Why we reject the proposition that "time is unreal"

Suppose I have two dollars in my wallet. I've checked very carefully and am certain that that's all I have in there: two dollars. Later, someone gives me two more dollars, and I put them in my wallet, too -- only to find that I now have five dollars in my wallet!

What happened? (The question is not entirely hypothetical.) Most likely I miscounted the money. I must have actually had three dollar bills in my wallet at the outset but mistakenly counted them as two; perhaps two of them had been stuck together or something. Or maybe when I and the other person both thought he was giving me two more dollars, he was actually giving me three. Or maybe someone else surreptitiously put an extra dollar into my wallet when I wasn't looking. Or, if you're willing to entertain  more fantastic hypotheses, perhaps a miracle occurred and the extra dollar materialized in my wallet by supernatural means.

One hypothesis you will not entertain is that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5.

No conceivable extraordinary experience, no matter how well corroborated, will ever make you entertain that hypothesis. People will say, speaking loosely, that its falsity is "self-evident" (which would be news to young children who are learning their sums), but we might more accurately say that it is metaphysically unacceptable -- or, as I have termed such things elsewhere, "philosophically dysfunctional." As Aquinas is quoted as saying in the linked post, such hypotheses "destroy the foundations of a branch of philosophy" and must therefore be rejected. If we admit 2 + 2 = 5 to our system of thought, the system crashes. We may, superficially, have gained the ability to explain that one weird experience with the five dollars. but only at the expense of our ability to really make sense of anything at all. No experience or anecdote, no matter how otherwise compelling it may be, can override that.

One of the philosophically dysfunctional hypotheses (positiones extraneae) Aquinas gives as an example is "the opinion that nothing changes" -- which brings us to Bruce's recent post "The Time Trap," in which he rejects as a nihilism-inducing "pseudo-explanation" the opinion that

All Time is Now - Time is unreal -- Past, Present, and Future are simultaneous - Everything is always happening...

VIP commenter Debbie sent me an email expressing her exasperation with Bruce's position, correctly assuming that if she had left a comment on Bruce's blog directly it would be unlikely to get past his "pretty severe" moderation. How, she asks, can Bruce maintain such a position in the face of her many unambiguously precognitive experiences, experiences which imply that "linear time is an illusion" and yet have made her life more meaningful rather than less so? She writes:

I personally believe that if someone has never  experienced the paranormal themselves, which it appears, at least to me, that Bruce has not, then I get somewhat irritated if a person writes or says something that they really don't have personal knowledge of especially if they express their belief as being fact.

But personal experience or lack thereof is actually not germane to Bruce's position. Bruce is certainly aware of the compelling evidence that precognition does occur -- in fact, he was the one who introduced me to the seminal work of J. W. Dunne on that topic -- but his position is that, whatever paranormal or miraculous explanation such experiences may have, the explanation cannot be that "time is unreal" because that is metaphysically unacceptable, a positio extranea, a proposition that will crash any system of thought in which it is included.

Briefly, if there is no time, there is no change. Time and change are conceptually inseparable, and neither can be defined except in terms of the other. And if there is no such thing as change of any kind, then all the unacceptable consequences Bruce delineates follow:

The implication is that nothing matters. 

Nothing makes a difference - because nothing can make a difference. 

There is no possible freedom, no possibility of learning; no possibility of betterment of any kind. 

Indeed there is no-thing At All - except what is, was, always, and evermore... An unchanging situation, that might equally well be nothing as anything. 

Making a difference, freedom, learning, betterment -- these are all subsets of change, and if time is not real, neither is change.

If your life is a book, are you writing it as you go along, or are you merely reading a book that has already been written, a story that can never be anything other than what it already is? If the latter, your "life" is an illusion. You aren't doing anything; nothing is happening; nothing means anything. We reject that possibility as, if not provably false, definitely philosophically dysfunctional. As I wrote in my 2018 post "Richard Taylor's fatalism" (from which I pinched the book metaphor):

If I reject fatalism, my stance is either (a) correct or (b) completely inevitable. Therefore, so far as it lies in my power to reject fatalism, I should do so. I find that I can reject it, and so I do. Perhaps I am right in so doing, or perhaps it is my inescapable fate to adopt incorrect philosophical positions — but I won’t waste any time considering the latter  possibility, because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, there’s no point.

