Time, a Useful Illusion: Temporal Perceptions That Make Us Human

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Copyright © 2023 Ronald P. Gruber

All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-5445-4282-9

Cover by Sophia Kalamas and Anna Dorfman

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To my beloved Gloria,

Wife, partner, and mother of our four children.

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Contents

Introduction: What Makes Us Human

1. Illusion versus Reality—How to Tell the Difference

2. I’m Not the Same Person I Was—Illusion of Persistence

3. Fast-Moving Clocks Tick Slowly—That Is No Illusion

4. General Relativity for Dummies and Time Illusions

5. Free Will—Thanks to the Illusion of Living in the Present

6. The Before/After Experience—Putting Flow in Time

7. Motion: Providing More Flow for Time

8. Stretching and Shrinking the Duration of Time

9. Resolving the Two Times Problem

10. What the Theory Says Happens without These Time Illusions

Appendix A: More on Special Relativity

Appendix B: Saving Some Free Will with Elementary Quantum Mechanics

Appendix C: The Most Fascinating Motion Illusion

Appendix D: Psychoactive Drugs and Other Distortions of Time

Appendix E: List of Illusions and Paradoxes

References

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Introduction

What Makes Us Human

The question What makes us human? does not seem like a difficult one. Up to a dozen factors have been given by various authorities on the subject and include (1) the upright position (being bipedal), (2) hands with thumbs that can use tools, and most of all (3) our brain. The cerebral functions of a human allow for speech, reasoning, language, self-awareness, and the overall intelligence to problem-solve.

At first glance, these factors seem indispensable for being human. Upon careful reflection, however, that is not entirely so. For example, if a person could no longer stand upright or if they lost their hands and thumbs, they would still be considered human. Language is certainly important, but some animals have an impressive vocabulary and would still not be considered human even if their speaking ability were to somehow increase tenfold.

On further introspection, intelligence would seem to be the most important factor because it allows for skills such as imagination and problem-solving. Then again, we would not say that a very unintelligent person is not human. So, what is missing here?

Suddenly, after analyzing the phenomenon, we are not so sure what the key ingredients for humanness are.

How about personality, character, and what is sometimes called a persona? Understandably, animals have personalities but nowhere as extensive. A human is not just an organism that intends to survive and perpetuate its species. A human does not just deal with momentary issues, going from one to the next in order to enjoy its existence. A human is a creature who creates a self, someone who acquires a lot of history and then creates an entity in her brain of who she is. The final product of that mental construction is much more extensive than what animals have in their heads. As loveable and spectacular as man’s best friend is, an adult dog, as far as we know, does not belabor thoughts of when it was a puppy or even relate to it. An adult human animal, on the other hand, has a perception of herself that extends back in time to her childhood. She is the sum of all those experiences because she makes it so.

With the aid of critical memory, our brains construct a self. But this is only the beginning. More importantly, our brains allow that self to endure over time. Let me repeat that because it matters so much: critically, the brain constructs a singular self that persists through time. This self is not multiple time personalities/people across time in the infant, juvenile, and adult phases. Rather, it is a united, complicated, and enormous personality or persona with acquired experiences that can scan backward and forward in time, regarding what it has done and what it plans to do. And this is where time comes into the picture.

The self and memory would seem to be two of the key critical ingredients to make us human. Neither of them is possible without time—or rather, our perception of it.

Understanding Time

To us, time is alive and moving. We can look back at the past and remember when we were children and how we grew into adults. We can watch a cup fall from our hands and smash onto the floor and describe the order of events: (1) we picked up a cup, (2) the cup slipped from our hands, (3) it fell onto the floor, and (4) it smashed. We can feel time passing us by, each hour, and can often judge how much time has elapsed between activities. If someone asked us, Is the present moment real? we would laugh. Of course, it is—we live in it, do we not? Time moves from the future into the present and then into the past, and our choices determine that future. Time, to us, is very much alive. It is dynamic and flowing.

Yet modern physics disagrees. Physics tells you that the dynamic time as we perceive it does not exist at all. It is not required for cosmological phenomena to take place; remove the element of time as we perceive it, and the world continues as normal. Impossible, you think. How can the world function without the flow of time? But it does, simply because much of time as we experience it has no corresponding explanation in physics. It is an illusion.

