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A
Although your mind and matter are one, there is no soul. There is still an eternal aspect of existence that can be attained. One can still step outside of time.
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B
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times. It's Ali and Ed. And today we have how to Fathom Timelessness with Peter Schusted Hughes. Ed, what can we expect from this talk?
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C
So Peter is a philosopher of mind and metaphysics, and in this talk he's going to be focusing on the mind side of that and in particular how subjective our experience of time is. And he's going to be drawing from the work of Spinoza and combining this with research into psychedelics and his own experience with 5 Meo DMT, which is one of the most powerful psychedelic compounds out there. And he's going to be putting all of this together to put forward the view that each of us has the capacity to. To go beyond our normal experience of time as something that moves and instead experience it as an endless now.
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B
Amazing. Let's hand it over to Peter.
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A
So I'm going to be concerned really with two main questions. And the first one is why would time not be real vis a vis timelessness? And secondly, is timelessness experiential? Can one experience being outside of time? And to that I'll give two affirmative answers, or, well, two and a half almost. Firstly, I'll say yes via the philosopher Spinoza's concept of amor de intellectualis, or the intellectual love of God. I'll say yes by the classic mystics accounts. And also at the end I'll talk about the experience of a one of the most potent of all psychedelic drugs, 5 Meo DMT. Let us begin then. Why would time not be real? Two aspects of this. The questions what is, what is time anyway? And what is the eternal that which is outside of time? So we start with this. What is, what is time? There are many aspects of this and it's obviously a huge question that no one's really answered fully. But I'll go through a few aspects of time and suggest why we might hold the unreality of it. So first of all, time refers to duration, that is experienced change. Everything you see around you is constantly changing. Even if you move your head, that's change. And even if you don't, if you see complete blackness, there's still changes, change in terms of the accumulation of memory. So you can't avoid duration in, in prosaic consciousness and everyday consciousness, duration is part of lived experience. So that's the most common notion of time. Of course, time itself in that sense Then when I say time, it's an abstraction from duration. So the real thing we experience is the change, you know, the perception of the change of, of things, of, of and of our mind. And from that whole experience, we sort of extract the abstraction that is time. And then often, you know, in physics especially, we put time on a timeline, an abstracted spatial representation of time. So you can compare these two. First of all, these two basic elements of time. First there's a lived experience, duration, and then there's the abstract timeline, like with, which is divided into T1, T2, and so on and so forth, which is used in physics and so on, mathematics and whatnot. Secondly, we must distinguish when we talk about time, the triplicity that is past, present and future. This is the essence of time, according to Jeremy McTaggart, who was British idealist at Cambridge. He wrote this great text in 1908, published it in 1908, called the Unreality of Time, where he argues that the past, present and future, which is the essence of time, is merely subjective. It can't really be properties of events themselves because they couldn't have all those three attributes at once, which he's, you know, much more complicated with, and I'm explaining it, but which he then leads him on to say that, you know, in absolute reality, mind independent reality, we can't have past, present and future. This is also, of course, the view of the classic idealists, especially Kant, who says time is merely a projection of our mind and doesn't exist in, in the world out there in itself. The world in itself, the noumena, the thing in itself. So anyway, so we can distinguish in time, this triplicity, past, present and future. And I should just emphasize this fact that in physics and science there is no such thing as the present moment as compared to the past and the future. The present moment is determined by the mind itself. So you take away the mind, you've taken away that fundamental aspect of time itself. What are you left with? Well, you can still talk about the order of events, C series, as mactaggart calls it, which are not subjective but objective. So, you know, first A happens and B, then C, then D, then eat, and so on and so forth. This seems to be objective, although it comes into. Even that comes into question when you consider relativity. So there's the first, just to summarize so far, there's the first pair of duration versus timeline. There's a second aspect, which is triplicity as against the order of events. Another aspect of time, very important, is what William James called the specious present. That means the length, the duration of the present moment. And again, you can't say that this is an objective fact, a mind independent fact rather of the universe. The species present, the length of the present moment, the now is very much determined again by our minds and it can extend and it can contract. Related to that is what Henri Bergson