Transcripts For CSPAN2 Dean Buonomano Discusses Your Brain Is A Time Machine 20170527

Tweet is twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Welcome, everyone. I direct programs at the museum of art where we do our best to channel the traditions of the high himalayas and offer them here in the 21st century, and what are we scoring tonight, this is called brainwave where we pair my scientists to attempt to figure out what this thing we think of as reality actually is, we are going to find that out tonight no question. So this whole series is based on the idea of perception. Those who have visited the shrine room will know that the shrine room is devised as a sensory experience. You not only see things but you smell the fragrance in the air. Are you allowed to touch . Dont touch the precious object if you dont mind. You take the whole thing in. You can hear the sounds and you also realize how limited you are in terms of your perception because you are not taking everything in. In tibetan buddhism there are not five senses, there are six senses and the sixth sense is consciousness. The process, the input from the socalled outside world. What has time got to do with that because that is what we are going to explore today. The notion of where time is something that is relative or fixed or there is a future or there isnt, some might think given our present situation that there is no future but lets take courage and explore the nature of time both past, present and everything in between. Maybe these are just words and they dont mean very much. Dean buonomano is here from ucla, has just bought this new book called your brain is a time machine your brain is a time machine the neuroscience and physics of time. This is the way he starts his book intriguingly at the very beginning. The chapter called flavors of time. Time. Person. Year. Way. Day. Five words. What do the words have in common . Anybody want to venture . Any takers . Time. Person. Year. Way, day. I will cut to the chase. This is what he right. One could be forgiven for not recognizing them as the five most commonly used nouns in the english language time sits on top of the list with two others that are units of time is a consequence of the overwhelming importance time plays in our lives. We are not asking for the time, we are speaking of saving time, killing time, serving time, keeping time, not having time, tracking time, timeout, good time, time travel, free time and my personal favorite, lunch time. So this is about the perception of time, the vehicle we use to communicate with one another which is language but our language runs left to right. It is linear. It does that. How many people saw the film arrival . A handful of you. How many people have read stories of your life . Fewer. That is interesting. The rest of you are a real mystery tonight, congratulations, thanks for coming out not aware of what you are in for. Let me describe worries of your life which is the basis for the film arrival, these creatures, beings from another world, another spatial realm arrived on earth and try to communicate with someone who is an expert in languages use low diagrams and in the film logo grams are depicted, you dont see them in pictures described in that sense in teds story but depicted as multidimensional expressions. You can read them in three and possibly four dimensions. They communicate in this way. That is their language. The question we are going to ask first is does the language dictate the perception of time q they use language to instill in the translator and understanding of multiple futures that our lives currently. That exquisite notion is what i will leave you with because you will discover more. We are delighted to have dean buonomano here. He is a Science Fiction writer but over the course of the last 25 years with his stories he has won so many awards, not like tony but way cooler, four nebulas, four hugos and the John W Campbell award for best new writer. He is no longer a new writer thomas so well established. Please welcome dean buonomano and ted chiang. [applause] hi, ted. Taking a cue from tim maybe you could Start Talking a bit about language and time. This is something you certainly delve in in the story of your life and touch upon but maybe it would be helpful to set the stage for the discussion talk about two terms that will be helpful when talking about time in terms of how it is viewed from what time may or may not be in terms of only the present is real, the past was real, the future some configuration will be real but only the present. Another is eternity in which the past, present and future are equally real and now is an arbitrary point or arbitrary moment in time as arbitrary is here. Your story embraces the notion of past, present and future all equally real but language is present, we have verb conservations normally related based or referenced to the present. There is a sense you have to read twice because it is hard to talk about this with language because we have sentences like i remember when you will be one year old or what you will say when you are 12. It is hard to process these sentences because language is not set up to talk about that view. Can you elaborate on your view of how language constrains you or talk a bit about kind of language . I dont think there is any language that would help us understand eternal is on a visceral level. The idea of eternal is in that the future and past are just as real as the present is people who hold to that can only do so in an intellectual abstract fashion. I dont know that we are capable of really feeling it, living it. I dont think human consciousness is capable of embracing it. All language will reflect the fact that we live in the present. I think i guess animals who lack language we would say they only live they only have knowledge of the present. Humans perhaps as a result of maybe not as a result but humans have language and we have knowledge of the past as being Something Different in the future being different from the present. That is something animals do not have. The different ways our language can reflect our awareness of the past and the future different languages to offer different perspectives on that and that is one idea i was trying to explore in the story. Im reminded in terms of eternal is him enables the concept of time travel. Your story does not engage time travel directly but i am reminded in reading your book, one of my favorite lines from Douglas Adamss hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, in the distant future they finally figure out how to do time travel but they have to