This gives rise to the two times problem, a knotty paradox that has fascinated mankind since the ancient Greeks. There are two types of time in the world: how we humans experience time, which is called psychological time and much of which is widely considered by the scientific community to be an illusion; and how physics describes or understands time, which is known as physical time or real time.

In this book, we will explore the gap between psychological time and physical time. Is it really true that our experience of time is an illusion? And if so, how can the two times problem be resolved?

The Quest for Our Humanness

In 2004, Paul Davies said: Until we have a firm understanding of the flow of time, or incontrovertible evidence that it is indeed an illusion, then we will not know who we are.

The quote resonates with me. Davies is right in that the two times problem reveals an essential aspect of our nature as humans.

My journey on the study of time began with an educational background in medicine and surgery. Despite a lifelong interest in physics and in my hero, Albert Einstein, the drama and excitement of the operating room enticed me away from becoming an academic physicist. But in the late 1970s, after completing a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford, the excitement of physics became too much to resist. No doubt Einstein was brilliant, but perhaps I could upset the applecart by discovering that the speed of light is not constant in outer space. So, I employed two astrophysics graduate students at UC Berkeley to teach me what I needed to know for the experiment. The arrangement was that I would pay them fifteen dollars per hour (which was a lot of money at the time), provided I be allowed to interrupt the one-on-one didactic sessions with dumb questions at any moment. After many months, I learned enough so that we could perform a relatively simple experiment on binary stars and acquire some not-so-earthshaking data that established, much to my disappointment, that the speed of light is constant.

I continued to find physicists to educate me so I could complete serious physics projects and publications about the concept of time. The highlight was contacting Richard Price, a relativist at the University of Utah who probably felt sorry for this struggling surgeon and wannabe physicist. He took me under his wing and before long, we wrote a few papers related to relativity. Price went on to become editor of the American Journal of Physics and is currently at MIT.

Despite being deeply involved with surgical research, I always found time for time. At the International Society for the Study of Time, I met Richard Block (Montana State University), a world authority on psychological time. He became one of my closest academic partners for future time projects.

I met and worked with the best and the brightest in not only physics and neuroscience but also in philosophy. I learned that philosophers are often incredible interdisciplinary scholars and extraordinarily insightful. One such individual who has been by my side since then is Carlos Montemayor of San Francisco State University; I owe a great debt to his insight and questions.

The actual experiments to solve the two times problem did not begin until 2008 at Stanford University. With the aid of several colleagues, I chose to first determine who was right about time: physics or experimental psychology (and its cousin, neuroscience).

What we discovered during the course of many experiments over a fifteen-year period was unexpected. It went beyond the traditional dual-nature-of-time debate: how we humans experience time is essential to how we function as people.

How we perceive time has led to some of the most singular phenomena that we associate with being human. The ability to understand cause and effect, for example, comes from our understanding of the linearity of time. Our impression of ourselves as having a personality that grows and evolves over the years depends on how we perceive time. The same applies for free will, foresight, hindsight, and self-awareness—all of which are said to help make us who we are.

Psychological time is what distinguishes us from animals, robots, and in many ways, children. Psychological time augments, beautifies, and enriches our reality of the world in which we live. It makes us human.

Which is why it is so hard to believe it might be an illusion. Because if it is an illusion, how can we be human?

What This Book is About

To fully explore the two times problem and the unified theory we reached through our experiments, this book will begin by deep diving into the gap between psychological time and physics time. Chapter 1 will explore the nature of an illusion and the concept of reality so that we have a firmer foundation on which to distinguish between psychological time and physics time and to judge whether psychological time really is an illusion.

Chapters 2 through 8 will explore five fundamental types of psychological time that affect how we understand and inhabit our humanness. (For reference, we deal with eight major phenomena of psychological time in this book, but we only go into depth for the five most exciting.) For each type, we will deep dive into how this form of psychological time compares with physics and prove that although our conception of time feels very real, it is indeed an illusion.

Five of the eight major phenomena in psychological time that are discussed in this book are as follows:

1. Persistence (the concept of the enduring self)

We humans think of ourselves as the same person moving through time, which is often referred to by specialists in the field as the concept of the enduring self. This concept provides us with an extended personality—in other words, with the summation and integration of our past experiences through memory. Our persona is complex, complicated, and interesting because it is a conglomeration of selves that are similar to one another and comprise the same person.

