Space, Time, and Reality

 Space, Time, and Reality

Metaphysically speaking, there are basically two kinds of fact: structural and dynamic, spatial and temporal. These are what nature is made of. Geometry deals with structure; physics (the science of motion) deals with dynamics. How they are related is a difficult question, but they are clearly real and fundamental. There is a deep dualism at the heart of things—space and time. We must understand these things in order to understand reality, but we may suffer from blind spots, biases, areas of ignorance. We may be cognitively thwarted or even cognitively closed; we may be subject to illusions regarding space and time. Some facts may be more spatial than temporal and vice versa, or they may be intertwined (e.g., growth). Historical facts are very temporal, while mathematical facts are hardly temporal at all. Some facts don’t need time to be facts, but some are time dependent. Concepts of shape and substance belong on the spatial side, while concepts of evolution and action belong on the temporal side. The concept of color is ambiguously both: spatial yet actively temporal.[1] We can ask, with respect to any sector of reality, whether it belongs on the structural side or the dynamic side, according as it is bound up with space or time—wholly or in part. A pre-Socratic may announce “All is form” or “All is flux” and we can debate the question concerning any particular domain.

I have argued elsewhere that the mind falls on the flux side: it is a kind of action or behavior, always changing, never static.[2] The brain, however, is (partly) defined by its structure—its geometry and anatomy. The mind has no geometry, as time does not. The brain is made of neurons, but the mind isn’t—though it depends upon neurons. The brain has an architecture, but the mind has about as much architecture as a shape-shifting cloud of gas (less in fact). The visual field may give you the illusion that the mind (consciousness) has a structure, but that is to confuse the act with the object; and it doesn’t apply to non-visual sensation. Geometry and consciousness have never been happy bedfellows or even vaguely chummy. The mind has the structure of time, to be sure, but that structure isn’t spatial structure (contrary to what some physicists like to say). What about meaning? Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is heavily imbued with geometrical notions and is markedly atemporal, while the Investigations is steeped in time and activity—abandoning the geometrical slant of the Tractatus. Some theorists of language like to talk about logical form and syntactic structure, but others prefer the idiom of speech acts, utterances, and performance (Chomsky has competence and performance—structure and activity). Language seems to straddle the two categories.

What about logic? Frege would see it as atemporal, eternal, fixed like a crystal; but woolier types would prefer to see it as a human product with a history. A formal language looks like a severe ornamental style (classical logic, classical architecture), while the vernacular bumbles along just getting by. Logic purports to capture the necessary structure of reality, yet it also is supposed to regulate the human practice of deduction. It has a foot in both camps, almost causing a painful split. Is it an abstract quasi-spatial structure (“logical space”) or an attempt to stabilize the mess of human discourse? It is the same with necessity: is it a fixed substantial thing (like a set of possible worlds) or is it a reflection of human linguistic conventions? Is it a structure or a squeeze (you must do this)? Is rule-following a momentary inner fact or a temporally extended practice? Is it hard or soft, rigid or plastic? Is it something we apprehend at a moment or something we do over time? Causality raises similar quandaries: is it a hard inflexible structural fact obtaining at the time of interaction or is it something distributed in time in the form of constant conjunctions? Is it a component of objective (spatial) reality or is it a reflection of our own nature as beings locked in time? Is it one damn thing after another or is it an unbreakable bond between spatially conjoined entities? Then there is the self: is there a solid kernel of the self, existing whole and entire at a given time, or is it just an extended temporal sequence of varying psychological stages. Is it like an atom in space or a process in time? Is space its natural home or is it time? What about existence itself: do existing things require time in order to exist? Could a tiger exist for just one second? Don’t things take time in order to exist? Geometrical forms may exist without benefit of time, but what about oceans or social movements? Which thing wears the existential pants—space or time, structure or history?

I have not tried to settle these issues, merely to articulate them. But I would like to make a general point, namely that we have a tendency to get carried away by space. We are biased in its favor, cognitively, temperamentally. For we are dominated by our senses and material needs: we can picture spatial structures, but we can’t picture time—and therefore history. We can picture how things look at a given time, but we can’t picture their temporal relations, because we have no mental image of time. We see things in space, but we don’t see the time in which they exist; time causes no sense-data in us. We can think about it abstractly, but we have no concrete image of it—and imagination matters conceptually (pace Wittgenstein). We therefore suffer from a kind of illusion to the effect that time is less real than space. Accordingly, we fail to grasp when a given reality has a strongly temporal nature—as with (arguably) the mind. It is like failing to recognize the reality of evolution because of the time scale involved and the difficulty of picturing biological change. Time makes greater demands on our cognitive resources than space and spatial things. This is why geometry has always been the paradigm of human knowledge and not psychology. We are not good with temporal reality (I’d give us a B). If we can spatialize something, we can believe in it; but temporalizing something leaves us cognitively lost. We “get” the structure of the solar system, but the big bang seems like magic, or deeply dubious. Yet time is as real as space, and it penetrates being to an equal degree. We should be temporal realists, despite our impoverished grasp of time.[3]

[1] See my “Are Colors Actions?”.

[2] See my “Phenomenological Behaviorism”.

[3] Anti-realism about time is far more popular than anti-realism about space: the future is unreal, and so is the past, and the present is fleeting; but who doubts that space exists? We can see it and feel it (in spatial objects), but time is invisible and impalpable. Anything closely associated with time, like the mind, is therefore subject to similar anti-realism. If the mind is the brain in time, i.e., in action, then it will strike us as flimsy and dubious. Yet it is immediately given; consciousness and time are inseparable. A course on the philosophy of time would include a section on the mind.