calls the rhythm of duration or the speed of time. And even this is very subjective, which means that the speed of time rather can change according to one's predicament, humans predicament, but also according to species. So there is evidence that different species perceive time faster or slower than we do. For example, a fly might perceive our whacking of it in slow motion. Unfortunately, also I remember like for example, my, my brother told me of this very peculiar incident only some months ago where he was riding his bike very fast and suddenly a toddler ran onto the road in front of him and he held his brakes, his back brake, but it wasn't slowing down enough. So he held the, the front brake and then he tipped over, luckily flew over the child and well heard himself landing, but luckily an ark that avoided the child. But anyway, the interesting aspect of that was this is a known phenomenon. Everything to, for him suddenly became suddenly slowed down. He was sort of moving very slowly and he could perceive the child, the parents in disarray and, and so on. And so for him then the rhythm of duration, speed of time was suddenly slowed down. And again, this was, this is a subjective aspect of his mind due to the danger of his predicament. So again, we can say that this rhythm is subjective, not mind independent. Fourthly, we can consider time as the fourth spatial dimension vis a vis Minkowski and Einstein. Minkowski was Einstein's mathematics teacher. And before then, before 1905, when the first theory of relativity came out, there were good mathematical theories as to why there were more than three spatial dimensions, stemming really from Riemann, who proved that you can have a geometry based on multiple dimensions of space, not just the three that we presuppose. I mean, Aristotle said that physicality is three dimensional. That's just it. There cannot possibly be more without contradiction. But this seemed to be at least theoretically, mathematically not right. Riemann proved that you can get very coherent geometries then based on four dimensions, five ad infinitum. But it was Minkowski really who suggested that time was a spatial dimension, which is hard to fathom. It wasn't. I mean, Minkowski sort of formulated it mathematically, but this idea was already prevalent before him, I mean even in the time machine, the novel, you can see this idea from 1895, I think it was H.G. wells. But anyway, Minkowski Einstein, then heralding the theory of relativity, said that time is a fourth spatial dimension. This was, you know, this is still controversial of course. I mean spatial dimensions are unidirectional. You can go left and right, up and down, forward, backwards of course, but you can't go backwards in time it seems. Time seems to be a one way dimension. But and Bergson, there was an interesting discussion with the French philosopher Henry Bergson, Einstein in relation to this. But nonetheless there has been proved that one's velocity in space affects the speed of time. So the faster you go, the slower time goes relative to other times. And also interestingly then with gravity, the closer you are to a gravitational point, the faster time goes as well. Now interestingly, Einstein, interesting to what I'm going to say later. Einstein was an avowed Spinozist follower of the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. He wrote, Einstein wrote in 1929, I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists. So I'll talk about Spinoza's God in a moment. But this is not the traditional notion of God at all. In fact, many people accuse Spinoz of being an atheist. I'll come back to this. Anyway, so we have then another aspect of time as a fourth dimensional space as the fourth spatial dimension. Linked to that we have Ouspensky, the Russian sort of philosopher, philosopher who wrote that time could be multi dimensional, just as we have, well at least three dimensions of space. There could be multiple dimensions of time as well. I'm not going to get into that. But it's very interesting, although highly speculative, I should say as well that modern theories of physics, string theories, they propose that there are actually 11 dimensions of space, including time as a dimension. But other physicists disagree with that completely, saying there are only three spatial dimensions. But I'm not going to get into that. But anyway the notion is not anti science, I should point that out. So we have then time, then this fourth spatial dimension as position, possibly multi dimensional. One can consider it that way at least. And as I said, time is as relative to gravity and speed. So those are just, you can say much more about time than that. But I've only got half an hour and I see I'm. I'm slow already. So yeah, just to summarize then, so we have what is time duration as opposed to a timeline? We've got triplicity past, present, future, as opposed to the order of events. We've got the species present, the duration of an hour as opposed to the not, as opposed to, in complement to the rhythm of duration, the experience, speed of time. And then we have time as a fourth spatial dimension, time as perhaps multi dimensional itself and relative to gravity and speed and theories of relativity. So if that is time, then if one considers time without subjectivity, without the mind, time independent of mind, then in this objective reality, it seems that all of this is debatable, by the way, but it seems that there is no distinction of past, present and future. As I mentioned, this is an old understanding or dilemma question, paradox. Even St. Augustine of Hippo, who was sort of brought Platonism to Christianity, who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, he