The past

In my last post I wrote about how the universe is constantly creating stories and histories — of people, countries, worlds — only to destroy them later, leaving no trace of their former existence. I often feel the need to believe that that's not quite how things work, that the past must still exist in some way now and will always exist. The idea that my childhood memories — places, people, etc. — only exist in my brain and will vanish when I die can be a difficult one to come to terms with. I sometimes like to watch TV clips from the seventies and eighties on YouTube: the news some random day of some random year, the test card they showed with background music at the end of the evening until the first programme began the following morning , ads, anything. As you might expect, it makes me terribly nostalgic, and something in me thinks that I should have the right to be able to go back and re-experience those things first hand. But it won't stop there. I want to be able to visit my parents village as it was in the forties and fifties, when they were kids, to watch them run around and play. You might think that I'm certifiable for saying this, but I also want to claim my right to visit early 20th century Bombay and 17th century Istambul, to meet Jesus and the Buddha (just out of curiosity), to have a coffee with my great-grandfather. But I digress.

It's not just the extinction of my own memories, the fact that my past is forever past, that concerns me, but also everyone else's memories and past, all the things that have happened on this planet. The past must still be real in some way. I just find it almost impossible to believe that it is gone forever and will be forgotten completely.

By the time the universe is 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years old, the black holes themselves will disintegrate into stray particles, which will bind loosely to form individual "atoms" larger than the size of today's universe. Eventually, even these will decay, leaving a featureless, infinitely large void. And that will be that — unless, of course, whatever inconceivable event that launched the original Big Bang should recur, and the ultimate free lunch is served once more.

(from TIME.com)

And then whatever has happened in the past, the innumerable indeviduals, lives, experiences, stories, memories, etc. will have disappeared completely. There will not even be any clue to suggest that any of those things have ever occurred. Whatever happens in the universe, the end result is the same: absolute nothingness. Can that be true? Let me try a desperate attempt to prove otherwise.

Mozart died on 5th December 1791. As far as we know that's a true statement. Would it make any sense to say that it is false — just because — or that it is neither true nor false? Obviously not. If it's true, it's true. And will it make sense to say either of those two things when the human race has disappeared from the universe? Obviously not. Whatever happens to the human race, "Mozart died on 5th December 1791" will always be a true statement. And does anything change when then universe "dies"? Will our statement stop being true? Obviously not. Now take all possible true statements about the past, down to the minutests details, to the position of each atom at every moment. All those statements constitute all of the past, and each one of them is true, and it wouldn't make sense to say otherwise. It wouldn't make sense now, and it wouldn't make any sense in 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. So, even if the past is gone in some way, there is another way in which it will always exist, because if it didn't exist in any way, it would be perfectly logical to say that "Mozart died on 5 December 1791" is neither true nor false, when that is clearly nonsense. If the past didn't exist in any way, at the end of the universe all the true statements about the past of the universe would cease to be true and become neither true nor false. I hope you'll agree with me that that cannot happen. Some might argue that after the death of the universe, "Mozart died on 5 December 1791," along with all other possible statements about the past, will just be something whose truth or falsehood cannot be known. But my point is that, even so, the statement will be either true or false. In conclusion, if we accept that the truth about the past exists, then the past, all of it, will always exist in at least some way, the way that makes true statments about it true.

I don't blame you if you don't find this argument very compelling — neither do I. There is something awkward about it, and it's little solace. But then there's something awkward about all philosophy. It's just another argument in my collection of philosophical reasons for puzzlement and hope.