prohibit it, not because of the paradoxes the cause it created in terms of going back, and committing grandpaside, verb conservation is way too complicated. And i think this is something you come up against in terms of verb conjugation becomes wildly complicated in expressing ideas that may happen in the future but you can avoid by jumping in the future or the past but what is your view . You wrote a piece of fiction, but on a more serious note, what is your view . Do you think only the present is you . Do you think the universe is eternal in which the past, present and future, nobody knows the answer, what is your view . I am persuaded by arguments from physics in favor of eternalism or block the universe view. Einsteins relativity makes a case which i find pretty persuasive that the future is as real as the past or the present and it is not one that i can inhabit but on an intellectual level i understand and buy into it, so i do agree that we live in an eternal universe which is a standard view in physics, the standard view in physics is this notion that in part, driven a lot by relativity this notion that because time is relative you end up with a situation where there is no absolute simultaneity. An event near and far doesnt make sense to ask if they are occurring simultaneously, this the block universe ted mentioned in which everything has been laid out. This creates a severe clash with intuition of time passing, time flowing in which the past is inaccessible, it is gone. We certainly feel that way and the future is wide open. There is this clash between the physics of time and the neuroscience of time. You feel this is an illusion . Our sense of time is flowing . The idea here is if everything is already laid out in a block universe time wouldnt really flow as much as it would just exist. This flow of time, very salient experience, physicists have struggled in this, would be illusory in some sense. Do you see this clash or does it bother you . Depends what we mean by illusion. I think physics does not say we ought to be able to remember the future. Why it really makes sense we can only remember in one direction and not the other. In the sense that there is no expectation that we ought to remember the future so it is not so much an illusion that we dont experience eternalism. It is a function of just the way either our brains work or perhaps the way any Information System can work. Not physically our brains but anything. Just to explain a little bit what im talking about, question of why we can remember the past but not the future. What is the difference between the past and future from a physics standpoint . There is an arrow of time that is a result of thermodynamics, increasing entropy. If we say the universe started with the big bang that was a state of extremely low entropy and if the universe ends in Something Like the heat death that is a state of extremely high entropy and there is a steady increase of entropy from one end to the other in a block universe. So why is it that we feel that we are moving in one direction as opposed to the other direction . There is a theory that memory, based on some work on information theory and interaction with thermodynamics that recording any information and reading this information, that would inevitably involve an increase in entropy. If this theory is correct, any event that is recorded would have to be closer to the low entropy end of the block universe then the time of recording so that means any memory would have to be of the lower entropy direction and that is what we call the past. If it is correct, it would be impossible to remember the future because that would mean that would require accurate recordings of a higher entropy state and it seems like maybe that is physically impossible. If that is true then any Information System including our brains could only contain Accurate Information about one direction which is the lower entropy direction. We call that the past. So as we record more information we sort of perceive that as our consciousness moving through time. The notion of asymmetry of time in which if we live in an eternal universe it should be why dont we, quote, remember the future, as a character in your story would say i remember when this will happen along those lines but it is a profound scientific question, physics and neuroscience have to collaborate. The standard view is because of relativity and fundamental laws of physics, dont seem to have any special meaning for the present. The present seems as arbitrary as before. If that is the case and time doesnt really flow, we have to decide if we want to interpret our sense of time as an objective observation about the universe. It seems like time is flowing, it seems like the present is evolving into the future. It seems like the actions i make now affect the future but is that, should we take that as an empirical observation that physics has to explain or is it just a trick of the mind of one sort or the other, and illusion . And neuroscience has to explain . We should clarify and say even though the standard view in physics tends toward eternalism, there is nothing anyone can call empirical proof of the past, present and future. Depending who you ask, different physicists will give you different answers but in my view it is better expressed, the simplest using occams razor, the simplest interpretation of relativity but other aspects of physics dont necessarily mesh with that including Quantum Mechanics which is a different treatment of time so it gets complicated but in terms of consciousness, whether consciousness is compatible it raises the issue of determinism and free will and what consciousness is. Consciousness is probably not a linear narrative about the passage of time. We seem to be evolving abcd, consciousness seems to maybe emerge in fits and bursts and an example of language i would use to express this, this is a hard concept to wrap your head around but i will say two sentences and you can follow in your brain how to interpret them. The first is the mousepad was beside the computer. Second, the mouse was hungry. The meaning of the word mouse is very different in both cases was one is living animal, what is the computer. You can only interpret the meaning of that word mouse as a word that came after, the mouse if consciousness has linear flow of eventss taking place it would be hard to explain. Most people probably dont feel that they understood the word mouse, went back and edited it. It is probably served, your brain waited until the appropriate moment or your unconscious brain defeating a conscious narrative to your