The idea of persistence or an enduring self is essential to our humanity because it allows us time travel mentally, thanks to what cognitive scientists call an autonoetic consciousness—a self-awareness over extended time. This means we can envision ourselves in the past, and using memories of the past that include what we perceive to be our self, we can plan events in the future that also include our (illusory) self. This ability to remember what happened and envision what is going to happen is an essential quality of being human.

In the following chapters, we will deep dive into the concept of persistence, and the theories and cosmic models that prove this concept to be an illusion. Most people struggle to believe our enduring selves are illusionary—it is impossible to imagine that who you were at five years old is entirely different from you who are at thirty. Surely, you think, something must remain. A soul maybe? We will explore the question through the lens of physics, cognitive science, and even philosophy to help shed more light.

2. Living in the present (free will)

The second phenomenon of psychological time is the idea that we live in the present. Everyone knows we live a little bit in the past simply because it takes time for information to travel from our toes to our brains and then be processed. But that time lapse seems negligible. So what? You might say. That is only a small and seemingly insignificant fraction of a second. It is as good as living in the present.

True—except the time lapse is far larger than you think. What people rarely account for is how long it takes us to make conscious decisions, meaning we are rarely living in the moment or, for that matter, reacting in the moment. This throws us questions of a fundamental quality of our humanness: free will.

In this book, it will become apparent that, to some extent, we humans have limited free will without that particular illusion of living in the present. If, however, you are rightfully fearful of all control being stripped away from you, then there are time paradoxes from quantum mechanics to the rescue—they provide evidence for both sides of the debate regarding whether or not we have free will. Without entering the extraordinarily detailed and controversial free-will debate, we will analyze how this particular illusion of living in the present provides a partial free will that is enough to make us human.

3. Succession (the before/after experience of temporality)

The third type of psychological time is the experience of succession, which is the before/after experience of temporality. The phenomenon of temporality embraces both succession (successivity) and sequentiality (the chronological order of events). The feeling of succession contributes to the more general experience of the flow of time, that dynamic whoosh that provides continuity between perceptual events.

This idea that time has a before and after experience contributes to our concept of cause and effect. For example, think of the incident at the beginning of this Introduction, where a cup we were holding slipped from our hand and smashed on the floor. We know the chronological sequence. But, thanks to the experience of succession, we can also divide the incident into successive events—it was in our hand before and then it slipped from our hand onto the floor where it broke (i.e., after). It gives us an even clearer indication of cause and effect aside from sequentiality. But this experience of succession, as we explore in the book, is yet another illusion of psychological time and yet simultaneously integral for our humanness. Without it, perception of the world would be dull by comparison, and unaesthetic.

In the physics of the arrows of time, that same temporal experience is noted but is sometimes referred to as directionality. In both cases, a life without the dynamism of temporality would be dull indeed.

4. The stretching and shrinking duration of time

Without a precise internal clock, our brain is enormously susceptible to distortion and contradictions with physical time, especially when confronted with situations that are flooded with a multitude of factors such as emotional changes. But the distortion gets worse because there are factors that impact duration judgments no matter how precise the internal clock is, simply because the brain allows it to happen. Fear is a good example of distorted mind time. The reasons for that distortion are not always for the benefit of the individual. And then there is a bizarre experience of time distortion from aging. For whatever reason, these extraordinary duration distortions are essentially illusory, producing yet another way of shaping how we think and who we are.

5. Motion

The fifth phenomenon is that of motion. But first, its definition is critical. Motion is the change of position of an object or particle over a period of time with a continuity (real or illusory) between positions. Movement, on the other hand, is the observed change of position of an object with time without presuming continuity. Thus, the change in position might be apparent if it does not even involve the same object.

As will be seen, motion is simply not necessary in physics, whereas movement (a change of position with unit time) is mandatory. The phenomenon of beta movement—which makes movies possible—accounts for our continuous visual experience of the world by providing an illusory experience of motion. Seeing everything stroboscopically would literally be a headache.

We also explore how motion is connected to the idea of change and why it is an integral time illusion that shapes our humanness.

Time

Once we have explored each of the phenomena in psychological time and proven that they are indeed illusions based on the physics model of the world, Chapter 9 explains the experiment that began all of this: our attempt to understand the relationship between psychological time and physics time and finally resolve the two times problem. Our results led us to create the dualistic mind theory, a unified theory of human time.

