‘Natural Philosophy of TIME – a personal essay on a neglected subject © H. J. Spencer
[email protected] < version 1.026 06Sep2017 begun: Aug. 2015 pp. 19 & 11.9KW >
ABSTRACT Time has an impact on every single person but it has been poorly studied by western intellectuals; especially philosophers and scientists. As Newton knew (and Einstein eventually realized): physics is about Time, so this connection is reviewed here (without mathematics). Major attention is focused on the role of philosophy and even more on the bad uses of language (developed by the Great Greeks) that fails to expose the poor assumptions about Time and its critical role in relationships, especially between humans. Again, bad language produced the illusion that Time could be understood via objective thinking (using static concepts) when our broad understanding is constructed on experiential intuition.
SUMMARY This essay explores the vast range of human thinking about the difficult subject of Time. It begins with attempts to put this concept on a scientific or objective basis but concludes with human psychology, in particular, the critical facility of human memory. The overall framework is to adopt a philosophical view, as this is how most thinkers have approached the problem of the nature of Time. There is also discussion of the history of ideas of Time across several civilizations and includes a critical analysis of how modern physics views Time, which is not as comprehensive as many think. The conclusion is that Time is all about Activity and that’s the secret of living: doing, the quality actions in life, especially building relationships; substituting numerical views of life (or Time) is a complete waste of time.
OBJECTIVE VIEWS DEFINITION
Webster’s Dictionary recognizes that this key concept in human thinking is used in three different but closely related (extended) ways: they are A) Duration B) Moment B) Period.
A) Duration: This is the primary entry defined as the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in (apparently) irreversible succession from the Past, through the Present to the Future. It has long been viewed as a Quantity. So it was believed it can be analyzed with mathematics. When Time is assumed to be a scalar quantity, it can be associated with either one number (like a line’s length). An alternative is to reference it with two numbers (its start and end times); but this implies certain units. The entire period of the existence of the entire universe may be imagined; either it is finite or forever (called Eternity). The implication is that this sense includes every moment there has ever been or ever will be. The word ‘existence’ is just Latin for “standing out” (not very helpful for a basic idea).
B) Moment (or Instant): A finite, usually short period of minimal extent, which can be thought about; the temporal equivalent of the spatial point, categorized (classically) as an object, so it has no value. Unfortunately, the ancient thinkers (including many of the Great Greeks, such as Plato and Aristotle) have smuggled in their religious concept of the infinite into the basic ideas of space and time, so this ‘endless’ concept now defines an instant of time as an infinitesimal moment in time; a moment whose passage is defined (but not experienced) as ‘instantaneous’ (see later).
C) Period: The interval between two events (or during) which something exists, happens or acts. The first sense here links into our idea of an existent (in reality), the third involves our idea of process with the second implying a transition. N.B. Note the interplay of meanings here between these ‘different’ words, referring to each other.
PHILOSOPHY Professional philosophers often view their own major activity as “thinking about thinking”. This implies that if this activity is to become communicated between others (even for thoughts that may arise as subjective intuitions) then they must be ‘externalized’ in the form of language. Thus, if we are to view philosophy as the social activity of creating networks of shared concepts to understand reality, then we can all see that TIME is one of the fundamental aspects of reality, i.e. a foundational concept. Such concepts: like space, objects (things), relationships, quantity, property, etc. have been grouped together in the history of western philosophy as Metaphysics, in honor of Aristotle who first wrote on these topics in one of his earliest books, which deals with first principles and seeks to explain the nature of reality (a specialty called ontology), the techniques by which humans acquire knowledge of reality, (another specialty called epistemology) and the investigations into the origin and structure of the universe (cosmology). This latter has now migrated into the scientific realm but most of those older questions that are too difficult to be answered by the scientific method, so they remain metaphysical. Indeed, the progress of science still rely on speculative thinking. Philosophy has also retained the study of morality and aesthetics while the ancient subject of logic has already migrated into a specialty of mathematics, whereas the systematic investigation of the material aspects of reality, first called Natural Philosophy, renamed itself about one hundred years ago as the profession of physics. Speculations about the mental activities of humans (sometimes called MIND) have also evolved into the specialty called psychology. As I will show in a series of related essays, our ideas of TIME still play a major role in several of these areas. Much speculative thought has compounded Time with all of Space into some super-concept, like the whole universe or cosmos. Greek philosophy obsessed about existence or being. This was not a good idea because it ties back into almost every other idea one can imagine, resulting in a tangled web too difficult to analyze (especially with thing or object-based thinking) but this was understandable since the verb ‘to be’ (or exist) is basic in most languages. A traditional, so-called ‘realist’ position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. ‘Idealists’ (usually intellectuals who build their worldmodels around their own minds) by contrast, deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of the mind (or at least, mind-stuff). Some ‘anti-realists’, (rejecting a binary classification scheme) whose ontological position is that objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space. This type of argumentation illustrates the problems of beginning one’s thinking at this level, while operating on a purely verbal level. Uneducated people make much progress here by adopting a common-sense position that they do exist and so do all the other distinct, localized stable things. When separating such objects from abstractions, ordinary people can manage very effectively; a position we call “simple-realism”. Two distinct viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, sometimes called a ‘dimension’ in which events occur serially. The image here is that of an abstract plane that cuts across all the spatial dimensions, creating a universal time. Dimension is the modern term for the idea that Time acts like a container for all of space at one instant.
An opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of actually existing dimension that events and objects ‘move through’, nor to any entity that ‘flows’, but that it is instead only an intellectual concept (together with space and number) that enables humans to sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Leibniz and Kant, holds that space and time do not exist in and of themselves, but ... are the product of the way we represent things, because we can know about objects only as they appear to us via our senses and how we discuss them with each other. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his hugely influential Critique of Pure Reason (1781), described time as an a priori intuition that allows us (together with the other a priori intuition, space) to comprehend sense experience. With Kant, neither space nor time are conceived as substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic mental framework that necessarily structures the experiences of any rational agent or observing subject. Kant thought of time as a fundamental part of an abstract conceptual framework, together with space and number, within which we sequence events, quantify their duration and compare the motions of objects. Spatial measurements are used to quantify their size of and distances between objects while temporal measurements are used to quantify the durations of and between events. Time was designated by Kant as the purest possible schema of a pure concept or category. Unfortunately, Kant’s thinking was bound up with the limited view of geometry in western cultures. Until the 19th century, we all believed there was only one possible form of geometry, based on ‘flat’ spaces that we call Euclidean. So, Kant appealed to our intuitions about objects constructed in this flat space as preexisting in all human minds (Eurocentric arrogance), thus these were thought to be without empirical experience or ‘a priori’ in his terminology. This illustrates the dangers of trying to develop timeless thoughts from a historical (time-based) context. Still, a huge advance over ‘substance’ type thinking. According to modern German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in his seminal “Being and Time” (1927) we do not exist inside time, we are time. Hence, the relationship to the past is a present awareness of having been, which allows the past to “exist” in the present. This special form of the verb “to be” (or ‘to exist’) allows Heidegger to smuggle in the implications of immortality. The relationship to the future is the state of anticipating a potential possibility, task, or engagement. It is related to the necessary human propensity for caring and being concerned, which causes “being ahead of oneself” when thinking of a pending occurrence. Therefore, this concern for a potential occurrence also allows the future to ‘exist’ (in our minds) in the present. The present becomes an experience, which is truly qualitative instead of quantitative. Heidegger seems to think this is the way that a linear relationship with time, or temporal existence, is broken or transcended. We are not stuck in sequential time. We are able to remember the past and project into the future—we have a kind of random access to our representation of temporal existence; we can, in our thoughts, step out of sequential time (ecstasis).
OLD THINKING ABOUT TIME (Substance)
I have recently come to the intuitive realization that our style of thinking is being badly served by the primitive level of language developed by the thinkers of Ancient Greece, especially Plato, who set the stage for many later philosophers, like Aristotle, Locke, Descartes and Spinoza amongst many others, in a tradition that protects (even reveres) and reacts to many earlier contributors. Their language use seems to have evolved from assigning unique names to people to inventing words for Things (“objects that separately exist in reality”) to inventing words for ‘Similar Things’ (a linguistic construct we now call concepts). One of the major mistakes made in this activity was to look for foundational features that all physical examples in reality must share; thus arose their critical idea of Substance. Relinquishing this old viewpoint will be difficult for philosophers too locked into their education.