mind. I to resolve these issues, this question of whether consciousness as we know it is compatible with physics or that interpretation, it would be interesting one of the few fields neuroscience and physics have to collaborate more in my view. I guess i feel like that, the question you bring up about making sense of these sentences, that is certainly a question cognitive science demands from linguistics, not sure it is a question for physics. I agree that it does indicate that our conscious perception as we make sense of language, that is something being constructed and it is not immediate, we are probably lagging behind our sensory input, some delay so we are hearing the words and we are not really making sense of them. We are not making a narrative aspect like a second or so so that gives us time to parse sentences but again, not sure there is a physics, something physicists need to the intersection, a decision of whether we should interpret conscious perception of the flow of time as empirical evidence so take another aspect of human cognition people interpret, perception of color. Color is an illusion created by the mind because color doesnt exist in physics which would exists is wavelength, electro magnetic radiation. Color is the brains interpretation of the wavelength of electro magnetic radiation and subject to illusion but it has an evolutionary advantage, color is innocent illusion that correlates tightly with physical processes. Done really flow but is sort of more static, then we have to, i think, also begs the question of, well, what would be its evolutionary value . If we have a sensation that has no correlation in physics. I think the need for the traction is to come together with this interpretation. Should we accept determinal jim as an interpretation or as a fact, and then if we should take our subjective sense of the passage of time which the constitutes aint empirical observation of the world . Does the sense of time count . That is what i mean by the intersection. er right in youre right the sense that man of those questions are about cognitive neuroscience but to determine if we should accept this or not as a physical observation is where the intercommunication would be a bet more beneficial. But time will tell. Yeah. Could be wrong. So, when you say, like okay, what is the adaptive advantage of perceiving time passage. If it doesnt flow yes. If theres no actual physical correlation to that. I guess one question to ask would be, what is the alternativegiven that like, if this theory about memory inevitably being tied to an interface, no conversation knock know the future, can have accurate recordings of the future. So, that means any Information System could only sort of acrete information about what we call the past. And so what other what is the alternative that such an Information System develops some kind of subjective experience. What would that if that their is correct its a if that theory is correct its a good question. If it poses on the memory that could good a long way towards explaining this clash. But that, by the way, is the beautiful example of interaction between physics and neuroscience, right . Youre talking about, well maybe the ebb trope by explains entrope by explains this. Everybody all of its possible we wont ever be able to answer these questions. But in a related issue is the question of how the brain just tells time to again with. So we have these notions of the brain whether or not it perceive time as growing or subjective. The brain certainly tells time and everybody does this. In relation to hawk to language its interesting you mentioned earlier on is that animals dont seem to be able to have a grasp of the pastpresent and future as much as humans. Theyre more presentbased. Tend to agree with that. Theres debate the degree that is true or not. How did humans come to acquire that ability . And much of that, some people believe, its by metaphors or understanding space. People believe that our human uniquely human ability to understand time relies in part on our ability to understand spas. And this explains why we in language, most languages, use spatial net to fors to talk about time. It was very long day. In hindsight that was a bad idea and youre think, i hope this talk ends shortly. This notion we use spatial metaphors is spatially spatialize time. Whether its true in the universe or not is a very natural phenomenon and a lot of a couple of investigators studied this with very common example. ll ask the audience. Next wednesdays meeting has been moved fur two days. Who thinks the meet is now on monday . Okay. Who thinks the meeting is now on friday . We have majority of people who are egocentric with time. What that means is that if you think the meeting is on friday, that sort of implies you have this sense that youre moving through time and since youre moving, monday, tuesday, wednesday, moving it forward would end up on friday. If, on the other hand, youre static and time is moving towards you, those who raise your hand on monday, that would imply a more time centric, where time is coming towards you. And interestingly enough, this time perspective, time moving perspective, is not fixed. Actually varies according to what you are doing. One of the many examples how in language we use spatial metaphors. Another one that comes up is this issue of the future being forward. Right . Yes. Right. So we were talking about this before, that we, in english and i think all the european cultures we think of the future as being ahead of us, that the past is behind us, and that is it seems to be almost sort of baked into most languages, but it is not a universal idea. The amara of Central America think of the future as being behind them and the past as being in front of them. And this is really the first time you hear it, it seems very counterintuitive, but theres a sense in which it makes a lot of sense in that we know the past, and so we can see the past, and so the future is hidden to us so in that regard it makes sense the future being hidden from us should be behind us and the past that is known to us should be in front of us. And then but then with regard to the question of, yeah, does that mean im walking backwards . Maybe if you have the idea of you walking sort of the egocentric view youre walking through time but could be that time is you are standing and time is flowing around you, and so more and more of time is coming into view for you. But that definitely requires a sort of cognitive shift for most people. Most westerners. And another example, a scientist, rafael nunes, he did work with the yipo people