asked this in his book Confessions, if the future and the past do exist, I want to know where they are. Wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. You never really answered that. But in this, in this book Confessions, there's a really wonderful talk about the paradoxes or the problems of time, which of course really relates to the problem of existence itself. You know, what do we mean by existence? Do we just say that the present exists or do we give an ontological status, an existence to the past and the future? I mean, there seems to be a reality to the past which is different to the reality of the BFG or some fictional character or unicorn or whatever. You know, these are different types of unrealities or, or different types of realities. But if the past does exist, then as Augustine asked, you know, where, where are they? How do they exist? Einstein, in relation to this, in relation to the triplicity of past, present, Future, wrote in 1955, he quote, People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. So yeah, I mean, so the argument then is that, yeah, without subject, without the mind, there is no past, present, future, also, there is no limited length of the present. The species present is just a subjective phenomenon, which means that objectively or time and mind independently, that could stretch to infinity itself both ways. In other words, there is no present and there is no past and there is no future as distinct. It is all one, as it were. Likewise, there is no speed of time, no rhythm of duration, because this seems to be very mind dependent as well. Now this is not to say that experience time is not real. I mean, this is Bergson's fundamental point. You know, the most real thing that we have, the Thing that we know more than anything else is that we have experience, and experience is for the most durational, but at the same time that we have to accept that that durational aspect of time is mind dependent on minds, it's not necessarily mind independent. So it can be concluded that absolute reality is eternal, in other words, timeless outside of time. I'll just quickly talk about what is meant by the eternal or eternity. Well, so it's existence outside of time, timelessness. It's not everlastingness, as the theologians call it, which means infinite within time, from the past to the future ad infinitum, infinite duration. It's not that it's as it were, outside of that. It's not infinity in other senses as well. It's not sort of actual infinities like Leibniz speaks about with regard to his monad, an infinite hierarchy of monads in physicality or. Well, for his, his ideality, as it were already. And it's not potential infinite. So like the mathematical distinctions between smaller and larger infinites, if that's not a paradox, it's no, it's actually not related to time at all. It's the eternal, as is traditionally meant, is then something next to time, as it were. Now the next question here is if this timelessness has a reality as a form of existence, is it experiential? And one thing I should have mentioned actually just before is that the eternal. Yeah. Does refer to existence outside of time. This means triplicity at once, then immediate actuality. So the past, present, future at once. It also means, I should have said eternal objects or eternal truths and qualities. So this is what Alfred North Whitehead calls eternal objects, traditionally known as universals. Arguably, universals include qualia. So even the color red, which Whitehead says doesn't come into existence and doesn't go out of existence. It can be instantiated within existence. But essence itself is eternal outside of any duration of the experience. Also mathematical theorems. The Pythagorean theorem seems to be an eternal truth. It exists whether or not any being has ever discovered it. It seems to be true without ever being actualized. So those are two main definitions of the eternal existence outside time, which includes then eternal truths and triplicity, immediate triplicity. Is this timelessness experiential? Can one as it is? I mean, in a way this sounds paradoxical. You know, if we say that mind independent reality is timeless, surely every time the mind has experience, it must be, then in duration and in time it can't be timeless. Kant said this, you know, the condition of experience is time and it's impossible to experience it otherwise. But I'm going to, I mean, there are many mystics, reports from mystics who say they have experienced, had an experience outside of time and love psychonauts, people have taken psychotic experience who also report this. I'm going to look at though, Spinoza then, and his intellectual love of God, which is, seems to be like a very rare and difficult experience of the eternal, of existence outside of time. Okay, so very quickly then, who was Spinoza? He lived, he was born in 1632, died 1677. He was a, he was a Sephardim, which means the Jewish people who came from the Iberian peninsula, Spain, Portugal, who were sent out by the Catholics there and they had to sort of practice in fear and secrecy. And anyway, Spinoza's forefathers, they moved to Amsterdam, which was much more open minded, liberal and tolerant of different faiths and beliefs, moved there. But he was unfortunately in his twenties. He was excommunicated by his Jewish community because his views already were very much at odds with the established religion. He was also later castigated by the Christians there in Amsterdam. And after he died, he had a very rough legacy. I mean, you know, to, to call yourself a Spinozist. In Kant's time, you could lose your, your position, your, your rent, your