PERCEPTION

This life’s five windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’, the eye (Blake)

Current theories of what it means to see the world, to hear the world, to feel the world, to smell the world and to taste the world are pretty primitive, but they are also almost impossible to understand. No doubt anything said here about ‘the problem of perception’ – as this conundrum of how we ‘experience’ the outside world is called – will be surrounded by similar difficulties and produce a similarly impenetrable set of notions, but at least no attempt will be made to oversimplify what is clearly very complicated and very wonderful. We’ll take sight as our paradigm of experiencing, because fundamentally similar things can be said about all the senses and sight is the most immediately comprehensible and the richest source of analogy. However, a caveat: we must never forget that each of our senses is doing very different things despite the scientific view, which holds that material impacts on the sense-organs (light on the eyes, shock waves in the air on the ears, molecules of various substances on the tongue and nasal receptors, or straightforward physical contact with the skin) are translated by the sense organs into electro-chemical pulses of basically similar sorts in the brain.
The current theories of how we see are dominated by what is called the ‘causal theory’ of perception and go back at least to the great English Empiricist philosopher John Locke. The story as far as seeing is concerned goes something like this: All matter in the universe is potentially or actually in causal contact with other matter and this contact involves a kind of external impact of one bit of matter on another – a kind of bumping into each other of the bits. The objects in the world reflect light (just as others provoke sound-waves, or shed molecules of some substance) and this light arrives in the form of streams of photons at our eyes, just as in the other senses, the organs are struck by various sorts of particles. The photons enter the eyeball via the pupil, cross the vitreous humour and strike the retina. Here the light of various wavelengths is transformed into neural signals that speed by means of electrochemical transmission to various parts of the brain. The process is entirely ‘material’ in the sense that we understand material processes, i.e. as three-dimensional things moving and bashing into each other. The bit of the brain most involved in the ‘processing’ of these signals is the occipital cortex at the back of the head and it is here that the signals are processed. This processing is of course no more than the ‘firing’ of neurons, which is understood, of course, as the movement or bumping together of bits of matter – more jiggling of three-dimensional objects. Eventually, this organisation of the signals derived from the light’s striking our retina is complete and hey presto! there is an inner experience of the outer object. ‘We’ (whatever that means) finally get the message.
The vivid experiences we have of summer sunshine on the glittering sea, the staggering contrasts of a snow-scene, the awe-inspiring grandeur of a sunset, the irresistible glamour of the one we love, and so on – all these are, in a perfectly ‘obvious’ sense, according to much current science of perception, merely the jiggling of three-dimensional objects (if we ignore or discount the ‘we’ who receive the message). Well, the best that we can say about this kind of conclusion is that those putting it forward, however convinced they claim to be themselves, have as yet to make a case convincing enough to persuade the ordinary man or woman. Indeed, they seem not to experience the world like the rest of us. They can only account for our perceptions in terms of particle movement by eliminating from perception everything that makes the perception perception, by eliminating all those so-called ‘subjective’ elements that we have indicated by our adjectives above and which are as much part of the perception as the colours, sounds, impacts and so on. Indeed, the irreducible sense of awareness is the one rock-solid constant in the process of perception, for whereas all the other elements are vague and shifting, the sense of experience is irreducibly and indubitably stable. The simple fact is that our sensory experiences, in addition to being so wonderful, so complex, so loaded with feeling etc, are so irrefutably ‘ours’ that to understand them as ‘no more’ or ‘nothing but’ tiny bits of matter bumping into each other in simply mind-splittingly counter-intuitive. We just find it impossible to believe. It is all the more impossible to believe since the radically different experiences of smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing are, according to the theories, all ‘nothing but’ the same kind of neural squirting or twitching in every case.
Now this ‘finding it impossible to believe’ is the flip side of finding matters simply ‘obvious’. Counter-intuitive is simply the reverse of intuitive. For that reason alone, we do well to be suspicious of it. But in the total absence of a convincing link between the richness of our inner experiences and what is after all only one aspect of that inner experience, namely our conception of the three-dimensional object, we have a right to cast around for another view that seems to do more justice to the complexity of our inner states of perception. Since we do not have to work with the notion of a world composed of three-dimensional objects, we simply do not have to work with the three-dimensional object conception of perception and may as well drop it. Consequently, we can ditch the idea that our world of perception is ‘nothing but’ the jiggling of 3D objects. This may be disturbing to some ‘psychologists’, but if we are wrong about 3D objects, then we are certainly wrong to equate perception with them.