Papua New Guinea and the found that they seemed to believe that, based on they way they talk and gesture, that they future is uphill and the past is downhill. And one of the interesting things, they live in an extremely hilly area, so theres basically no flat land anywhere. Everything is sloped. But they think of the future as upslope and the past is downslope, and so the odd thing is that is not dependent on where you are facing. For both our version of time and the amara version of time theyre egocentric. Yes, but the yipo way of looking at time, its geocentric, terrain centric so in some way it is independent of the way that you yourself are positioned, and i dont think theres any not enough data on how fully this affects their conversations, just what how to infiltrate every aspect of their live. Its interesting thing to think about. I think that its hard to think about time, theres a pairs docks i have always struggled with. That we intend to spacialize time, and i think this influences how we think about time. I think this leads some people to more readily embrace eternallism, and i raise the possibility that physicists due to inherent spatialization of time in not only the equations but in talking about it, we write the t axis on graphs as this inherent spatialization of time. As your brain becoming more and more familiar with that, and i worry that creates a bit of a bias in interpretation in which we accept the standard interpretation a bit too strongly without enough empirical evidence. If this is the natural interpretation to think about time in the spatial dimension, what is puzzling to me is if you go through the literature in and history, its how long it tike writers to come up with the motion of time travel. Its really now its everywhere. You cant turn your damn tv on without seeing a show on tv about time travel. Right . But shakespeare, who had predicted every hollywood plot ever, skipped time travel, and you look throughout historical writing, and maybe with a few exceptions but until the very late 1800s, which is coincidentally enough right around where einstein was delving into special relativity and not only einstein but others were working on the problem. Why its do you think, that something that is so common in universal now in terms of stories about time travel, was absent largely from the literature for so long . Okay. So i do have a theory about this. Fantastic. It definitely had struck me as odd that a lot of sort of things we associate with fantastic stories about, like, traveling to distant places, theyre present in ancient myths in some versions. People being transported to great distances, but, yes, time travel story does not exist in any ancient mythology. However, there is some a sort of analog to timetravel stories which do exist and ancient pathology and that is stories about prophecy. If you think about stories of prophecy as information traveling back in time, then this is the ancient version of time travel stories and i think for me the i think the big difference between the sort of premodern and modern stories and why the role that time plays and the role the presence of time travel in modern stories, i think that has to do with an increasing importance in the increasing popularity in the idea of free will, because one of the consistent thing in any mythological story that features prophecy is that the prophecy always comes group get some information about what will happen. The characters do their best to avoid it, and all they accomplish is bringing it about. So, all of these stories, they reinforce the idea of faith, that your destiny is fixed but you cannot change your fate. I think in the modern age, the idea of free will, the idea that people have agency, that your future was not fixed, that your destiny was not decided. That became more popular. I think even just the term free will, i think may only appear in the 1800s. And for me, the first crucial story about time travel is not hg wells time machine, which is often cited. Its actually Charles Dickens Christmas Carol because theres the scene where scrooge is visit by the guest of christmas yet to come. Accomplish he is shown a vision of his Newspaper Program and he dies of his Found Program and he dies unmourned, and scrooge asks the spirit of christmas yet to come, spirit, is this what will be or what may be . And right there, he is asking, do i have free will . Do i have agency . Can is my fate decided or is my fate open to me . And that is the first story because then he whether it was a dream or not yes, he goes immediately sets about to change his fate, tomake sure that what he saw does not come to past. Thats the first story in history where he got essentially prophecy and he was able to avoid it. So, i think that idea, that notion of agency, that the future is not determined that your fate is not already decided. I think that is sort of that is what makes time travel stories possible, because without that notion, if time travel stories in which you cant change anything, those are not stories. Those thats not what we think of for a time travel story. I think the unspoken assumption of time travel stories is that you can change but theres an irony in that because eternallism doesnt imply you can change anything and in the literature people have this view of stories that are consistent or compatible or causally incompatable, and teds story in the book is the perfect story of a compatible no paradoxes created which are causal links that are broken in which you go back and commit grandpaicide. Time there is but the movie is different. Dont know your interpretation if theres a causal issue or not but raises the issue of free will and can we change it . My view as an neuroscientist, is they whole debate about free will is somewhat misguided in that free will a lot of the problem is a question of defining free will. How doey define free will. Its my ability to choose something. Okay, what does that mean . Your Computer Program can choose something. Does it have free will . I think of the neuroscientist my preferred view of free will is that its the feeling we get, the flavor of conscious we get, when our unconscious brain makes a decision. So in the same sense that if i was to step on teds toe and he was to feel pain, that pain is a flavor of consciousness, that the conscious mind generates, and free will is a flavor of consciousness the mind makes when the unconscious brain has made a decision. Whether you believe in this universe in which offering is laid which n which everything is laid out i view free will in a defendant context. In the context of time