pension. You know, it's almost like saying you're a fascist today. I mean, it was, it was a dangerous thing. He was called by the Irish philosopher John Toland, he was called a pantheist. So actually Tolland coined this term pantheism or pantheist really, and that was in relation to Spinoza, although Toland said that Moses was also a pantheist. Strangely, so often in the sort of 17th, 18th century, if you call yourself a pantheist, that was akin to being known as a Spinozist. Over time, that has sort of separated a little bit. So Spinozism is now considered a form of pantheism, not the only one, or panentheism. Spinoza was most famous for writing the Ethics, which I'll focus on, but also he wrote Theologico, political treatise, which was very controversial as well because it said, for example, Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible as was commonly believed, and miracles were not really scriptural. And he started what was known as the higher criticism of the Bible, which became big in Germany in the sort of 19th century especially. And this was, I mean, this was considered more inimical to Christianity than Darwinism even, which came out what in 1859, Darwinian evolution and this questioning of the sort of authorship of the Bible. His philosophy is this, and this is what got him into trouble. Descartes proposed this philosophy of dualism, substance dualism. So the fundamental substance in reality were, apart from God, were mind and matter, or extension of thought. The problem with dualism is how they interacted. And Descartes never, never really agreeably formulated that. So what Spinoza did is he brought these mind and matter, or thought and extension together into one substance. So instead of there being two substances, one substance, which he called God or nature, they were synonymous. Substance, God, nature, all synonymous for him. Now, this was perfection itself. And by definition, that had to exist. By being perfect, it had to be eternal, it could not be of a finite duration, it was infinite. And so this was a monism. It was not material monism or materialism, which is that everything is made of matter. And it wasn't mental monism or idealism that everything is fundamentally mind. No, it was that this God was substance. There were two attributes of substance that humans were aware of, and that was then thought and extension, or mind and matter, not quite the same, but more or less the same. But then Spinoza said there were an infinity of other attributes of which humans were not cognizant as well, other modes of reality which were different versions of that same substance. So I should say that thought and mind and matter were both expressions, attributes of that one substance. They were not two separate things, they were just two separate ways of seeing the same thing. They were expressions, as it were. Now, this is why Einstein, who wrote poem about Spinoza, wrote the following 1930, Einstein wrote, Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things. This is very, should say, efficient manner of thinking about mind and matter, that they, you know, mind doesn't cause matter. You don't have this problem mental causation, or matter doesn't, or mind doesn't emerge from matter. As you get in most physicalisms today, they're one and the same thing, but that one thing is not matter itself. Like I said, that's just one of an infinity of different attributes. So it's not a physicalism, even though Svenitsa is interpreted as a materialist. I mean, more so in the 18th century, really, but still today. But anyway, what this means is that there's no, for Spinoza, there's no dualistic soul, there's no separate soul from the body that can endure after bodily Death, when the body dies, that soul or mind also dies because they are one and the same thing. However, interestingly, at the end of Ethics Part 5, in the. In the latter half of that, he writes this. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal. Proposition 23, Part 5 of the Ethics, what is that? Well, that's achieved, he says, via a third kind of knowledge which calls intuitive knowledge or intuition. So this is very rare. There's the basic. The first kind of knowledge is just basic senses and opinion. Second form of knowledge kind of knowledge is science or abstract knowledge of laws of nature and so on. But then there's this third kind of knowledge, which is very rare, rare, intuitive knowledge, and the pinnacle of that, the highest form of such intuition is called, he calls the intellectual love of God, amor de intellectualis. This is then a fundamental understanding of the essence of things, which realizes that that essence is God itself. And by God, remember, he means now nature. This is why people have accused him of being an atheist, even though I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't go that far. This is a becoming one with that eternal. And remember, God, nature is eternal. He's not of a finite duration. And this is ultimate blessedness, he calls it. He also says, and this is very much avoided in many interpretations. There are varying interpretations of this. I should say very many. I mean, you never really get agreement. But he says one thing that a lot of interpretations miss out is that Spinoza writes that in the Scriptures, this intellectual love of God is known as glory, which goes Latin, gloria, which happens in Hebrew to be kavod, which is very interesting. This is sometimes translated in English as the presence of God. And it's often in the Bible associated with smoke. Now, I'm not going to go there, but, you know, this is. This is for another talk. So he writes for notes of. Writes, for example, we feel and