Two (or More) Moving Spotlights of Time

There is something special about this moment: that it is now.  We talk about the “flow” of time, are tempted to say “the now moves” and may find appealing the analogy of a spotlight sweeping across a series of pictures.  I am not, here and now, going to defend the, philosophically controversial, moving spotlight theory. What I am going to do is to show that we could have evidence, not decisive evidence but pretty good evidence, that there were two or more spotlight nows moving along the timeline, and perhaps moving at different speeds, or even in different directions.

I am going to try to avoid such biq questions as whether there would be a moving now if there were no consciousness in the universe or whether the now is subjective in any number of different senses of "subjective." Instead I am going to stay as close as I reasonably can to the level of evidence, which, thought not evidence obtained, is evidence that might conceivably obtain.

Theme: A Second Moving Now

I adopt a device that has been used once or twice by philosophers and many times by writers of fiction: Oscar awoke one morning with unusually clear memories of a remarkably realistic dream. He was a farm boy some place on the prairie. It must have been the prairie and not the steppes or the pampas as everyone spoke what was clearly American English, although a little oddly. The dream went through a hardworking day, picking up in mid-morning and fading out just after an early supper. He was mending fences. He used the big, square shafted nails in his bag only when really necessary, knowing they were expensive. Nothing exciting happened; it was just hard and mostly boring work. The meals weren’t bad, though. The fare was simple, but plentiful, and the farm family of which he dreamed he was a member, was generally good humored. When Oscar awoke he was astonished at the detail of the dream and how real it all seemed. 

Oscar was, if you are not, surprised that the same thing happened the next night, and the night after, the prairie dreams being a little longer or a little shorter depending on when he fell asleep and woke up. They all fit together; advancing day by day without gap. Very soon he knew that the protagonist in his dreams was the second of two sons of the Johnson family, owners of a medium sized farm in central Nebraska in 1886. The nearest settlement was Merna. Seven miles farther was the bigger town of Broken Bow. Naturally enough, Oscar started searching the web for information on this locale and time. He didn’t find much at first, but what he did find supported the accuracy of his dreams. As time went on like this, and he knew more about what he now thought of as his life “as Jeb” he found more and more confirmation. He even found some genealogy of a Johnson family of Custer County. It all fit, except that Aunt Tilly didn’t seem to be what Jeb had been told she was. 

At this point Oscar, if he has the least spark of the philosopher in him, is bound to entertain some extravagant conjectures. He might hypothesize that he was time traveling back to 1886 where he either became Jeb or somehow cohabited Jeb’s consciousness. Then perhaps he didn’t travel back in time in the sense of “being in” 1886. After all, Oscar-as-Jeb never had any of Oscar’s twenty-first century memories. Oscar couldn’t have Jeb buy Standard Oil stock, and there was no risk of a grandfather shooting. So Oscar might only be the beneficiary of some extremely high quality telepathic transmission by which the conscious experience of Jeb had either jumped across time or had somehow wended its way through all the intermediate time. On either of these information transmission hypotheses, the sleeping Oscar must have been uniquely situated to pick up the signal. He rejected the possibility that it was memories of his own prior life that was coming out in his dreams. He couldn’t remember any day from last week in that kind of detail.

The fact that time travel or signal transmission or whatever it was progressed 1886 day by 1866 day in Oscar’s night by night experience is going to be our focus. Notice that on either a time travel or a telepathy reception scenario it might well have been that Oscar’s experience of 1886 not be chronological. He might witness Jeb’s high school graduation under a scorching sun and the next night experience Jeb’s snowy tenth birthday. Happening in chronological sequence, as they do, however, Oscar will surely start to think of himself as having an intimate relation to two different places in time, with two different yesterdays and two different tomorrows. If the moving now is an illusion, Oscar will be doubly victimized by the illusion. 

Oscar’s reports, even when checked out for accuracy by appropriate experts, might not yet have been enough for anyone to conjecture that there were two different spotlights moving across the timeline. But then reports of other Oscar-like experiences started turning up in the news. Thousands of people reported extraordinarily detailed and lifelike dreams of life in 1886, each from the standpoint of a different person and in a different place in the world. All the reports, however, agree on the 1886 dates.  On the same morning all those reporting sleep experiences of a nineteenth century life in the United States report on local observances of the Fourth of July, 1886.

As the historical accuracy of these reports get more and more confirmation, university history departments start developing programs for collecting, collating, analyzing, and checking the reports. These scholars, as well as the “time commuters,” themselves, as Oscar and his ilk came to be called, tend to keep two calendars handy and to be careful to disambiguate “tomorrow.”  On this evidence, I think there would be a pretty good basis for talking about two spotlights moving across the time line. 

Variation: Multiple Moving Nows

If this is right, it is easy to see what evidence for a third and fourth spotlight would be like.Conceived as moving spotlights, Jeb’s and Oscar’s moved at the same rate, one day per day. This need not be.  Oscar might have gotten Jeb’s morning on one twenty first century night and Jeb’s afternoon on the next. Alternatively, he might have gotten two Jeb days each Oscar night. We would have spotlights moving through time at different relative rates. 

 

Variation: Counterclockwise Nows

Could we have evidence of this sort for a spotlight moving backwards in time? Yes, although things do get more complicated.