Incidentally, here's a completely insane synchronicity: When I revisited that old post on Richard Taylor, I found that in making my argument I had used as an example the tenseless proposition "There is/was/will be a full cup of coffee on William’s desk at 4:30 pm on May 1, 2018." I guess that was the date and time that I wrote that particular sentence, though the post wasn't finished and published until May 6. I first noticed the coincidence of the date -- today is also May 1 -- and then I glanced at the clock on my computer and saw that it was precisely 4:30 p.m. (I had a half-full cup of green tea on my desk, a near miss.) As a further coincidence, just a couple of days ago, in "Into the mouth of the whale," I posted a synchronicity involving reading the phrase "at 4:30 PM" in a years-old blog post.

Does that synchronicity mean that I was fated to write that sentence at 4:30 p.m. on May 1 and then read it again exactly eight years later, at 4:30 p.m. on May 1? No. For the reasons given above, I reject that explanation and take it as axiomatic that, whatever the sync may mean, it doesn't mean that.

Coming back to the apparent conflict between Bruce's views and Debbie's, Debbie's position isn't really what Bruce is arguing against. She believes in freedom, she believes in choice, she believes that "To see the future means that we can CHANGE IT." In other words, though she likes to say that "linear time is an illusion," she is speaking loosely and doesn't mean it in a strictly literal sense. What she means (or what she would realize she means if she thought it out rigorously) is that linear time is not the whole story -- a position with which I agree and assume Bruce does, too.

Debbie has immense psychic and spiritual gifts, but she is not a philosophically rigorous thinker --which is fine. Most people aren't, and most people don't need to be. If "linear time is an illusion" is a good-enough shorthand for her to make sense of her experiences, then, well, that's good enough. All of us most of the time, and most of us all of the time, use such imprecise concepts to make sense of the world, because that's how the human brain is designed to work. ("There are no coincidences" is another example.) I respect both Bruce and Debbie and benefit greatly from their very different modes of thinking.

My own understanding of time is essentially that of Dunne. His model accounts for precognition -- including, crucially, the ability to see the future and then change it -- and, far from dismissing linear time as an illusion, it takes as its starting point the axiom that time is real and really elapses, a fact which is impossible to explain or even to express using linear time alone. I believe Bruce currently doesn't have much use for Dunne, since the latter's system is highly abstract, involves complex mathematics, and is fiendishly difficult to wrap one's head around. I agree but do not find that an insuperable objection; after all, the same can be said of Einstein's theory of time (which Dunne partly anticipated in his first book and incorporated in his later work). It's all a question of how rigorous one feels the need to be, and different souls have different needs.

Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego

It occurred to me to see if any major films had been released on my birthday, the Ides of March. Only one that's a household name, it turns out: the original Ice Age, released March 15, 2002. I don't think I've ever seen that one, though I did see one of the sequels. The poster immediately got my attention:

Right at the top, even bigger than the name of the film, it says "SUB-ZERO HEROES." Just two days ago, in "The Jolly Switzer," I had posted this picture of a novel titled Less Than Zero:

My reason for posting that was that the art on the cover -- a pair of spectacles with a red right lens and a blue left lens -- was a link to my January 14 post "Red and blue spectacles." The very first image in that post, the one that kicked off the whole red-and-blue spectacles theme, was about a movie called The Ides of March.

My other reason for finding Less Than Zero synchronistically relevant was that Vox Day had just published a post called "Less Than Zero," referring to his assessment of the probability that the Darwinian model of evolution is true. Ice Age, being about prehistoric animals and primitive humans, is obviously evolution-adjacent.

