Mortal Time

What makes us powerfully human, and powerfully broken.

I’ve always been kind of obsessed with time. When I was 5 years old, I’d sometimes ask my mom what time it is, and then I’d get mad at her if she said something like “It’s about half past three.”

I mean, I didn’t want to know roughly what time it is. I wasn’t trying to play “Guess the time!” I wanted to know what the time actually is. She’s still pretty baffled what a five-year-old could possibly need to know the exact time for. Oh well.

I also wanted to study physics… so I could build a time machine! Basically because it’d be awesome. I didn’t have any specific thing I wanted to go back and change. Mostly I just thought it’d be a lot of fun. Overturning old ideas of what’s possible, kind of showing up all those stuffy old people who wanted the accepted theories to be all boring and mundane.

And also time tourism. I mean, come on, how awesome would it be to actually experience ancient Rome for a few days? Or go back and talk to Benjamin Franklin?

So, yeah. I’ve been thinking about time for a long time.

So in the spirit of everything being monocausal…

…I’ve come to wonder if our experience of time might be super central to most of the problems I care a lot about. Personal things like remembering what really matters instead of getting lost in stories. But also collective things like how we all deal with the arrival of AI, or what to do about the culture wars.

I see a kind of puzzle at the heart of it all. I’d like to try spelling out what I see.

If nothing else, I think it’s interesting.

But I think it might be really important. It’s honestly one of those key things I most regret not having tried harder to talk about when I think I’ve run out of time.

We are time lords

I think the super duper power that makes humans so absurdly powerful is mental time travel. Normally we call that “planning” but I think it’s bigger than that.

I want to belabor the subjective experience as I imagine it here. Most life is “in the present moment” relative to us. There’s a kind of experience of time where you toss a ball in the air and you anticipate it’s about to fall, and where, and how to position your body. I think many living things have this sense of time.

And I think a lot of them even do something that deserves to be called “planning”. Like how spiders concoct a whole strategy for weaving their webs.

But I think the basic experience is fundamentally embedded in the present moment. The way we view a ball tossed in the air. The spider is looking at where the web goes and intuiting what to do. It might stare at the situation and gather data, but at some basic level the spider’s experience must be something like the catching-the-ball type.

The human experience of time obviously includes the catching-the-ball type, but it has another one: I can refer to Christmas, or the Cold War, or the coming of smarter-than-human AI. We can talk about what we’re going to do two months from now, or how it takes 365.24 days for the Earth to go around the Sun once.

I don’t think other animals can do all that. They can react, depending on whether their instincts have had evolutionary time and opportunity to create a strategy (like the spider’s web weaving). But they don’t have a general-purpose ability to embed themselves in time and think things through.

It makes us very general problem-solvers. We didn’t evolve to weave spiderwebs, but we could build them if we wanted to. We’d just use this other kind of time. We’d consciously work out how it needs to happen, and who needs to do what when. And then people could go do it. That’s how we create skyscrapers and bridges and rockets to the Moon.

I think this mental time travel is enough to explain human dominance over so much of the biosphere. We can do arbitrary planning, and we can coordinate across those plans. It wouldn’t matter if something else were “smarter” than us if we could tell better what’s going to happen than it could: if it literally cannot conceive of a time horizon greater than a day or two, and if it’s not physically more powerful than all of us combined, then we can outpace it. We can change what resources it has on vastly larger scales than it can orient to.

Time for ego

This whole setup makes me think of the sapient paradox. We humans have been roughly as smart as we are for about 100,000 years, but somehow we didn’t start building cities and civilizations until about 12,000 years ago — at which point we did it everywhere across the whole globe. So if it was such an amazingly good idea, why did we stick with tribal hunting-and-gathering for ninety thousand years? And if being tribal was so functional for that long, what changed?

I’m guessing it just took that long to invent this other way of experiencing time. Most of the pieces were there, but it wasn’t until twelve millennia ago that we suddenly figured out how to combine them into mental time travel and teach each other how to do it. Before then we literally couldn’t coordinate on larger scales than a tribe. We were embedded in the eternal present moment just like all other forms of life. But after that profound shift, we became the eyes through which life could see arbitrarily long stretches of time.

