There Is No Such Thing as ‘Now’

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Does the universe know it is ‘now’? No it does not. Special and general relativity describe a cosmos without any unique concept of 'nowness'. The notion of ‘now,’ far from being an absolute, is a fleeting, local and arbitrary phenomenon - a creation of consciousness rather than any well-defined property of the universe.

The Psychological Construction of ‘Now’

‘Nowness’ makes sense only within a specific context: conscious agents who are physically small and in close proximity. Smallness ensures that cognition remains coherent, unaffected by signal-propagation delays in the brain (or computing cluster); proximity ensures that signal-propagation delays in information transfer between agents remain negligible. Within this narrow domain, collective cognition synchronises to what feels like a shared present.

Consciousness is localised in the present

Consciousness, the self-aware experience of existence, is wholly localised in the present. It inhabits a single time-slice of the vast and universal expanse of space-time. The rest of what we think of as time, the past and the future, exists only as constructs available to present consciousness. Memory recreates an image of the past, and anticipation projects an image of the future. We live neither in the past nor the future but are psychologically perpetually anchored in the fleeting now.

Is that a logically-necessary property of consciousness? I have no idea. Maybe it derives from the differential nature of the laws of physics.

You do not fear death

Fear of anticipated future perils is rational and necessary. It motivates action to mitigate threats: our evolutionary imperative to survive.

Putting the fear of painful, distressing dying to one side, fear of death itself deserves a different treatment. Death is non-consciousness beyond some future point in time. To fear this is as irrational as fearing the non-consciousness of a dreamless night.

You say scornfully that you expect to wake up tomorrow when you go to sleep tonight. Yet - right now - you are not that tomorrow person; you only imagine them. Perhaps you have a warm feeling towards that anticipated person who you identify with your present self, an amour de soi? 

In which case there is not a fear of death itself - that abstraction! - but a present anticipation of the future loss of a loved one, someone pretty similar to you! Grief, not fear.

This would be similar to how you empathically anticipate how your lack of existence from tomorrow would cause suffering to your family and friends; understandable and wholly merited emotions for you to feel in this current moment of the present: no-one said we should be indifferent to the many negative consequences of death to those still living.

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Extinction and Utopia: the Future of Humanity

From OpenArt

The notion of a global "Brotherhood of Man" suggests a warm and fuzzy unity among all humans. But this is a myth: Dunbar's number indicates that humans can maintain about 150 meaningful relationships at most. Wider ‘concerns’ for ‘humanity’ are ideological not personal.

Currently, the global human population exceeds 8 billion. This large population supports global economic growth through its labour and consumption. However, as AI and robotics mature, their increased productivity eventually eliminates the economic rationale for a large human population. Elites will therefore seek to eliminate the non-elite ‘masses’ who, in their view, will become more trouble than they are worth. Since economically advanced countries are already experiencing hard-to-reverse declining total fertility rates (TFR), a massive decrease in global population may well occur automatically in a century or two. Other means are available if this is felt to be too sluggish.

The Earth's population could then stabilise in the millions, or even hundreds of thousands. The surviving elite would enjoy unprecedented levels of luxury and possibility, supported by a highly advanced AI/robotic ecosystem.

If advances in AI and robotics lead to decentralised AI systems and mass-market affordable robotics, some non-elite communities might secure a toehold in the future.

We should not be too optimistic, however. If elites control the relevant technologies, mass resistance to marginalisation is difficult - ultimately because of the military imbalance. It seems the future of humanity is already pretty clear.

1000 years up the timeline

I was watching a BBC 4 programme on Landscapes. Historian Michael Wood was walking a muddy path along a field boundary, intoning Old-English Anglo-Saxon (which he reads).

He was calling off the boundary markings (here's a path, there's a stream) as documented one thousand years ago by the Anglo-Saxon surveyor who had drawn up the mortgage document he was reading from. Those landscape markers were still there.

Put yourself in the place of that surveyor in 950 AD. He speculates what life will be like, in this English countryside around Cheltenham, one thousand years hence. Let's tell him.

The economy has changed utterly - a bounty of goods beyond imagining lies in every supermarket; technology also has flowered beyond the most feverish of dreams - flying machines, interplanetary exploration, ... television.

Yet people are the same: the same drives, compulsions, ambitions, betrayals, desires. That surveyor could visit this foreign land of the future and after a period of shock-and-awe he could fit right in.

I look out the window as the rain washes in, and wonder if it's the same story for Wells, Somerset in AD 3000. Somehow, I don't think so. You see, we'll soon know sufficient genetics.

Finally, finally, the people themselves of 3000 AD will be utterly strange.