During the course of the symposium, in the book TotIs, the characters spent some time exploring the nature of the cognitive illusions that are produced as part and parcel of the organism’s bio-sensory interpretive system. During that discussion, three types of illusions were defined: imperfect, perfect and creative (see chapter 8 in TotIs). Later in the book the characters created a new word, antIs. It is defined as the human observer’s experience of reality and the universe that is perceived through the biochemical/bio-sensory input and interpretation system, (see  chapter 12). It also describes the near-perfect, and in most cases, perfect illusion this system creates, and our continuous attempts to use this interpretation as a proxy for actual reality, even though it is not. This definition became important for two reasons. First, it had become cumbersome to keep using the expression “the observers experience of reality through their biochemical sensory input system.” Secondly, it was paramount to place this product, that is, the created experience, into it’s own class that we no longer had to call “illusory”. By defining an antIs experience we are conclusively able to place the entire gamut of the outputs of this process into a single class that comports with the fact that there is not a single antIs experience that is actual reality and, by extension, none by which all other antIs experiences can be judged as “illusory”.

I think we can agree that to define our everyday experience of reality as an illusion is a loaded and anxiety producing act. It is, after all, what we rely on to determine what we deem the “real” world to be, as well as what is illusory. AntIs, as now defined, removes that problem, if not the anxiety, by placing all products of antIs reality in the same class. Now all antIs reality lies on a continuum of the single, if complicated, antIs process. This means that all antIs reality is a biological interpretation of actual reality and is subject to the same limitations, exclusions and breakdowns associated with the antIs process. Most importantly, this includes our antIs experience of time itself. By redefining our experience of time and it’s flow as an antIs experience, we can finally say, with confidence, that our experience of antIs time is an interpretation, and that as such, it will be colored by the same limitations and distortions as the rest of antIs experience.

In order to discover whether our antIs experience of time is inaccurate, and if it may be that time indeed does not flow, we need some conception of the limitations of the antIs experience as it relates to this alternative reality of time. In TotIs I use the metaphor of the swimming but blind fish, which goes like this:

“Let’s imagine ourselves for a moment as blind fish, swimming in a vast expanse of water. We can feel something moving past us, but we don’t know what. We can only feel and use the force of the water at the very position within it that we occupy. The experience of this fish is that the water it swam through is ‘gone’ and the water it’s going to swim through does not yet exist to it, but its movement past the now experience of this water would be impossible, if the water did not exist as a whole.”

By using water as a metaphor for time, and the fish as the observer experiencing the water, we see that without the fish as an observer, there is no flow of time. The entire expanse of water simply is, and it relies on neither an observer nor their experience for its existence. It is only from the observers antIs perspective that time seems to flow. And since, from the observers antIs perspective, their experience is, by definition, real, time therefore flows.

It is interesting to note that the definition for antIs came late in the book, even later than the definition for totIs, but it seemed, as I was writing, that it was a nearly impossible leap for the characters to make that would allow them to come to terms with the fact that nowhere on the continuum of our antIs experience is actual reality ever manifest. Much of that difficulty seemed to come from this word illusion we were using to describe the experience of reality rendered by our biology. So now we have a definition, antIs, to describe the process that our biology uses to render reality for us. It is of a class that incorporates each and every one of our bio-sensory interpretations of reality, even the ones that we used to consider as illusions, and as such, reality now stands apart in a class by itself, unfettered by the need to comport with the experience of an observer. From this platform, the observers a priori belief in the objectivity and centrality of their experience of reality are removed, and all antIs reality becomes suspect. We can now investigate, from this new vista, and in a new frame of mind, the true nature of time. To do so we will use the counterintuitive and downright improbable experimental results of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.