The key idea of substance resulted (I believe) from the Greeks observing the ‘magic’ being performed daily in their kitchens by people who were designated as experts in food preparation. One of the obvious questions they could readily answer was: “What makes soup salty?”. They knew that by adding the special ‘stuff’ called salt, which had the special property (or attribute) of “saltiness” then significant changes could be effected. Thus, began the 2000 year long research program for identifying all the special types of substance that defined reality. This developed from the intellectual processes of abstraction and generalizations. Even living animals could be analyzed (separated into parts) by inventing invisible substances that were the essence of life. Thus, adding this special substance (called “soul”) to ‘dead’ matter would produce life; conversely removing this substance (by deliberate act of murder or simply getting old) would cause the living to die. The fact that this wonderful substance could not be given material form only added to its allure and mystery. This focus on the unchanging led to the abstraction called SUBSTANCE, so every thing experienced by humans had to assigned into its own special substance (or combinations thereof). This method of Analysis, with its key idea of substance, became a central technique in the “Tool-Box” of philosophers. Ultimately, it was taken up by Natural Philosophers, especially as smart mathematicians rediscovered analysis with the invention of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Unfortunately, intellectuals are very reluctant to change their mental Tool-Boxes when they have invested much of their lives mastering the esoteric features of their profession’s “tools”. Originally, the distinction between substance and attribute was taken literally reflecting different ontological levels but around 1600 this evolved just into a linguistic distinction. Although intellectuals may invoke the rationality of Analysis, most people readily react to real objects in a holistic way. Even our animal perceptual senses seem to operate in an integrated modal manner, mutually confirming the existence of real objects whenever doubts arise that question a single sense (e.g. visual illusions). This linguistic method is reflected in our simple sentence structures of ‘subject-predicate’, where the predicate usually includes ‘linking’ verbs, especially the core verb “to have”; often leading to a static (timeless) spatially structured arrangements of existence of (the key verb “to be”) its parts. This method of Analysis has been adopted wholesale by modern science; it has now been able to identify 92 basic “elements” (or unique atoms of material existence), chemistry has then found several thousand unique, small combinations of these, called ‘molecules’ (many of them stable) and now molecular-biologists have identified several hundred thousand more gigantic combinations of atoms called ‘proteins’. The problem has arisen that we know what these things are but they are too complicated for us to know what they do. This style of thinking was so common that the Old Greeks even had a word for it: “hypostatization”, which Webster defines as “thinking of a concept or abstraction as having real, objective existence.” In my view, this was Plato’s greatest mistake that has cursed both philosophy and mathematics ever since, leading to his notorious doctrine of ‘Forms’ (the original Greek was simply the word idea) and then the reification (the Latin word) of Numbers etc. However, Plato was logically falling into his own trap of Substance-thinking, leading to the perpetual philosophical problem of the reality of universals. Thus, Plato believed that all red things contained the substance ‘redness’, which then made them ‘red’. Modern thinking (at least since the 17th century) has progressed little by viewing ideas as the (substance) contents of one or more minds, now limited to private subjective awareness until externalized in language (sometimes, just to ourselves in ‘silent’ thinking). We now know that even such ‘universals’ as color are culturally determined and taught to new members of their cultural group. It is no surprise to find that quite a few thinkers have committed the ‘crime’ of hypostatization of Time. The cure here is to ask for several examples of a concept to justify its claim to being real: all real examples readily offer up multiple examples to prove their ‘real’ claim but without memory none of us can invoke examples of time.
UNREAL TIME Verbalists over many years have constructed bizarre schemes to view time as only an illusion. Time as an illusion is also a common theme in Buddhist thought. Modern physicists generally believe that time is as real as space—though Julian Barbour in his book The End of Time, argues that quantum equations of the universe take their real form when described in the timeless realm containing every momentary configuration of the universe, called ‘Platonia’ by Barbour. A modern philosophical theory, called ‘Presentism’ views the past and the future as human-mind interpretations of movement instead of real parts of time (or “dimensions”) which coexist with the present. This imaginative theory rejects the existence of all direct interaction with the past or the future, holding only the present as tangible. A fashionable theory is the ‘Growing Block Universe’ invented by C. D. Broad (the present and the past are real, but the future is not); this is the ultimate form of spatialization.
