Lunacy, Part VI

“There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.” This quote comes from Eugene O’Neill’s play A Moon for the Misbegotten, which debuted on Broadway in 1957. The story is O’Neill’s continuation of Jamie’s story from A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Let’s just say, in typical O’Neill fashion, things don’t work out well for the characters.

The quote is Jamie’s, well, James Tyrone, Jr.’s, and, perhaps due to his drinking issues, he’s having trouble distinguishing between the past and the present. Which brings up an interesting question: Do the past, present, and future (PPF) actually exist?

Of course, here the old adage applies: Ask ten people the same question and you’ll get ten different answers.

Answer #1 regarding the existence of PPF says, no, time may not be passing at all. This is the Block Universe Theory (BUT), which sees our universe as a “giant four-dimensional block of spacetime.” This “cuboid is filled with every event that ever happens.” In the BUT (hmm, is that acronym purely coincidental, one wonders?), “time does not flow” and “there is no specific present moment, and ‘past’ and ‘future’ moments are relative.”

If I understand this correctly, the “now” moment in which you are reading (and thoroughly enjoying, I’m sure) this blog exists simultaneously with the moment when some hapless Tyrannosaurus looked up to see a monster asteroid plummeting toward it. In the BUT you (and your moment) are here in the present (we, that is, everyone, are always located “here” and in the “present”) and the doomed dino’s cuboid location is over “there” in the “past.”

To make matters even more confusing, the BUT construct allows time travel. One can imagine jumping on some type of intercuboid pogo stick and bouncing from your here to the dino’s there (but not staying long, of course). The irritating thing about this kind of time travel is that you can’t fix anything in the past you think needs fixing. Professor Kristie Miller of the University of Sydney’s Centre for Time explains: “What I do tomorrow makes tomorrow the way it is, and the way it always has been. What I do in the past makes the past time the way it is, and always has been…. Nothing a time traveler does changes anything in the block. Instead, what the traveler does at any time makes that time, and later times, the way they are.”

To disemobfusclarify [describe in a way normal humans can understand] further, Miller writes that if she time traveled, her actions would not change the past, “just as when I eat cornflakes instead of toast tomorrow I am not changing the future, I’m just making the future the way it is, when I travel to the past I don’t change it, I just make it the way it is, and always has been.”

I think Miller would have done better to explain BUT using a Rubik’s cube. All the red, blue, green, and yellow squares on the cube are present, and in their individual presents, simultaneously. Put an X, say, on a red square to mark your here. Put another X on a green square anywhere else to mark the dino’s there. Then twist and turn the cube until your red square lands next to the dino’s green square and you can step over to visit just long enough to yell RUN! and then retreat to the asteroid-free safety of your here, hoping, of course, that the Tyrannosaurus isn’t savvy enough to follow you and have you for lunch. Now I get it!

Next time, we (or me at least) will explore Answer #2 regarding PPF, which is another theory called “eternalism” that posits the sole existence of “the real, isolated, and changing present.” I can’t wait, or no, that’s not right. I don’t have to wait because the now of that blog already exists, it’s just not here in my now. Does that mean I don’t have to write it because it’s already been written and has always already been written? Or does that mean if I don’t write it that I always didn’t write it and it always never existed?

After all this, if I were hanging out with Jamie and Josie in O’Neill’s play (which I could be in the BUT world), I would adopt Josie’s simple view of the world and time and how to cope with it all: “There’s only tonight, and the moon and us — and the bonded bourbon. Have another drink.” I couldn’t, and didn’t, and always didn’t, say it better.

(Image: Poster for 2000 Broadway revival. Fair use.)