To encourage you to abandon the causal bumping and banging conception of perception, you should contemplate the fact – and it is a well-attested fact – that all the physiology of perception as briefly described above, thus supposedly all the bumping into each other of all the right bits of matter, can be in place and yet there be no inner experience at all. This state of affairs is a phenomenon called ‘blind sight’ and involves every feature of seeing without any conscious experience of seeing. The body ‘sees’ and all the results of vision are measurable; but the person, the subject, is conscious of no visual experience whatever. People who possess perfectly functioning eyes, but have some sort of brain-lesion, affirm they have not been able to see something that is presented to them and then proceed to give evidence from their behaviour that ‘they’ nevertheless ‘know’ what was there to be seen. Their behaviour provides conclusive evidence that their body, at least, has seen. This experience in itself, which has been demonstrated in numerous experiments, tells us that seeing is something different from enjoying the physiological processes in the sensory organs. In these blind-sighted subjects the latter are all intact and indeed some part of their brain still ‘sees’ and responds accordingly. It’s just that the process that turns the stimulation of the sense-organs into inner experience has somehow been turned off by the lesion, even though the process of perception is fully functioning in all other respects. Thus the unavoidable conclusion to be drawn is that the inner experience of perception in all its richness is distinct from the stimulation of the perceptual pathways. The two are categorically not identical for they can be separated.
The causal theory of perception simply cannot explain why we are so certain that our inner experiences give us an accurate picture of the way the outside world is. Common sense tells us that we simply see the world exactly as it is. According to common sense, when we view, say, a red apple, the apple simply appears as it really is in the world, without any distortion addition, interpretation etc. In the common sense view, the subject doing the seeing does not affect the process. He or she has no properties that alter the appearance of the apple. The world, i.e. the apple, simply floats unchanged through the open doors of perception into some inner theatre of observation and is contemplated unchanged. The outside world is present, as it is in itself, in the inner world. According to common sense we have direct access to the world without any mediation. But if you believe in the causal theory of perception, this simply cannot be the case, given the complications of the physiology of perception as understood by current brain science. The red apple is first translated into light waves as light bounces off them, then into retinal stimulations as this light enters the eye, then into electro-chemical neuronal firing as the retina stimulates the nerves in contact with it, then into various complicated organisational operations of the processing capacity of the brain at the rear of the head, then into more diffuse patterns of neuronal activity deep within that mass of neural tissue, like a thick rind over the brain, called the ‘cortex’. We speak as if there were only one eye; but there are normally two and the images from each are not only different, but split by the brain in half; and each half is then combined with the half from the other eye. The conceptual ‘distance’ in terms of filtering mechanisms between the original ‘thing’ (which for some reason we think we can imagine ‘out there’ before we see it) and the ‘image in our heads’ is so great in terms of the transformations of the information that it is difficult to see how the experience of the object could in any way resemble the original object. There is, in short, nothing left of the original apple; no guarantee, indeed, that it was ever there in the first place.
So the physiological complications in no way allow us to believe that our experience even resembles the world of which it is supposed to be an experience. Your idea of a red apple may be caused by some entity that bears no resemblance at all to your idea, either to the visual experience of it, the tactile experience, the gustatory or the olfactory experience, or to the auditory experience, if you make it emit a sound. What is more, you have absolutely no way of comparing your inner image with the entity that is causing it, since your only access to this entity is via the images it causes. You may make a leap of faith and decide that the resemblance is just given anyway; and indeed, most of us do this all the time, every day; but you would have no cast-iron justification at all for doing this apart from your leap of faith in what seems obvious.
But there is a further major difficulty. This is the problem of ‘seeing-as’.
The fact is that we bring to perception a mass of assumptions that actually make us see what we see, or rather perceive what we perceive in a particular way. A lot of this ‘seeing as’ has to do with common sense and with the manner in which we have become accustomed to think of the things around us. For example, you might be walking through a department store and you see someone coming towards you who is vaguely familiar. You concentrate, and not having realised that there are mirrors on the pillars, you ask yourself where you have seen that person before. Then with a sudden shock, you realise that it is your own reflection and you feel a little silly. But the point is that for a while, you saw yourself as someone different. Or you may be walking down a street and you see someone standing motionless on the sidewalk smiling at you through the crowd. You approach and gradually realise that the person is smiling a bit too fixedly and has too rigid a posture. Then you realise that it is a life-size photo of a person stuck on a cardboard cut-out, an advert. It is a convincing two-dimensional picture of a person that has momentarily deceived you. Again, you have seen as one thing, what turns out to be quite another. You have applied to one thing assumptions that turned it into something else. This is ‘seeing as’ at it most simple and obvious, but it operates in far more complicated ways as well. We are certainly unaware of these ways in which we ‘see as’ most of the time; but they may be at the heart of what we call common sense. They may also be responsible for our tendency to see the world as grainy, or as composed of separate 3D objects.


