far lower than has ever been produced before and created an entirely new state of matter predicted decades ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.
Cooling rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero caused the individual atoms to condense into a “superatom” behaving as a single entity, said Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA, a joint program of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder. [see Physicists Produce a New State of Matter]
What’s happening, by some interpretations, is that those nearby rubidium atoms are put into the same physical state and become one atom in some important ways. It’s as if nature herself can no longer distinguish between these atoms in the same state. Also, for the benefit of those who had never followed these experiments: those scientists ‘froze’ those atoms by hitting them with lasers to hold them in place. An absolutely motionless atom would be at a temperature of absolute zero.
Returning to Bergson, I read that quote from Creative Evolution as a claim that a fully-determined world would happen all at once. The true state of the universe would be like a fully recorded movie — to use Bergson’s own example. The universe, from a creaturely viewpoint, would be complete in the same way that a reel of film is a complete movie. Time is an illusion when a movie is shown to creatures such as us. A fully-determined world would be in a radically different state from that of an open world moving through time with some freedom — even if the formal laws of motion (such as those of Newton or Einstein) were the same in both of those worlds.
I think this is an interesting and fruitful attempt to explain why and how time is different from space though modern physics tell us they’re part of one structure. We know from quantum mechanics and also from our social experiences that the things and living beings of this universe are closely related but some sort of independent existence is important to each atom and to each point of space for our universe to be what it is, but time as we know it introduces freedom and openness of a special sort. It’s not just a fourth dimension of space though it’s a fourth dimension of a structure, the other three dimensions being space.
There are speculative theories in modern physics which strong imply that our world may have been created from something which has no time and no spatial dimensions as we know them. This universe may well be shaped from some strange stuff that I call the Primordial Universe. In the worldview I’m constructing, this Primordial Universe is a manifestation of the truths God chose for Creation, though there might actually be any number of phases between that Primordial Universe and the beginning of the expansionary phase which is this universe. That beginning is, of course, often called the Big Bang.
I’m circling around the immediate problem: why is time different from space? Einstein taught us that space and time are intertwined even to the point that current cosmological physics, based upon the general theory of relativity, ties together time and the expansion of space. Even if time were somehow created by that expansion of space, time is still very much different.
Our freedom lies in time. It would perhaps be useful, though ultimately wrong to say we are enslaved in our spatial dimensions. Our better understanding, intuitive and scientific, of space relative to our understanding of time is perhaps one reason for our difficulties in believing in our own freedom when we think in cause-and-effect terms, rationally thinking through our relationships to other things or living beings and even our relationships to physical forces. There might be lifetimes of philosophical contemplation in this problem, but I’ll move on for now.
Time, at least in this universe, is tied up with entropy, a measure of the relative mix of order and disorder defined in terms of information science or statistical physics — those two different approaches provide pretty much the same definition. Our freedom might be tied up with entropy, but that creates a problem for Christian thinkers, one I’ll discuss in another entry I’ll upload soon: What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven? Actually, it points to a number of interesting problems we should welcome if we really value freedom, which has to include freedom of the mind in empirical matters.
This is not to advocate the false freedom of atheism or even agnosticism. It’s not mind but a sense of gratitude and a sense of justice which determine if we believe in God in at least a provisional sense. A human being with a creative mind and a sense of gratitude will enjoy exploring God’s Creation and his own relationship to God without feeling a need to be creative at the price of ingratitude. Nor will that creative thinker feel his faith threatened with the discovery of nasty parasites or poorly understood phenomena in deep-space.
As I try to move more deeply into the issues I’ve been exploring in my various writings, I’ll be writing about open problems more than solutions. In many cases, I may not even have speculative solutions though I may have some to at least start off the process of thinking towards solutions.
If we were to do our best to open ourselves to God and His Creation, we’d accept problems, even welcome them instead of fearing them. The world is mostly a story being told by God, a morally ordered narrative, but we face puzzles often. It might well be that such a situation is necessary for creatures such as human beings to be free. Our freedom is maybe a set of learned skills rather than some sort of metaphysical attribute. If so, the learning takes place during evolutionary and developmental processes. In fact, we know that confronting difficult moral choices is a part of growing up — even in a well-ordered society where most questions are pre-answered.
If freedom is for real, we should expect new problems to emerge, problems which deny solutions by our established ways of thought and behavior. John Henry Newman told us that even the most absolute of truths have to be continually restated because those truths are necessarily expressed in human words and concepts which are continually changing. I’m saying that our need to deal with changes in our concepts and language represent a still deeper need to deal with changes in our understanding of Creation. Moreover, I suspect that our difficulties in understanding Creation might point to a certain freedom in even the most frozen of physical entities in Creation. It’s possible that our freedom lies in our interactions with our environments just as much of our thought seems to lie in those interactions. (See Adaptive Minds… and the three succeeding reviews of Gerd Gigerenzer’s analyses of human thought.)