travel, the paradoxes are reason enough not to believe in my mind. Well, a couple notes. One, one thing about time travel with regard to present verse eternallism, time travel stories have to subscribe to a blend of both presentism and econcernism. They have to describe to eternallism in the idea that the future and the past are plays you can go to and they have to subscribe to a presentism if, as most time travel stories do, they place priority on where the time traveler is and that is oh, the future can be changed. Or the listener. If the future can be changed its not real in the same sense that the the epic i am in is real. So, a any time travel story where its possible to change things has to subscribe to a kind of mixture of presentism and eternallism. I agree in part because language is sort of inherently presentist. So, these issues, i think, are fun but in terms of the science is so difficult, but as, again, neuroscientist interested in time, one that that were interested in is a more how he brain tells time, and a lot of people when you talk about your sense of time, youre probably thinking of knowing the time of day or knowing how long it is until lunchtime, but what youre doing right now is highly time dependent, which is understanding speech. So your brain is timing the pauses in my speech, were using cues, temporal cues to communicate and the brain is sophisticated timing device and temp polar processing devices. In laing are i say two sentences like they gave her cat food or they gave her catfood. So, theres two different meanings there. And based on pause, and another example is in music, and music doesnt make sense. Think music would be less enjoyable in an eternalist universe. I give an example and now might be a good time to play the audio clip, and this audio clip would be of a song and the challenge to you is to see if you can recognize the song. If it reminds you of anything. Ill explain what it is later. The clue is that whenever i give this to my undergrads the look ate me with the blank face but the name of the group is the beatles, and so this see if this song remind you of anything. So play that, please. So does that remind you guys of any one or two songs . Anything pop into your heads . Yellow submarine. Anything else . Any other beatle songs . Somebody said yesterday. So, the people who sort of picked up on yellow sub marine are were paying attention to the note but the timing was totally of yesterday. So it was hybrid song in which we crossed both songs, one is spatial and one is temporal. This is the idea that time is really but at the same time how sophisticated the brain is able to tell time up to a few seconds to a mill hi second and if you slow music down or speed it up too much or slow speech down or slow speech up too much it ceases to be search or music. Theres a very critical range of the goldilocks zone of time. Ted do you think we should open up to questions or anything else you want to add . I mean, we could probably good on for hours, but probably appropriate to take some questions now. Okay. Lets do that, then. We should dollar that and i think tim will be the referee. The moderator. Exactly. So really show questions because it is about time and we want to use time as efficiently as possible. That last music cue was very helpful because it allows me to prophesize or forethe future of what mike take place in this theater on may 250th when sean, rick moody, and david will convene and talk and flay their favorite beatles tunes. Why . Well, very simply, we are exploring this world of sound in the latter half of the year. We are only doing so because we have this extraordinary little recording booth ton booth on the six until floor and. And were collecting all of your mantras and going to create a sound track for the new exhibition in june based on your contributions. So we are one, people. Use who would like to ask one question, right in the back, sir. I think that this notion that the ability sometimes you need to be human might be problematic because its known if an nail has to wait longer to receive the next unit of food, then they would more easily switch to another food source, or in some cases you can teach an animal to reproduce a time interval, or even modern theories that say that animals derive sense of confidence from elapsed time. So, maybe the sentiment you express needs to be known a little bit. The notion wasnt that animals cant tell time. Clearly its well established fact for many reasons that animals item time, and plants tell time and bacteria in the knowing that they sir okayedum rhythm but its not that animals cannot tell time but cannot engage in mental time travel, engage in longterm thinking. So squirrels store nuts. Birds make nests and my dog bill bury a bone but theyre not doing that in thinking about the future but thats more instinctual behavior. The argument that one thing,sight homosapiens is our ability to think about the longterm future. The ability to carve a tool is something you say, im going to not doing this because its fun. Im doing this to use in the future. One of the biggest inventions of human kind was the agriculture. And thats a hard one for animals. The notion, agame going to obtain food by planting a seed that will bear few in years. So the know anythings is timing. Animals can tell time but whether they can conceive and connect the dots between temporal cause and effect. Wonder if human beings are the only creatures to connect the dots between sex and pregnancy. Is that something uniquely human . If anybody knows the answer, let me know. With regard to. With regard to the ability to plan for the future, i think there is only very scant evidence that i think i read that they did observe some monkeys or apes that seemed to have some ability to, like, gather some rocks in anticipation of an event where they would need rocks to throw, but in general, animal does not do that. If they they will rely on rocks being around them when theyre in the mood to throw them. They will not lay rocks good rocks. Yes, not storing. So, that is sort of what i was talking about, about animals ability humans being unique our ability to know the future, think about the future, think about laying in supplies, because when animals fatten up for the winter its not because theyre thinking, we better prepare. Its like, theyre some instinct. Lets face it some teenagers that cant even do that. Should save this for later. Yes. Would anybody like to exercise free will and ask a question . Yes, sir next back and then you and then you. Thank you. You mentioned time is flowing and i think about water, and