What do you think?
Rate this book
Time and the Instant
250 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 29, 2024
This book offers many jumping-off points that could be enjoyable or even fulfilling and meaningful to explore in a seminar or a book club; its best strength is not resolving toward a complete picture, but opening up more and more doors and alternate constructions and metaphors. Although I am far too tired and undereducated to fully engage with most of this book, and not motivated enough to gather the needed energy when I do not have people to share it with, I still enojyed the ideas. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the topic, doesn’t mind dense academic writing, and is willing to skip past parts that become too esoteric or technical.
Depressing that an anthology on such a broad subject as Time is constructed from contributions by eleven men and zero women.
I’ll summarize my thoughts on each chapter mostly for my own sake, in case I ever have more vim and want to return to this book:
The dedication: This book opening with a The Third Policeman quote about the narrator’s mother is far, far too weird and personal for me for reasons probably not worth immortalizing on Goodreads.
Chapter 1, Durie: One of the least intelligible chapters, summarizing a few philosophies on time from the ancient Greeks. Some surprising parallels to questions that quantum physicists grapple with, but I was deeply uninterested in parsing comparisons of the Instant and the Now or the garbage sentences about how the what is is what is not what is not.
Chapter 2, Poincaré: A beautifully argued piece with a conclusion that can speak for itself:
“We do not have a direct intution of simultaneity, nor of the equality of two durations. If we think we have this intuition, this is an illusion. We replace it by the aid of certain rules which we apply almost always without taking account of them.
But what is the nature of these rules? No general rule, no rigorous rule; a multitude of little rules applicable to each particular case.
…We therefore choose these rules, but not because they are true, but because they are the most convenient… all these rules, all these definitions are only the fruit of unconscious opportunism.”
I find this comforting, though many might have the opposite response.
Chapter 3, Bergson: An excellent essay that uses careful evidence of the phenomenon of déjà vu to decipher how consciousness works, concluding that memory is a process running in the present, alongside our conscious perception. Consciousness is about attention to life. Very interesting for me to read about as I explore my own dissociation, and very readable. (See, Foucault, it is possible to write as an academic Frenchman and still be intelligible.)
Chapter 4, Bachelard: Apparently this bloke took shots at my boy Bergson (I’ve read entire pages of that guy in chapter 3 so I’m an expert.) Bachelard’s starting axioms reveal an experience of conscioousness so different from my own that I saw little point in following them to the conclusion, and skipped ahead. I have decided to coin the term “Bergsonian durationist” as a self description though, and “Bachelardian instantite” as an all-purpose insult. If I’m not directly part of the academic dialogue, I can at least enjoy the petty factionalism.
Chapter 5, Barbour: An attempt to synthesize Bergon and Bachelard which ends up leaning too Bachelardian for me. Sorta helped me understand their disagremeents more.
Chapter 6, Smolin: Now we have a famous quantum physicist’s contribution. Philosophers might be right that we ultimately need to examine our consciousness to understand anything—but quantum physics is so unintuitive and yet so real that we gotta bring it into the questions on time. Both fields are confused about it so maybe they’ll help each other. This is the chapter my dad scribbled a couple excited notes on, notably “no meaning of ‘universe’!!”
Much of this chapter is about formal logic and math, but the verbal arguments are well-stated and interesting so I’m willing to take it on faith that Smolin is competent without learning math myself (though there are many specifics which could be valuable to engage with).
I can’t really do this chapter justice tonight, but the clumsy entertaining summary is: “Don’t worry about those various proofs that time doesn’t exist. Those proofs aren’t valid because the creators didn’t realize the universe is not observable from inside it, so maybe causality doesn’t exist?” Up to you whether the solution is more alarming than the problem.
Chapter 7, Pearson: More Bergson and Bachelard discussions, which have blurred together in my mind. This chapter introduces biology (specifically evolution), but this whole book needed a proper biologist. If any scientist is set up to understand time as a continuous interpenetrative set of durations, it would be a biologist. These philosophers seem clumsy around biological concepts (though what do I know I guess).
Chapter 8, Cramer: The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics involves signals sent forward and backward in time, communicating in both time directions until the initial probability wave has squonked into place as an observed event. It is an interpretation I have maybe never heard anywhere else except at my kitchen table when I was a kid, when dad doodled a demonstration in which a TV station broadcast “I Love Lucy” and asked us what the signal back in time was… the answer being “Lucy Love I”.
It seems ridiculous to our forward-moving time brains, but from what little this book can get through my head in terms of quantum physics explanations, physics is mostly time-reversible and so why not?
More specifically this chapter is about how this interpretation relates to possibility and doesn’t require determinism, but I was (unrelatedly) in a heavy mood for the second half of this book so my summaries are going to get worse.
Chapter 9, Webb: Bachelard is in the chapter title again, I cannot, I cannot. Who on earth experiences time as a series of discontinuous instants reborn one after the other? Ridiculous. What a goddamn instantite.
Chapter 10, Driebe: A discussion of how statistical mechanics can make better mathematical sense, analyzing dynamics not in terms of trajectories but in terms of probability functions. This apparently solves some issues regarding time irreversibility (e.g. the fact that we do experience the arrow of time) while other approaches require clunky bandaids. A bit beyond me.
Chapter 11, Wood: On the poetics of time, individual humans (and many other bounded things—musical pieces, sports matches, nation-states) as “time-shelters” (or, much more opaque to me, metaphorical “economies”). Time runs in one way inside this boundary, and another way outside it—but these boundaries are soft. “A boundary is not a thing, but a cluster of procedures for managing otherness.”
