Emergent time is universal to all humans. It is also a universal element of the process of evolution and much of what we call the Universe. We all call emergent time the now. Yet it is only one expression of time, and ours is only one interpretation of it. For as long as I can remember I have had an obsession about our interpretation of the now, and why our minds work as they do, so since from our perspective time only flows forwards relentlessly, and I am now 54 years of age, I figured I would write some of my potential theorisations down, in as simple a language as possible. Before you continue reading I have to let you know that you are reading a lifetime of a thought experiment and, every word of this could be wrong.

“Emergent Time And The Spinning Brain.”

As you read the following paragraph, each word unfolds creating a sentence, a sentence becomes a paragraph, the words you have read already create comprehension of the next word. Past, future and now are all present in your understanding of the words. Each word in every sentence you have ever read is an emergent quantity. Emergent time functions exactly the same way as a word in a sentence does, it flows forwards. Yet emergent time unlike a paragraph is illiterate, it only knows the flow of its waveform, much like pure music does. It has been estimated that human beings. “Lag behind the now by 60 to 100 milliseconds.” This lag is essential, and even the language used plays against understanding what is happening, because the brain may not be lagging behind the now at all. What you are about to read has a beautiful simplicity to it.

It has recently been discovered that the brain spins, generating a cyclical wave, fast like a vinyl record would, but as a relentless cycle. Within the brain is a recognisable structure known as the insular cortex, they are present in both left and right of your brains hemispheres. The Insular do a heck of a lot, as our brains like our hands are particularly good at multitasking. The lag now becomes a clue, as the brain is giving you a midpoint measurement of an emergent time wave. In effect your brain is surfing this wave, and using multiple reference points, to allow you to navigate and exploit the emergent mobility that time creates. This means that the window of opportunity of emergent time is at most 200 milliseconds. Which leads me back to the insulars, because they are the most versatile structures. It would point to both hemispheres being slightly offset to measure this wave, but probably it is just both insulars. One set slightly faster and one set slightly slower, and that enables you to perceive the now. Another clue to this is our emotional connection with time itself. Think about your experience of time, when your happy it flies, when you are sad it can catastrophically slow. This again leads to the insular cortex, as it is believed they are involved in consciousness, emotions, motor control, cognitive functioning and perception. Those are just a few of the insulars suspected functions. It is why I point to the insular cortex and why I am focusing on them as the most likely candidates within our brains structure, using a slightly offset speed to enable a perception of time so we can function.

In the simplest of terms it is like a rifle site, where three points of reference allow you to score a bullseye. It’s like using a compass, where again points of reference enable you to know exactly where you are on a map. Putting it even simpler and possibly more accurately, its like a surfer, balancing between the front and the back of the surfboard in relation to the wave they are skimming over. There is no lag. This is a middle measurement, a balanced point between a wave crest, and the wave in question is emergent time. The simplicity of this is beautiful, as that slight 60-100 millisecond offset of perceived time, is all it takes to enable you to function or even dream.

“Emergent Time As A Window Of Evolutionary Opportunity.”

Where evolution begins should be a topic of mass debate, as an extremist when it comes to Charlie Darwins fabulous theory, well I would argue it should begin with astronomy, at the very least. Simply put, without planets to supply the basic ingredients, life would have an even tougher time getting going. Plus it does look as though a lot of the Universes functions, make life itself an inevitability, which results in the random dance of Tetris that animated minerals played at beginning of all life on Earth, and inevitably results in you reading these words, a billion or perhaps billions of years later. This was eloquently summed up by Professor England’s following quote. “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine a light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.” Relax, you are not a geranium. Your evolutionary ancestors took a different route to today. Light creates heat, impacts create heat, and heat dissipates measurably, this is basic thermodynamic theory. Now think of a cup of coffee, the drink cools down over a period of time. That is a thermodynamic exchange. The entire basis of thermodynamics could collapse without emergent time. So intertwined is it with emergent time, that thermodynamics is almost inconceivable without it. Unless it goes backwards.

Life itself began evolving through animated minerals, that lead to primitive structures, structures which became more and more complex over time. Ultimately becoming the predator and prey world of our animal kingdom. One of the many evolutionary battles would have been with emergent time itself, as any organism that can get closer to the now would develop an impressive advantage over the competition. That advantage has been overlooked especially in the random development of the different brains that evolution enabled. How to exploit your environment has to include time itself, and that has to include the emergent window of opportunity we call the now. We as a highly evolved primate take the now for granted, to the point where we overlook it’s importance even in the archeological fossil record. Evolution is a battlefield unlike any other. Emergent time and an organisms proximity to it, had to become a factor as life speeded up. Picture two fish. In an ocean from our distant past. One has evolved closer to the emergent time wave, one is further away from it. Which fish is going to be able to exploit and avoid exploitation more successfully?