BERGSON The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) also took the radical view that only personal (subjective) duration was real while objective (‘external’) time was an illusion. The benefit of this view is that it defeats the mathematical construction of time dividable into any number of shorter durations, even down to an infinity of “moments of time” (‘instants’ with zero extent): this idea of infinitesimals [see my review/essay] is the actual starting point for Newtonian physics (and calculus). Bergson’s intuition grew from his observation that we experience our lives, finite durations at a time; never instants (like we listen to music, where the notes blend readily together). In fact, the analogy is strong because a melody slowed down to where we can hear the distinct notes (or chords) loses its magic as music. As Bergson was born when “The Origin of Species” was published, he invented his own solution (‘Élan Vital’: vital spirit, which could not be reduced to physics) to the variety of life that avoided Darwin’s reliance on Extended-Time. Bergson was falling into the ancient philosophical trap of “substance” thinking (see above) so it was only time, as a substance that he was dismissing. Bergson did believe (as I do) that our idea of time is tied closely to human creativity and our memory.
McTAGGART
John McTaggart (1866-1925) also proposed the view that “time is unreal” – even though he and Bergson were contemporaries, it does not seem that either was aware of the other’s ideas; perhaps illustrating the academic divide at that time, between France (Paris) and England (Cambridge). The huge role of mathematics (“the Queen of the Sciences”) at Cambridge seems to have influenced the idealist McTaggart, who built his theories around the notions of time series: the ‘A’ series based on concepts of “past, present, future”, while his ‘B’ series based on the sharper relational concepts of “precede, follow, simultaneous”. He ‘proved’ that these two series were entwined but inconsistent, so he logically dismissed the whole concept of time; he certainly was right to reject the substance style of thinking and dismiss the idea that the series ‘A’ concepts, as they are not qualities (or properties) of “substances” such as objects or events: but he does not seem to have convinced too many readers. Later philosophers have pointed out that McTaggart was assuming that the ‘present’ was “flowing” from the past into the future; an idea reflected in many of our oldest metaphors.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
Joseph Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) was a classic example of that British eccentric known as the gifted amateur. He is best known as an English novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, social commentator, and broadcaster. Although he attended some philosophy lectures while an undergraduate at Cambridge (even attending some McTaggart lectures) he kept a lifelong interest in Time; in fact, his book “Man and Time” (1964) provided a valuable overview for this essay.
We can see from this review that philosophers casually refer to abstractions as if they were simple things like stones, etc. because they are used linguistically like any other noun. They then try simple classification schemes, like singular properties (like colors) to create trivial hierarchies, so they can get quick answers to such questions, like: “Is a dog an animal?” This approach has provided little insight in thousands of years of analyzing complex objects or situations. For example, too many philosophers have treated events as simple ideas (e.g. check Wiki for the past , the present , the future) or to suggest that the Past is a common set of events for all living humans (i.e. History), when their occurrence, awareness, significance vary enormously across many individuals. This is how ‘objectification’ trivializes reality; really important viewpoints are usually ‘subjective’ – even if difficult to discuss.
TIME IN MATHEMATICS Pythagoras was the leader of a religious cult around 500BC, who exaggerated his intuition that harp strings of certain lengths sounded harmonious, into a deep belief that the world was simply numbers. This bizarre claim was reinforced by the famous theorem about right-angled triangles (which was actually known hundreds of years earlier by the Egyptians and Babylonians). Meanwhile, these “Old Greeks” were investigating the properties of space (actually idealized definitions) in what became known as geometry: the model for all ‘rational’ thinking. This timeless subject was much easier than the difficult problem of studying time. These timeless obsessions have been accepted by all subsequent mathematicians, who spend years learning their unchanging specialization.