Science and Perception

The prevailing belief concerning perception is that it is a passive process: one just lets the world of things come into the mind unchanged and as it is. This is however a profound misconception. Perception, as the great Swiss psychologist Piaget showed, is an active process in which the brain constructs a hypothesis about the way the world is on the basis of the information available to the sensory apparatus.
The information in question is a combination of information created by the mainly muscular activity of our sensory organs and information that comes from those entities that we must assume stimulate our sense organs. The hypothesis we develop is the most economical way of representing to us the interactions between the object we call our body and the objects surrounding us that are not our body. These interactions are a sort of interference pattern of movements in the organs (flicks and oscillations of the eyes, feeling movements of the hands, and so on) and whatever information is impinging upon them. Young children, who initially do not make any distinction between inner and outer, self and world, between their body and other objects nor between the disparate aspects of their experience, have no conception of an enduring object; and when an object disappears from their field of view, they do not look for it where it disappeared, but rather where it first appeared. They seem to have a magical conception of how objects may be made to appear. But then later, as stable, repeatable patterns emerge in their perceptual field, they build up the habit of viewing the world as three-dimensional and as separate from themselves, as they learn to move in variable patterns while experiencing invariant relationships between experiences. The theory they then adopt – that they move through a world of separate objects – is the most economical way of interpreting the invariant aspects of their flux of experience and it is reinforced by parental or social influence and by the structure of language.
But the brain has enormous power in all this. It is the brain that imposes the hypothesis upon experience that we call the ‘three-dimensional world’. It is the brain that makes it ‘obvious’ that the world has three space dimensions and exists in linear time. This is the most economical way of representing to us what is apparently invariant within our immediate range of experience. The hypothesis is built up from early childhood, following the predisposition of the brain, of course, and becomes ‘second nature’ in the consciousness of the adult. It probably becomes second nature because of its real adaptive value for our ancestors; if so, it has a ‘first nature’ basis. But once it has become second nature, adults then do not question it any more. Their habits turn into a fixed belief that this is the way the world is, rather than considering that the world might be entirely different from their hypothesis about it. But the world according to current physical theory is not an arena of three-dimensional space cluttered with three-dimensional objects. Science has for some time now called into question this basic habit of mind that common sense is based on. Science questions it because of facts that conflict with the scheme and science discovers that as a hypothesis it is useful to earthbound creatures moving at very low velocities, such as we are; but physicists at least recognise that for a view of the universe as a whole, or for a view of very small aspects of the material world, it is a completely useless distortion.
Bohm’s suggestion that the process of perception fundamentally resembles the process of scientific investigation and theorising is very convincing. As the brain builds hypotheses to interpret the stimulation of the sense-organs our understanding of the world moves from an undifferentiated consciousness of sensory impressions, in which the infant makes no distinction between itself and the world, to a progressive discovery of the dynamic interactions that are possible between the perceptions that we identify with our bodies and those that we identify as being not our bodies. The invariant features of these perceptions are turned by the brain into memories of interactions with the environment that constitute a kind of map, but not a precise map of a precise terrain, more a map of general instructions of what kinds of things are likely to turn up and how these things are likely to behave. This set of expectations concerning what we have begun to remember as the invariant features of our interaction with the world then settles down to a theory that constitutes a set of assumptions about the world as such and the universe as such.
The hypothesis that the infant develops concerning the disposition of objects, their extensions and boundaries, becomes a hypothesis concerning the nature of reality as such. The world becomes a collection of objects surveyed by a subject that is not one of them. This infant’s-eye view of the world provides a fine working hypothesis for daily life, but when extended to the whole universe, it breaks down. The notions of three-dimensional space and one-dimensional linear time, though appropriate and adequate for everyday interaction with the world of our experience turn out to be completely inappropriate and completely inadequate when applied within frames of reference that are larger than those of everyday living. It was for this reason that the world-view of Newton turned out to be lacking, or at least only correct within a limited frame of reference – the limited frame, indeed, in which everyday intuitions concerning time, space, objects and subjects were extrapolated beyond their scope and in which the point of view of the observer could be ignored. As already pointed out, the theory of Special Relativity found the assumption that time and space were an absolutely fixed background to all reality to be no more than an unnecessary generalisation of a prejudice of ours that had application only to our immediate, low-velocity life. Different and differently moving observers would attribute different meanings to the notions of simultaneity, physical dimension, time-succession and related matters, because they would be calculating the variables in these questions according to different frames of reference. Thus any talk of absolute three-dimensional space and absolute linear time was not only off-beam, but also hindered understanding.
So if science is discovering the inadequacies of perceptual assumptions that have served us so well for millennia that we don’t even think they are assumptions, maybe the human race is now ready to abandon its common sense for all but the most mundane of activities. Maybe we can begin to take seriously hunches about the nature of reality that our species has had for all of recorded history at least, hunches that have always suggested to us that common sense is far from giving us the whole picture.
This ability of ours to question the experience of common sense demonstrates that although we are profoundly manipulated by our brains and by the interpretations they make of sensory experience in order to allow us to function, we are nevertheless not enslaved by them: we can transcend the view of the world that they impose upon us. Something in us is able to criticise what our brains present to us as a reasonable hypothesis concerning the way the world is. This something is clearly able to stand above and beyond the constructions of the brain. What this something is, we have already discussed as the ‘self’ and will discuss a little more later. It is sufficient here to assert that this something can legitimately be considered to be our indeterminate intelligence rather than our determinate brain; it not habit-ridden, ego-directed, mechanical thought that simply repeats past patterns, but rather unique creative insight that manipulates the mechanical aspects of thought in compete freedom. Thus the above word ‘something’ in this context is impermissible in a very precise sense, because what we are considering is precisely not a thing. But such are the infirmities of our language that we are almost compelled to use it.

