 "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.” -Bill Keane Temporal philosophy is a fascinating but eerily difficult topic. Correctly answering the philosophical questions and paradoxes of time paves the way to unlocking one of the last remaining mysteries of mind since our perception of time and consciousness, as you know, are simply inseparable. A new theory of time, Digital Presentism, comes from the triangulation of temporal physics, digital physics and experiential realism. This essay addresses the flaming questions in philosophy of time: "Is time fundamental or emergent?", "How does time exist, if at all?", "How can we update the current epistemic status of temporal ontology?" For starters, let’s recap what we’ve learned so far about physics of time. Here’s a quick summary: in Time Series essays, we dissected the nature of time through the prism of these 7 common misconceptions:
RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access What is Digital Physics?
To us humans, to be alive is to perceive the flow of time. Our perception of time is linear — we remember the past, we live in the present and we look forward to the future. Our spatio-temporal reality and consciousness are two sides of the same coin made of information. We discussed the properties of consciousness and digital ontology in “Digital Pantheism: Philosophical Afterthoughts and Follow-up Questions to the Argument.” RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access The Digital Pantheism argument rests on identifying certain features of reality and claiming that these features are a consequence of our reality being a computational simulation of a special emergent kind. We, as "avatars" of the greater cosmic mind, are instrumental for bringing the finite experience of reality out of absolute infinity. Infinite becomes finite. That's quantum computation: incrementally changing into "adjacent possible," from potentiality to actuality, from quantum past to digital present. So, what is Digital Presentism?* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access  DIGITAL PRESENTISM: D-THEORY OF TIME Let's start with a brief historical overview of temporal philosophy, crucial definitions and basic assumptions. One of the earliest philosophers of time Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) compared the present to a knife edge placed exactly between the perceived past and the imaginary future. If the present is extended, he said, it must have separate simultaneous parts but we know that time cannot be simultaneously past and present and hence not extended. Contrary to Saint Augustine, some philosophers argued that conscious experience is extended in time. For instance, William James (1842–1910) said that time is "the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible". Philosophical Presentism, as its name hints, holds that only the present moment is real – neither past nor future exist. By contrast, Eternalism and the Growing Block Theory stipulate that past events, like the Wright brothers’ first flight, and past entities, like Salvador Dali’s ocelot cat Babou, really do exist, although not in the present. Eternalism extends to future events as well. Classical Philosophical Presentism is not to be confused with Digital Presentism which we’ll discuss at length hereafter. In the beginning of 20th century, Cambridge idealist philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart published "The Unreality of Time" (1908) where he categorized events into three ways of referencing: the 'A Series' (or 'tensed time': yesterday, today, tomorrow), the 'B Series' (or 'untensed time': Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), and the ‘C Series’ (or ‘sequential time’: Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday). In the first part of three, McTaggart offers a phenomenological analysis of the appearance of time, in terms of the now famous A- and B-series. In the second part, he argues that a conception of time as only forming a B-series but not an A-series is an inadequate conception of time because the B-series does not contain any notion of change. The A-series, on the other hand, appears to contain change and is thus more likely to be an adequate conception of time. In the third and final part, he argues that the A-series conception of time is contradictory and thus nothing can be like an A-series. Since the A-, the B-, and the C- series exhaust possible conceptions of how reality can be temporal, and neither is adequate, the conclusion McTaggart reaches is that reality is not temporal at all. This impasse in the philosophical discourse on temporal ontology, also known as the "problem of time" in modern physics, only looks unsurmountable but in actuality has an elegant solution to it. In 1983, physicists Don Page and William Wootters proposed a theoretical solution based on quantum entanglement. Thirty years later, in 2013, at the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) in Turin, Italy, researchers experimentally confirmed Page and Wootters' ideas: time is an emergent phenomenon for internal observers but absent for “God-like” external observers of the Universe. Can these scientific and philosophical ideas be further developed and refined in order for us to make a logically consistent temporal ontology argument? What if we try to combine all salient features of the McTaggartian time series and throw into the mix of temporal conceptions