On Time and Archaeology

We believe in the passage of time, even though we cannot perceive time’s passage, and our belief in time is so confident that we then go on to assign the objects we encounter at various points along time’s passage.

Our friend hands us two objects: one is a fossil and the other a fragment of terracotta, freshly baked from the kiln.

When we first look at these two items there is nothing about them that reveals their age. They are just two pieces of matter, albeit different in colour and constitution. The only way we can age them is to first recall our belief in time’s passage and then assume that the objects are of different age – in this case we assume that the fossil is older than the terracotta. But there is never any justification for this: we only ever perceive things in the present; the fossil in our hand is, at this point, still as fresh or as ancient as the terracotta.

But, for no reason, we do go ahead and assume the fossil as ‘old’, and then we analyse it and discover certain attributes about it – for example we might notice varying proportions of chemical isotopes. These proportions are then also assumed to be characteristic of age, because they are associated with the ‘old thing’ – the fossil.

And henceforward, each time we encounter an object whose chemical constitution is similar to the fossil, we call that thing ‘old’ also, forgetting that the fossil’s antiquity was only ever assumed in the most arbitrary fashion.

All this is delusion.

We only perceive things in the present. The fossil in our hand is as timeless as the terracotta – both of them exist only in the here-and-now that completely transcends our arbitrary designations of age.

The age of the fossil is a story we tell…in the present. At what other time can such a story be told?

The survival and death of the fittest

When Darwin says that everything evolves in order to survive he refrained from saying whther everything also evolves to die. The instinct to die could be said to be as prevalent as the instinct to survive. Survival is happiness and health. Death is despair and disease. We are somewhat inclined not to include the latter in our systems

Each time we analyse a phenomenon and wonder what survival advantage is being achieved, we must also bear in mind what death advantage is being achieved. We often say that anxiety is part of fight or flight – a survival strategy. We must also admit that anxiety is part of a death strategy – it is the process by which the person’s life will to die manifests itself.

Quantum mechanics

Quantum physicists get all het up about the spookiness of non-local communication, but really it is no more remarkable than the non-local effect that the moon has on the earth. The difference is that one is familiar and so no longer fills us with wonder, and the other one is novel. If we simply invent a word for the communication like we did with gravity then we will naively accept it as something definite and knowable and intuitive and we can start including it in our equations.