Time Will Tell: An Interview with Kristie Miller

This is the second post in the Time Will Tell series. You can read the first post here, or see all the posts in the series here.

Dr. Kristie Miller is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Joint Director at the Center for Time, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, Australia. Kristie is also an ARC Future Fellow.

Thanks to you and your school (the University of Sydney) for doing this interview, especially in these hard times. Your center, the Centre for Time, was established alongside the philosopher Huw Price, a personal favorite in theories of time. What does the Centre for Time study? What are some of its current interests, aims, or research projects?

The Centre is interdisciplinary, so we have people working on all sorts of things. There are psychologists working on how it is that we perceive events as occurring at the same time, or as occurring at different times and in some particular temporal order.

It turns out we are actually pretty good at figuring out what order things occur in, as long as the temporal distance between them is long enough. Once that distance is very short, it becomes much more difficult for us to determine which order things happen in. Interestingly, you’d think that once we can’t tell what order events are in, we’d judge that they are simultaneous. You’d think we’d just hear, say, two tones, as happening at the same time if we can’t tell what order they occur in.  But in fact often we have the capacity to know that two tones are not simultaneous, even though we can’t tell which happened first.

Moreover, you can actually influence which order people hear (or see) certain events to come in, through experimental manipulation. In general, the psychologists in the Centre are interested in all they ways that you can experimentally intervene in people’s perception of events in time, in order to get a better handle on what mechanisms are responsible for our temporal judgments.

We also have people working at the Centre in both the history of the science of time, and on the current science of time. The former are interested in how different scientific theories of time evolved, and what implications they had for how we understood the world around us.

 The latter are interested in what our current best science tells us about time. They look at current scientific theory and try to work out what metaphysical picture the science paints for us. Two of perhaps the most interesting questions arising from this research are, first, how to make sense of the way the world seems to us, if various scientific theories are correct, and, second, whether it turns out that time as we, the folk, conceptualize it, is eliminated altogether from some contemporary scientific accounts. So, for instance, it’s often thought (by philosophers) that it seems to creatures like us as though time has a direction, and as though there is some deep and objective difference between what is future, and what is past. It might also seem as though time flows, inasmuch as future events come ever closer to us, become present, and then recede into the past. Yet most contemporary scientific accounts don’t paint a picture of time on which time itself has these features. That leaves us with the task of trying to work out why and how time appears to us that way, if that’s not the way it really is.

I’m familiar with research on perception from a philosophy of film perspective, and I write about as well as teach Henri Bergson. Bergson says that during the human experience of duration and simultaneity we feel exactly what you said psychologists at your university proved to be the case. This is exciting, as we all know how theories take time to prove. It’s interesting that you say you know exactly what time “is” since you also say that time is not what we think it is just because of how we experience it. H.G. Welles’s work The Time Machine says something similar. If I may ask, how can one say they know exactly what “time” is when it is partly a human construct? I’m thinking here of work in quantum mechanics, advanced AI, and Bergson, who writes that the past is necessary, and always in motion, in order for us to have perceptions, language, or any access to the next moment. I’m also interested in the work of neurophilosopher and Spinozist Antonio Damasio. In his research, extended consciousness goes beyond core conscious capacities or functions. It needs an individual, particular, and moving, rolling autobiography. Any thoughts?

