This thing we think of as reality is that we are going to find that out tonight. No question. This is based on the idea of perception into those that havee visited know that it is calibrated and devised where yos not only see things but you smell the fragrance in the air. Are you allowed to touch the bead is just not the object if you dont mind and you just take the whole thing and you can hea the sound and also realize how limited you are in terms of your perception because you are not taking everything in. In tibetan buddhism there are six senses and of the six this consciousness, the one that process the input from the socalled outside world. Now what has tim go time to do h that because that is what we are going to try to explore today, the notion of whether time is something that is relative, that is fixed or there is a future or there isnt and some may think given the present situation but there is no future. But lets take courage and explore past, present and everything between. Maybe they dont actually mean very much. Well, funny enough, here from ucla hed just brought out a neo book called your grave is a time machine you are a signed physics and time but this is the way he starts his book. Right at the very beginning the chapter called flavors of time. , time, person, year, they, what do the words have in common, he asks. Anyone want to venture . Any takers . Time, person, dear, weigh iny. Today. Im going to cut to the chase. Not recognizing as the five commonly used nouns in thent ro english language. It sits atop of the mist with two other units of time as it consequence of the overwhelming importance tim plays in our lives we were not asking for the time, we were speaking of serving time, keeping time, not having time, tracking time, timeouts is my personal favorite, lunchtime. [laughter] this is about the perception of time with the use of the vehicle we use to communicate with each other which is language. E, but you can see it runs from left to right. It does that. How many of you saw the film arrival, how many have read stories of your life . Fewer from a severe rest of you congress relations, thanks foraf coming out not knowing what you were in for. But we just described in the book that is the basis for this film, these creatures from another world arrive on earth and try to communicate with somebody who is an expert in languages and use logo grams and they are depicted you dont see them described in that sense in the story but they are depicted as multidimensional expressions. You can read them in a three or four dimensions. So they communicate in this wayu thats their language so the question that we are going to wo ask first is does the language dictate the perception of time because they use the language to instill in the translator and understanding of multiple futures or lived currently. And thats exquisite notion is i will live you leave you with. Those of you that dont know hes a sciencefiction writer but witscience fiction writerbun so many awards, four of these nebulous hes got. [laughter] hes not a new writer hes so established and well loved. [applause] taking the cue maybe we could start by talking about languagee and time i think this is something you certainly delve into the story of your life and i touch upon that maybe it would be helpful to set up the stage for the discussion to talk about the terms that will be helpful when we talk about timing and terms of how philosophers oftena do you get the series. The present israel, the tas paso the future configuration will be real but only the present israel. Another which the past, presentr and future are all equally and a now it is an arbitrary point so now the time is here in space. So your story implicitly embraces the notion of internali is some where they are all equally real. Ce its hard to talk about with this with the language sentences but i remember when you will be wheone year older what you willy when you are 12. Hard its hard because language wasnt set up to talk about this view. Can you elaborate on your view of how language codes stranded your talk of it about language . While i dont think theres any language that would really help us understand a journalism as a visceral level. The idea that the future and past are just as real as the ash president i think people who hold to a journalism can only do so in an intellectual abstract fashion. I dont know that we are capable of freely feeling it and letting it. I dont think human consciousness is capable of really embracing a journalism and i think all language is going to reflect the fact that we live in the present. Its interesting like animals that lack language i think we i would say they only have knowledge of the present. Se humans perhaps as a result maybe not as a result of humans have language and we have knowledge of the past as being Something Different and the future as being Something Different than the present and that is something animals do not have a. And the different ways that our language can reflect our awareness the past and future i think different languages to offer different perspectives on that and that is one idea i try to explore in the story. So naturally it enables the concept of time travel. E trav your story doesnt engage in time travel directly but im reminded in reading your book. In the distant future they find out how to do time travel but they had to prohibit it noty because of the paradoxes it created intentionally going back but because it was way too complicated. I think this is something you come up against in terms of thet verb conjugation it becomes wildly complicated and expressing ideas that may happen in the future but you can avoid by jumping back in the future. What is your view on the more serious note do you think only the president is real and eternal list which the past, present and future are equally real no one knows the answer. I guess i am persuaded by the arguments from physics in favor of paternalism or that they block the universal view. Einsteins relativity makes the case which i find pretty persuasive that the future is as real as the past or present and like i said its not one that i can inhabit but at an intellectual level i understand and i buy into it so i do agreed with that but we live in its the standard of you in physics. The standard view in physics iss this notion that in part driven a lot by relativity this notion that because time is