Perception and increased dimensionality

It is a liberating experience to take on board the possibility that we are obliged by evolutionary development or by culturally conditioned habit – or by a combination of both – to see the world as a three-dimensional collection of things, whereas it is in fact anything but that. Having done that, some further light can be cast on the problem of perception and on the difficulty we have in seeing the wonderful world of our experience as ‘nothing but’ bumping together of bits and pieces of stuff, if we start to think of the world, as the physicists do, as consisting of many more dimensions than the three of space and the one of time that common sense reveals to us. If we start to take on board the possibility that the world possesses at least the eleven dimensions of modern ‘String-‘ or ‘M Theory’, then the wonders of perception begin to make a little more sense and we don’t have to explain them away as embarrassing ‘epiphenomena’ generated, much like the buzz of an electric motor, by the mechanism that is our brain. After all, they are only embarrassing if one is committed to eliminative materialism, that is to say, the dogma that represents the world as just a collection of chunks of matter, just bits and pieces. The reason why extra dimensions make mysterious things a little easier to accept is that every extra dimension added to the world is, as already pointed out, a multiplication of its degrees of freedom by a staggering amount. When one is handicapped by an intellect obsessed with 3D objects, these freedoms are inevitably mysterious; but that is not their fault.
To start, imagine a one-dimensional world. It may be a line, but any being on it has to be either a point or a line. Imagine the restrictions imposed on you if you are merely a point or a little line moving along a longer line (because we throw in the dimension of time). There’s not a great deal you can do. Life would be pretty uneventful, going back and forth along the line. Imagine then that you have another dimension added to your world and that you now have two. The degrees of freedom that you suddenly acquire are vastly increased and what you can do suddenly becomes hugely more interesting. Instead of only being able to go backwards and forwards along the line, you can move to the right and to the left, you can describe circles, you can design arabesques, you can paint any picture with your movements that can appear on the cinema-screen But most importantly, you can simulate worlds of higher dimensionality, such as three-dimensional worlds.
But then imagine that the third dimension is actually given to you. What happens then is miraculous compared to what you had before. Not only do you have the simulation, you have the reality. You have all the light and fire of the world of three-dimensions and the fourth of time comes with it as it came with the others, because movement implies duration. But now you have real movement in three dimensions. The degrees of freedom that you now have surpass to an incalculable extent those you had in your two-dimensional world. But then what happens if you then add a fourth space dimension, and a fifth and a sixth…? Our imagination fails us here, but one can nevertheless appreciate that the degrees of freedom soar exponentially with each new dimension. There is a runaway complexification of reality.
You need to let your imagination run away with you a little to imagine the degrees of freedom that are conferred every time you add another dimension. But you can draw an analogy with the differences between the one-dimensional and the three dimensional worlds in order to help you a bit. Obviously, with the addition of every extra dimension, the world becomes unimaginably more complex and the freedom unimaginably greater. If we have eleven dimensions as String Theory suggests, then we must have a whole lot of freedom. We may have vastly more than eleven. We may have infinite dimensionality. So why do we continue to try and understand our experience in terms of a world that only has three space dimensions and one of time? One explanation is that it is the brain that presents us with this theory as the most economical way of interacting with the world. But why is this of any relevance? Well, the reason is that our mental experience may in its very nature be precisely a matter of dimensionality.
Our senses tell us that the world has three dimensions. But our minds clearly constitute an entirely different sort of dimensionality. Perhaps our conscious mind is an inchoate understanding of more dimensions than our sensory awareness can imagine. Perhaps the so-called ‘unconscious’ mind is the even more inchoate understanding of yet more dimensions. So with those considerations alone, we are far beyond the 3D world of common sense. There is moreover no terribly good reason, apart from common sense, to believe that time has only one dimension. Why can we not entertain the thought that whereas our senses suggest that the world is three-dimensional, the fact of our minds and the fact of the pictures we have in them of the world outside and the fact that we know these pictures to be distinct from the real world itself – all this suggests that we are dealing with a phenomenon of dimensionality. The postulation made earlier of a fourfold world of foreworld, hindworld, midworld and hyperworld is not a suggestion that there are only four dimensions; it is rather an attempt to get away from the notion of a monolithic three-dimensional object-world of common sense as the only world there is and to move towards a sense of higher dimensionality by means of additions to our vocabulary. To highlight the most basic limitation of the 3D world: it cannot accommodate the subject. So rather than abolishing the subject, as much scientific thought strives to do, the sensible thing to do is perhaps to abolish the three-dimensional world – as has already happened in physics.
Consciousness may be operating in some, all of, or more than the eleven dimensions talked about by modern physics. Consciousness may have some sort of non-sensory access to the multiplicity of possible worlds postulated by quantum physics. Perception is emphatically not just the contemplation of a brutally objective external world by a propertyless and non-existant subject. The inner world of experience, though inconvenient to some scientists, is no less a world of perception. It is unhelpful to discount these as ‘mere subjectivity’. In a word of only three dimensions, the gulf between the subject and the object is unbridgeable, which is why much scientific thought tries to get rid of the subject. In a multi-dimensional world, there is no need to make any fundamental distinction between subject and object. This makes the world an infinitely more interesting place than the simple world of three space dimensions in which the subject has to view itself as a delusion. Since our business here is to try and excite wonder, try this: reflect upon higher dimensionality for a moment and try to imagine more complex worlds than that of your everyday. Imagine being inchoately conscious of the superposition of the infinity of quantum states alongside the one that you actually experience by means of your physical sense-organs. If you can, you might want to try and get a handle on them. If you do, then you need not imagine that our primary experience of the world is just a causal interaction of three-dimensional objects. It is infinitely more wonderful than that.
We have already seen that the theory of a world of three-dimensional objects is most likely a convenient construct of our brains and that it probably does not correspond to reality. The old causal impact view is simply old hat and it was never convincing anyway. We do not have to think of collections of three-dimensional things at all, we can think of multi-dimensional processes. If no portion of the material world is ultimately in any real sense separate from any other and if every so-called ‘particle’ is actually a process that mirrors the whole universe, then you can really liberate your mind by imagining how that might appear to us. The interpenetration of eleven or more dimensions may well give you the degrees of freedom that a world requires for the mind to be taken seriously in itself as having access to reality that is more complex than current 3D understanding of the physiology of the senses seems to suggest. Compare the one-dimensional being on his line with the three-dimensional being that common sense tells you you are. Then try to compare this three-dimensional being with the eleven-dimensional being that you might be. You don’t have to grasp all the fine detail to understand that the wonders of perception and of every other inner experience may well be easy to accommodate in a world of so many freedoms.
Our precise understanding may not be helped by such speculations, but we don’t have to have a precise understanding of every matter of interest to us. We are after all not exclusively interested in technological gizmos. Often the intimations of a more interesting world than the one we thought we lived in are enough to liberate the mind and encourage it to come up with a reasonably precise understanding of a higher order than those it has so far arrived at. The amazing discoveries of science have only happened because people first began to think outside of their particular socially conditioned box and then, with the help of imagination and logic, created a more complicated box. We don’t know how many possible boxes there are, there may be infinitely many. Real thinking may be intrinsically outside of any box. But one thing is clear from developments in physics: thinking of our perception as just the bumping together of three-dimensional things may be too small a box either to satisfy us any longer or to satisfy the reality that is beginning to dawn on us.