We found that psychological time and physical time were not at odds with each other. The debate should not be an either/or proposition, i.e., the human experience of time is neither an illusion nor a reality. Our results suggest, with experimental evidence, that the brain has two systems of temporal experiences, one physical and one illusory. The mind experiences both physical time (as is currently described and generally accepted in the physics community) as well as illusory time.

The dualistic mind theory proves two things we did not know yet in the scientific community: (1) physical time exists within the brain to an extent not fully appreciated until now, and (2) every physical temporal experience has an illusory counterpart and vice versa. Moreover, the brain intentionally has these illusory experiences of time to supplement each experience of physical time. It does so purposely to shape who we are. This evolution of the human brain to incorporate illusory time is the result of natural selection.

Chapter 10 tests what we have claimed in this Introduction: that psychological time is the very essence of our humanness. To see how vital these time illusions are for our understanding of the world, we explore what it looks like if you do not have them. Case examples are provided in which humans suffer from not having the persistence illusion. There are schizophrenics with a so-called self-disorder who unfortunately have difficulty projecting themselves into the past or the future. Brain trauma patients have been known to have a similar dilemma with the inability to time travel and make plans for the future because they are stuck in the present. Lastly, contemplating the possibility of not having as much free will as we think we ought to have can itself be a disturbing thought scenario. We will explore the impact of these and other time illusion losses.

Who Is This Book For?

If you have ever been fascinated by the concept of time, then this book is for you. If you read Scientific American and ask questions of the wider world around you, then this book is for you. If, especially, you have found yourself caught up with the larger questions of an enduring self, of past and the future, of free will, then you have picked up the right text.

Thanks to the nature of the topic we are dealing with, this book is slightly complex—but do not worry; it is not incomprehensible. My intent for this book is for readers to achieve that aha moment that we have all gotten at one time or another when an explanation suddenly rings loud and clear and the phenomenon under study is no longer counterintuitive. Expect the same level of comprehension and analysis as in Scientific American and theories from different disciplines—including psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy—to help us get as all-round a view on psychological time as possible.

Also expect a bit of physics. It is unavoidable, I am afraid: many of these phenomena are largely physics-derived, and you need to understand the theory to be convinced of their illusionary nature. To help readers along, certain chapters explore general and basic concepts in physics that add to the discussion, such as general relativity and Einstein’s block universe. The ultimate aim is to help you, dear reader, understand how the time phenomena you have experienced in your life are illusory, how they relate to real time, and how they contribute to your life. It all comes down to appreciating those illusory phenomena that shape who we are and help make us human.

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Chapter 1

Illusion versus Reality—How to Tell the Difference

How difficult is it to tell an illusion from reality? In most cases in ordinary life, it is not that difficult. We can tell, for example, when someone is hallucinating or responding to voices that aren’t there. But, on the other hand, the reality of the matter is that it can get quite difficult. What is, after all, our basis for defining real or illusionary? If many people experience the same thing, does that make it real?

Thus, upon reflection, it quickly becomes apparent that we must probe deeply into what we think is real and why we believe it is so. According to physics, much of psychological time is an illusion; to fully understand and verify this claim, we must first have a clear and solid grasp of what illusions are. After all, determining which part of time is illusionary or paradoxical and which part is real has been the very essence of the debate about time since the ancient Greeks.

This chapter, therefore, will focus on the difficult task of definitions and trying to come to grips with how and why the human brain decides what is real and what is not. For example, what is the purpose of illusions? And how do we determine if an experience is an illusion or not? Each of the lessons in this chapter will offer us a firm foundation on which to judge the time phenomena in the pages that follow—the most difficult of all illusions to understand.

What Is an Illusion?

Let us begin with a simple answer to the obvious question: what is an illusion? The human brain constructs a world inside our heads based on what it samples from the surrounding environment. Sometimes it tries to organize this information as it thinks best, while other times it fills in the gaps. When its interpretation conflicts with science—physics in particular—it is an illusion.

Illusions are not necessarily mistakes that our mind makes. There may be a good reason to have the illusion in terms of how it benefits the body/brain in general, i.e., in terms of its function and survival. In fact, most illusions are adaptive, as will be demonstrated.

Let us take a look at the different types of illusions. Optical illusions are the most common type of illusion because our vision is the biggest source of information from the outside world. An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that are deceptive or misleading. Therefore, the information gathered