experience that we are eternal. And then this experience, then he writes, the love of God towards men and the mind, mind's intellectual love towards God, are one and the same. So when we become. When we form this higher cognition of Godness, we become eternal. We experience the eternal. And this eternal is God himself. So it is simultaneously both us experiencing the eternal via God, or being one with God. And it's God's way of experiencing himself via mankind. And this is then the complete unitive state. You become you, your body, mind become God. God becomes you. God is eternal, you become eternal. So the human mind becomes eternal, for Spinoza, immortal. When it steps outside of time to unite with God, nature, substance, as he says, this is a very rare and difficult to attain. Plotinus, it's said, attained it a few times. Plotinus was a Neoplatonist philosopher who lived in the third century ad. He wrote this quote for how come and describe as other than oneself that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself. There is no doubt why in the mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated. Now, this leads on to psychedelics and I realize I'm out of time. I'll just quickly go into it then. So the mysteries. In ancient Greece, there were these mystery festivals, Dionysian festivals. The prime one was known as the Eleusinian Mysteries in the town of eleusis, which was 13 miles or so from Athens. And the large ceremony there take place annually. Everyone was allowed to attend it who could speak Greek and wasn't a murderer. And it is speculated that in this potion that initiates took, called the kaikyon, there was a psychoactive element of some kind. Like Albert Hoffman, who discovered lsd. He thought it was ergot, which is a fungus that grows off wheat, barley, and a barley field was next to the temple, I should say, in Eleusis. But anyway, whatever it was, the sort of ostensible purpose of the Eleusinian Mysteries was to get rid of the fear of death. And Spinoza's ethics really is a kind of metaphysics of that. It's both a psychology and a metaphysics. So by understanding that although your mind and matter are one, there is no soul, there is still an eternal aspect of existence that can be attained. One can still step outside of time. Now, Plotinus, and also the last Neoplatonist, Proclus, I should say, they suggested that this can be attained through these rituals. And this moves us on then to psychedelics. And there are experiences, many reports that one with certain psychedelics experiences something akin to this intellectual love of God. One becomes one with everything. Time stops, but yet experience is there. I myself, as I mentioned, have had an experience with 5 Meo DMT, which was near inexpressible. It. It bore this extreme. You can't even use the word feeling, but this extreme, extreme sense of importance. I was gone in. In Earth years, as it were. I was out of it for about 15 minutes. But to me it was an instantaneous thing. It was not visual except for a whiteout to start, with slight hexagonal patterns. But then it was different from the other psychedelics because it was a complete contraction of all Time within one and a complete blocking of normal experience and duration. And something that I am exploring at the moment then is this association, this link of 5me or DMT, but also other psychedelic experiences, this link with that to mystical experiences and also to Spinozist and Whiteheadian metaphysics to see if these things are not mere hallucinations, are not mere products of the mind, but actually are veridical. I mean, one final thing I'll say here is this. To say that such an experience is hallucination would be to assume a metaphysics already, usually a sort of physicalist ontology where such things are mere, merely emergent properties of brain functions. Now physicalism is a self, a metaphysical point of view, which is, I argue, very much opposed to Spinozism. And this is just assumed, this is a kind of default view in the west due to Descartes, I would argue, mostly actually, even though he was a dualist. But I think he led, he, he led the west to this physicalism. And this has just been taken as default by the sort of academic profession, mostly scientific discipline. But it needn't be. I mean, there are so many problems with it. I mean, first and foremost the so called hard problem of consciousness, the mind matter mystery, which Spinoza, by identifying mind and matter, sort of overcomes in a much more agreeable manner than saying that mind emerges from matter, which is a complete mystery. So there's an interesting link then between metaphysics, timelessness and psychedelics. And that's just merely an introduction to a lot more to come.
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B
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe like and go to IAI TV for hundreds more podcasts, articles and videos from the world's leading thinkers. Ed, how did you find his talk?
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C
Well, I really enjoyed the talk. I am a big fan of Peter's work. I'm also big on philosophy of mind and have an interest in psychedelics. So, you know, the combination of the three was quite interesting for me.
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B
An academic interest, I'm sure.
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C
And yeah, if you get in touch via the email, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as well. But until next time, take care.
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B
Bye.
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D
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