After reading the recent stats on what people believe (link) I was quite astounded. Nearly two thirds of the population believe some people have powers not explainable by science and about half of people believe in ghosts! I think what hit me most was that I had assumed that over the last 20 years the world was becoming more rational but instead it was just me and the type of people I now associate with.
Coming out of an extremist fundamentalist religion I spent many years clawing my way away from irrational belief. I somehow thought that I was becoming more ‘normal’. Now it appears that I’ve gone a ways past the boundaries for the majority of ‘normal’ people. I am still wondering if there is a correlation anywhere between culture, sex, age and irrational belief. I had assumed age made us more rational but maybe that is not so.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
- Steven Weinberg
Time is fundamental to our existence. As we grow we almost intuitively apprehend a past, present and a future. Most people think they see the present and some (strange) people even think they see the future but this has been shown not to be the case. Your conscious mind only ever percieves the past. Your mind recieves information after the event has happenned and then makes decisions before you actually become conscious of them; and this is for the things that you do actually become conscious of. Your mind also makes the vast majority of your decisions without your conscious awareness as all.
Time is at least party, if not completely intertwined with our mind. We experience time through a subject/object framework the mind holds during ‘normal’ awareness. Time is referential. Without referents time ceases to exist to consciousness. Without a subject/object framework time ceases to have any meaning for a consiousness. There have been descriptions by people who have alterered their concsiousness that state that time ceases to exist during certain states of awareness.
So if we only experience the past and time itself is only a construct of our minds then what is the purpose of ‘time’. Time gives us meaning, objective goals and a sense of self that persists. Without time our sense of self disolves, goals disintegrate and meaning becomes void.
If our overarching reality exists out of time then the overall question of where we are are where we are headed is meaningless. In a world without time purpose ceases to have meaning.
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