The Redundancy of Silly Theories

There are few sillier theories than the attempts of so-called ‘eliminative materialists’ to banish the reality of mind. To recap: essentially all materialistic theories of perception are devoted to the notion of matter as a bunch of three-dimensional objects. They are then devoted to the idea that what we may think of as the rich world of subjective experience is ‘actually’ no more than the collision of bits of matter. The mental gymnastics required to dispense with the mind and with mindlike concepts (‘experience’, ‘feeling’, ‘inner states’, etc. etc.) are so monumentally unconvincing that one wonders how they could ever be taken seriously. They involve a sort of denial of the obvious; a denial of the elephant in the room. They involve an entirely uncritical attitude to the assumptions of common sense. They also involve a massive exercise in personal vanity on the part of those who invent them: the vain possibility that a few squirts of so-called ‘proof’ are going to banish the profoundest convictions of most human beings.
Subjective experience (which is after all the basis of all so-called ‘knowledge’), where it is not simply dispatched as ‘illusion’ (illusion to whom or to what?) is airily pronounced to be ‘no more’ than an ‘epiphenomenon’ of material processes. The best these epiphenomenalists can do to elucidate their pet concept is to compare this epiphenomenon to some inessential accompanying phenomenon of a physical process; but even these physical processes are substantial in their own right and the analogy with the hum made by an electric motor is pitiful when one considers what is being dismissed (i.e. the universe of conscious awareness). But we may as well admit it openly: all of these reductive and eliminative theories are in fact desperate attempts to save the assumption that the world is ‘nothing but’ a collection of three-dimensional objects. Since this assumption is wrong, we can drop it and the silly theories of eliminative materialism that go with it. So what can we put in its place. We don’t have to start waffling about ghosts and spirits. We can stick to the concept ‘matter’ if we wish, since the assumption that the universe is constructed out of it is a reasonable one. But we don’t have to equate matter with three-dimensional objects or indeed with any of the stuff of our everyday experience. In place of this, we can consider the universe to be a multi-layered reality in which each layer is characterised by increased dimensionality. Realities of lower dimensionality can begin to show up features of the next level of dimensionality above them. For example, the Peano curve is a one-dimensional line that in fact goes through all the points of a two-dimensional surface and therefore has some of the latter’s properties. Fractals provide further examples of this ability of entities of lower dimensionality to encroach on levels of dimensionality above them. Now we know that the world of three-dimensional objects arises, in a way we have yet to understand, from a reality that has much higher dimensionality. This is one of the most basic insights of string theory. Is it not therefore possible that what we call the ‘mental’ realm is the emergence into the world of three dimensions of the properties of higher levels of dimensionality? If this is the case, then conscious perception may be the self reflection of the world of three dimensions within the vastly increased freedom of a world of many more than three dimensions. It may be, further, that self-conscious perception is the reflection of this reflection in a realm of still higher dimensionality. What we call perception may be an effect of lower levels of dimensionality encroaching on higher; and in self-conscious perception these levels’ then encroaching on yet higher levels. We can maintain this conception of perception and of self-conscious perception without invoking insubstantial ‘spiritual’ or mythical entities.
It is entirely possible that there are vast numbers of different levels of material subtlety hidden in the regions of sub-atomic matter that we are as yet unable to investigate. There is sufficient range in these unexplored regions of space that are beyond our powers of perception and even imagination (at scales of between 10-16 cm and 10-33 cm) for enormous intricacy of structure to be possible. This range is about the same range, by the way, as that which exists in the difference in size between ourselves and the sub-atomic particles we can identify. This vast zone of possibility may be characterised by levels of dimensionality and thus levels of freedom of which we have little conception and from which our rather bone-headed assumptions concerning the three-dimensional materiality of the world look simply naïve. Thus it is simply hasty, to say the least, to announce that subjective access to the world of perceptual experience is no more than an irrelevant illusion. The simple fact is this: we know it is not an illusion with as much certainty as we know that an object cannot be both itself and something else at the same time and in the same place. It is far more intelligent and indeed liberating, to take conscious (and self-conscious) awareness seriously and to consider perception as the interpenetration of levels of dimensionality and thus levels of reality.
There is a real sense, sanctioned by physics, in which we can talk of ‘levels of reality’, for the classical world of our experience arises out of a more fundamental, and thus more real, world of quantum processes. We do not have to set any arbitrary limit to the number of levels that reality possesses. But we can at least entertain the thought that our conscious perception and our self-conscious perception involve the interpenetration of many, perhaps very many levels. Were we purely creatures of three-dimensions, we would have no consciousness at all. Where a creature is conscious of three-dimensions, this must be because it is in some sense rooted in and encroaches upon a higher dimensionality. Where the creature is self-conscious, the dimensionality is higher still. There are almost certainly levels of consciousness above the self-conscious (for example, the ‘mystical’ or ‘oceanic’ consciousness) and we cannot legitimately dismiss these any more than we can dismiss mere conscious or self-conscious perception as illusory. When one reflects on the perfectly reasonable theory that the universe is composed of light and that its phenomena as they appear to us are species of bound or frozen light, one could consider our perception and our levels of conscious awareness from simple consciousness to ‘enlightened’ states of cosmic consciousness as our access to the many levels of light from the bound to the unbound.

