Editing An Experiment with Time (section)

===The theory of Serialism===
Having presented Dunne's evidence for precognition, the book moves on to a possible theory in explanation which he called Serialism.<ref name="levy">{{cite journal |last=Levy |first=Hyman |title=Time and Perception (review of ''An Experiment with Time'') |journal=[[Nature (journal)|Nature]] |volume=119 |issue=3006 |date=11 June 1927 |pages=847–848|doi=10.1038/119847a0 |s2cid=4123898 }}</ref>

The theory harks back to an experience with his nurse when he was nine years old. Already thinking about the problem, the boy asked her if Time was the moments like yesterday, today and tomorrow, or was it the travelling between them that we experience as the present moment? Any answer was beyond her, but the observation formed the basis of Serialism.

Within the fixed spacetime landscape described by the recently published theory of [[general relativity]], an observer travels along a timeline running in the direction of physical time, ''t''<sub>1</sub>. [[Quantum mechanics]] was also a newly emerging science, though in a less-developed state. Neither relativity nor quantum mechanics offered any explanation of the observer's place in spacetime, but both required it in order to develop the physical theory around it. The philosophical problems raised by this lack of rigorous foundation were already beginning to be recognised.<ref>[[Arthur Eddington|Eddington, Arthur]]; ''[[iarchive:natureofphysical00edd|The Nature of the Physical World]]'', 1928 (delivered as the [[Gifford Lectures|Gifford lectures]] in 1927).[https://web.archive.org/web/20200919221214/https://www.giffordlectures.org/lectures/nature-physical-world]</ref>

The theory resolves the issue by proposing a higher dimension of Time, ''t''<sub>2</sub>, in which our consciousness experiences its travelling along the timeline in ''t''<sub>1</sub>. The physical brain itself inhabits only ''t''<sub>1</sub>, requiring a second level of mind to inhabit ''t''<sub>2</sub> and it is at this level that the observer experiences consciousness.

However, Dunne found that his logic led to a similar difficulty with ''t''<sub>2</sub> in that the passage between successive events in ''t''<sub>2</sub> was not included in the model. This led to an even higher ''t''<sub>3</sub> in which a third-level observer could experience not just the mass of events in ''t''<sub>2</sub> but the ''passage'' of those experiences in ''t''<sub>2</sub>, and so on in the infinite regress of time dimensions and observers which gives the theory its name.

Dunne suggested that when we die, it is only our physical selves in ''t''<sub>1</sub> who die and that our higher selves are outside of mundane time. Our conscious selves therefore have no mechanism to die in the same kind of way and are effectively immortal.<ref name="priestley-mt" /> At the end of the chain he proposed a "superlative general observer, the fount of all ... consciousness".<ref>Dunne, J. W. ''An Experiment with Time'', First Edition, A.C. Black, 1927, Page 207.</ref>