So, it’s a good question: how do we try and figure out what time is like, in itself, given that we are of course always measuring it and engaging with it via our own sensory and conceptual system. And to what extent is time a human construct? It seems pretty clear that lots of ways we represent time, and various systems for measuring elapsed time, are human constructs. We tend to measure periods of time in terms of certain kinds of changes that are salient to us: like the rotation of the earth. That might seem conventional, in the sense that we could choose to measure time in terms of the change of something else (although, our circadian rhythms are unsurprisingly nicely attuned to earth’s rotation, so that wouldn’t be a great idea in practice). But none of that makes time itself a human construct: or at least, it doesn’t make time any more of a human construct than, say, space, or chairs, or atoms, or fields, or trees. In all these cases we measure and perceive these things using the human perceptual system, and we categorize and understand them using the human conceptual system. Still, we hope that although the way we conceive of things is in part determined by our particular goals and projects, that we are still seeing and measuring something that is there, and that we are going some way towards saying what it is like, in and of itself. We don’t think it odd that our experience of, say, trees, or fish, could lead us astray regarding what those things are really like, and discovered to be like, by science. There is nothing puzzling about discovering that dolphins aren’t fish, and there’s nothing inherently puzzling about discovering that time isn’t the way we pre-theoretically expect it to be. The difference, of course, is that we can poke and prod dolphins in a way that its not so easy to poke and prod time (or indeed space). But that doesn’t mean it’s not experimentally accessible. Einstein came up with a very elegant theory about the nature of space and time, well before it could be experimentally tested. But since then we’ve found lots of ways to test his theories, and they’ve been shown to be correct (at least at the macro scale). Those experiments vindicate those theories, and in turn, that tells us that time is somewhat different than we supposed it to be. In that regard, the investigation of time isn’t any different from the investigation of dolphins: we develop a theory, the theory makes predictions, and we test those predictions experimentally.

Can you elaborate on your own research in the philosophy of time? What concerns you most now, temporally speaking? 

At the moment I am working on two interconnected projects. Both of these are joint work with various collaborators, because work at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and physics, is often best done in teams.

One of these projects focuses on trying to get clearer on how we (we in general, not we philosophers) think about time, and what our folk concept of time is like. As part of that project we are also interested in the way people experience time and the ways they report their temporal phenomenology. We have been using experimental methods to try and answer these questions. It’s interesting that there hasn’t been much experimental work of this kind in philosophy. There has been lots of work in psychology that focuses on cross-cultural differences in the way people represent time through picture and gesture, and this work is super interesting. We know that there are, in fact, lots of cross-cultural differences. For instance, you and I probably would point in front of us if we were asked to point to the future, and point behind us if we were asked to point to the past because (regardless of our explicit philosophical theory). That’s probably because we imagine the future to be what we are heading towards. But in other cultures the reverse is the case. Some cultures point forward to point to the past, because the past is the portion of time that we can see and know about. By contrast, we don’t know what’s in the future, so obviously that’s the bit of time that is behind us. This kind of research is fascinating, and there’s lots of it. But it doesn’t help us answer some of the questions philosophers have been interested in.

Philosophers of time have often made various assumptions about what view of time the ‘man on the street’ has, and what our temporal phenomenology is like.   It’s usually said that something like an A-theory (the view on which there is an objective moment that is present, and which moment that is, changes) is the theory of the man on the street, and that it seems to us all as though time flows.

 This has then been used as data that any metaphysical theory of time is meant to accommodate, either by vindicating its being so, or by explaining away why we are mistaken.

We’ve been interested in seeing whether the assumptions that many philosophers have made are right. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.

Most people aren’t A-theorists. Or at least, to be a bit careful here, most people (though by no means all) think that our world is most like a world in which the A-theory is true. But most people are not A-theorists in the sense that they think that time has to be this way: they don’t think that time is, necessarily, characterized by their being an objective present that moves.

What’s more, most people don’t report that it seems to them as though time passes in anything like way that philosophers have supposed: that is, a way in which the future (or future events) are felt to be coming towards us, becoming present, and then receding into the past.

In fact, our research suggests that people’s concept of time is much more complicated that we might have thought, and that people’s temporal phenomenology is much less strong, clear, and ‘flowy’ than people have thought. So any arguments that try and take us from our concept or phenomenology of time to some metaphysical view, are not going to be at all straightforward.

Another project I am working on at the moment involves scientific theories that have become known as ‘timeless’; these are theories whose advocates claim that they eliminate time. We are interested in understanding how to best interpret these scientific theories, and then, in working out whether they really deserve to be called timeless or not.