Later on gets into Aristotle on narrative. A hero is a single person, but contains many plots. For this hero or for yoursel or for a larger structure, the quest for “temporal intelligibility” or narrative requires selecting and arranging and discarding. The reality is one of intermingling, complexity, and we do not depend on narrative intelligibility for day-to-day survival…
Having skimmed over it for this summary, yeah, pretty cool book, leads some unexpected places.
Depressing that an anthology on such a broad subject as Time is constructed from contributions by eleven men and zero women.
I’ll summarize my thoughts on each chapter mostly for my own sake, in case I ever have more vim and want to return to this book:
The dedication: This book opening with a The Third Policeman quote about the narrator’s mother is far, far too weird and personal for me for reasons probably not worth immortalizing on Goodreads.
Chapter 1, Durie: One of the least intelligible chapters, summarizing a few philosophies on time from the ancient Greeks. Some surprising parallels to questions that quantum physicists grapple with, but I was deeply uninterested in parsing comparisons of the Instant and the Now or the garbage sentences about how the what is is what is not what is not.
Chapter 2, Poincaré: A beautifully argued piece with a conclusion that can speak for itself:
“We do not have a direct intution of simultaneity, nor of the equality of two durations. If we think we have this intuition, this is an illusion. We replace it by the aid of certain rules which we apply almost always without taking account of them.
But what is the nature of these rules? No general rule, no rigorous rule; a multitude of little rules applicable to each particular case.
…We therefore choose these rules, but not because they are true, but because they are the most convenient… all these rules, all these definitions are only the fruit of unconscious opportunism.”
I find this comforting, though many might have the opposite response.
Chapter 3, Bergson: An excellent essay that uses careful evidence of the phenomenon of déjà vu to decipher how consciousness works, concluding that memory is a process running in the present, alongside our conscious perception. Consciousness is about attention to life. Very interesting for me to read about as I explore my own dissociation, and very readable. (See, Foucault, it is possible to write as an academic Frenchman and still be intelligible.)
Chapter 4, Bachelard: Apparently this bloke took shots at my boy Bergson (I’ve read entire pages of that guy in chapter 3 so I’m an expert.) Bachelard’s starting axioms reveal an experience of conscioousness so different from my own that I saw little point in following them to the conclusion, and skipped ahead. I have decided to coin the term “Bergsonian durationist” as a self description though, and “Bachelardian instantite” as an all-purpose insult. If I’m not directly part of the academic dialogue, I can at least enjoy the petty factionalism.
Chapter 5, Barbour: An attempt to synthesize Bergon and Bachelard which ends up leaning too Bachelardian for me. Sorta helped me understand their disagremeents more.
Chapter 6, Smolin: Now we have a famous quantum physicist’s contribution. Philosophers might be right that we ultimately need to examine our consciousness to understand anything—but quantum physics is so unintuitive and yet so real that we gotta bring it into the questions on time. Both fields are confused about it so maybe they’ll help each other. This is the chapter my dad scribbled a couple excited notes on, notably “no meaning of ‘universe’!!”
Much of this chapter is about formal logic and math, but the verbal arguments are well-stated and interesting so I’m willing to take it on faith that Smolin is competent without learning math myself (though there are many specifics which could be valuable to engage with).
I can’t really do this chapter justice tonight, but the clumsy entertaining summary is: “Don’t worry about those various proofs that time doesn’t exist. Those proofs aren’t valid because the creators didn’t realize the universe is not observable from inside it, so maybe causality doesn’t exist?” Up to you whether the solution is more alarming than the problem.
Chapter 7, Pearson: More Bergson and Bachelard discussions, which have blurred together in my mind. This chapter introduces biology (specifically evolution), but this whole book needed a proper biologist. If any scientist is set up to understand time as a continuous interpenetrative set of durations, it would be a biologist. These philosophers seem clumsy around biological concepts (though what do I know I guess).
Chapter 8, Cramer: The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics involves signals sent forward and backward in time, communicating in both time directions until the initial probability wave has squonked into place as an observed event. It is an interpretation I have maybe never heard anywhere else except at my kitchen table when I was a kid, when dad doodled a demonstration in which a TV station broadcast “I Love Lucy” and asked us what the signal back in time was… the answer being “Lucy Love I”.
It seems ridiculous to our forward-moving time brains, but from what little this book can get through my head in terms of quantum physics explanations, physics is mostly time-reversible and so why not?
More specifically this chapter is about how this interpretation relates to possibility and doesn’t require determinism, but I was (unrelatedly) in a heavy mood for the second half of this book so my summaries are going to get worse.
Chapter 9, Webb: Bachelard is in the chapter title again, I cannot, I cannot. Who on earth experiences time as a series of discontinuous instants reborn one after the other? Ridiculous. What a goddamn instantite.
Chapter 10, Driebe: A discussion of how statistical mechanics can make better mathematical sense, analyzing dynamics not in terms of trajectories but in terms of probability functions. This apparently solves some issues regarding time irreversibility (e.g. the fact that we do experience the arrow of time) while other approaches require clunky bandaids. A bit beyond me.
Chapter 11, Wood: On the poetics of time, individual humans (and many other bounded things—musical pieces, sports matches, nation-states) as “time-shelters” (or, much more opaque to me, metaphorical “economies”). Time runs in one way inside this boundary, and another way outside it—but these boundaries are soft. “A boundary is not a thing, but a cluster of procedures for managing otherness.”
Later on gets into Aristotle on narrative. A hero is a single person, but contains many plots. For this hero or for yoursel or for a larger structure, the quest for “temporal intelligibility” or narrative requires selecting and arranging and discarding. The reality is one of intermingling, complexity, and we do not depend on narrative intelligibility for day-to-day survival…
Having skimmed over it for this summary, yeah, pretty cool book, leads some unexpected places.
Displaying 1 of 1 review