Phenomenology of Being "Lost in Time"

This post has been copied over from my old blogspot blog.
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I wrote this a couple weeks ago but forgot to post it. Surprise, surprise, more thoughts on "Arrival." 

Here I'd like to talk about what it would actually feel like and be like to experience time in this alternate world. One thing I'm interested in is what the nature of consciousness would need to be like. I find myself imagining, for a creature that "sees all of time at once" - that they are like, on the outside, looking in at their life, seeing the whole thing play out. Is that plausible? Is there no longer an actual conscious experience associated with each particular moment?

I didn't read the book, but this quote from it is relevant:
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When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.

So, it is meant to be that these differences are fundamental differences in conscious experience of the world rather than differences in the world itself. It is interesting, though, that the author intended these differences to have their root in the very first beings with "the spark of consciousness." The alternative seems possible as well; that the heptapods started with sequential consciousness, but as their physics developed they began to understand the meaninglessness of cause/effect/time. Then this enabled them to begin to theorize on that assumption which slowly caused them to change the way it was perceived. Why does it matter when the change occurred? It may have implications for the future of humanity. On my interpretation I understood it that all of humanity would be able to learn the language and change their perception of time, but perhaps not. Anyway, the purpose of this post is merely to discuss the phenomenology of time perception. Let's run through a few different possible options.

1. "Sequential, linear mode of awareness" - Experience time as a causal flow, or a "stream of consciousness" from past, to present, to future, beginning at birth and ending at death.
2. "Circular mode of awareness" - Experience time as a circular "flow." Perhaps still perceiving cause and effect, but cause and effect not necessarily rooted in "past," "present," and "future." This could come in the form of:
   1. Circular-lifetime: wherein the circle spans your whole life; when you die you are born again, forgetting your whole life that you have already lived, and this proceeds infinitely. This is non-distinct from (1) other than that you are reborn again at death.
   2. Many (infinitely?) layered circles within lifetime: wherein there are many circular modes of awareness even within a lifetime, meaning that you can experience an event in your future interacting causally with an event in your present, but you experience that whole circular causal chain of events (rather than just experiencing life beginning to end circularly, there are various interacting loops that your experience perceives as causally related). This could also result in an indistinguishability between "memories" and "precognitions" because a circle has no beginning.
   3. Beyond-lifetime circles: Perhaps it is possible to perceive these "circular flowing causes" even beyond one's own lifetime, spanning the circle of interconnected causes that are the whole Universe, or are experienced by a species, there are a great many possibilities within this one.
3. "Sequential but non-linear mode of awareness" This would be something like time travel, visions, hopping, or 'jumping' between times, where one's experience is still a "stream" but that stream doesn't linearly follow from the "past" to the future but rather hops around as one wills it. This would be closely related to 2.2, perhaps, but in which experience is better described still as a "stream" rather than a "circle." This could be combined with a circular view if the "stream of awareness" follows a "circular path through time." However, circular awareness is not necessarily experienced as a "stream," which is why I added this as a separate option.
4. "Simultaneous mode of awareness" - Don't experience time or causation as we understand them at all - rather, experience all things "at once." Don't experience anything as "causing" anything else. Experience all things as they are, perhaps as they must be - experience the "purpose underlying" all things.
5. "Sequential teleological mode of awareness" - I'm not sure if there is really a different phenomenology to encoding causation as pulls rather than pushes, but if so, it would seem an important distinction from (1). This would be the idea that we still experience time as a flow from past to present to future, but we perceive causation as backward looking rather than forward looking. It is not the past pushing the present to be where it is, but the future pulling the present to be where it must, or should, be.
6. Some combination of the above: for example, perhaps a species could experience circular time, having both mechanistic and teleological views on causation, such that both past and future events cause all "present" events - all points on the circle are causally related to all other points on the circle. Particularly since future events themselves can be considered past events, depending on one's perspective. Perhaps one can will what level of these circular flows to focus in on, and can focus on any circle whether it spans a year or is almost as small as a moment, but then one can also "zoom out."

It seems that the author of the short story intended for heptapods to be illustrations of type (4) of time perception. However, it's not clear this is the same kind of time perception that was illustrated in the film. Perhaps it would just be impossible to really display simultaneous-consciousness in that medium. Or perhaps there is not a real distinction between (6) understood as in reference to (2.2), in combination with the kind of experience described in (4). That is, suppose an individual experiences time as a circle in which causation (as we conceive of it) is largely irrelevant, because everything on the "causal circle" at some level of analysis is connected to everything else. Also suppose that individual has a teleological worldview in which all things are the way they are because of their natural purpose.