streams and oceans, and what is recycled through evan evaporation, rain going into the ground. Can time be recycled . Actually a collection bin for your memories in the back if you need it. Im not sure what it means to say time be recycled. You can see time some people believe time is cyclic. Yes, this idea of eternal recurrence, but youre going to live this life over and over again, but in terms of recycling time, i guess i feel like that particular metaphor, thats an aspect of the time flowing metaphor which doesnt really apply. I agree with that. I think there some traditions certainly in the world that might disagree with you. There is, of course, the musical groundhog day opening on broadway. And of course, protagonist is condemned to repeat and recycle existence but not consciously or only gradually consciously until something enters this consciousness to make him register, rather like scrooge, that i should change my way and, therefore, change my carmic expression, and the other one is, of course, the vague understanding that time is totally cyclical but on such a massive arc that we cannot contemplate the range of it. And theres this beautiful illustration, this concept in tibetan buddh devil where the eon buddhismy the eons are described as massive cubes that contain the most minute and we mentioned little animals squirreling away doing in massive milehigh cubes and each eon that is already beyond concept of what we can imagine in terms of time flow, each eon is represented by one of those timey little squirrel hairs. So just imagine yourself removing one of those tiny squirrel hairs once every eon. You cant, can you . But that is the concept of time in buddhist philosophy. Its just too much. Who would like to yes, your turn. Good for it. I was really intrigued by the theory that you mentioned about being able to store things with lower entrope and i wonder if you can tell me where to find out more about the theory, and also i was trying to think of examples of where you could record things about the future, and i think the closest thing is being able to make use probability to guess pretty accurately about what the future entails and do you think that is the closest thing we can get to. Thats twoparter. Okay. I dont have a specific reference for you to find more information. Its bennett . The researcher that does quantum information theory. That might be. That might be. I dont think i read it from bennett specifically but it was in the context of quantum information theory. So, that might be a starting point. So, with regard to probability as a way of knowing the future, well stick with sort of classical physics rather than quantum physics. I guess i think our ability to predict the future it varies widely depending on the situation. There are some situations where systems behave in very predictable fashion, and so there are systems where you can very you have a very high degree of confidence of what the state will be in at various points in the future, and so its not the case that you never have any information about the future. But there are also many systems where we do not have good tools in which theres strong mathematical reasons well never have good tools for predicting the state of systems at any point beyond the immediate future. So,. I think your point about probability is the best we can do in prediction. By the way, my view alet of neuroscientists do your brain is a prediction machine, and the ability of animals to predict what their enemies or whether youre predator or prey, nothing gives you a revolutionary advantage like being able to predict what is about to happen. Many people believe the many driving force of brain evolution was the advantages provide by the degree which animals can obviously and perfectly predict what is about to happen. Of you look at a clock, clock is prediction device. Youre circadian club. We think its a clock that tells you what time it is and predicts this is when the sun will rise and when you will be hungry stocker prediction in timing and prediction in clock goods hand in hand when it comes to brain. Surprise is one word we have not mentioned in terms of specifically Human Behavior and thinking and emotions, which is the word imagination. Its imagination being able to place yourself in a different time space that allows you to do the planning. There is also allows you to conceive of something that does not yet exist in your current situation, and its also imagination, emotional imagination, is something that is key in certainly buddhist thinking in the term of the use of empathy. So by putting yourself in somebody elses shoes, youre better able to exercise that fundamental essence of humanity which is compassion, and thats the key to changing your again referencing the future your karmaic implication. So if you can go about the world understanding how things are connected you have much less need and dependency on the future as such. And thats the way you subvert time and its affect on you and thats also counterintuitive. I leave that with you. We have another question. Yes, sir. Id like to the thought of each of you on whether you think the perception of time that we have can be considered i think the term is qualia that personal experience like we have of the color red. Die know that my experience of red is like yourself yours . Is that the same experience with time . I absolutely think our perception of the flow of time is a quality of constance. We can be dilated or contracted. I think theres something a lot of people ask, well, how is that subjective sense of the flow of time can be distorted. Youre engaged in a task that seems to be going quickly. If youre bored out of your mind, seems to be going very slowly. This seems a mystery but not its a misdirection, let me put it that way. The real mystery is how we perceive time to begin with, not how its distorted. So the quality of time whether we perceive it, match thing external clock or pro longed or contracted. These are just parts of the brains flexibility in assigning color to one thing or different dollar another thing. So i different dollar another thing. The real mystery is how the brain ascribes a sense of time independent of duration, and then what those durations are a bit arbitrary, and the ability to expand or contract is a squall we have. Can ask you to play a song quickly in your head or slowly or do an action, play the piano at a fast tempo or slow tempo. So the brain has the ability in one sense to speed up the clock or slow it down. I dont have a lot to add to what dean said in answer to your question. Want to just follow up what