anarkhos

The older have an advantage over the younger that the younger cannot appreciate fully until they join the ranks of the older. Had someone said that to me when I was younger, I would have been indignant. Nevertheless it is true. This advantage has nothing to do with the brain or intelligence. In fact, physiologically it is all down hill after 30 and if you are, like me, a philosophical materialist, you must accept that this degradation over time has direct implications on the mind itself. In terms of mental acuity, the younger must be superior to the older. What accounts for the advantage that the older have if it cannot be traced to intelligence?

Time is one of the least understood phenomena. In fact, thinking of time as a phenomenon is exactly the error that leads to misunderstanding time. Time is not a phenomenon, it is a substrate of existence, in every way equal to space itself. The human universe is four dimensional - not three dimensional. All phenomena exist within these four dimensions. When you see only three of the dimensions, you limit your understanding of the human universe.

Once we accept time as a dimension, equal in every way to space, various observations can be made and these observations explain the advantage of the older over the younger. Within space, we all know that our ability to "see" the world around us has everything to do with our vantage point. For example, standing on top of a platform, I can see more around me than I can see when standing on the ground. When standing on top of a mountain, I can see even more. From space, I can look back on the Earth and see it not as a huge entanglement of billions of lives interacting on the surface of a material sphere, but as a single whole, where processes cancel each other out and the appearance of tranquility and peace obfuscate the details of individual lives. Indeed, this is exactly the observation made in the song, From a Distance. Whatever holds for any dimension of space, holds for time as well, at least objectively. That is, the higher your vantage point in time the better able you are to comprehend the four dimensional space around you.

I do not wish to trivialize the subjective differences between space and time. Our ability to see back in time is indirect. It is a derivative sense, unlike the other direct senses. We do not perceive time directly, we reconstruct it from recordings of our senses in the form of memory. Our sense of time, therefore, is less acute than our spatial senses and it is more prone to error. And since our perception of time is indirect and constructed from a combination of our direct senses and our memory (which refers only to prior perceptions), it can only look backward. Perhaps in time we will evolve to apprehend time directly and it will become an equal among our senses. However, we have not yet reached that point and perhaps there are laws of nature that will forever prevent us from doing so.

For those of us that have been around long enough to have gained a vantage point in the dimension of time, we have developed an ability akin to driving a car while looking only out the rear-view mirror. We have seen enough of the universe passing behind us that we can now predict with some accuracy what is coming before us. However, as anyone who has tried driving for more than a few seconds looking only through the rear-view mirror knows, our ability to predict the future extends only briefly forward. Thus, a short prediction based on "hindsight" is more likely to be accurate than a long prediction based on "hindsight." Driving while looking out the rear-view mirror is not likely to result in death immediately, but it is guaranteed to kill you (or someone else) if you do it for more than a few seconds.

Thus, the advantage of the older over the younger with regard to the perception of time is limited by the quality and makeup of the mechanism by which we perceive time, but this does not argue against the knowledge gained by having this perspective. For example, if you were to stand on a mountain and look only Southward, you would learn much about the world around you that someone who has never been on top of a mountain would learn. You may have little clue about what it looks like to the North, but you will know that rivers are like the veins in leaves, that the universe is large, that people are small in comparison to the universe and many other such things. You will also, as you shift eyes a bit from left to right, infer that the nature of things does not change much as you approach that divide in your perceptual universe between that which is in front of you and that which is unseen behind you. You will infer that what is behind you, on a grand scale, is not different with regard to its nature than that which is in front of you, though you have never seen it. Time is like this and the wisdom of the older exceeds that of the younger for exactly this reason.

Main article copyright © 2004-2008, Stephen DeVoy. All rights reserved. No permission to reproduce is granted without explicit permission, in writing,by the author.