I'm having a rough time after a couple interactions with Eric Heisserer, the writer of the film. It seems he intended (3), which surprised me quite a bit. Hopping? Visions? I thought it was just portrayed that way on film since a film is necessarily a sequence of frames, but I thought they were trying to bring across a non-sequential view of awareness. Why does this worry me so much? Well, if experience is "hopping" between different times -- who is it that is doing the hopping? I can make sense of and "imagine" myself hopping to a point in my future and being confused, but this doesn't fit with our current framework wherein what we think is just a function of our brain states.

In order to make it fit, I can think of two options, both of which are problematic:

1. Perhaps there is a non-physical "subject of experience" -- a "ghost in the machine." This ghost could travel between times, and represents our conscious awareness. Problematically, it also seems to be the thing that holds memories. Louise can't remember at the gala that Chang gave her his number. So memories aren't brain states anymore, they are had by the ghost in the machine?? I get that it's science fiction, but like it so much better if it at least makes sense with what we currently know about science. And this doesn't, particularly if the ghost isn't just a "passive observer" but one which interacts with the physical world, can affect change, and holds memories.
   
2. Perhaps there is a multidimensional physical "subject of experience." Is this better? I think not, but maybe. It's a homuncular regress, for one thing. If there is an "inner eye" required for your brain states to reach the level of conscious awareness, it seems hard to know where the regress ends. Who views that inner eye? Also, what is the inner eye viewing? What information does the eye itself have? If it were just a passive viewer then maybe this could make sense, but it wouldn't explain the fact that the stream of experience could be continuous when the contents of the theater drastically change. That is, not just the physical perceptions, but the thoughts, memories, etc, seems that they would be different as well, in which case it's not clear how this is really different from perception without an "inner eye."

I'll have to do a lot more thinking, so I apologize if this is all just messy. I'm not sure what to think after those conversations with the writer. I'll close this out with an alternate interpretation, rather than "jumping," and maybe if I make a decision between the two I'll make another post explaining it, and correcting the errors this would have for my past post on the metaphysics of the movie.

Simultaneous, Circular Mode of Awareness

Perception at a time is perception of a moment - but what is a moment? Is a moment an infinitely small amount of time - like a point in euclidean geometry, existing as a demarcation point, with no dimensions in itself? On the sequential mode of awareness, where experience exists as a stream, this is what it must be - or at least, seems to be. However, on my theory of "Arrival," we can fit all modes of awareness into a single cognitive framework. All that differs is perspective. So, what I described above as a stream of experience consisting  in "moments," may not be what it seems. Instead, even this mode of awareness is actually of a circle in time. A circle is perceived all at once, which is why it is simultaneous rather than sequential. But if the circle is small enough (say, 200 microseconds), then in order to parse the physical world it would seem to make sense to represent that world as a sequential flow between "moments" which are linked together through "causes" in time. 

But what if we could choose how wide our window of perception was? How would this affect how we viewed causation, time, and experience itself? Would we see links between things, that we don't see currently? Can we imagine a creature with a circular mode of awareness, that is able to zoom her perspective in and out at will? Relating to Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians - as if she is looking at a mountain range, and can choose to focus her attention on one mountain peak, or many, or one tree, or the whole range?

The heptapods have a circular, simultaneous mode of awareness as well. However, they are not bound to the 200us window of circular time that humans are. It is not clear how wide of a window of time they are able to perceive at once, but it seems to be at least 3000 years. In a sense they can "see the future," but not in the sense of being a single thing that is hopping in and out of existence at particular times. Seeing the future is just taking a different perspective, like when you view an optical illusion that can either be a wine glass or two faces. Both are correct, depending on what you focus on. They are higher dimensional creatures, but this doesn't necessarily run into the above problems of cognition, because it refutes that conscious awareness takes place through "streams." There need not be an inner eye to view one's brain states. The window of time which one views as being simultaneous will be mappable to brain function, though may require a reconception of what precisely that means. When Louise is both at the gala and making the call, there is no separate person hopping between the experiences. There is just one brain, and the events are experienced as simultaneous because there is a unity existing between each of those brain-states. Maybe we can make sense of that unity as a physical-mathematical notion, perhaps related to the synchronization of neural oscillation. Typically this is bound to time-windows that are very small, but Louise's brain learns to synchronize with events that are separated in time, the same way that the heptapods do.

So it's hard to imagine, but perhaps that's as it should be, since this kind of experience would be alien to us. Seeing all of time is the same as seeing one time (as we understand it) except with a greater understanding of purpose. It's like the relationship between looking at a single point on a piece of paper versus looking at the whole thing. It's still the same piece of paper and it is still the same point, and nothing is lost with respect to that particular point. You just see more now. And making sense of that kind of perception would involve a different framework for doing science and value-theory, especially because without a sequential mode of awareness notions like causation almost just don't make sense. And this led the heptapods to greater scientific advancement and a greater understanding of purpose.