This is in a way little more than a missing ingredient in our understanding of the process of evolution, as we know early organisms were slow. The development of the eye itself is a process of speed too, primitive eyes only registered dark and light, but got more and more complex, and with the eyes came the earliest brains, with them came time. With further time comes humanity, you, us, our species, a species that can understand this process. A species that has a smaller but potentially better brain than our ancestors, and a species that lives in the here and now. We have evolved to exploit the window of opportunity that this emergent now offers us. Combine that with memory and potentially we become one impressive mammal. Add imagination and creativity and you can see the now, and understand it, and exploit it. That is why evolution chases emergent time, its why we can engineer things, plan and create, that is because emergent time offers us a window of opportunity. Yet we are almost oblivious to it, as it is as natural as breathing. For something that is essential to every human process, we like surfers, simply flow instinctively oblivious to it, and that is because we have evolved with it. To the point where emergent time or thermodynamic time is a part of us, just like gravity.

“Perspective Curves.”

Time always flows forwards? Yes it does. From our perspective. Evolution has wired us this way, to the point where we can only see the world in these terms. This phenomenon is called the arrow of time. (AOT) An arrow once it is let loose can only go forwards, until another force brings it to a stop. Which is pretty basic Newtonian physics, action and reaction, plus atmosphere, friction and gravity. This has even been applied to time, action and reaction, time going backwards and forwards, it is called, retro causality, and decades ago I thought that it may be the mechanism of emergent time, energised particles causing the emergent present, where the now resulted in a reaction going both ways. In my defence it wasn’t a bad effort, but it illustrates some of the complexities of time, even though I now see it as wrong. In fact I would argue that localised retro causal events are not possible. Yes I did use the word localised and not possible there. Yet I am about to zap you with a retro causal model of the whole universe. However for all intents and purposes, here in our patch of the cosmos, well we only plunge headlong and forwards in our progression through time.

We measure the Universe using Minkowski coordinates, which work fine most of the time, however large gravitational masses, up to and including Black Holes, impact upon those coordinates, creating amongst other things dimensionless time. Here things get a bit weird or as Einstein would’ve said, “Spooky.” Directionless time, frozen time, reversing time, energised time, accelerated time, possibly colliding with each other, however you choose to translate this dimensionlessness, is probably an emotional reaction, because we are wired one way with time. Think of the breakdown that time has in relation to large gravitational masses. One recent paper suggested that if 3 or more large gravitational masses are in a reasonable proximity to each other, then time via dimensional space could flow backwards, picture this flow, apply a curved space time to it, throw in dark matter, toss in the fact that the universe is not expanding evenly or cyclically, add causality and then retro causal expressions of time, and what you get is an infinite structure, forever exchanging energies and dominance, because time is not constant.

“Infinity.”

Role the word around your tongue, think about it, it isn’t possible, because energies dissipate, matter decays, gravitation lessens as masses decrease, infinity should not be possible, but that is not what all of our telescopes are showing us. The edges of our universe may be jagged uneven chasms. All the mass and matter should be distributed from some source central surely, yet it is an incredibly uneven distribution, you could say disharmonious. Why? Because time is not constant. Yet this indicates that time is flexible, that flexibility results in a bundle of cyclical repeating energies. Those energies are our Universe. One fact worth knowing is that most physical forces and functions, like thermodynamics, work perfectly well going backwards. Add the speed of the viewer to that fact and throw in the uncertainty principle for giggles. What you get is a kind of Yin and Yang physical effect where time itself, flows backwards, forwards, possibly sideways and via dimensions could even fold, or freeze. Yet in a curved spacetime universe then that arrow of time, has to be curved also, but it’s a curve so slight that we cannot see it, or be aware of it.

“0-11-0”

Heres a radical thought experiment for you. The speed of light is constant. The closer you get to the speed of light the slower things will get in relation to, lets say everyone on planet Earth. You would not be aware of this, it would seem normal, yet lets say that at the speed of light everything freezes. You are not in motion from your POV, everything is rushing at you. Or away from you. You in essence have become a photon. If everything slows to stop at the speed of light, lets treat that as a zero, and balance it between positive and negative, which results in treating the speed of light as a zero on a plus or minus scale.

Emergent Light speed———Speed of light——-Emergent Dark speed

So far so good, but lets change the language slightly.

Emergent Time———-Speed of light———Reversing Emergent Time

This is an ongoing thought experiment that I have been playing with but if I change the language one more time.

Light energy————Speed Of light———Dark Energy

Accelerate beyond the speed of light and matter would be in a different state, but so would time. However impossible it may seem. Have a play with this experiment on your own time, it’s an abstract bit of fun.

“Quantum Heads In A Quantum Wave.”