TIMELESS TIME

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. (T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets)



Though there are still many believers in linguistically expressible absolutes, the context-dependency of what we call ‘truth’ is now appreciated in all disciplines by all who have some philosophical understanding. The meanings of words are related to the frame of reference in which they are used and the truth that they express is a truth that implies a relation of concepts to this frame of reference whether consciously chosen or not. Since the frame of reference is itself a conceptual structure, truth is a relation of concepts, and not some ultimate constituent of the universe.

Whereas in the past, some absolute relationship between speech and things was assumed, we now think differently and use language ‘relativistically’, that is to say that we postulate no necessary or favoured relation between a word and a thing but only a word’s ability to refer more or less illuminatingly to the relationship between our concepts, concepts that, themselves, only play a meaningful role in reference to a particular and limited intellectual scheme. Take one of the fundamental time-concepts: the word ‘present’. If, as is the case, there can be no absolute meaning to the concept of ‘simultaneity’ in the universe, then there can be no talk of ‘the universe’ as a single, present state of affairs that the observer is deemed to observe and, by observing, believed to know. A similar remark can be made about the ‘past’ and the ‘future’. We may assume that there are events in the universe that lie outside of the light-cone in which we find ourselves and that therefore presumably are unknowable by us – at least by the normal empirical methods. They lie outside of any measure of time that we can use; but that does not mean that they are by that token incapable of having any influence on us and our universe. It’s just that we have no everyday way of determining either the nature or the quantity of such events, nor their impact upon the universe that is in fact accessible to our observation. If this is the case, then any thought of a final ‘theory of everything’ is a pipe dream because it will be incomplete. And because it will leave something out, we have to put up with the possibility that it may leave the most important things out. The best we can achieve is a provisional account of what is in our range. These remarks are particularly appropriate in opening a brief discussion of time. What must be remembered, is this: the only constant in the universe is that the universe perpetually becomes what it was not. That is to say that the timeless potential achieves presence within a timebound series. The concepts of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ do not designate universal absolutes; they are indicators of our point of view and of the frame of reference created by that point of view.

Time is intrinsic to the structure of the intellect and our society has become accustomed to judging everything it considers as implicated in a time series. The whole of society is structured according to a historical consciousness. The whole of science, likewise. The entire body of our much-vaunted knowledge is inseparable from our awareness of its history. Education and culture are similarly dominated by the notion of temporal succession, beginnings, middles and ends and, crucially, by the belief in arrival one day at ‘the truth’. The entire cognitive enterprise of the human race is structured by this narrative. The fact that there is absolutely no possibility of any final destination does not stop us hoping for one.

All of these notions of temporal succession that structure our most important and most trivial activities are subject to a narrative, without which we would find it difficult to make sense of them or to value them. It is extremely difficult for us to conceive of timelessness for we strive to grasp even this as a time-series. And yet, it is necessary for us to consider the fundamental operation of the mind – by which is meant not ego-processes, but rather the mind’s ability to generate coherent novelty – as standing outside of a time-series. ‘Outside of a time series’ here means no more than ‘not subject to the irreversible succession of instants that measure the rate of change in the positions of 3D objects’. Without a conception of the creative intelligence as outside of the timebound order and as only becoming timebound when it expresses itself, we will be unable to understand ourselves and proceed to any new level of culture characterised by open-ended and continuous creativity rather than by some monolithic ‘truth’. If we do not understand our intelligence as timeless, we are condemned to operate forever with the delusions of the time-bound intellect and within the limits of its established methods. If we do this, we are condemned to a nonsensical, anthropocentric notion of truth as an acquisition situated at the end of our narrative and therefore at the end of time or history.

Our intelligence cannot be time-bound. If it were it would have no conception of time at all. We might be conscious of time’s passage, but our consciousness would be the kind of consciousness we attribute to animals, which to our observation appears entirely constituted by the succession of events and lacking any notion of time past, time future and by comparison, time present. It would appear that the consciousness of an animal involves no distinction between perceiver and perceived: the flow of perceptions wholly constitutes the perceiver. A time-bound mind would be as tied to and unaware of the temporal flow as a stick floating on the current of a river. The timelessness of the human mind is attested to by our ability to contemplate past, present and future all at once without our being tied to any one of these. Awareness of time is awareness of the totality of time, beginning, middle and end, past, present and future, simultaneously and from some vantage beyond all of them. The timeless property of the mind is clear from its ability to stand above the flow and view it as a self-contained totality. To pursue the river-image, the mind is able either to consider the flow from the point of view of the floating stick carried by the stream of events; or alternatively, it is at liberty to view the course of the river from source to mouth as a single event. All conceptions of time are structured by a particular frame of reference; and the mind is always above and beyond this frame. The frame intrudes only when consciousness of time structures discourse. This timeless view of time is merely an aspect of the mind’s indeterminate simultaneity from which all its productions and all its actions are unfolded into temporality and spatiality.