TIME SEEN AS SPACE Time is often referred to as the fourth dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions (often abbreviated as 3D and mapped into triplets of numbers). Although Time is regarded as an abstract concept, there is increasing evidence that time is often conceptualized in the mind in terms of space. This not surprising as we now know that the majority of most normal animal brains are dedicated to visual processing from the eyeballs all the way to the visual cortex at the back of our head; additionally, we seem to rely primarily on our visual sense for understanding external reality. Furthermore, no organ (or region) has been discovered to act as a mental ‘clock’. So, instead of humans thinking about time in a general, abstract way, we think about time in an analogous, spatial way and we mentally organize it as such. Using space to think about time allows many humans to mentally organize temporal events in a specific way. This spatial representation of time is often represented in the mind as a Mental Time Line (MTL). Using space to think about time allows humans to mentally organize temporal order (series). These origins are shaped by many environmental factors––frequently, literacy appears to play a large role in the different types of MTLs, as reading/writing direction provides an everyday temporal orientation that differs from culture to culture. In western cultures, the MTL may unfold rightward (with the past on the left and the future on the right) since people read and write from left to right. Western calendars also continue this trend by placing the past on the left with the future progressing toward the right. Conversely, Hebrew speakers read from right to left and their MTLs unfold leftward (past on the right with future on the left), and evidence suggests these speakers organize time events in their minds like this as well. This linguistic evidence that abstract concepts are based on spatial metaphors owes much to the brilliant semanticist, George Lakoff. Anthropologists have shown that temporal concepts also reveals that the way humans mentally organize time events varies across cultures––that is, a certain specific mental organization system is not universal. So, although Western cultures typically associate past events with the left and future events with the right according to a certain MTL, this kind of horizontal, egocentric MTL is not the spatial organization of all cultures. Although most developed nations use an egocentric spatial system, there is recent evidence that some cultures use quite different spatialization, often based on environmental features.
A recent study of the indigenous Yupno people of Papua New Guinea focused on the directional gestures used when individuals used time-related words. When speaking of the past (such as “last year” or “past times”), individuals gestured downhill, where the river of their valley flowed into the ocean. When speaking of the future, they gestured uphill, toward the source of the river. This was common regardless of which direction the person faced, revealing that the Yupno people may use a tribal MTL, in which time flows uphill. A similar study of the Pormpuraawans, an aboriginal tribe in Western Australia, revealed a similar distinction in which when asked to organize photos of a man aging “in order”, individuals consistently placed the youngest photos to the east and the oldest photos to the west, regardless of which direction they faced. This directly clashed with an American group which consistently organized the photos from left to right. Therefore, this group also appears to have a tribal MTL, but based on the cardinal directions instead of geographical features. The wide array of distinctions in the way different groups think about time leads to the broader question that different groups may also think about other abstract concepts in different ways as well, such as number and causality. Here is a simple example to illustrate why time is not a dimension, like space. Two lengths may be multiplied together to form an area of any size from square centimeters to vast acreages. No one has ever succeeded in multiplying two time durations together, say one week multiplied by one month. Also, we can readily travel (easiest horizontally) from any point in space (say, in London) to another (say, Manchester), even going on a unique path back to our origin (say, via York); no one has ever completed a comparable journey in time: even a two-point trip into the future and back. These limitations suggest we are dealing with intrinsic differences, not just verbal distinctions.
UNITS OF TIME All attempts to apply number concepts to reality soon exhibit that Nature provides no natural units of measure. Even Descartes’ invention of ‘real’ numbers did not help – so all units are based on agreed procedures, that ultimately are quite arbitrary, such as the meter (intended to be a fraction of the Earth’s circumference), the unit of mass is the gram based one cubic centimeter of ‘pure’ water under specific conditions of temperature and pressure. The unit of time (the second) was once an agreed fraction (1/86,400) of one rotation of the Earth. This was not accurate enough for atomic physics, who picked the regular decay pattern of caesium atoms to define the smallest unit (see later). None-the-less, all measurements are subject to inherent variations (errors).
TIME IN PHYSICS In order to measure time, one reverts to simple counting to record the number of occurrences (events) of some periodic phenomenon but this simply exposes the arbitrary units we use for nature: a different unit and a very different number will result. No insights are gained from such numbers. There are many cyclic or periodic phenomena in nature. The regular recurrences of the seasons, the motions of the sun, moon and stars were observed and tabulated for millennia, before the ‘Laws of Physics’ were ever formulated. In particular, the astronomical observatories maintained for religious purposes became accurate enough to ascertain the regular motions of the stars and even some of the planets. It is often forgotten that the ancient astronomer Ptolemy (c. 100 AD) invented an incredibly accurate planetary forecasting model, using imaginary circles on circles (epicycles), that was even superior to Newton’s scientific gravity model that was confronted by the mathematical difficulties of ellipses. At first, timekeeping was done by hand by priests, and then for commerce, with watchmen to note time as part of their duties. For the tabulation of the equinoxes, the sandglass and the water clock became more and more accurate, and finally reliable.