the all new D-series, the one that has never been conceived before in philosophy of time? It turns out it can be done and that's how Digital Presentism, that I also call the D-Theory of Time, comes to the fore. Reality is not temporal, it's digital. According to Digital Physics, all experiential realities are digital, i.e. information theoretic and observer-centric – you can't get rid of the centrality of observers. Think of the new conception of time, Digital Presentism, like real-time streaming of progressively generated content in immersive virtual reality (VR). We're all familiar with online music streaming, too: When you stream music online, every bit is discretely rendered, interpreted and finally interwoven into your unitary experiential reality. Only with Digital Presentism “music” is also being created in “real time" as if right from your mind. At last, Digital Presentism brings in the most comprehensive conceptual framework for our notion of temporality, and soon you'll see the reasons why.* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access Digital Presentism engulfs some similarities with other classical theories of time. With Philosophical Presentism, it shares not only the name but also the ultimacy of the present moment which appears self-evident in the spotlight of your conscious awareness; it's also similar to Eternalism as to digital pasts, digital present and digital futures are all informationally real – nothing really is ever lost – quantum information is said to be preserved. Similar to the Growing Block Universe theory, consistent digital histories, if experienced and therefore actualized, become part of the ‘Akashic Records’, or “the memory of the Universe,” in the words of Hungarian physicist and philosopher Ervin Laszlo, author of Science and the Akashic Field (2004). The past is quantum theoretic (or 'analog', if you prefer that term), the present is digital, and the future like the past is quantum, made of qubits, quantum mechanical bits of information. Once again, pay attention: the present is digital, the future and the past are quantum (analog). There is no universal frame of reference, instead, there's only the conscious observer’s frame of reference. At this point, you might say: “But I do remember my past!” And you'll be right! However, if our memories are mutable and editable, at least in principle, you can't vouch with 100% certainty for one particular digital history. There are always countless forgotten or otherwise misremembered past periods of time filled with qubits of potentiality. So, how editable is our past? RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access ANALOG TIME: "EDITABLE” PAST The present, the “now” is what we’re experiencing. But it feels like the past exists. We remember the past happening. Well, none of us remember everything, we may only remember some moments, some pieces of information. But does that past exist? Or is that just a memory we're experiencing now? Things get even more complicated when we realize that there is no possible way to prove the past existed at all. Already, scientists can project holograms onto the top layer of the brain, activating dozens of neurons many hundreds of times a second in an effort to simulate real activity patterns in the brain. By using this technique, called optogenetics, they hope to essentially fool the brain into thinking it has perceived something. The scientists also intend to imitate real patterns of brain activity so that they can ultimately reproduce sensations and perceptions that they can “play back” via the holographic system they have developed. Ultimately, this technology will help stream VR experiences broadcasted to and recreated from within your nervous system, as well as implant and edit your memories. Clearly, everything around us including our relationships could be illusory with our consciousness being the only necessary truth. But we do not have to go so far as to imagine a supreme being implanting memories in our minds of events that never happened. Your own brain is capable of creating false memories all by itself because it doesn't work as a digital camcorder...* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access. THE TEMPORAL SINGULARITY The experienced present is always the temporal singularity (let's call it 'the Theta Point' represented by the Greek letter θ) with maximum informational input/output, and thus well could be regarded as the origin of any observer-centric reality (or ‘observer-centric virtuality’ if you’d like). Experiential reality is being created at the present moment, i.e. digital writing/reading occurs in the now. You need additional degrees of freedom to reread, or rewrite, or instantiate certain initial conditions, colloquially speaking, travel in time. Moreover, reread could be done from the akashic records. Does it all sound like "electronic Buddhism"? Since antiquity, in fact, Eastern wisdom traditions have been teaching us to live in the "present moment." In modern relativistic physics, the conceptual observer is at a geometric point in both space and time at the apex of the 'light cone' which observes the events laid out in time as well as space. Different observers may disagree on whether two events at different locations occurred simultaneously depending on whether the observers are in relative motion — and it seems like more often they are — just by “sitting” still on different planets puts them in