Our mind generates, based on our intellectual models of reality, the stories we call the past. Moreover, we know that the mind is innately incentivized to construct these stories so ‘to preserve a coherent personal narrative,’95 which reassures us by strengthening our sense of personal self. Clearly, then, the coherence and plausibility of our image of the past, no matter how compelling, are at least suspicious as evidence for objectivity. After all, we construct this image so to make it coherent, plausible and reassuring to ourselves. Our commitment to the objectivity of the past arises, thus, from self-validating mental processes. It survives because of our inability to notice how we deceive ourselves; our inability to become lucid of the many nuanced layers of our own mentation.
Explanatory truths require mind-independent past states of affairs that are never really out there, for the past is always a mental construct. All bulletproof rational arguments for believing certain explanations are also subjective, arising from our intellectual models of the workings of nature. No matter how much we want to project our stories onto the outside, the truthfulness of any explanation will always reside in our inner lives alone. It has nowhere else to go.
Recall Joan Didion’s words quoted in Part I: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.’96 Indeed. All explanations are myths whose truth-value we assign subjectively. They are true only insofar as we say that they are true. They are stories we conjure up and tell ourselves in order to make sense of the disconnected, context-free phantasmagoria of present perception. It makes no sense to proclaim any explanation for the present to be objectively true. And since the concept of falsity is simply the opposite of that of truth, it makes no sense to proclaim any explanation to be objectively false either. The attempt to attribute objective truth or falsity to any explanation is as nonsensical as the attempt to attribute marital status to the number five:97 it simply isn’t applicable. All we can hope to establish is whether an explanation is consistent with memories, present perceptions and our intellectual models of reality.
The past is a mental construct generated by subjective, intellectual models of reality fed with subjective memories and present perceptions. It isn’t anywhere out there but an internal myth meant to give context to present perceptions. Thus, there can be no explanatory truths.
The subjectivity of the future
Naturally, the same goes for the future: Where is it? It exists only as a subjective expectation. No matter how sure you are of what is going to happen in the next minute, you can’t point at it and say ‘There it is, the future!’ It’s just an image in your mind. What else could it be? Where else could it exist? Moreover, it’s even cliché to say that the future is unpredictable. You may be sure that you will still be sitting where you are in the next minute but, for all you know, there may be an earthquake and your location may forcibly change. The future is always just a subjective expectation in your mind, never a mind-independent state of affairs somewhere out there.
We constantly tell ourselves the ‘story of the future’ because doing so is essential to the continuance of life. Without this story, we would literally grind to a halt. Why move the fork to the mouth if you haven’t got a story running in your mind predicting that you will get food once you complete the motion? Why do anything or go anywhere if you haven’t got a story that tells you where you will eventually arrive and what you will find there?
The future is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give perspective to your present actions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the future has been anything else; I challenge you to find one.
Therefore, there cannot be predictive truths, for they require mind-independent future states of affairs that are never really out there. The future, after all, never comes; otherwise it wouldn’t be the future. All predictions are myths whose truth-value we assign subjectively. They are true only insofar as we say that they are true. They are stories we conjure up and tell ourselves in order to motivate action in the present. The best we can ever say is that a prediction is consistent with intellectual models, memories and present perceptions, like the predictions of both teams of seismologists regarding Mount Etna’s eruption.
You may claim that, although it is strictly impossible to assign objective truth to a present prediction, in some future moment we will be able to look back and assert retroactively whether the prediction was true. For instance, one week in the future we should be able to tell for sure which team of seismologists made the correct forecast about Etna. The problem is that this very scenario is also a prediction. It only exists in your mentation. You are imagining this future moment when the truth-value of the seismologists’ forecasts can be assigned in a non-subjective manner. Your mind is using an imagined future scenario to reinforce its own conviction in the objectivity of another imagined future scenario. The whole thing is circular.
Moreover, even if you were to eventually arrive at this hypothetical future, by then the original prediction about Etna’s eruption would be just a memory; a subjective image woven in a mental narrative meant to couch your perceptions in a subjective context. You would exclaim: ‘Aha! Etna is erupting just as they predicted!’ But where would the original prediction exist at that moment? What else would it be but a subjective recollection that reinforces the storyline playing out in your mind at that moment? You see, we are prepared to imagine even the memories we would have in a hypothetical future, in order to reinforce our conviction in the objectivity of that hypothetical future. But how could imagined future memories possibly count as evidence for the objectivity of the future?
