Trees and Time

It's an obvious thought, I know. So obvious that I ought to look it up and see who's said it first before I make a prize arse of myself. But why can't we catch flies?

And how come you feel a light bulb blow just a half-second before you flick the switch? How come the cat hears the phone ring and jumps up before it actually does? How can I look at my alarm clock, drift off into an hour long dream. then wake up again to find that not just very little time has passed, but no time? That's right, not a minute, not a second, nothing?

And what the hell does all this have to do with trees? Well, time is the common factor, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger got there first, just before he started sending fan-mail to Hitler, but that's another story. And Physicists have got there last, rather recently, with a little help from Albert Einstein.

You see, the head-hurting news is that Time does not actually exist. This can be proven now in the realm of particle physics, but Heidegger reasoned it out using, well: just reason, actually. And he expressed it like this: Time has no being and therefore beings have no time.

Oh shit, did you see that last bit? Just when the time thing was looking bad enough, I've thrown something else into your mental microwave. Let's clarify, let's grab a lifebelt before we drown, I'll cut to the chase:

We can't catch a fly because to it we are moving incredibly slowly. But trees, which are also alive, also appear to be moving incredibily slowly to us. Perhaps a fly concludes about a human therefore, what we conclude about trees, namely that they are not even sentient? Oh God, scary, scary... let me re-read that. Thought so. Totally logical but entirely insane. Would we know if trees have consciousness?

Well, the fact that I can dream for 14 years inside 3 seconds of the real world, and even the cat can see into the future, rather suggests that consciousness is not bound to time therefore is not measurable or existent in any normal sense. Thoughts in the brain are conveyed by electrons and electrons are exactly the particles, along with photons, which physicists have found travelling around in time like there's no tomorrow. Ho, ho, ho.

It gets worse. If slower means smarter, then the trees are a higher consciousness than us, but what could be higher than them? We begin to move towards evolutionary and geological time, and then the planet itself. Gaia as James Lovelock named it (with some help from the ancient Greeks) becomes a candidate for consciousness. Since Gaia created us, it is by definition our God (or Goddess), but even more so if the concept of sentience is considered.

So using only science and logic and philosophy, we have just proven the existence of God, time travel, ghosts, premonitions, and sentient trees. You thought those things did not exist. But it was only time that was blinding you, and it's time that does not exist, remember?

Interestingly, this also means we cannot die. Plenty of "time" to get your ahead around this post then...