relative motion by default. So, something can happen in one observer’s future, but another observer’s past? * RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access Do you still doubt retrocausality? Perplexed by it? In quantum mechanics it does seem possible for causality to work backwards in time. The mysterious retrocausality displayed in delayed choice experiments, where an act of observation can collapse the wave function of a quantum state not only in the present but also backwards in time, altering the state's past. This retrocausality, seemingly allowed by quantum physics, has been used by the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) to explain how reality has brought itself into existence. Wheeler hypothesized of the ‘Self-observing Universe’: present-day and future observers retroactively collapse the wave function of the Universe from the Big Bang onwards, thereby facilitating their own – as well as the Universe's – evolution. Wheeler suggested that reality is created by observers and that: “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” He coined the term “Participatory Anthropic Principle” (PAP) from the Greek “anthropos”, or human. He went further to suggest that “we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.”* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access EMERGENT TIME Since time can't be absolute but is always subjective, Digital Presentism revolves around observer-centric temporality. What we call ‘time’ is a sequential change between static perceptual "frames", it's an emergent phenomenon, “a moving image of eternity” as Plato famously said more than two millennia ago. Nowadays, a renowned scientist and consciousness researcher Robert Lanza explains how the arrow of time ‒ indeed time itself ‒ is directly related to the nature of the observer: “[T]ime doesn’t just exist ‘out there’ ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer’s ability to preserve information about experienced events,” adding that “In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer… Our paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer actually creates it.” Physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that what we experience as time’s passage is a mental process happening in the space between memory and anticipation.* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access Video: D-Theory of Time: Digital Presentism - Ecstadelic Media (cc) DEGREES OF FREEDOM If you're like me who loves thought-provoking sci-fi literature and movies, Interstellar and Arrival are both about transcending temporality, one through physics and the other through language. Arguably, these two outlooks on time reflect our current understanding as the most plausible ways to overcome the grips of impermanence. If we look back at evolutionary emergence on our planet, the simplest organisms like primordial mitochondria, the frontrunners at the onset of biological life, were able to perceive and move towards nutrients and away from environmental threats in an essentially one-dimensional existence. In a while later, the more complex plants and animals were able to sense their environment and move around in two and eventually three spatial dimensions. Finally, the mathematical description of time in relativistic physics as a fourth spatial dimension implies that the more complex conscious entities like us humans, who perceive temporality, are perhaps in the process of emerging into the more advanced consciousness of ever more expansive degrees of dimensionality.* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access DISCARDING COMMON OBJECTIONS At first glance just like classical presentism, Digital Presentism faces a glaring conflict with relativistic physics. Relativity theory affirms the relativity of simultaneity, an objection that immediately threatens presentism. This apparent contradiction between Digital Presentism and general relativity can actually be easily overcome. The following conjecture can also demonstrate that the quantum realm of ultrasmall is quite compatible with the relativistic realm of galactic scales, if we assume a computationalist perspective. To the reductionist delight, Einstein's fabric of space-time can be reduced to space-time experiential data. In the universal operating system with finite computational resources, as Digital Physics suggests, the more space-data you use by moving too fast near the speed of light, the less time-data is available to you, so your time naturally slows relative to others (Chapter 15 in the book). In the introduction, I mentioned that Digital Presentism, comes from the triangulation of temporal physics, digital physics and experiential realism..* RELATED:   *This article is abridged from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. *The full story is also available at Premium Access section of this website - Sign up for Premium Access THE MOST “OUTRAGEOUS” PREDICTIONS OF D-THEORY OF TIME 1. Time travel to the past is possible… with a caveat: Again, given certain degrees of freedom, anything becomes possible in our quantum multiverse (but not necessarily realized through experience). 