I first heard of the sapient paradox from Andrew Cutler. His answer is similar: a really powerful idea became capable of spreading and explosively did so. He suggests that the core idea was “I am.” Basically the creation of a self-reflective sense of self. I think he might be right. But I think the reason it mattered so much was because it made our weird relationship to time possible.

My guess is that we already had a sense of self before this explosion. We need it for social reasons. For me to track what other people think about me, I have to have a way of thinking about myself from their vantage point. Which means I have to be able to see myself “from the outside” somehow. My guess is that we do this by creating a kind of mental image and using the same pronouns for it that we use for ourselves (“I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “myself”). Kind of like how we have icons for apps on our phones: we tend to point at the icon and call it the app. (“Oh, yeah, that’s a game I downloaded a few months ago.”)

The key thing here is, that mental “self” icon is seen in third person but somehow maps to first person experience. If I wonder what Alice thinks about Bob, both Alice and Bob are “out there”. But if I wonder what Alice thinks about me, I have to both see “myself” as “out there” while also connecting my thoughts about her looking at my “self” icon to when she literally looks at me. I have to flexibly switch between viewing myself in third person (“Bob knows that Alice trusts my ability to make a good pie”) and my raw experience of seeing the world from what sure looks (to me) like the center of consciousness (for me).

If I put fictional characters on some kind of timeline, I can tell a story about them. Like in the Harry Potter series: we can talk about when Harry’s letters incessantly besieged the Dursley’s home, and how that happened before Harry’s first visit to Diagon Alley. All that can happen in coherent story time.

So what happens if I put myself on such a story timeline, and tell a story that connects to and includes my present-moment experience? So that I, in this very instant, am in the very story I’m telling?

I think that’s basically it. That’s the key insight that gave us this enormous power. We learned how to embed ourselves in stories that we could then make happen.

It just seems kind of mundane because we don’t remember a time when humanity couldn’t do it. Kind of like it’s hard for me to remember when I was too young to do it as a baby. We do this embedded storytelling constantly.

(Although we do tell myths of a time when we couldn’t do it: the Biblical Garden of Eden, Australian aboriginal Dreamtime, Greek Golden Age, Hindu Satya Yuga, Japanese Age of the Gods, Daoist Age of Perfect Virtue, Native American time of the Sky People, etc.)

I think this story embedding is related to why reframing the past can sometimes feel so healing (or damaging). How we describe what happened before and anticipate what lies ahead defines what meaning we make in the present moment.

I’m reminded of how, at 18, I read a book on the Enneagram and realized that my dad’s frequent harshness and disapproval were actually how he expresses love and care. The revelation rewrote a lot of my memories so I could see him as having always been that way. It helped me relax a lot around him. I simply changed the story that I saw as leading up to my present-moment experience of him.

Or on the flipside, the Boltzmann brain thought experiment. I think it’s disturbing precisely because of how it messes with our experience of what the present moment even is. It makes the “now” unsafe when we mentally place ourselves in this timeline.

Whereas thought experiments like the trolley problem, the Sleeping Beauty paradox, and lifeboat scenarios are just abstract things to ponder. By default they don’t relate to the present-moment experience of reading this blog post. So they don’t hit the same way.

Life finally sees death

I think the above is interesting. And I hope it makes clear what I’m thinking.

But the reason I bring it up is this:

I think this explanation of how we embed ourselves in time lays bare a big problem we keep poorly grappling with. And I think it gestures at what a solution has to look like.

Here’s the issue:

We have this superpower. It’s overwhelmingly powerful. We really want to be able to use it.

But also, it makes our individual deaths something we can each see. Not just abstractly, but as something we can map back to our first person experience.

I think that’s huge. It’s absolutely bewilderingly huge.

The rest of life cannot conceive of death in first person at all. This is a first-time unique weirdism. Maybe the first true existential horror.