The sophistication and skill with which we trick ourselves in these circular cognitive games is dazzling. We imagine a future wherein we remember a past wherein we predicted a future that matches the future we are now imagining. From this tortuous intertwining of imaginings we conclude that the future and the past must exist, well, objectively, even though all the while we’ve never left the present. Wow! Do you see how we create past and future out of thin air? What an amazing trick of conditioned cognition this is! Past and future are myths: stories in the mind. If you truly grok this, you will be dumbfounded. When I finally did—which happened while I was sitting with friends at a restaurant—I was somewhat catatonic for a half hour, which made for some understandable gossiping around the table. You see, we believe so unreservedly in having pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps that it stuns us to realize we actually never have. As discussed in Part III, it is this unreserved belief that creates our ordinary experience of life. But I digress.
What matters for now is this: whichever way you look at it, if you remain attentive to the many nuanced layers of your own cognitive processes, you cannot escape the inherent subjectivity of both past and future. Explanatory and predictive truths are thus mirages. They don’t exist. We only ever live in the present. And it is in the present that our limited awareness of our own cognitive processes perpetuates the illusion of past and future.
The future is a mental construct generated by subjective, intellectual models of reality fed with subjective memories and present perceptions. It isn’t anywhere out there but an internal myth meant to give perspective to present actions. Thus, there can be no predictive truths.
There is only ever the present
The past is always gone and the future never comes. There is only ever the present. Have you ever left the present in your entire life? Even if you had a time machine to visit the ‘future,’ during your visit the ‘future’ would be your present. You cannot escape the present; ever; not even theoretically.
Past and future exist only as mental explanations and predictions, images in the mind. But these images are experienced in the present. Pause and consider this. There has never been a single moment in your entire life in which the past or the future existed as anything other than images experienced in the present. Any other conclusion is simply the subjective output of an
intellectual model of reality—no matter how plausible—not a mind-independent fact.
Forever locked in the now, we subjectively project a past backwards and a future forwards. See Figure 6. But even those projections exist only insofar as they are experienced in the present. Past and future, at bottom, are simply particular qualities or configurations of certain present experiences: the past corresponds to the qualities of remoteness and finality, while the future corresponds to fuzziness and openness. It is our intellect that mistakes these different qualities of present experience for an objective timeline extending back and forth. Past and future are merely concepts arising from cognitive confusion.
Past and future exist only as mental explanations and predictions, images in the mind projected backwards and forwards. But these projections are experienced in the present, for there is only ever the present. Our intellect mistakes particular qualities of certain present experiences for a past and a future.
Figure 6. Past and future are subjective projections of present mentation.
The intangibility of the present
Having concluded that only the present still stands a chance of really being out there, independently of our subjective mentation, we are left with the question: Where exactly is the present?
We could say that the present is today, while the past is yesterday and the future is tomorrow. Yesterday is a memory and tomorrow is an expectation, so both exist only in mind. But today is really out there, isn’t it? Well, if you come to think of it, today is quite a long period of time. Within today there is last hour, this hour and next hour. Last hour and next hour can only exist in mind. Only this hour is really out there. Or is it? Within this hour there is last minute, this minute and next minute; and so on. You get the picture.
We could say that the present is a very short moment squeezed in between a growing past and an approaching future. But even that wouldn’t be satisfactory: How short is it exactly? After all, even very short periods of time still contain past and future. If you try to pin down the present moment by exclaiming ‘Now!’ it’s already gone into the past by the time your tongue begins to move.
The present is infinitely short unless we choose to believe the theoretical, abstract limits imposed by current physics. In this case, the shortest possible interval of time is supposed to be the so-called Planck time, denoted tP:
tP ≈ 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second
If you try to develop a felt intuition for how short this is, you will quickly discover that you can’t. It is inconceivably shorter than the ranges of time you have any familiarity with and could use as references for comparison. Yet, the present cannot be any longer than one Plank time. As such, however close to nothing you may imagine the present to be, it’s a lot closer. From an intellectual standpoint, the present is thus intangible. See Figure 7.
Now, since perceptual truths must correspond to present states of affairs, they can only exist within this intangible moment. They are, at best, inconceivably fleeting. The overwhelming majority of what we consider ‘true’ is conjured up by the mind in the form of explanations (projected past) and predictions (projected future). Most of what we experience in our life thus consists of our own internal storytelling. The bulk of life is entirely mythical.
The present is an intangible moment squeezed in between a growing past and an approaching future. Therefore, perceptual truths are, at best, an inconceivably fleeting part of the experience of life. The bulk of life consists of internal myths.
Figure 7. The intangible moment we call the present.
The cognitive ‘big bang’
Despite its intangibility, all of existence must fit within the present moment, for the present is all there ever is. Even the past and the future, as myths experienced in the present, exist within it. Thus, out of the quasi-nothingness of the now somehow comes everything. ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ says the Heart Sutra of Buddhism.98
The present moment is the cosmic egg described in so many religious myths,99 which we briefly discussed in Part I. It is a singularity that births all existence into form. It seeds our mind with fleeting consensus images that we then blow up into the voluminous bulk of projected past and future. These projections are like a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in our mind. They stretch out the intangibility of the singularity into the substantiality of events in time. But unlike the theoretical Big Bang of current physics, the cognitive ‘big bang’ isn’t an isolated occurrence in a far distant past. It happens now; now; now. It only ever happens now.