Looking up Ice Age, I discovered that the latest installment in the franchise, set to be released next year, is called Ice Age: Boiling Point. The boiling point is 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which corresponds to Darwin's birthday, February 12. I know that some other person I recently looked up was also born (or perhaps died) on February 12, but I don't remember who it was and can't find it now.

Coming back to the original Ice Age movie, the plot is apparently that a group of Pleistocene mammals are trying to bring a human baby back to his family. One of the group, a saber-toothed cat named Diego, was originally secretly planning to deliver the baby to his pack to be killed in revenge, but by the end of the move he has a change of heart and helps save the baby.

Since the significance of the movie to me is that it was released on my birthday, it's natural for me to see the baby as the character representing me. In my dream "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree" (March 2024), a man called G (who I thought might represent me) fought with a man called Diego, and after the fight, I asked G, "Are we in a movie?" and he replied, "Well, let's say it's a preview for a movie." As discussed in "Tim, Claire, Diego" (June 2024), Bill Wright thought that Diego in my dream represented "Israel" (or rather his Tolkienian reinterpretation of that name), and then shortly thereafter I met a real person named Diego and helped him rather than fighting him. This seems relevant to the plot of Ice Age, where Diego is originally the baby's enemy but eventually becomes its protector.

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Last night I dreamed that I was back at my old Ohio home in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area. I was with my wife, and we were walking in the woods. There were several leopards and tigers living there, and we were responsible for them. A tiger and a leopard got in fight, and I separated them, realizing that this was a potentially dangerous thing for me to do but trusting that neither of them would attack me, and they didn't.

These big cats all subsisted on milk, being breastfed by my wife. I had some doubts as to whether that was a suitable diet for adult cats. I tried to look up on the Internet whether it was healthy for big cats to live on human breastmilk, but of course couldn't find anything because probably no one else had ever thought to ask such a question. I wasn't sure what else they could eat. White-tailed deer? Or should we bring in some goats? But I like goats and would feel bad about feeding them to the cats. We decided to stick with breastmilk for the time being.

I had this dream before looking up Ice Age, but the big cats and breastfeeding seem related to the saber-tooth and baby in the movie. I see that my original Diego dream also involved going back to the Hell Hollow home to feed the pets.

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In a later dream segment, which was very brief, I was offered a book by Elizabeth Kashara but said I didn't want it. I wanted a book by Brant Forest. I have no sense of what kind of books these were or what I wanted them for. Looking up the names after the dream didn't turn up much. Elizabeth and KaShara are apparently two members of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and Sebastian Brant did a woodcut called In the Forest near Carthage, illustrating a scene from the Aeneid.

From the Jolly Switzer to Dark Spirits and savagery

Doing an image search for "The Jolly Switzer" led me to a 1967 Canadian book called This Is Music. (Note, if you have to explain that that's what it is, that's usually not a good sign.) It has sheet music for the song, with a note immediately below it explaining that there is "no black key between E and F" on a piano.

The mention of black keys caught my eye because in a comment on "American brownshoe" (April 25), which reports a dream about a gray Plymouth Voyager van, Bill brings up a group called The Black Keys whose 2011 album El Camino has on the cover not the Chevy El Camino you might expect but rather a gray Plymouth Grand Voyager.

This minor sync was enough to make me dwell on the idea of "black keys" enough to make a random connection: There are 36 black keys on a standard piano, and the 14th-century grimoire known as The Key of Solomon includes a chapter called (in MacGregor Mathers's English translation) "The 36 Dark Spirits of Solomon" -- a list deriving from the 2nd-century Testament of Solomon, with each Dark Spirit corresponding to one of the decans of the zodiac. I've never actually read any of that stuff; it's just one of those factoids one picks up. (Actually, I had misremembered it as being the "36 Dark Keys of Solomon," which would have been even better, but a Google search set me straight.)