'Open timelike curves’ don’t create causality problems because they don’t allow direct interaction with anything in the subject’s own past: Time-travelling data never self-interfere in the quantum multiverse. Any messages from the future would be insulated. I elaborate on feasibility of time travel technologies in my essay “Temporal Mechanics: From Theory to Feasibility of Time Travel”. A great example of one of the plausible scenarios of traveling back in time is depicted in the Canadian TV series Travelers: In a distant future, a benevolent Artificial Intelligence finds a way to project the consciousness of “time travelers” into unaware hosts in the 21st century. The idea is that travelers from the future take over the minds and bodies of people in the past. The travelers go back in time by embodying a conscious entity — hack their experiential data stream, so to speak. Similarly, if you were to travel to the Jurassic Period, you could embody a pterodactyl, one of those adorable flying dinosaurs of the epoch, or a ferocious T-Rex, for the full multisensory immersion... A comprehensive thesis on Digital Presentism and the physics of time could be found in my book: "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" available now on Amazon, Audible, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. -Alex Vikoulov  Tags: Digital Presentism, D-theory of time, Temporal Philosophy, Digital Philosophy, time paradox, Digital Physics, Experiential Realism, Temporal Dynamics, Temporal Mechanics, temporal ontology, Claude Shannon, John Wheeler, Bill Keane, qualia computing, topological qubits, Digital Pantheism, Saint Augustine of Hippo, William James, Philosophical Presentism, Eternalism, Growing Block Theory, Salvador Dali, J. M. E. McTaggart, The Unreality of Time, A Series, B Series, C Series, A-theory, classical presentism, B-Theory, classical eternalism, Don Page, William Wooters, problem of time, universality of computation, experiential reality, Conscious Observer Moment, Theta Point, past causal diamond, future retrocausal diamond, Universal Causal Diamond, Akashic Records, Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field, Jacques Pienaar, reversible computing, universal operating system, Blade Runner, immersive VR, optogenetics, causal assymetry, retrocausality, temporal singularity, observer-centric reality, Minkowski space-time diagram, D-theoretic Diagram, Alpha Point, Omega Point, probability wave function, Wheeler-DeWitt equation, Schrödinger equation, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, time reversibility, spatio-temporal matrix, free will, Self-observing Universe, Participatory Anthropic Principle, emergent time, arrow of time, Robert Lanza, Albert Einstein, Carlo Rovelli, Loop Quantum Gravity, The Order of Time, Anti-Time, dimensional manifold, parallel participatory reality, transcending temporality, evolutionary emergence, perceptual dimensionality, Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, relativity of simultaneity, Is God The Ultimate Computer?, quantum physics, emergence, relativity, quantum neo-empiricism, quantum neural networks, quantum multiverse, open timelike curves, Canadian TV series Travelers, Artificial Intelligence, time travelers, pterodactyl, anti-timelines, digital timelines, reversing entropy, observer probable timelines, Extra-Dimensionality, The Syntellect Emergence, species-specific temporality *Image Credit: Alex Ivkin About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist, philosopher of mind, CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Ecstadelic Media Group, painter, essayist, media commentator, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution," "The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology," "The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics," "The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence," "Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality," "NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology," "TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man." Self-described neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, transhumanist singularitarian. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio... Author Website: www.alexvikoulov.com e-mail: [email protected] 
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Recent Publications The Cybernetic Theory of Mind by Alex M. Vikoulov (2022): eBook Series The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): eBook Paperback Hardcover Audiobook The Omega Singularity: Universal Mind & The Fractal Multiverse by Alex M. Vikoulov (2022): eBook THEOGENESIS: Transdimensional Propagation & Universal Expansion by Alex M. Vikoulov (2021): eBook The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2021): eBook TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020) eBook NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): eBook The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality by Antonin Tuynman (2019) eBook Paperback The Science and Philosophy of Information by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook Series Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook More Than An Algorithm: Exploring the gap between natural evolution and digitally computed artificial intelligence by Antonin Tuynman (2019): eBook Our Facebook Pages
A quote on the go"When I woke up one morning I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel “oh so real” when inside them but they are what they are - dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true... The question then becomes how to "lucidify" this dream of reality?"— Alex M. Vikoulov Public Forums 
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