Thermodynamic time is pretty easy to wrap your head around, it is simply the period of time that heat dissipates, but quantum expressions of time are very different. If you look at particle behaviour it does seem that a dimensionless element is in play. Which implies that the energies within the quantum foam of everything are chaotically creating the reality of time around us. Seriously if the same photon can inhabit different areas at the same time, or appear in different states simultaneously, then it makes a mockery of emergent time just by existing in that manner. Yet emergent time is all around me, and as that is the case, then the chaos is creating the stability as the scales of measurement increase. Realities complexity seems to require stability. This chaos beneath everything is known as quantum foam. It is a sub atomic wild and unruly everywhere place, concealed beneath the atomic structure of everything, including you. I believe one of its major side effects is emergence, specifically emergent time. Then again I believe that time like the Universe consists of often conflicting wave forms. “Quantum foam?” It is tiny bubbles of matter a billion trillion trillionths in length, perpetually popping into and out of existence. That is quantum foam. Which leads to quantum gravity, which is eluding any measurability as yet, but may also be reacting to a dimensionless environment. If quantum time can become dimensionless so could quantum gravity. The result of this chaos is energisation, and those energies become part of a wave of thermodynamic emergence that we call emergent time, or more accurately, the now. On a very real level, time is energy and energy is time.

Now look at your own mind, where the neurones within in your brain have electrical charges, sparking thoughts off, left, right and centre. They have been measured by science, there are fast lanes and slower lanes of thought, yet speed of thought is an as yet none abused area of science in and of itself. Feel your mind as you read this, the mind is a quantum gestalt, but it is also a part of a greater gestalt called the universe, you are part of that greater quantum system of emergent energies. It has already been accepted that the matter that makes every person on our planet is little more than stardust, but you are evolving stardust that is creating energies and taking energies, from a buoyant and boisterously playful disharmony of energies. It may be that through your mind the Universe has developed consciousness, your experiences of life, though constrained by the structure of life itself, result in a quantum harmony of energies, that are part of that gestalt called everything. Thinking further on the brain and quantum foam, it is possible that such a dimensionless environment can only be measured by the curve of it’s overall mass, which is in line with Heisenberg, but then so is the brain. I will push this a bit further because part of the energies within the brains structures would be dimensionless too.

“The Tachyon Schmackyon Thought Experiment.”

Tachyons are theoretical particles that routinely travel faster than light, such a particle would travel backwards in time. You would never see a tachyon coming towards you but you could see it leaving you. In theory the tachyons lower speed is the speed of light, its top speed is infinity. Obscenely as it’s speed increases it’s energy decreases. It’s mass would actually be an imaginary number squared negatively.

The thought experiment of this is a question. Is a tachyon simply a photon in a different expression of time?

“Perspective Self.”

At the beginning I warned you that every word of this could be wrong. If it is that is alright, as science is a generational evolution of concepts, rules and knowledge. It is also an evolution of the imagination, and here my ideas may be of use even if wrong. All of these words have been been sparked by the vitality of scientists and the preceding theorisations they have developed. This process of social thought and communication is very invasive, plagiarism is inherent to the evolution of scientific thought, as the theories evolve with the information of each generation, and every word you have read here, owes a lot to those stepping stones that have built the foundation of this and all other ideas. Ultimately it boils down to perspective, the viewpoint and angles that different people see. In a way this is an unfair article as it has just been thrown at you and you cannot argue back. It is a tunnel of logic and concepts that you have just travelled through. However it is simply my point of view about time itself. It is also an incredibly simplified piece of work, who knows one day I may finish the longer, more in depth variation, complete with lots of lovely numbers. I am certain that some areas of science will make little progression until we understand the instrument taking the measurements more clearly, that instrument is the brain, and as yet we have barely begun to understand it. This leads to a very beautiful interpretation of the human journey.

Stardust formed and gradually collided, it’s masses grew together until gravity began pulling the stardust into larger masses, the forces grew and grew in strength, and created solidity from that basic dust. Many billions of years later and after many collisions on a small blue marble, in an otherwise unimpressive solar system, in a minor galaxy called the Milky Way. Animated minerals became more thermodynamically ordered, and then life began. Finally a small primate began to walk and think beyond the trees it inhabited, it evolved further and further until, an upright walking primate called humanity gazed at the stars wondering what they were. Created itself in those stars as it sought order. Psychology evolved, science evolved, good and evil evolved, alongside the camp fires that burned warm against the fearful darknesses. Yet more time and this species developed through diverse thinking processes, until today. Where on a small blue marble. In an otherwise unimpressive solar system. To the descendants of those adventurous over curious primates, it is all getting clearer than ever, and that is because to an emergent being, perspective is everything.

Steve Merrick 15/04/2020

Appendix: 5 books worth reading to learn more about this.

Order Out Of Chaos. Prigogine and Stengers.

A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking.

Every Life Is on Fire. Jeremy England.

Relativity. Albert Einstein.

Aristarchus of Samos, The Ancient Copernicus. Thomas Heath.

I would also recommend George Rajna, on academia.edu as his selection of papers although generalised often throws up some real logic gems.