So, having cast in doubt my experience of the reality of an external universe, where does that leave me? As an animist Druid, my experience that consciousness is present within everything is actually strengthened by the doubt raised. At one end of the scale, our perception of the external universe is something that is entirely constructed for us and we are passive observers with just the illusion of having some sort of choice or control. At the other end of the scale, our biological apparatus is doing a remarkable job in processing this electro-magnetic information into our sensory world in which we perceive we do have some sort of control.

For me, there is no binary answer because the law of diversity mean binary answers become less and less likely to be correct. Our understanding that every life form experiences its environment individually means that there are only common conceptions because we agree there are.

On a very real level, we may agree the sky is blue, but unless I was able to view the sky through your eyes and experience the end result of your processing of it, it is entirely possible that in doing so I may say “Wait, that is not blue as I experience it, that is green”. And “this” is very much the reality of our perceptions. We agree something “is” something because, generally, that benefits all parties.

Tied in, right at the very centre of our perceptual experience of the external universe, is the notion of time.  Superficially, time is thought of as an animating force in itself as it “gives life to the external world”. We experience the animation of the external world because our perception of time is intrinically tied into it. But there have always been doubts about the reality of time from science and within some areas of philosophical thinking. Certainly in the last thirty years, published science throws into doubt our experience of time even more strongly.

It’s not my intention to go into these scientific discoveries in depth here, there is plenty of material published both in journals and online and you can find them for yourselves should you be interested in that. What I am going to do is present my own conclusions. I will relate to how that has shaped my Druidry in the last post.

Humans generally experience time at a rate that appears to be consistant with each other. This common consistency can lead us down a “blind alley” with our assumptions about time though. Because we may well then believe ours is either the “right” or “only correct” perception of time. Yet we know that other animals’ perception of time can be quite different from ours. Animals can perform physical feats beyond our abilities because their perception of time is “quicker” than ours and sometimes even the reverse is true. Think of the difficulty in trying to watch flocks of birds on the wing. Their reflexes result in individual movements we may struggle to keep up with.

So if time exists independently in the external universe, like some sort of force that the physiology of a perceptive organism may tap into, then the particular metabolism of that organism may have a direct corelation of how that time is then experienced by that organism. In other words, your experience of time would be determined by your physical biology.

That may sound reasonably logical and was a perspective that I thought was consistent with my own experiences for many years.  But then the science of the last twenty years or so threw a spanner into that line of reasoning and the outcomes suggest something quite different from the notion that time is experienced the same by every living thing.

Probably the biggest spanner is Quantum Entanglement. Again, I’m not going to go into depth with this and I certainly don’t profess to be an expert on the matter but just reveal the crux of the results as I understand them. Scientists have paired photons and sent them off in different directions measuring how they behave. Because of this pairing, the actions of one photon is always mirrored in the other. If one changes its spin to clockwise at any one time whilst moving away from the other, the other always changes its spin to counter clockwise at precisely the same time.

But the really interesting thing about these experiments is that the photons actions have been measured and shown to happen instantaneously no matter the distance between them. The classical view of how our universe works is that nothing can travel quicker than the speed of light. Our understanding of the distances to the nearest stars are measured in Light years, the amount of time we would experience if we were to travel to those stars at the speed of light. Our understanding of time is linked specifically to the speed of light.

If the speed of light was the maximum universal constant it was assumed to be, we should logically be able to measure an increasing amount of time between the actions of the photons as they traveled further away from each other. But here’s the thing, there is no increase in time. No matter the distance, it always happens instantaneously.

For me this disparity suggests a couple of alternative positions.

One: time is an independent external force and these inconsistancies are demonstrative of the flaws in our biological experience or our current technological abilities in the measuring of it at this time.

Two: time does not exist externally, it is the result of our biological processing of information that actually creates time as a sensory perception. It doesn’t exist independently, our biology creates it. It is a result of animal sensory perception created to best experience change consistently.

This second position contradicts the idea that time is some independent external force present in the cosmos. If it was this independent external force then our present understanding of it states these photons couldn’t behave like they do. The further they move away from each other, then the time measured between their change of actions should logically increase because of this increasing distance between the two.

At this present point in 2020, the experiments are consistently showing these same disparities even when variations of the experiments are created. We haven’t been able to create an experiment yet to explain why this should be. You may have heard about the next generation of computers called Quantum Computers that they are presently working on. Processing speeds will be drastically reduced again from the current generation of computers and this will be directly as a result of them harnessing this quantum entanglement process within computer systems.

Where does this leave us then? Well my personal experiences best fit with the Biocentric explanation offered by Robert Lanza.  Briefly, biocentrism posits that the universe is the way it is because it wasn’t created by some random “billiard ball” collisions as physics has suggested (at least the early physics) but that it is life itself that has structured the universe as we experience it.

This promises to better explain why the very fine margins within the forces of nature needed for our universe to exist, only need fractional adjustments to completely destroy those same conditions for life. Some of these very fine tolerances are statistically improbable (the scientific way of saying almost impossible) through random chance.

Biocentrism concludes that time exists only in our heads, it is a result of animal sensory perception and does not exist independently outside of this perception. Biocentrism then goes further by suggesting spacial awareness is also just a product of internally generated animal perception. Arguably two of the most prevelent sensory perceptions of biological existence, namely space and time, may not be actual independent external features but exist only as a result of the processing done by our own biological sensory equipment.

The idea that time may just be a result of our biological processing resonates with me through my own experiences. Time may just simply be a sensory perception created by us and not actually be an external thing of itself that our biology then goes on to connect to.

This has raised the idea within me that if time is an entirely internally created thing then the direction of it, namely linear time, is also probably just an internally generated experience. Linear time is the way our biology has evolved to experience change. That is a world away from assuming it is the universal constant and that all life experiences change in the same manner. Logically, if the experience of time is determined by the processing biology of the organism then the “direction” of how it is experienced is now also open to doubt. That direction may be specific to the organism creating it.

This may go some way to explain why we appear to be alone in the universe as such. Our physical biology makes our experiences of time specific to our processing of it. Our asumption that all of life must experience time in the same way as us is not supported if it turns out time is just an internally generated perception. Other life in the universe may process information different to us and therefore their experience of time would differ from ours including the direction of any linear time experience as we couldn’t assume ours was the common experience of linear time or, indeed, whether linear time was the universal experience of the rest of life.

If time doesn’t exist independently and is solely created within us, then I have come to the conclusion that this thing we call death is just the end of our biologically created linear time experience. The actual reality of it may well be that we simply enter into a new way of experiencing life that experiences change, but not in the linear time fashion our present biological processing creates.

If our essence / spirit remains in this physical universe, as is the basis for the concept of reincarnation, then death is just the physical marking for a change of sensory perception equipment.

Because the laws of this universe don’t allow for energy loss, it would appear to me to be an illogical conclusion to suggest that our present experience of life dissipates into “nothing” just because our ability to create and experience linear time stops with the failing of our biology.  As an animist Druid who experiences consciousness in every physical thing, my experiences back up this conclusion for me at this time.