When I ran a Google search for jolly switzer (no quotation marks), most of the top hits were for hymn sites due to the fact that the song, though not remotely religious in nature, was included in official children's songbooks published by the LDS Church. The second result, though, was something completely unexpected: the Wikipedia page for the novel The Lord of the Flies. That was an intriguing sync, since Bill just brought up The Lord of the Flies two days ago, in a comment on "Jupiter, star of chaos."

What possible connection could there be between the gay tra-la-la with his fa-la-la-la and Golding's schoolboy savagery? None. The article quotes a reference in the novel to a "jolly good show," and it quotes a review by a critic named Charles Switzer. The review was published on May 5, 2025. Having just looked up the writer Bret Harte, to whom the lyrics of "The Jolly Switzer" are credited, I recognized that date as the 123rd anniversary of Harte's death.

Switzer's review of The Lord of the Flies is divided into five sections, the first of which bears the heading "Golding's Island Despises Order and Chaos in Equal Measure." The post on which Bill left his Lord of the Flies comment was, again, called "Jupiter, star of chaos," and it cites Arrowsmith's post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos."

The Jolly Switzer

My April 27 post "Jupiter, eight-spoked wheel, Ides of March" featured a person named Gaylord, and Bill left a comment exploring various meanings of the word gay and connecting it with -- care to guess? -- Pharazon, who was "gay" in the archaic sense of being "decked out in finery."

I have two main associations with the word gay as used before the sexual revolution: Nietzsche's The Gay Science (which I always make sure to shelve next to his Ecce Homo) and a song called "The Jolly Switzer." This comes from an older generation of Mormon children's songs, but when I was very young there was one older gentleman in our ward who taught it to a few kids, who taught it to others, and it became an underground hit. We were too young to be aware of the psychiatric meaning of gay; we just thought it was a funny song. The old man pronounced Switzer with a long i, and so we did, too. The lyrics, such as they are, run as follows:

I'm a gay tra, la, la,

With my fa, la, la, la,

And my bright, and my gay tra, la, lee;

Then a laugh, ha, ha, ha,

And a ring, ting, ting, ling,

And a sing, fa, la, la, la, la, lee.

Looking up the song now just to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the whole thing, I find that the lyrics are attributed to Bret Harte. Wait, surely not the Bret Harte, celebrated and much-anthologized writer of Wild West fiction? Are you telling me he wrote "The Jolly Switzer," too? A regular Renaissance man! Apparently, yes, it's the same Bret Harte. I find this very satisfying, much like the discovery that the John Bongiovi who sang "R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas" was none other than the future Jon Bon Jovi in his debut as a recording artist.

I searched Harte's Wikipedia page but unsurprisingly found no mention of his contribution to Mormon children's music. Looking under "Dramatic and musical adaptations," though, I did discover that the 1975 spaghetti Western Four of the Apocalypse is based on a couple of Bret Harte's stories. The Four Horsemen are a recurring theme around here and were just mentioned again in my last post, "Into the mouth of the whale."

I also thought it interesting that Bill's comment that led me to look up "The Jolly Switzer" was on a post whose title includes both "Jupiter" and "Ides of March." Jolly and jovial are synonyms, with the latter word literally meaning "under the influence of the planet Jupiter." The name Bret recently came up in "Bret Michaels" (April 19), about a singer who was born on the Ides of March.

When I searched my blog for bret just now, I found only one post that wasn't referencing that recent Bret Michaels post: "Black men and old ones" (March 2025), referencing "the Bret Easton Ellis character Patrick Bateman." Realizing I know essentially nothing about Ellis (I know of Patrick Bateman via cultural osmosis but have never actually read American Psycho), I did a quick Google search to find out what else he had written. This came up:

Yes, that's yet another instance of the "Red and blue spectacles," on the cover of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero. Just prior to writing this post, I had checked Synlogos and found a new post by Vox Day also called "Less Than Zero" (referring to his own anti-evolution AI slop book Probability Zero).

Remembering that I had used a Patrick Bateman "dubs guy" meme here recently, I looked it up. The post is "My plan for a sync experiment" (January 28), where Bateman is pointing to a logo that says "Double Well." I just brought up "Well Well" -- specifically two repetitions of the word, not the more usual three -- in the comments on "Happy God Is a Whale Day."