There has been surprisingly little philosophical attention given to these theories, despite the fact that the conclusions that they claim are radical indeed. (As a bit of background here, these are theories that are the result of attempts to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity, something that has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.) These theories are often said to be timeless because they eliminate (at least fundamentally) anything like an ordered sub-structure of events. Our recent work has focused on using some of our empirical work on the folk concept of time, alongside a philosophical investigation of these theories, to work out whether they really deserve to be called timeless, and, if they do, whether we should all be worried if they were to turn out to be true. The interesting work here lies, at least in part, in trying to figure out what it would be for time to ‘emerge’ from something timeless—something some of these theorists claim occurs—and whether we can make sense of such a picture.

That’s wonderful. As someone who wrote a doctorate on Spinoza, I’m interested in thinking through problems of causality, explanation, and Laws of Nature. I’m a little familiar with how challenging it is to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity, especially as it pertains to the science done by Gary Swartz (the Director for the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona). It’s very interesting that more work experimentally has not been done on those kinds of phenomenological experiences.

I know there is a lot of literature out there, especially on how accurate Epicurus, Bruno, Galileo, etc. might have been in current trends in atomist materialism, but what you’re all doing is both important and interdisciplinary. I hear what you’re saying, yet if you asked me where the “future” is, I wouldn’t point at all. It’s everywhere, in my humble estimation, even if we do have dreams and goals. I study various, more marginal human experiences. I’m fascinated by the work of Julian Barbour and dove into it for my MA thesis in 2004. Barbour writes that time and motion are complete illusions, yet biologically necessary. I also love Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology in the Ethics, which Wim Klever notes “is motion and motion once more,” ontologically and otherwise. Philosophers have gotten a lot wrong, but they get a lot right too, in ways I think would benefit our society. For example, they know the value of being critical and compassionate thinkers. The Critical Philosophy of Race understands lived experiences in time, which is crucial in a country with a history of institutional oppression. The experience of time and trauma here stands out. I would suggest the new ontological work of Thomas Nail here Being and Motion, which some are describing as on par with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Yes, Julian Barbour’s work is fascinating! His theory of quantum gravity is one of the ones my colleagues and I are interested in, in part because it’s so revolutionary. It’s a fascinating proposal: ultimately I am yet to be convinced that his approach does (or can) work. But the work is super interesting, and he is a great example of someone working in physics who is willing to really think through the big questions and engage in, and with, philosophy. I imagine there are lots of other views out there going back much further in time (as it were) that also take very different views on the nature of time than are the views we typically find in the contemporary literature in the philosophy of time. I know, for instance, that some of the indigenous Australians had a view of time that is reminiscent of the one that Barbour has: that there are just many temporally disconnected instants and no correct ordering of said instants (though of course, they were motivated by somewhat different concerns than Barbour).

Is time money or is that too simplistic to describe the many possible and relevant aspects of contemplating the logic of time?

Time is definitely not money! Of course, since we typically pay people by the hour, the more time something takes, the more money we’re going to have to pay for it. What this really shows is how embedded temporal notions are in the way we interact in the world. We measure so many things in terms of elapsed time. But more than that, time is central to our lives. Maybe that’s another more profound way in which the saying is apt; we are temporally extended, but limited, creatures. Of necessity, our lives are lived extended in time: we wouldn’t be the kinds of things we are, if we didn’t experience our life as an extended narrative, and if we didn’t conceive of our current selves as the product of our earlier selves, and anticipate our future selves being a product of our current selves. Yet the more time we spend doing one thing, the less time we have for everything else. There are no time refunds. So, time is not money, but it is a precious, and limited, resource.

Well said. I absolutely love the idea and proclamation that we are “temporally extended, but limited creature.” Agreed! Do you believe backwards causation is temporally possible, logically or otherwise? Time travel? What about death?

I certainly think backwards causation is logically possible; I also see no reason why it’s not possible consistent with the laws of nature of our world. One of my erstwhile colleagues, Huw Price, thinks that the EPR experiments in quantum mechanics are best accommodated by positing micro-level backwards causation. I’m not sure that counts, as yet, as evidence that there is backwards causation, but perhaps it comes close. Having said that, I don’t think we see macro-level backwards causation around here. But that’s not to say that there isn’t such causation elsewhere, where things are very different.