If one drops one’s everyday prejudices about three-dimensional things and the three-dimensional space that we assume contains them, it becomes that much easier to take a critical look at our everyday commonsense conception of time. According to this, time is an absolute context of linearly successive instants in which each instant is simultaneously the same throughout the universe and follows the one before with perfect, mathematical regularity in an infinite sequence that goes back without beginning into the past and extends without end into the future. It is one-dimensional. Common sense cannot conceive of its ending or beginning; and it advances in an exact analogy to the infinite sequence of integers, like the ticking of some gigantic clock. That each instant adds itself to an already infinite number of instants means of course that time does not get any longer or shorter; so the finite local time that we experience is embedded in supposedly infinite universal time. This, of course, makes the succession very mysterious; for how can a series that strikes us as starting and finishing, i.e. as finite, also be infinite? But most of us happily overlook the mystery.

The physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the popularised versions of which still influence people’s minds, were dominated by such a conception of time, and for no good reason except that it was ‘obvious’ to everyone that that is how time is. It took a major genius with a childlike taste for indulging in imaginative fantasy about the behaviour of light to come up with a conception of time that was radically at variance with what was ‘obvious’ to everyone. Newton’s classical physics and the linear conception of time were not wrong; they were not wrong, because there is no absolute right. It’s just that they failed to explain all the phenomena that were encountered even though they were considered to be aspects of reality and not just theories. The classical conception of time was incompatible with certain inconvenient facts concerning the behaviour of light that would not fit into the theory. Of course, the fantastic success of Newton’s physics was extremely useful, it allowed a much more detailed description of the local universe and this description ultimately made possible the technology of the industrial revolution. But its truth was limited to a definite context that had to exclude many other possibilities, many other freedoms. Einstein was the genius who saw that there was no privileged point in the universe from which universal time could be measured and that time must always be measured in relation to a particular frame of reference, a particular vantage-point.

The upshot of this insight (that further demonstrates the timelessness of the human mind) was that time and the order of events always had to be considered as relative to a particular set of circumstances of relevance to a particular observer moving in a particular way. Another observer would not necessarily be tied to these circumstances and so would measure time differently. So, for example, for the first observer, events A, B, and C may come in that order according to his or her measurement of time. But to the second observer, the order could be quite different. The notion of simultaneity, i.e. of a universal ‘present’, turned out to have no absolute meaning, since there was no absolute standpoint from which this could be judged. Simultaneous events for one observer or set of observers would not be simultaneous for other observers perhaps moving differently and judging according to a different frame of reference. This view of things demonstrated conclusively that time is not the absolute, one-dimensional, universal context for everything that we think it is when we extrapolate from our immediate bodily circumstances to the universe as a whole. Your past may be future for another observer and your future already past for yet another. These considerations are sufficient to show that our everyday conception of time is not as ‘obvious’ as it seems intuitively to us. All time-considerations concern the behaviour of bodies. The mind is beyond this even though humans are embodied. Once we see how defective our ‘obvious’ ego-intuitions are, it becomes easy for the mind to suspend them or even to drop them altogether.
But we can rock the boat of common sense a little more by considering the measurement of time. We measure it in units of the same length – in days, months, years, nanoseconds etc. – and imagine that time proceeds (within a certain frame of reference, of course) according to this scheme: one unit following upon the previous one in mechanical regularity. We measure time with mechanical devices that are so designed as to oscillate, vibrate, or perform some other regular movement with a precise period, of which we then keep a record with a counting device – hands on a dial, figure on a display and so on. We imagine that just as the sun comes up every day after the same period of time (more or less) and the seasons follow each other after the same periods of time (more or less) so our more refined machines indicate the passage of precise units of time, one after the other. The smaller the units, we believe, the more accurate our measurement of the passage of time. Following our naive acceptance of the thing-ideology and its belief in the benefits of reduction to supposedly ‘simple’ components, we would like to arrive at ‘atoms’ of time, that are not further divisible. The trouble with this conception of time is that it raises more problems than it solves. Though it makes the mathematics involved in counting units easier, it does not improve our understanding of the nature of time.

Imagine that time does proceed forward in little hops, nanoseconds or whatever. We have to ask ourselves what happens between the nanoseconds. Where does one nanosecond end and the next one begin? If there is no way of deciding this, there is no way of separating them. A nanosecond lasts a definite, finite, measurable period of time and thus must begin at one point and end at another. Ignoring the absurd concept of infinite accuracy, which is impossible and unnecessarily complicates the issue, we can assert that any gap between the intervals cannot arbitrarily be pronounced to be infinitely small. So if the nanosecond begins and ends, there must be something between each of them. If there is nothing between each of them, then they don’t begin or end. If they don’t begin and end, then there is no way of deciding whether each one is of the same length. The measuring device may record the passage of precisely ten nanoseconds, say, but if we do not know exactly when they begin or end, it might be the case that each nanosecond is actually of a different length. Indeed, to adapt Zeno of Elea, if each nanosecond is infinitely divisible, it may be of infinite length. The measuring device just records the passage of a definite number of units; it does not say whether each of those units was the same length.

