what Heisenberg grasped—what he calculated mathematically, yes, but also what he was able to capture in language—was that to simultaneously observe an electron’s position and momentum would require a perfect presence in a single moment in time, which is utterly incompatible with the minimum condition of observing anything at all. Not because of som

Like Kant before him, he also discovered that the conceit of slowing time down to a single frame, honing the moment of an observation to a pure present, destroys the observation itself. The closer we look, the more the present vanishes from our grasp.

Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other

For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him- or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all.

Funes, Borges soon realized, lacked the basic function that permits us to think in the first place—abstraction. “Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol ‘dog’ took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes,” Borges recounts, “it irritated him that the ‘dog’ of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile

without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”[26] Like Knutzen staring into the heavens and mistaking the comet he sees there for the one he expected to find, when we believe that our impressions belong to a self, we falsely project an expected unity on a disjointed and random series of impressions.

Hume encountered only baseless impressions: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time

There is no such thing as a law of nature; we are trapped forever in our subjective impressions, and believing otherwise is pure delusion.

The more precisely you relive the past, the less it is a past you remember, and the more it becomes the present, vanishing before your eyes as the present always does. A truly perfect replay would erase its very sense of being a replay altogether because it would erase the connection between moments of time that constitute the one remembering, the