In turn, I think that time travel is logically possible. As far as we know, it’s also possible consistent with the laws of physics; but whether we can ever achieve backwards time travel is another matter. We had a difficult enough time getting to the moon, so I’m not holding my breath for the invention of the time machine. Of course, there are ways to travel into the future if you can just travel fast enough. So my advice to those who are looking for the most likely way to travel in time is to look to the future, not the past. Having said that, I have to say that if you come back to earth several hundreds years into the future, I am sorry to say that I expect it will be a very hot, inhospitable place that has undergone a series of mass extinctions. So you might want to stay where you are!

I like that emphasis on “currently.” Yes, our world is facing horrific global warming events now. I often wonder why more don’t want to listen to scientists. It’s disturbing when people don’t desire to reason well, as it is in all of our best interests to do so.

Indeed! The rise of a sort of anti-science brigade world-wide is very worrying, especially because governments seem to be leading the forefront of such thinking.

I find that what you are saying is both logically accurate and has a long history, one which “linearly oriented” philosophers have generally not paid enough attention to. Hegel, in his Science of Logic, proves that backwards causation is logically possible and makes it a part of his ontological system as well. I love that text, the little I’ve studied of it. I’ve experienced micro-level backwards causation in my own life, in various ways, theoretically and otherwise. I hear you that macroscopically things get extremely complicated, especially around issues of time, causality, and metaphysics.

You’ve experienced micro-level backwards causation. Wow. Do tell!

Well, theoretically speaking, Hegel’s Science of Logic proves the logic of backwards causation, something I have presented on at an APA conference, but we can pick up with the actual experiences of it in another interview. What intrigues you about these topics that you might place to the side as a marginal interest?

Nothing should ever be a marginal interest! If it’s fascinating, have fun with it. Investigate. Until very recently I’d have said that I’m interested in the connection (if there is one) between the way people think about time, their temporal phenomenology, and the structure of their cross-temporal preferences. For instance, some philosophers think that it’s irrational to have time biased preferences: to care about where in time an event is, except insofar as where it is, is connected to the event being better, or worse. If so, I shouldn’t simply have brute temporal preferences (like preferring events to be on a Wednesday, or preferring events to be in the past). Normativity is above my pay grade. But I’ve just started to wonder there might be a connection between people having time-biased preferences (or not) and the way they think about and experience time. I don’t know whether there is or not: that’s something I’d like to take up in future research.

Thanks for that, you’re fun to talk about philosophy with. Thank you for pointing out that nothing should ever be a marginal interest. You might have read in the opening interview the APA did as we introduced this series that I experience temporally related (and therefore language related) time delays in the form of mini seizures around the ages of 4 to 6. I recall the phenomenological experience of them distinctly and have yet to find that many good descriptions of it, although poetry and music have helped. There is ton of research to be done yet in these kinds of experiences. I also don’t think in detailed images when awake! I dream vividly and recall a lot of my dreams. Your current interests and future projects sound worthy to me, but they are also very interesting. I wish you all the best in this research.

That’s fascinating. I’ve recently been getting together with some neuroscientists who are interested in how various brain conditions affect our perception of time. Of course, there’s been quite a bit of research on the ways in which certain drugs affect temporal perception, but much less on various other connections between brain events and temporal consciousness. The researchers I’ve been talking to work predominantly on various forms of dementia. They’ve been doing a lot of work on the way in which these different kinds of dementia are linked to altered time perception. The research is fascinating and is something I’m keen to follow up on.  I don’t know of similar research into time perception and seizures, although there might well be some, but I can see that that could be a very fertile ground to explore. I will see if I can track down some studies on this over the next couple of months! I think that all of this kind of research can massively enrich our understanding of how we develop a full sense of temporality. And it’s the sort of research that should be of huge interest to philosophers of time.

Finally, do you ever waste time? I find myself needing time to waste to cope.

I have no time to waste! We are always super busy at the Centre, and the pile of stuff that I need to get through never seems to get any smaller.

I hear that… Good ‘on ya, as they say in the downunder.