St. Augustine: Quantum Measurement in the Making?

While doing Shadowstrider research, this time on quantum measurement and the troubles therein (i.e. Schrödinger's Cat), I came across this. Although not the research I was aiming to find, it brings up hypotheses that are geared toward my character's personality and how she would analyze the given situation.

In other words, instead of sounding like I'm writing straight from a physics book (which I've been accused of on occasion) I decided to have Ahaovathea take a more existential POV concerning Time ("time is a protraction of the mind") rather than her mother's POV, which definitely follows a more literal scientific definition.

The only area where I imagine her thinking differently is St. Augustine's theory that "temporal existence is taken to be equivalent to 'being in the present.'" As a Native American, I think Ahaovathea would definitely disagree with both that and the theory that past and future, in a sense, do not exist at all. Although this is a main focus on this treaty, it is one point my character would certainly not agree upon.

My research and wonderful discussions with Native Americans have showed one constant perception that is so different from "Western" thought: Time is fluid, alive, past and future are living things, and the present moment is a knife's edge dividing the two. The Hopi believe that life is filled with things either manifest (thus belonging to the past) or coming into manifestation (and thus categorized as future). A house, tree, memory, etc. exist and are manifest, but hopes, dreams, and expectations are things of the future.

If the future did not exist, does this also mean our dreams do not exist? And yet we have dreams, which proves the existence (even if existentially) that there is a living future out there.

So in that sense, St. Augustine (as is common among European-influenced cultures) veers far from the indigenous respect for Time. Instead of acknowledging the existence of these two major temporal forces, he brushes past and future off as inconsequential.

However, the end result is the same as if you took Ahaovathea's ideas. Time is a protraction of the mind, but St. Augustine's conclusion negates the inclusion that the mind could protrude into past and future.

Like tentacles on an octopus, we reach out in all directions and grasp the world around us. We reach into the world, and we are the world. We reach into Time, and we are Time.

Any comments to debate this temporal issue are encouraged. I love debating the mechanics of Time and hearing the ideas of others. I've flipflopped views on Time, destiny, and choice throughout Shadowstrider, allowing the different members of the family to express unique POVs.


[St. Augustine's treatment of time occurs in the eleventh book of the Confessions, and is connected to his investigation of the opening words of Genesis.]


1. There's no sense in asking what God did before creation because time itself is a creature. God, as for Boethius, is in eternal present. Hence, God precedes all things, including time, ontologically but not temporally.

2. Time seems something we all know well; however, upon further analysis it turns out to be something we barely understand. Some say its the motion of the heavens. But this cannot be right because:

• if motion of heavens stops but a potter's wheel spins, could it not turn faster or slower? Moreover, scripture tells us that the sun stopped and yet time went on;
  
• by time we measure the motion of bodies, and so that of the heavens.

3. The issue is so complicated that if no one asks me what time is, I know; if one asks me, I do not know. And yet, we can say a few things:

• if nothing passed away, no past; if nothing were coming, no future; if nothing were, no present;
  
• the past doesn't exist anymore; the future doesn't exist yet; the present must be transient, from future to past (otherwise it would be eternity), and it cannot be extended, otherwise it would overlap with past and future.
  
  NOTES:
  
  • Time, then, involves a flux from future through present to past.
    
  • Temporal existence is taken to be equivalent to "being in the present."
    
  • The treatment of the lack of extension of the present is identical to Aristotle's.

4. The non-existence of past and future and the restriction of existence to an extensionless present are seemingly incompatible with two activities we engage in every time: relating the past (and foretelling the future), and measuring time.

• Relating the past and foretelling the future are not possible because what is not (past and future) cannot be related or foretold.
  
• Measuring time is not possible because:
  
  1. We cannot measure past and future since they do not exist (what is not, cannot be measured). How, then, can we say "a long time past" or "a long time to come"?
  2. We cannot measure the present because it has no extension.
  
  NOTE:
  
  A similar problem in involved in the attempt to explain how we can measure the duration of anything, e.g. a sound. It cannot be measured before or after it exists, and we cannot measure while its present, otherwise we don't measure the whole of it. In short, we cannot measure past and future because they don't exist; we cannot measure the present because it's unextended; we cannot measure passing time because it's not complete.

5. Augustine's solution:

1. When we relate the past or foretell the future, we behold our present memories of things past (effects of past causes) and consider present "signs" of future things (causes of future events).

2. When I temporally measure things, I don't measure things themselves, but my representations of them: I measure the "protraction" of the impressions of things in the mind. For example, a "long future is a long expectation of the future;" a "long past a long memory of the past."

NOTES:

• Hence, time is a protraction of the mind: the future is expectation, the present enduring consideration, and the past memory.
  
• But why is measuring representations (instead of the things represented) a solution? Cannot all the arguments about things be reproposed about representations of things? The answer is that a long past is not a "long memory of the past" in the sense that it's a memory which lasts a long time, but an (instantaneous?) memory of a long past (that is, temporal length is not a formal feature of the memory, but an intentional feature of it).