Oscar could report that his second night’s “dream” was of Jeb’s life the day before the first.  If this continues, something is going backward in time. We might well hypothesize, however, that it is a matter of Oscar’s implicit time travel device having a control that keeps resetting for a day earlier after each use. Alternatively the trans-time telepathy channel might not be “direct and instantaneous,” but cached. It might be programed to remove data from the cache day by day but LIFO, last-in-first-out.  Spotlights move continuously, but all Oscar’s reports only show a jerky day by day backward movement, for which we might well favor some explanation less radical than a now heading towards the past.

Suppose, however, that Oscar reports, in addition to this day by day regression, that his nocturnal experience made him seasick. He was always walking backwards, and splattered eggs drew back into their shells, which came together unbroken. Once he was limping in pain, let himself painfully to the ground where he felt yet more pain and was then launched up to a precarious perch at the hayloft door, where he found himself in no pain at all.

So when he wakes up on Sunday morning, Oscar has memories, say, of Jeb’s Saturday. Oscar’s memory of his dream started on Saturday night with Jeb at a barn dance, then supper, haying, dinner, and breaking off in the middle of more haying all in the movie run backwards fashion. Oscar’s Monday morning memory are of Jeb’s Friday, starting again with Friday evening and proceeding to Friday morning.

Surely Oscar could tell such a story, and that here and there details of it could be confirmed just as in the simpler case of our theme. You might wonder, however, whether the supposed relation between Oscar and Jeb can be explained in a way that keeps the whole thing from falling apart.

Consider what Jeb would experience and what he would remember if he were subject to a now running from future towards past. The complication is that Jeb’s memory processes would themselves run backwards. What is memory acquisition with a forward moving now is memory deletion for a now moving backwards. Even if Jeb saw an egg unbreak, he could have no memory of such an event. His memory of the omelet in the frying pan will have been erased when he sees the whole egg sitting on the counter. So Jeb will always have memory contents that seem to him forward running in time.

When Jeb is lying in bed a few extra moments on Sunday morning will have no memory of the big family dinner and the trip to church he has experienced in the backwards now. Instead he has memories of Saturday’s chores and the barn dance although he has yet to be in that now for those experiences. You may feel called upon to object here that one cannot have memories of what one has not experienced. There are many psychology experiments to the contrary, but leave that aside. All I need to keep the case on its feet is the possibility of remembering what one has not now-experienced for the particular spotlight now under consideration. Here the now in question is the hypothetical one we are tentatively taking to be behind Oscar’s description of Jeb’s experience.

An objection recalling logical positivism and the verification principle of meaning: inasmuch as the memory deletion mechanism entails that Jeb could never have any evidence that he was in a backward moving now, the whole hypothesis of a backwards moving now is meaningless. Now I am generally hostile to the verificationist edict that a declarative sentence, untestable in principle, is meaningless. This is flatly false unless “in principle” is construed so broadly as to make the claim uninteresting. That battle need not be fought here, however, because Jeb is not the only possible source or interpreter of evidence. It is true that Jeb left to his own devices could never distinguish whether his now was moving forwards or backwards along the time line. Oscar, however, is a different matter. If Oscar’s account of his nineteenth century adventures could be true, then there is another possible source of verification of assertions about the direction of Jeb’s now.

Still, there are some questions about whether the relation of Oscar to Jeb doesn’t harbor contradictions in the psychology/philosophy of mind sort. It is not easy to see how Oscar could have movie-backward memories from his nightly odyssey. If Oscar experiences exactly what Jeb experiences, and remembers just what Jeb remembers, then he, no more than Jeb, will experience eggs unbreaking or wake up with memories resembling a movie run backwards.

If we think of Oscar as cohabiting Jeb’s mind, he will only experience it as a movie backwards if he retains his own forward running memory. Not beyond imagination, however, is a one sided sort of mind meld in which information passes Jeb to Oscar but Oscar retains all of his own mental functioning including his own memory. So Oscar will directly witness both the egg unbreaking and Jeb’s losing the omelet memory.

If you find mind melds a little extravagant, return to the idea of a one way telepathic channel. This explanation of Oscar’s accounts would raise the question why it is that the telepathic input should follow Jeb towards the past rather than towards the future. That is not a bad question, but it reveals no contradiction. The answer “because the channel is anchored in a backwards moving now,” does nothing worse than raise lots of further questions.

Certainly, once we got to the bottom of things, Oscar’s data might turn out not to be evidence of a backwards now, being merely an artifact of the way Jeb’s experiences get to Oscar. The mechanism’s cache might have an output governed by an instant by instant last in first out principle.

Suppose now that one Elmer had dreams like those of Oscar for 30 nights, but that Elmer reported the experiences of Cliff, a Silicon Valley software test engineer. Elmer’s first “dream’s” content was from 67 day’s in advance of the date of his dream, and had the backward movie character. His subsequent dreams went day by day into the past of the Cliff of the first dream, the final one being still a week in Elmer’s future. To Elmer’s disappointment, Cliff did not follow the stock market. He did catch enough news here and there for Elmer to be able to give investigators, with only a little patience, sufficient confirmation that he had accurate information from the near future.

This all would provide a great deal more drama, and a modicum of additional credibility, to those who argued that the reports of the backwards time commuters, for, of course, Elmer was not alone in giving these 30 days of reports, were evidence of a counter-clockwise now.

   

Conclusion

I conclude that we can imagine circumstances that would provide good, although not decisive, evidence that there was more than one, and perhaps several, moving nows; that they moved at different relative speeds, and even that one or more of them moved towards the past.