This is a subtle but crucial point: the cognitive ‘big bang’ is not a process unfolding in time. Rather, it’s a qualitative pattern of distribution of mental contents across the map of human cognition. This complete pattern exists now and only now. Mental contents close to the central singularity have the qualities we associate with the present: immediateness, vividness. Contents distributed across the periphery of awareness have the qualities we associate with the past or the future: remoteness, fuzziness. Nonetheless, each of these mental contents is a particular reflection of the central singularity on the mirror of human awareness. There is nothing else they could be.
The past and the future are thus projected images—symbols, icons—of the intrinsic, timeless attributes of the singularity; of the intangible essences contained in the cosmic egg. There is nothing else the past or the future could consist of. Myths are the form taken by these symbolic projections of intangible essences. No wonder that physicists ended up conceiving of a Big Bang: it is a ‘true’ myth as an icon—a reflection—of the now, not an explanatory truth in the culturally sanctioned sense. Analogously, in the words of Wittgenstein, the myth of ‘Christianity is not … a theory about what has happened or will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.’100
Existence only appears substantial because of our intellectual inferences, assumptions, confabulations and expectations. What is actually in front of our eyes now is incredibly elusive. The volume of our experiences—the bulk of life itself—is generated by our own internal myth-making. We conjure up substance and continuity out of sheer intangibility. We transmute quasi-emptiness into the solidity of existence through a trick of cognitive deception where we play both magician and audience. In reality, nothing ever really happens, for the scope of the present isn’t broad enough for any event to unfold objectively. That we think of life as a series of substantial happenings hanging from a historical timeline is a fantastic cognitive hallucination. Roger Ebert’s last words, illuminated by the clarity that only fast-approaching death can bring, seem to describe it most appropriately: ‘This is all an elaborate hoax.’101 And who do you think is the hoaxer?
The present moment is an intangible singularity containing all existence. It seeds a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in the human mind, whereby intrinsic attributes of the singularity are symbolically projected onto past and future, in the form of myths. These myths conjure up the volume and substantiality of experience.
The subjectivity of all concepts of truth
We have now refuted explanatory and predictive truths, and confined the potential existence of perceptual truths to an intangible singularity called the present moment. But is even this intangible present really independent of mind?
Like explanatory and predictive truths, perceptual truth is also contingent on the dichotomy inside/outside. A perception is true only if it corresponds to a present external state of affairs,102 so there must exist something ‘outside.’ And by ‘outside’ I mean an objective world independent of consciousness, wherein states of affairs would still exist and develop even if no conscious entity were observing them.
Clearly then, perceptual truth is contingent on the validity of a metaphysical abstraction: a world independent of consciousness. The problem is that such a world is merely a hypothesis, for the only reality we can ever know is that of subjective experience.103 We infer a world outside experience in
an attempt to explain present perception, but—as we’ve known at least since Kant—the reality of any world beyond the subjective contents of perception is fundamentally inaccessible to us.104 As such, the concept of perceptual truth is inextricably linked to an abstract hypothesis formulated by, and residing entirely within, thought. In other words, perceptual truth is as subjective as explanatory and predictive truths. All three rest on intellectual projections.
Perceptual truth depends on a metaphysical abstraction: a hypothetical external world independent of consciousness. All three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth thus rest on intellectual projections. The very foundations of truth are inherently subjective.
The circularity of space-time
I’ve argued that the existence of a world independent of consciousness is an inference, a hypothesis. We can never be sure that it is really there. Now I’d like to take this reasoning one step further: there are strong signs that, in fact, it isn’t there.
The fabric of this hypothetical world outside consciousness is what we call space and time. They make up the scaffolding where supposedly objective things and events hang from. But what is space? What is time? Try to state in words what time is. You may say: ‘Time is the interval between two events.’ But ‘interval’ is just another word for ‘time.’ As such, this definition is circular and says absolutely nothing; it contains no new information. It’s like saying that high speed is the quality of being fast. If you try it, you will soon discover that it doesn’t matter how much effort you spend, you will never find a strictly non-circular definition of time. Go ahead, give it a go. Even dictionary and textbook definitions are broadly circular, simply hiding their circularity under indirection and the use of synonyms. These indirections create the illusion that we know what we are talking about when, in fact, we haven’t got a clue. ‘What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not,’105 admitted Saint Augustine. You see, if you can’t even define time, how do you know it’s out there? What is it that supposedly is out there? In recognition of this conundrum, there is even a formal articulation of physical theory that excludes time altogether.106
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