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Tallis in Wonderland

Time, Tense & Physics

Raymond Tallis on the ‘Theory of Everything But…’

Readers of this column may recall an earlier piece, ‘A Smile at Waterloo Station: The True Mystery of Memory’ in Issue 78, in which I challenged the claim that there is, or ever could be, a purely neurological, that is to say a materialist, explanation of human memory. I focused on those memories in which we explicitly locate things in the past, in particular our own past. Such memories are tensed: indeed, they are crucial to our sense of tensed time. Now, according to Einstein and many other physicists, tensed time is unreal, and tenses are illusions, although rather ‘stubborn’ ones, as Einstein admitted. Since matter does not entertain illusions, there cannot be a materialist account of memory.

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