Into the mouth of whale

Last night -- so still April 27 (see "Happy God Is a Whale Day") -- I was thinking about Dee and Kelley's whale vision of April 27, 1584. The vision involves the two magicians, at the behest of a prophet, entering the Whale's mouth:

the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in, but they trembled vehemently; He said unto them the second time, Go in: and they durst not. And he sware unto them, and they entered in

This made me think of the climactic scene in Unsong -- a novel positively obsessed with the symbolism of the whale -- where, after Ana's confrontation with God in which she insists that he is wrong about the problem of evil, the ship she is on is swallowed by the Leviathan:

"COME AND SEE," said God.

Then the Leviathan wheeled around, opened its colossal maw, and engulfed the Not A Metaphor. The ship spent a single wild moment in its mouth before the monster closed its jaws and crushed all of them into tiny pieces.

Unsong wasn't written until 2017, and I didn't read it until 2020, but I just noticed now that that "Come and see" is a link to my whale-dream post of April 27, 2014, which was titled "A beast with many eyes." That post was published on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's whale vision, and I see that the online version of this chapter of Unsong, from which I copied the above excerpt, ends with an announcement that the author will be doing a dramatic reading of the next chapter "at 4:30 PM."

The title of my 2014 post mentions a "beast" rather than a whale -- because the many-eyed whale of the dream was sychronistically or precognitively connected with another many-eyed beast that was not a whale. The significance of this is that "Come and see" is the line uttered in succession by each of the four "beasts"  in Revelation 6. These are the Cherubic beasts introduced in Revelation 4 as "four beasts full of eyes before and behind," just as Dee and Kelley's whale was "full of eyes on every side." Each "Come and see" uttered by a beast introduces one of the famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In my 2009 post "The seven walruses," I tried to tie the walrus both to the Seven Seals (because a walrus is broadly speaking a kind of seal, as in "Of sealing wax") and to the Four Horsemen (because walrus is etymologically "whale-horse"). The "whale" part of the etymology was irrelevant back then but has retroactively become significant.

Happy God Is a Whale Day

On April 27, 1584, John Dee and Edward Kelley had their vision of a "Whale . . . full of eyes on every side," representing "the spirit of God." Dee himself was symbolized in the vision by a "naked man."

On April 26 or 27, 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys took a large dose of LSD and "claimed to have seen God."

In 1989, Paul Quarrington published Whale Music, a fictionalized biography of Brian Wilson, in which the Wilson character is always naked and constantly refers to himself as "the Whale Man."

On April 27, 2014, I posted "A beast with many eyes," reporting my dream of the previous morning (April 26) in which I had seen "a whale with many eyes." Not until 2022 would I discover that "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision," and that either the post or the dream itself also came on the anniversary of the Whale Man's theophany.

Today, April 27, as luck would have it, I gave a group of very young students a quiz focusing on a few common digraphs, one of which was wh. These two items appeared together:

After the quiz, one of the students said, "Who!" and then, pointing up at the sky as if indicating God, "Who is he? I don't know."

He that dwelleth between the caribou antlers

"Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) reintroduced the "Christ between antlers" sync.

Today I lunched at a restaurant called Caribou, which made me think of that, because caribou have antlers, and one of the old syncs was specifically about a reindeer, which is the same as a caribou. That specific word, caribou, also reminded me of the fact, previously noted in "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window" (June 2024), that "cherub is believed to derive from the Akkadian karibu, which I assume would be a near-homophone of caribou." Eleven times in the Old Testament God is referred to as the one who "dwelleth between the cherubims," giving special meaning to Christ between the antlers of a caribou.

Sure enough, I saw at the restaurant an image connected to those ideas.

The Chinese is 神奇, which means "amazing." However the first character taken alone -- the one that is directly above (though too wide to be actually between) the antlers of the caribou -- means "God."