Researching Lost and Perceptible/Imperceptible Time

The quantization of matter is at the root of the perceptible dichotomy of the discrete and continuous. In physics quantization; the root name of quantum physics, “asserts that all measurable quantities are quantized (or discrete as opposed to continuous)” (Deutsch, 54) Quantization therefore allows for the most important aspect of quantum theory, that of interference, alluding to the Multiverse. In perception psychology this plays out in the difference between what we perceive the world to be and its physical characteristics. For instance the most obvious of these would be the fact that we have a perception that the world is flat despite the fact that we know our planet is round. Psychologically, this concept was first taken on by the Gestalt Psychologists Christian von Ehrenfels, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka. They looked to understand why, “elements come together to form wholes, objects that are qualitatively different from the sum of their parts, and can not be understood in terms of their parts.” (Levitin, 74) In this sense they endeavored to explain how discrete parts can become continuous.

But physical and mathematical research has resulted in theories which are averse to such unification. Since Max Planck kicked off the quantum age by postulating that atoms could “absorb or emit energy only in discrete amounts,” physicists have struggled to answer how one escapes continuous motion to merely explain how you get from particle A to particle B. Modern quantum theory describes a world where discrete values are assigned to observable quantities, but despite this, motion and change are continuous (Deutsch, 1). Upset by the narrow focus in which most particle physicists propose a ‘theory of everything’ and, “because the fabric of reality does not consist of only reductionist ingredients such as space, time and subatomic particles, but also for example, of life, thought, and computation,” David Deutsch has argued for a Theory of Everything with a wider scope (Deutsch 30). Epistemologically, considering Reality as a malleable fabric allows for the overlay of quantum theories, computational theories and cognitive science; all of which have roots based in the disjunction between discrete and continuous.

In the first book of his epic A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: A Cote de Chez Swann, Marcel Proust explains the discrepancy between the world in which we live, the world which exists and the role in which memory plays in a quantization of time and continuity of memory. He describes 2 different walks his family would take from their house in Combray: the Geurmantes way and the Meseglise way. Both distinctly different in the flora and fauna one would encounter as well as the time each walk would take and the repercussions which would ripple into the evening; determining whether or at which time he might receive his bedtime kiss from his mother. For Proust, these routes, “linked with many of the little incidents of the life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most episodic, the most full of vicissitudes; the life of the mind.” (Proust 258) As specific ephemeral qualities would be realized within his perceptibility so too they would be realized as physical veracities. These interweave to create an intricate network of time and space which was no truer without the knowledge of its physical traits as it was with them; the network creating a conception which depended on the existence of all possibilities:

All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them – between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or “perfume”, and finally those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand – if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of coloring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation.

Because the majority of information we receive cognitively is incomplete, perception becomes a process of inference and the relegation of probabilities. When we receive insufficient information our cognitive processes provide it themselves, and are typically very good at it (Levitin, 99). This was developed as an evolutionary trait, but it now has become manifest within a deeper observation in epistemological lineage and our understanding of the universe. Cognitive science allows for a link between our measurable or quantized realities, and those which are continuous. Memory and perception begin to broach the link where singularities combine to form a whole greater than the addition of their individual quantities, but which are dualistically perceptible as quantifiably individual and intrinsically continuous within a complete whole.