As always I was reluctant to choose which of his books I was going to re-read, because I dread the specific horrificness his excellent writing is going to seduce me into witnessing, but I’m re-reading Banks, Use of Weapons, possibly his best? Who cares. So and as always I want to quote at length, which I still might, but not now, because just now, I read a sentence fragment which seemed to sparkle with one of those little gleams of ‘transcendental’ or metaphysical (or whatever) insight for me: “… the identity of thought and passing time.”
Now there’s an idea. Time, the passing of it, the concept of time as something that passes, the concept of time; being identical with thinking. Not a cause and effect relationship, it’s not that time passes because I think; it’s like only when there’s thinking around does the tableau of the world manifest a kind of time that passes from the might-be into the over-and-gone.
I haven’t read up on any popular science lately so I’ll say I don’t know what I’m talking about right up front, but here we go anyway: how was that again with the proof that time has an arrow? Far as I know that’s accepted physics, although there’s a couple smart dissenters, e.g. Julian Barbour. Anyway, it suddenly became clear to me again that if time has an arrow it isn’t possible to show it exists from looking at sense experience, all you get from that is an opportunity to compare memory images and conclude that there’s different ones.
