Page 214 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

unable to remember what happened before, and are therefore
unaware whether there’s been any interval between two events.
This is one further proof that time exists solely as a perception.
Since the events occurring in our daily lives are shown to us
in a specific sequence, we subdivide time into the past, present and
future. But in fact, the idea of a progression from the past to a fu-
ture is mere conditioning. If we watched the information in our
memories in the same way that we watch a film run backwards,
then for us the past would be the future, and the future would be
the past. This shows that time is not absolute, but forms in line
with our perception.
The famous physicist Roger Penrose makes the following
comment:

I think there’s always something paradoxical about the way we seem
to perceive time to pass and the way physics describes time. And
partly it’s a question of is there a clear temporal order of things in
our perceptions, or do we somehow put lots of things together and
form pictures of things . . . 130
The sequencing we perform in our own minds between
events that we recall gives rise to what we refer to as past, present
and future. This, however, is a decision we make of our own will.
François Jacob, French biologist and Nobel laureate, makes this

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