Collision with Chronos

Ascar frowned. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. The Regression Problem points out the apparent impossibility of passing time. It’s defined thus: take three consecutive events, A, B and C. One of these events is occurring ‘now’ and the other two are in the past or the future. Let’s say that B is ‘now’, so that A is in the past and C is in the future. But there must have been a time when A was ‘now’ and B and C were in the future, and likewise there will be a time when C is ‘now’ and the other two are in the past. So we can draw up a table of three configurations of these three events, giving nine distinct terms in all. But we can’t stop there: if we did there’d be three simultaneous ‘nows’, and there can only ever be one ‘now’. So we must select one of these configurations and assign our own ‘now’ to it – this gives us a second-order ‘now’ related not to a single event but to a dynamic configuration of all three events: the one containing the real location of ‘now’. But we can’t stop there, either. Each one of the three configurations can in turn claim a second-order ‘now’, by virtue of the fact that the ‘now’ is moving. So we have to draw up a new table where the first table is repeated three times, the A-B-C groups number nine, and the single events themselves are permutated to twenty-seven, all this being encompassed by ‘third-order time’. The process can be repeated to the fourth-order, fifth-order, and ad infinitum time.”

Shiu waved his hands at Ascar, suddenly impatient with the exposition. “I’m fully conversant with all the arguments,” he said. “But what made you think you’d resolved the paradox?”

“Well,” said Ascar slowly, “when we actually travelled into the past and into the future and discovered there was no ‘now’ there, I simply assumed that the whole argument was fallacious. The facts showed that there was no regress.”

“But did you not bother to ask yourself why the regress did not occur?” said Shiu acidly. “No; you merely rushed in like a schoolboy and forgot about the matter.”

Ascar was silent for long moments.

“All right,” he said, “where did I go wrong?”

“Your basic mistake was in presuming time to be a general feature of the universe,” Shiu told him, bringing out his words carefully and emphatically. “You imagined the Absolute Present as a three-dimensional intersection of the whole of existence, traversing it everywhere simultaneously, much like a pickup head traversing a magnetic tape and bringing the images it contains to life. Agreed?”

“Yes,” said Ascar, “that’s a pretty good description.”

“But don’t you see that if you adopt that picture then the Regression Problem remains?”

“No,” Ascar answered slowly, “because the time intersection passes each instant only once –”

He stopped suddenly.

“Yes, you’re right,” he resumed heavily. “I can see it now. There’d have to be an infinite number of identical universes, one for each instant in our own universe, varying only in that the Absolute Present – the time intersection – was in a different part of its sweep. Every instant, past, present or future, would at this moment have to be filled by an Absolute Present somewhere among those universes.”

“And beyond that,” Shiu continued for him, “would have to exist a further set of universes numbering infinity raised to the power infinity, to take care of the next stage in the regression. Already we’re into transfinity.”

Ascar nodded hurriedly. “All right, I accept that. I also accept that the facts have shown my model to be wrong. So what’s the truth?”

“The truth,” said Shiu, “is that the universe at large has no time. It’s not ‘now’ everywhere simultaneously. The universe is basically, fundamentally static, dead, indifferent. It has no past, no future, no ‘now’.”

He refilled his teacup, allowing Ascar to interrupt with: “But there is time.”

Shiu nodded patiently. “Localised, accidental phenomena without overall significance. Processes of time can begin over small areas, usually associated with a planet, though not always. They consist of flows or waves of energy travelling from one point to another: small, travelling waves of ‘now’. Philosophically it’s explained thus: the universe issued from the Supreme as an interplay between the forces of yin and yang to form a perfect, dealocked harmonic balance. Occasionally these forces get a little out of balance with one another here and there, and this causes time energy to flow until the balance is redressed. As such a wave proceeds it organises matter into living forms in the process we know as evolution.”

“So time is a biological phenomenon, not a universal one?”

“Rather, biology is a consequence of time. Biological systems aren’t the only phenomena it can produce. There are – many variations. But life and consciousness can arise in the moving present moment and be carried along with it.