Other living things, embedded in the ongoing flowing eternal present moment, will sometimes encounter threat. And they’ll react to that threat. Like when a rabbit is caught in the jaws of a wolf. The rabbit’s body reacts to this, often by going limp and kind of playing dead and hoping that the wolf gets distracted long enough for the rabbit to make a run for it.

But that’s not how the rabbit experiences it. For the rabbit, it’s just horror and numbness, and then when the wolf looks away there’s an explosion of “OMG I CAN GET AWAY GO GO GO GO GO”. It’s not a mental plan. It’s a set of instincts that have had time to evolve via contact with death’s filter (i.e. natural selection).

What this means is that the rabbit never actually orients to its own death. At some point it dies. But death is kind of a surprise. There’s momentary anticipation depending on how it happens. But death just sort of side-swipes the rabbit. The rabbit simply was, and then BAM it’s dead. The dying experience might be strange, but at no point does the rabbit have the cognitive and temporal context to have an idea of its mortality.

Literally all life is like this as far as I can tell — except for humans!

We literally invented mortality. We figured out how to embed our experience within a linear time that extends from and beyond the catch-a-ball range. This makes our deaths perceivable. We understand mortality in a way that is literally the first time life has noticed it. Up until this point life has made some adaptations based on parts of it getting carved away via natural selection. But human beings can see personal death itself. We are life’s first eyes in this sense. The first thanatoscopes.

Broken cope

But here’s the problem: we are part of life and heirs to its old tech for dealing with threat. It’s a momentary avoidance and escape strategy. Like the rabbit going slack, or a bear going ferocious when some animal tries to sneak in to eat its cubs. There’s no plan. There’s just reaction.

So what do our animal instincts do when we can see the “predator” coming for us? When we see inevitable relentless death heading our way, looking right at us from down the story timeline? From every believable story timeline?

I think our instincts in fact kick in and make us do dumb stuff. And here I say “dumb” because those actions often don’t make sense based on what’s in the present moment, even accounting for the eventual death we see. Those instincts aren’t reliably orienting to how long or uncertain the time is between now and our demise. They just grip us and tell us to run and hide, or rigidly freeze, or “play dead”, or go beat up the f**ker. And usually that we have to do so right now.

Right before the pandemic, a dear old friend of my family died. His brother heard about the death and panicked, and took up running to try to get healthier. He pushed himself too hard and gave himself a heart attack and died.

What did he learn from his brother’s death that he didn’t know before? Why did he push himself that hard that fast?

By my read, most humans are this kind of crazy most of the time.

(Including me!)

The basic puzzle I see here is: how do we use mental time travel without overwhelming our animal selves? How do we look at the truth of our predicament without going mad?

I think we have a bunch of partial solutions. But they really are partial, and we keep pretending they’re good enough. They really aren’t good enough, best as I can tell. They’re just barely functional enough that we can (and usually do) ignore the problem for the time being.

My impression is that most solutions fall into one of three clusters. There might be others, maybe major others. But these are the three I keep noticing:

1. One strategy type is to stop doing mental time travel. I think this is why “focus on the present moment” can be such good stabilizing advice: it gives the human animal an opportunity to regulate in its current situation the way it would if it didn’t have this extra time thing in its head. I think this is also why “be present” and “no self” are so commonly intertwined in spirituality: they’re strategies for dealing with mortality based on breaking the engine that does mental time travel. It’s basically an attempt to return to Eden, metaphorically speaking.

2. Another strategy family is based on lying to our instincts about the nature of death. I say “lying” because there’s an obvious physical reality to the situation that these strategies hide. These are things like “There’s life after death” or “I am one with the universe, and the universe will continue on after this body dies, so really there is no death.” Without trying to comment on whether there is or isn’t truth to these claims, it seems important to notice that they’re trying to tell the animal survival instincts that animal death won’t happen. The fact is still that at some point the physical body will probably die, which is precisely the part those survival instincts care about.

3. The third strategy type I often see is what I call “timeshatter”. It’s extremely common. The gist is to use mental time travel but only in fragments that seem like they’ll safely avoid glimpsing mortality. This seems to result in things like being able to plan your afternoon and put things on a calendar but not being able to orient to what you want out of life or how you want to do things over the course of years or decades. If you never build a coherent long story, you never connect the sight of your death to your present-moment experience. It’s like talking about a lion hunting you versus seeing a lion coming at you.

