When Is Now? A Secular Proof of the Existence of God

At first glance, this post has nothing to do with data science. I hope that by the time you finish, you will understand why it has everything to do with data science. The connection is the distinction between objective reality (being an object) vs. being a trace of an object.

Data science, machine learning, and AI are just iterative applications of statistical math. Only the loss function changes, and the number and treatment of parameters. That's it. In AI, there is a feedback mechanism, which changes the coefficients of a model, depending on various forms of target validation and variable interaction.

Statistics, once the black sheep of mathematics, has come back to quite literally take over the world, aided by its combination with matrix math and unfathomable parameterization. Statistical truths are compelling, but they are not truths, strictly speaking. They measure the trace of an essence, but the essence itself is never captured satisfactorily. If applied to ethical pursuits, happiness, virtue, and the good life could quickly give way to an echo chamber in which norms go off the rails, and then become the training set for even worse norms.

No essence of a thing is defined via statistical aggregation. You can chop the fourth leg off of every cat on the planet, and still, a cat has four legs, by definition. The truth does not drift the way density drifts. We are on the verge of this being a moot point, as the machines have learned to learn so well that they can mimic being closely enough that it appears that they are. But we must not lose sight of what makes the truth true, mostly in order to save ourselves.

This essential difference is captured in its purest form, I think, in the consideration of the difference between "eternity" and "infinity." Summed up first in the cliché that, "every moment contains a drop of eternity."

On the one hand, being alive teaches us that the only moment is now (another cliché). You and I, and everyone who has ever been, have only ever experienced the present moment. Paradoxically, and equally undeniably, there is a past and a future.

When we try to make sense of what time means, we veer off into two wrong directions: (1) We think of time as an static, infinite succession of present moments, like a strip of graph paper, or (2) we think of time as a fleeting cascade, the past spilling into the future. In both of these cases, the momentousness of the moment, as it were, is lost.

It seems there is a chicken-egg paradox inherent in the concept of time itself. In order to conceive of the "timeline" of time, we project eternity onto lesser dimensional space. This begs the question. In other words, we assume a parody of eternity in order to explain eternity. Kierkegaard does a great job at explaining this paradox, in The Concept of Anxiety:

If time is correctly defined as an infinite succession, it most likely is also defined as the present, the past, and the future. This distinction, however, is incorrect if it is considered to be implicit in time itself, because the distinction appears only through the relation of time to eternity and through the reflection of eternity in time. If in the infinite succession of time a foothold could be found, i.e., a present, which was the dividing point, the division would be quite correct. However, precisely because every moment, as well as the sum of the moments, is a process (a passing by), no moment is a present, and accordingly there is in time neither present, nor past, nor future.

OK. Let's stop here for a second, because this is already getting dense. It's written in 1844 by an aristocrat with nothing but leisure time on his hands. The elevator pitch version (god help me for using this corporate metaphor) is this:

The concept of time as succession is insufficient to explain the present. In other words, if time is always falling away, passing by, decaying, etc., then when is Now? Well, now is just the moment sandwiched between the past and the future:

If it is claimed that this division can be maintained, it is because the moment is spatialized, but thereby the infinite succession comes to a halt, it is because representation is introduced that allows time to be represented instead of being thought. Even so, this is not correct procedure, for even as representation, the infinite succession of time is an infinitely contentless present (this is the parody of the eternal).

You can try to conceptualize Now with a spatial metaphor, but that just yields a parody of now. I totally get this idea of drawing out the succession of time, before my mind's eye, in a literal timeline, and putting a blank circle in the middle of that timeline, in order to represent Now. But using a mental picture to make time stand still doesn't  and can't represent the present:

[…]

The present, however, is not a concept of time, except precisely as something infinitely contentless, which again is the infinite vanishing. If this is not kept in mind, no matter how quickly it may disappear, the present is posited, and being posited it again appears in the categories: the past and the future.

So when is now? Now, must be, can only be, the eternal moment. In thought experiments, it is a disappearing thing. In representation, an attempt to slice something with an invisible knife:

The eternal, on the contrary, is the present. For thought, the eternal is the present in terms of an annulled succession (time is the succession that passes by). For representation, it is a going forth that nevertheless does not get off the spot, because the eternal is for representation the infinitely contentful present. So also in the eternal there is no division into the past and the future, because the present is posited as the annulled succession.

Being is becoming, precisely because we create time, by virtue of our eternal nature. This unfolding paradox, is why there is a difference between essence and representation. Kierkegaard goes further and says that the state of being of a Being endowed with an eternal essence is anxiety. In other words, anxiety is just what it feels like to be endowed with freedom.

In other words, as Kierkegaard puts it: "Man … is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal."

Humans are, and machines are not, in the sense of being the do-er of the activity of being. Seemingly, humans are endowed with varying amounts of spirit, the substance which generates the matrix of temporal succession and dimensionality in general, out of nothingness, strictly speaking. I fear that we are losing our grip on what makes us valuable.

More than ever we need to recognize what it means to be created in the image of God.