Moreover, it may be that there is indeed something going on between each nanosecond: let’s say that the universe freezes into complete immobility for an indefinite period between each nanosecond, but because we are frozen and everything else in the universe is frozen for that period, no observer notices the passage of these periods between each nanosecond. This is a bizarre but not absurd possibility. To make this last – admittedly wacky – idea more imaginable and comprehensible, think of a computer display. Think of one of those geometrical designs that are used for screen-savers, a cube or something that gradually morphs into a spiky thing that then becomes a sphere and then back to a cube again. When we watch this sort of display – and indeed any series of ‘moving’ pictures, either on television or at the cinema – we have the illusion that the stages of the design or the stills of the movie just ‘flow’ into each other seamlessly. Of course they do not. It’s just that our eye is not quick enough to detect that what we have is a succession of static images. In the case of the screen-saver display, the computer generates a series of images, but it calculates, with a refresh rate that goes more quickly than the eye can detect, the new co-ordinates for a new design in the series, and the design jumps to that next still; but we do not detect the illusion. Between each of the stills, there is nothing on the screen at all. It is blank. So perhaps the universe is like that: it is blank between the nanoseconds, nothing happens, there is nothing. In that case, we have to explain how the universe gets from one still to the next. If there is something between the stills, then we really have a problem for we have no idea what it could be. On the computer-screen, the blank does not last long enough for us to detect it, but in the universe, the blank could last for the entire length of a universe and we wouldn’t notice. Of course this would be a fairly miraculous state of affairs, for the universe would have to disappear and then to be recreated miraculously either side of each blank. This strikes us as nonsense, but the view of time that we have, as a succession of identical instants, permits it as a possibility.

There is a definite similarity between the atomic conception of matter and the separate ‘moment’ conception of time. Both permit many helpful ways of thinking, but both create very great problems and, if pushed too far, unhelpful states of mind. If we think for a moment that both conceptions are mere midworld structures and that they are striving to portray to our imagination what happens in hyperworld, which is strictly unimaginable, we will be able to put them in perspective. But it is helpful to realise that the atomic conception of matter and the moment conception of time have this in common: they are attempts by our minds to identify fundamental ‘things’, invariable repeatable units to which we can reduce any complex process. This is a helpful realisation because we can see this habit of our mind as just that, a habit of our thought and not as a strictly necessary feature of the world, as not part of reality but as just a particular mental kink that we have developed. In the universal flux of reality, we just have to espy repetition and stability. That’s how we function. We’re programmed that way for our survival, but the exciting thing about humans is that we are not slaves to such conceptions. We are creatures that constantly overstep bounds set to our minds by nature precisely because the essence of the self is beyond space and time.

Dropping the linear and granular conception of time allows us to see that we do not have to assume that time advances in mysterious little hops as our unit conception of it suggests. If the timebound universe is perpetually, seamlessly and as a whole morphing into what is was not, we can imagine that events simply flow seamlessly like the water in a river and it is we who chop them up into changeless, stable bits for our convenience. Thus we can imagine that time flows seamlessly. Of course this means that we cannot guarantee that each instant measured by the clock is of the same length in reality, just because the clock counts them as such. Clock time, one identical unit after another, is an abstraction from the mechanical movements of clocks that we have made and not a feature of the world as a whole. Their ticking, the sign of their movement, tells us that the machine is doing something with a regular period; and it does that because we have made it that way. The clock incarnates our abstract commonsense notion. It tells us nothing about what is happening in the universe at large. Even when we choose a natural period such as the vibrations of quartz, we extract a convenient periodicity that suits us from the seamless flow and abstract its period as if it were intrinsically invariable. The seamless flow, moreover, is merely our take on the timelessness of reality. Ultimately, of course, there is no flow.

Subjective time is different from clock time. We all have the experience of long, sometimes interminable minutes and short years that flash by. Counting the units of time is irrelevant when we are completely absorbed by some activity. Creative activity has its own temporal flavour that both dilates and shrinks vulgar clock time. The self can lose all notion of the flow of time in its absorption. It seems unreasonable to say that because a machine records identical units, then each period of our time that we designate by the same word is necessarily of the same length in an absolute sense. In Relativity theory, there is no possibility at all of absolute universal agreement on the length of an instant, any more than on the dimensions or the mass of an object: different observers will judge these to be as different quantities. It seems clear that for us the objects of our experience occupy space and endure through time. It is just that the three-dimensional space that strikes us as so obviously the ‘way the world is’ is clearly more mental construct imposed upon reality than property of that world itself. The same can be said about our notion of one-dimensional time.

If commonsense time is no more than a measure of the change in the relative positions of a collection of objects of perception within a particular frame of reference and for a particular observer, then it is incomprehensible except from a timeless vantage from which all its instants are as if present at once. The impossibility of considering 3D objects as absolutely distinct and separate is added to the impossibility of understanding their movement as a series of immobilities (as in the computer-display) and the time taken in that movement as a series of instants separated from each other by intervals of timelessness. This granular structure of the way we experience and describe the world seems to be something that we find very difficult to do without in our effort to understand; but it is entirely possible that this tendency we have to view things atomistically is akin to a pair of coloured spectacles that we find difficult or are unwilling to take off, but that make us see the world in a particular light.

Spectacles that we cannot take off and that make us see the world as grainy, as composed of many identical little bits? Maybe we do have these on along with time and space spectacles; but maybe they are merely the result of long habit and maybe we can take them off as well. Perhaps when we take them off, one of the first things to happen will be the discovery of our ability to understand our selves as aspects of the absolute timeless simultaneity of all reality. There is after all no reason why from one vantage point the universe should not be a simultaneity while from another it is a succession. These two are not incompatible. In our commonsense frame of mind, this simultaneous reality has to be unfolded into a series, into a narrative, unfolded into the determinate realm of the timebound. But it is conceivable that this is only the result of our infirmity and that all narratives are simultaneously enacted with their past, present and future combined timelessly along with everything else that is not part of the series (although it might be part of a series belonging to a distinct and separate realm of time).

If creativity and creative living mean anything for humans, they mean the irruption into the realm of timebound narratives of what is atemporal. We could with a little stretch of the imagination call this process ‘incarnation’.