The thing is that none of these strategies let us really collectively orient to the truth of our situation. The second one at least lets us talk about our physical mortality… but in a way that tends to trivialize it, like it’s something that happens to a fictional character. We aren’t really looking at it or acknowledging the devastation it really implies.

All this together means that we never take death seriously.

I think this is part of why we keep getting so intensely impacted by death when it happens near us. These coping methods stop working when death is on the “catch a ball” time scale. Touching the fresh grave of a loved one makes it extremely vivid that there is a long flow of time, that death is real, that it matters, and that a tremendous amount of what we occupy our attention with does not make a lick of sense in the face of this intensely relentless silent truth. It’s all a distraction from what matters.

I think it also has super practical effects. Timeshatter makes it almost impossible for groups of people to have good collective memory and foresight. Today it often feels to me like the shared context window of Americans is roughly one week. That’s in part because of the speed of communication on the modern internet. But a lot of it is because short collective time windows are a natural result you should expect from timeshatter: different people shatter time in different ways, so the ability to have a coherent sense of shared time ends up relying on time windows that are much smaller than most individuals operate in.

I think this short context window is key to why collective planning is so hard. Today’s fears around AI are at least decades old, but the public couldn’t orient to those fears until AI started taking jobs. The problem finally became visible in collective “catch a ball” time. But it’s still not part of mainstream (as far as I can tell) to talk about where we collectively want to go as we automate more & more human cognition. We can’t even talk coherently about what global relationship we want the nations to have. Geopolitics is all reactive. “Catch a ball” thinking.

But the most heartbreaking part to me is, we let what’s utterly precious die. We keep forgetting what really matters until it’s too late.

So, yeah. None of our current solutions really work.

Finding a real solution

I’m a fan of deeply understanding problems without having to have a solution first. Often an answer just kind of bubbles up on its own.

I think this sentiment applies here. I think we’re in a bit of a collective bind. We shatter our shared attention or tell ourselves lies about our predicament because that’s easier than facing naked, simple mortality without any way to bear it.

I view what I’ve shared in this post so far as defining the parameters of a solution. It’s not “Oh man, human existence sure is bad in this way.” It’s more like “Hey, can we take a look at this puzzle and really solve it?”

My best bet right now is based on strengthening the body’s ability to handle threat. Building up the capacity to “channel lightning”.

In the style of aikido I trained in, we had to keep our expansive meditative calm even when someone was attacking us. If we tried to “stay calm” we’d numb out and move too slowly. If we got anxious, our focus would become weak and we’d lose balance and coordination. So we had to learn to move the fight-or-flight energy through us without it “catching” anywhere.

I’m reminded of these two guys reacting to an alligator on the golf course:

They’re both reacting to basically the same real threat. But the first guy is way more composed. The second’s reaction just… isn’t very helpful to him.

If we can build up our ability to look our deaths in the eye and react like the first guy, we don’t have to avoid looking anymore. Then we can look clearly, and collectively, into the long future.

I think that’s a really big task though. Way bigger than people imagine.

What would it take to get a terminal diagnosis and have the experience be “Oh, I guess this is how it happens”? Not because you’re dissociated from it being real, but because you’ve already prepared for what your death will feel like from behind your eyes and inside your skin? How can the vivid first-person truth of mortality move freely through you like any other emotional energy? The dread and panic feeling like yet another fluid sensation?

I hope that’s doable. I think it might be.

But I do think it’s a big ask. And we won’t ever do it if we stay lost in distracting fantasies instead. And man oh man are the distractions tempting.

That said, what I’ve articulated here is just my best current guess about a real solution. I’m most interested in there being a real solution. Some way we can retain our full capacity to peer deeply into time, and tie it to our present-moment experience, without overwhelming our animal selves. Some foundation on which we can build coherent collective attention that can have a long memory and see far into the future.

The problem remains unsolved as far as I know. The space for pondering is open.