relevant even death with a situation which there is no absolute no simultaneity so event near and far it doesnt make sense if they are occurring simultaneouse because its relative to your prospective of speed or so forth so this ends up bleeding into this block universe mentioned which everything has already been laid out. But this creates a clash of intuition it sort of mocks our intuition of time passing and flowing which is inaccessible and gone we certainly feel that way and the future is wide open yet undetermined so there is a clash between the physics of time and science of time so do you feel this is an illusion that time is flowing and if everything is already laid out in the block universe if within flow as much as it would just exist. Did you see this or does that bother you . It depends on what we mean. Th it doesnt say that we ought to be able to remember or future and actually there are some works now on why it really makes sense that we can only remember the one direction but not the other so in the sense theres no expectation we ought to be able to remember the future course of its not so much antievolution that we dont experience eternal wisdom but it is a function of either the way our brains work or the way any Information System can work, not specifically our brains but a anything i can explain a little bit about what im talking about. The question of why you said we can remember the past but not the future and what is the difference between the past and future from physics standpoint. There is a hero of time that is the result of thermodynamics that if we say the universe started with a big bang that is low entropy and if the universe ends in some ring like this that is the state of extremely high entropy and theres a steady increase from one end to the other, so why is it that we feel that we are moving in one direction as opposed to moving in the other direction . There is a theory that memory and this is based on the work on information theory that recording any information in and then sort of rating the record of information would inevitably involve an increase in entropy. That means any event that is record it would have to be closer to the low end of the block universe than the time of recording so any manner he would have to be of the liverbe of direction and that is what we call the past. So it would be impossible to remember the future because that wouldve required accurate would require accurate recordings of a higher entropy state and that it seems like maybe physically impossible, so if that is true then anystem, Information System could only contain Accurate Information about one direction which is the will were entropy production so because of the past. As we record more information, wrefer to perceive that as our consciousness moving through time. This notion of asymmetry in time which if we live in the eternal List Universe would be bidirectional and why dont we remember the future as the store with say i remember when this would happen along those lines but i think it is a very profound scientific question ana i think the physics and science have to collaborate more so the standard view on physics and the fundamental law of the physics dont seem to have any special meaning for the present. It seems to be as arbitrary as before, so if that is the case and time doesnt flow we have to discern if we want to interpret our objective observation about the universe. It certainly seems like time is flowing and like the present is evolving into the future and like the actions i choose to make now affect the future. But should we take that as an empirical observation about the universe and one that which then physics has to explain or is it just a trick of the mind of one sort or another and evolution of consciousness and then science has to explain that. But i think we should clarify here and say even though the sort of standard view in physics is towards paternalism bears certain evidence of that and nothing anybody would call empirical proof of the past, present and future. I think depending who you ask, different physicists will give you different answers but my view is better expressed as the simplest interpretation of relativity. But other aspects dont mesh with that including Quantum Mechanics is a different treatment of time so it gets a bit complicated. D but in terms of consciousnesscoi and whether consciousness is compatible, i think our determinism and free will loveai what consciousness is is probably not that linearar narrative that we use in the language about the passage of time that seems to be involved in a, b. , c. And d. An example from language i would use to express this hard concept ingrained to take two sentences and we can sort of follow in youfollowingyour brain how you t them so the first one is the mouse pad in the computer and the second, the mouse was hungry so the meaning of the word is different in both cases one is an animal and one is a computer device that you can only interpret the meaning of that word of mouse by the words that came after that, the mouse pad or the mouse was hungry. So if it is a linear flow of events taking place i dont think that would be hard to explain. Most people probably dont feel that they understood the word to go back and edit it. But your brain waited until the appropriate moment for your unconscious grain to feed intomt the narrative. So i think to dissolve these type of issues on whether consciousness as we know it is compatible with physics or that interpretation i think it would be interesting in one of the few fields of science and physics that have to collaborate more at least in my view. A that is the question that you bring up making sense in thesen sentences. That is the question for the content of science and linguistics. I agree that it does indicatedie our conscious perception as we make sense of language, that is something that is being constructed and it is not immediate we are probably lagging behind our input but wet are not making sense of them making a narrative out of that for another second or so. But again i guess i feel like im not sure that there is adon physics. I think the intersection is in the decision of whether we should interpret conscious perception or the subjective feelings of the flow of time as empirical evidence. So take another aspect people interpret as perception of color so it is an illusion in the sense that it is created