Time, Space and Causality

When I think about time, I like to think about stars and about live sports on TV. Stars because when I look at the night sky, I love

the realization that all those star appear to me to be existing at the same moment, yet the individual lights that I see all at once, actually were emitted individually anywhere from a few years ago to thousands of years ago. In fact many of the stars that I am looking at right now, might not even exist anymore. That star over there might have gone supernova three thousand years ago, but I will never know it because its light will still be in our sky for many many lifetimes past mine. Yet, strangely, I seem certain that all those stars are actually there. 

I like live sports on TV because it’s all delayed by a second or two or even maybe by a few minutes. It takes time for the camera to send the image to my screen. So that touchdown that I just high-fived 

my son about, actually might have happened two minutes before I knew it. The fans in the stadium have already been cheering way before I even set down my bowl of chips. Of course this is true of all perception. We never actually perceive what is currently happening, we perceive what has just happened. There is no “live.” We are always a bit behind. And so I think about this old philosopher named Immanuel Kant. Here’s what Wikipedia reports about this German dude. 

Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology during and at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy. 

Ok … and although the article goes on to offer some good stuff, it fails to mention that he’s one of my favorite philosophers. Further, it 

doesn’t really focus on the one thing that I really like about this guy. Now I’m not a professional philosopher, so here’s a somewhat basic understanding of one of the things he was doing. See, he wanted to deal with how we 

know for sure that what we think is real is actually real. I like this. And strangely, I often think about this. I mean just go to a now old website and listen to the mosquito ring tones 

http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/ 

and you’ll see, or hear, that sounds exist that some of us cannot hear. If I cannot hear it, does it exist? This suggests that there very well could be substances I cannot see, matter I cannot feel, and odors I cannot smell. Well, Kant agreed. He too wanted to deal with this. And now that we have computers, his idea make a lot of sense in an analogy. Just as computers can only function within their operating systems, we, according to Kant, can only function through our human operating system. And for Kant, this system is constructed in such a way that we experience things outside of us in time, space, and causality. Kant then says the troubling part: we have no way to know if time, space and causality actually exist. We are stuck living in a world that we can absolutely only interact with in this way. We cannot get outside ourselves and perceive things as they might actually be. I mean, maybe time, space and causality actually are inherent in the things we perceive; however, these things could just as easily only seem to exist in time, space and causality because that’s how we function. We perceive the world as growing older. Everything we perceive seems to be moving from a moment of inception toward a moment of final decay. 

Yet, why does everything have to begin and end? Perhaps all things are always happening, but we are unable to see it as it really is. The same is true of space. We see things taking up space and existing as individual items, yet, this is not necessarily true. Maybe everything is one big blob, but our senses break this big blob into trees and houses and people. Finally, we make connections that lead us to believe that if I throw a ball, I caused the ball to move. Yet, again, if space and time are not really demonstrable, then I really cannot cause anything. I can only seem to cause things. Ok, getting pretty deep here, so let’s pull back and ask why this is important. Perhaps it is not, but perhaps it is a constant reminder that all this reality that seems so certain to us, might not really exist at all. I like to think about that stuff, and so I think about it, if I can.