tim was saying about imagination, and our ability to imagine things which we dont actually are not actually experiencing at the moment. I think this is interesting because this ties into what length wists consider one of the defining characteristics or language, what separates human language from animal communication and that is the ability to refer to counterfactuals to things not actually happening here and now. When like when prairie dogs or monkeys when they warn each other about a predator, theyre warning them bat predator that they see. They do not have the ability to, say, talk about the idea of predators they dont actually see. They cannot refer to something that yes, lets talk about the panthers or whatever. They cannot engage a conversation about things which are not in their here and now. When bees communicate about bees give very detailed information about here is flowers to get nectar at this distance, in this direction, but they have no ability to talk about, like, well, tomorrow there might be nectar there or lets discuss, like, if we have neck for in places, what should we do. Guest they cannot engage in speculation or reference to things which are not actually happening, and human the fact that humans can do this, its obvious essential in our ability to plan the future, and it is something that human language is unique in doing. Give us the capability to refer to these things, and, again, this is something that lingists say one thing that distinguishes humans from animal communication. Animals can communicate dolphins and chimpanzees, can communicate quite a bit of information to each other but theres no evidence that they are able to refer to things that are counterfactual in the way that humans can. We also not only imagine the future but we imagine the past. Maybe do you want to talk about how memory is sort of effectively invented each and every time . Might be use inflame terms of understanding the brain mechanism. When we talk about memory we happened to use the same word, memory for computer memory or human memory and should probably have different words for those thingsle might be a safer element of the word memory there and how we think about things but i think its very misleading in the computer when it stores memory, it stores it very faithfully to the external world. If its a tape like right now its a mapping of exactly what is happening. Thats not what happens when we memorize something. Youre not going to probably good home and remember the color of my shirt of teds shirt unless youre in the lineup later maybe. But youre going to remember the context, the facts. So human memory the goal of human memory, why do we have memory . Why do animals have memory . Thats guess to the point of prediction. The whole point of memory is not allow toes reminisce not good told times but to help prepare and predict the future. The whole point of memory is future oriented and in order to do that the brain does not store factual information but highly processed mission about the gist, the messages that are presumably going to be relevant. So its an interesting contrast because memory is about the fast but its really for the future. I just want to gosh, i know you have questions, just need to throw in one thing. Again, this is an example in tibetan buddhism and its history that illustrates past, present and future. The great indian his stick, mystic and came to tibet and introduceed buddhism in the ninth your century and what he did was plant into the future these spiritual time capsules in the form of teachings that were then to be discovered by these treasure revealers whos who in a futile be able to reveal the teachings to a society that would be sophisticated enough through the passom of time to be able to see these rather more elaborate teach, that were evolutions of the initial buddhist precepts that were introduced in tibet. How you have an example that is incredibly politically and socially savvy of suggesting that a belief system is mallablely to time and can adapt itself. Just as we have to dew point ourselves as societies to changing consideration. That allowed the lineage to be referenced back to the past and get authority and yet be virtually independent as a means of discovery and revelation. And eye think it would make on uncannily exhibition . What do you think . I cant tell the future, of course, i dont know whether it would ever happen but lets see. Okay. Time for three more questions. Have to be quick. I wonder about how time relates to pain perception . You have this stress tolerance, you have pain and agoetz going to go away. Some people have the capacity to endure that time and some people do not, and i wondered it you could speak to that. I think einstein this is anecdotal story. Dont know if its true, was asked if time is relative, and sitting having a conversation, relativity is that sitting, talking to a lovely woman for an hour can feel like a mere five minutes but sitting on a hot steve for five minutes can feel like an hour. So time certainly extend order dilates our perception of time, and but how that happens, theres their iowa have a clock in your you have a clock in your head and circuits tell time and theres a certain hormone, neuromodulators, dopamine, that seems like i mate be able to accelerate or dee accelerate the clock, but other than that we dont dont know much about the neural mechanism for pain, the subjective part of pain. We know about the peripheral part of pain but no idea how the brain generates the subjective and important part of pain. [inaudible question] i dont think its clear. Dont think we have clear answer to that yet. Sorry. Yes. Thank you for this conversation. We have talked a lot about past and present no, fast and future, whether its forward, backward, uphill, downhill. Ive also had a problem with the present because im either living in the future or the past, not too distance but when you walk on the sidewalk, the foot that is lifted has left the past and is about to step into the future. And so i came across this very beautiful line that i wish to share, which is that the present lies at the intersection of two eternities, the past and the future. Now, given all this understanding, we have been sitting here in the temp of buddhism, that puts stress on living in the precious present and so my question to you is, how do you come to that understanding of living in the precious present when the present is such a fleeting moment. Thats a tough one. So, william james, one of the first psychologists to talk about time, referred to the present as the specious present, the misleading