by the mind because it doesnt exist in physics. What exists is the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, so color is the brains interpretation of the wavelength and subject but it has an evolutionary value but itlusiont correlates tightly. Because it is incredibly adaptive. It has a underpinning. If you live in this world at the time doesnt flow but is more static than we also have the question of the evolutionary value. I think the need for the attraction is to come together with this interpretation should we accept this as an interpretation or fact and then if we should take the subjective sense what constitutes an empirical observation about the work and does this count or not so thats what i mean by the intersection so you are right in the sense that the questions are cognitive science to determine if we should accept this or not is where the communication will be more beneficial but time will tell. After cow. I could be wrong. What is the adaptive advantage of perceiving time if it doesnt flow from if there is no actual physical correlation to that i guess one question to ask is what is the alternative given this theory about memory inevitably being tied to the increase so no Information System can know the future or have accurate recordings of the future so that means any Information System could have what we call about the past. So what is the alternative for such an Information System to develop some kind of subjective experience. That theory is correct if that opposes any symmetry on thn memory i think that could go a long way towards explaining this clash but that is a beautiful example of the attraction between physics and science because youre talking about maybe itd display and something at this level. But as we all know it is speculated including this theo theory. But its possible we will not be able to answer these questions. But on the related issue is the question of how the brain just is time to begin with so we have this notion of whether or not it proceeds time. In relation to language again, its interesting that our ability as you mentioned earlier on his animals dont seem to have a grasp of the past thathe they are more present based and i tend to agree on the debate which that is true or not but how did humans come to acquire that ability. Its believed to be by metaphors and understanding space. Some people believe its to understand space or time and this explains why we in most wen languages use spatial metaphors to talk about time, so it was a very long day in hindsight it was a bad idea or your thinking i hope this talk ends shortly. So this notion that we use spatial metaphors is again specialized as time whether it is true in the universe or not is a natural phenomenon and a couple investigators studied this with a common example i will ask the audience. Next mondays meeting has been moved to today. Who thinks it is on monday and who thinks it is on friday . We have a number of people that are egocentric with time. Ti what that means is if you think that meeting is on friday, that implies you have a sense that you are moving through time and distance you are moving monday, tuesday, wednesday, it would end up on friday. If on the other hand you are static and time is moving towards you, those of you that raised your hand up for monday that would imply a moral time centric where time is coming towards you in this time perspective is not fixed its actually very us according to what you are doing. But there are many examples about how in language we use spatial metaphors. Another one that comes up is this issue of the future being forward. We were talking a little about this before. In english and european culturea we think of the future as being ahead of us and passed is behind us and that is it seems to be sort of baked into most languages but its not a universal idea. Central america they think of the future as being behind them and the past as being in front of them. The first time you hear it this seems counterintuitive but there is the sense in which it makes a lot of sense in that we know the past so we can see the past so the future is heading to us so it makes sense the future being hidden should be behind us and the past that is known to us should be in front of us and then with regard to the question of white does that mean immdoet walking backwards. [laughter] media few have the idea of this egocentric view that you are walking through time. But you are standing and time is sort of flowing around you so more and more of the time is coming into view for you. But that definitely requires a shift for most people. As another example of how he did work with people in guinea and found that they seem to believe the future is uphill and the past is downhill. They live in an extremely hilly area so basically no flatland anywhere. Everything is sloped. But yes, to some extent they think of the future as upslope and the past as downslope. The odd thing about that is that is not dependent on wheres you are facing. For both our version of time they are egocentric and dependent on every direction im facing theres this way of thinking about time it is thi geocentric said in some ways it is independent of the way that you your self are positioned and i dont think theres enough data on how this affects the conversation in every aspec andf their life but its interesting to think about. That it its hard to think about time we tend to specialized time and this influences how we think about time. This leads people to embrace eternal for some and i raise the possibility that physicists due to the inherent spatial position of time not only in the equations but thinking about the key access is this specialization of time is your brain becoming more and more familiar with it and i worryre l that creates this interpretation which we accept the standard without enough empirical evidence. If this is natural to thinkckin. About time into and spatialre dimension, what is puzzling toaz me is if you go through the literature and history its how long it took the writers to come up with a notion of time travel. Now its everywhere where you cant turn your tv on without seeing a show about time travel. But shakespeare who had predicted every hollywood plot ever skipped time travel and you look throughout historical writing with a few exceptions but until the very late 18 hundreds, which is coincidentally around where einstein was da