So the intersection of time consciousness and ethics defies our fantasies of time travel. As many celebrate Christmas, the incarnation, an epiphany, I come to this:
If we take time consciousness as embodying the present in a constructed narrative – it’s a story – while we actually live in an unstructured moment that has infinite dimensions – that is to say if we take our experience of time as all that we can know, accepting it as unknowable in the present – the irony at least might be humbling in a positive sense.
For instance, we must give up wild speculations about time travel. This is it, now. It can be otherwise. We must recognizing that in the expansive present – actually not merely expansive but without dimensions, which is to say infinite – nothing can be other than it is. If we traveled forward in time or back in time, we can’t help but impact it with our presence. That would change everything, not just in the future and the past, but presently. The whole is new. So that is it, now.
There are some good movies that seem to clear on this point. My favorite is Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne, 1990).
Again, if I were to travel forward in time, whatever happens, well, that happens for all infinity. This point is more obvious if we consider traveling back in time. If I were to travel back in time, to yesterday, and eat oatmeal instead of eggs, then today I would have eaten oatmeal yesterday. I might today remember eating eggs, but no matter. I would simply be mistaken, had I traveled back and eaten oatmeal. If I hadn’t traveled, well so be it: if I ate eggs, the eggs it was.
Is that true? Are we logically stuck with everything just as it is?
There is no jumping into some future because, logically speaking, going into the future makes it not that particular future at all, but a transformed present in which we are living now. Similarly, past lives or traveling into the past is simply logically impossible. That past would be a different past, and that different past would be the only past there is.
Our freedom isn’t limited by our being stuck with the past, as it was constructed in our narrative even if that has infinite possibilities at every turn. How we exercise our freedom, though, is definitive. Similarly, the future will be what it is, as we construct it, even as it too is open to infinite possibilities in infinite time.
But what’s done is done. Our freedom entails consequences or it wouldn’t be freedom at all. And it does and it is. There is an ethical dimension as well to the infinite possibilities: What we do matters. It matters for all eternity.
In Islamic thought there is this sense expressed as the ethical implications of infinite value: if you kill one person, since each life is infinitely valuable, it is as if you’ve killed all life. And if you save one, it is as if you’ve saved all.
Consider this: If I have that right, and if it’s true, my complaint against God (and pardon me if this is blasphemous that I write it out but I think it so I might as well put it out there and you can have the pleasure of correcting me and granting forgiveness) is that it took so long. Change came glacially slow for many millions of years, before there was conscious experience in some galaxies and perhaps parallel universes. Volcanoes erupt, black holes implode and, so long as that was all that was going on, no one was getting hurt. Only when organisms evolved that could feel pain could God, through creation, experience pain. Even then, if the creation was something other than God, would God be ignorant of this pain? What is knowledge if it’s not knowledge of something.
Perhaps God’s pre-incarnate knowledge is akin to compassion. “I feel your pain.” But not really. It’s your pain, not mine. This puts the incarnation in a certain light, God experiencing joy, pain and even death, not as I do through the fictional characters I create, but as I do directly in my own life.
Well, dear God, what took you so long? (That’s my rude question, my rude prayer.)