present, referring to the notion first, what isuprely presence is present because the brain has delays. And brain for me to process what just said so in a sense were certainly living slightly in the past, but this notion of specious scent what the present is, is very tricky to grasp. Its not an instant. Its this time we build. This time window this is something we were alluding to earlier has some flexibility . What we call the present and when youre processing sentences, maybe youre going to wait for the full sentence im saying to complete before your brain generates a conscious perception. But if i Say Something and i shouldnt even say this by the fire but i think thats against the law. If i yell out the word fire, i think did i just break the law . You did with such subtlety. Thats something you can process relatively quick. So the presence there, you have shrunk that and processed that career very quickly. This motion of what the present is, is, again, in part in physics, and in neuroscience, the present is arbitrary in physics and now sort of arbitrary, but in the conscious perceptionwhat we define as the present is some sort of creation of the brain. Last thingll say about this is right now, when youre looking at me, theres a delay between the sound coming from my voice and the sight of my lips moving. Those things are really happen asin chron newsily. Your eye seize my sees my lip move before you hear what i say. That delay can by significant. If im in the back that delay could be 50 milliseconds. So thats a significant delay. Yet your brain most of the time will wait, just and tune those to realize theyre happening simultaneously but theres an example of our the presentes trifle as far as the brain is concerned. Do you have something to add at present . I do. I just want to offer you, if you dont already know, id thereof be able to say that at the reuben and in the present every second of every day is not true. Were wasting around like the rest of you most of the time. But we do deliberately engage and experience on wednesday lunchtimes at 1 00, for 45 minutes. In a mindfulness meditation which allows you a deliberate practice, a technique by which you register the process of just breathing, bringing this first thing you did in your life and the last thing you do in your life. Im sorry if thats a shock. Theres really basic tool that we have to foster existence, breathing is what we focus on and that allows you get to the essence with practice. Im sorry. You have to come every week. One last question. Got be a good one. Have you really got a good one . You have a good one. So, we spoke earlier about how most language is presentism biased but how in your story and the movie theres this idea of maybe in eternallism that language is that view. Do you think that is something that is actually possible and if it is, its worthwhile . Is it possible to know the future . To make language bias towards [inaudible question] i guess i think it would be possible to have a language that doesnt have quite the same biases that we english or most languages do. I whether that would actually change our perception of time, like as i was just saying before, dont actually believe its possible for us to know the future. So the idea that appears in the story that this learning an alien language enable his protagonist to know the future. Im engaging in dramatic license for the story. So, i dont believe that language can do what happens in the story, but i do i definitely think that a language with a very different way of representing time could shift our a lot of our attitudes about time. I cant really be pick about what is d specific about what effect it would take but die feel that again, an example we mentioned about how the way different languages treat time. Just the fact that our sense that the future lies ahead of us and our past lies behind us. That fuels that feels for most of us really deeply imbedded in us, but to realize that is just a cultural construction. I think that is valuable because that indicates just how profoundly culture can fake our perception of ourselves and the world around us, and so i imagine that it is sort of a reminder that we are humans are maybe more flexible than we might initially think, and perhaps things that we take for granted as being inevitable are perhaps not inevitable, and so that would apply to some extent to our perception. I mean, to talk a bit of a scientific license there, i would say in a way math is a language and science is a language in the sense thats what smooth the lose physics do. Take a more eternalist view, contributely or incorrectly experiment think theres a way to treat that, which dont necessarily imply eternallism or presentism but take the bias out. So i think in a way math and laws of physics do a bit of that. Id like to suggest, begin the place where we are, is theres another form of communication that doesnt necessarily is not linear and that allows you to subvert a sense of time or linearity of process and that is the active looking at a work of art. Its not linear, and your eye will inevitably rove over and it find difference things and different connections which then register in a different sense and understanding, and literally through the passage of time but can always be rechanneled and challenged in the process of that particular communication from artist to viewer. And so i would encourage everybody to go upstairs in the to galleries and check it out and see what happens. Could be kind of a cool experience because were open on fridays until 10 00 p. M. So, you want to engage not that but im sure before you do, youll standinger out to stagger out the six flights of stairs laden with both deans book and teds book if you dont have them already. Theyre happy to sign them for you right after this program. So, weve been talking about really the way time might be cyclical and isnt it curious the last question was about language and time, which was a very first question we started with. I won wonder whether that is meaning. I thank you so much for grappling with a very, very tricky thing, and we dont know what else to do here because we are fairly limited in our expression. However, we do have catalogues aplenty, and given that we have been talking about how time transforms our perception of reality, i think the most fitting catalogues to present to the two of you is the first collection of the reuben art which is called world of transformation because it always will. Dean, congratulations on your book. Its really startlingly clear. [applause] thank you. And ted, thank you for your imagination. [applause]