Although J. B. Priestley devotes a whole chapter summarizing his discussions with eminent British scientists (most of them physicists), it should never be forgotten that everyone (not just scientists) has direct experience of time and this personal experience implies that each one of us does not have to forgo their own views in respect of the opinions of professional education of theorists (scientists) and practical men (such as engineers). Ironically, as a physicist myself, it appears that Priestley too readily succumbs to the usual orthodoxies of science, such as veneration for Einstein’s theories of Relativity.
NEWTON Since physics was the first metrical science where its theoretical calculations of numbers are compared with numbers generated by direct measurements of reality, it is not surprising to discover that physics views time operationally i.e. as numbers a ‘clock’ shows. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and Quantities. As such, Time is used to define other quantities—such as velocity: a key concept in Newton’s revolutionary invention of the concept of momentum; the heart of all classical physics. The others (space and mass) equally remain mysterious. Both the Italian polymath Galileo (1564-1642) and the English mathematician Isaac Newton (1642-1726), as well as most people up until the 20th century, thought that time was the same for everyone everywhere. This is the basis for our idea of timelines, where time is an index. As a Natural Philosopher, with a secret obsession with theology, Newton recognized the importance of Time to his theories, so he offered his own definition, on the fifth page of his famous 1687 masterpiece (“Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”): “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration.” He had to introduce his own definition to distinguish his needed mathematical features from ‘vulgar’ time of common folk and the known variations observed by astronomers. This was needed for his own new theory of motion, or ‘kinematics’ as medieval scholars called it. It is not a coincidence that this evoked the metaphor of flowing water as water-clocks were still the most accurate time devices in his time. The key feature of this old substance view of time was that it was infinitely dividable into vanishingly small equal units (‘infinitesimals’). His ideas of Time and Space derived directly from Newton’s God, who created the World and left. Although many interpreted Newton’s Laws as mathematical descriptions of the “World as Machine”, (relying on the newest technology that was impressing Europeans at the time), the real impact of his gravitational theory was to demonstrate that the ‘stuff’ of the Heavens was the same as our Earthly matter. It was these two radical ideas that helped destroy the millennial hold of the Catholic Church on the minds of educated European men. The evolution of Newton’s theories became the basis of 200 years of what is now referred to as “Classical Physics”: ideas readily understood by most people, including men with engineering talents, responsible for the English industrial revolution. The irony here is that while Newton was fascinated by assigning numbers to natural phenomena (such as motion), very smart mathematicians, such as LaGrange soon replaced Newton’s time-based approach with his own spatially-oriented concept of potential energy as a structural source of dynamic change. Physics has been hiding in this spatial resurrection ever since, with very little new insight into Time itself.
EINSTEIN Few realize that Albert Einstein (1879-1956) was motivated to save the mathematics of the theory of light invented by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), whose physics was grounded in the ancient Greek view of the æther that was shown to not fit the experimental facts. Maxwell introduced the ‘smooth’ mathematics, now known as Field Theory, that has become the orthodox technique across modern physics. Einstein created his (Special) Relativity Theory in 1905 by assuming the fact that light always travelled at the same speed; ironically, the famous Michelson experiment that destroyed Maxwell. This quickly produced a simple set of equations, earlier developed by Lorentz (amongst several others), with
the implication that all measured intervals of space and time were dependent on the relative speed of the observers (thus, contradicting Newton). Fortunately, for most of us, these effects only become measurable at very high speeds. Some physicists interpret these mathematical results as implying that rates of time run differently in different situations, but I do not: I agree with Prince de Broglie’s grand idea of electrons possessing a standard ‘clock’. At the very least, Einstein’s work has been adopted by most physicists, so that their ideas of space and time have merged into a common substance called space-time, where we live on a 4D world-line rather than a 1D timeline in 3D space. Unlike Newton’s ideas of space and time, Einstein’s have never gripped the public mind but the common assumption of a single universal time spanning all space (simultaneity) has had to go. Even Einstein finally admitted that only “local” time (at each electron) has any universal significance. In 1916, eleven years after his “Special Theory of Relativity” (no accelerations, so no forces, so no physics), Einstein tried to replace Newton’s theory of gravitation with a Maxwellian-style field theory (called the “General Theory of Relativity”); this too impacted our ideas of Time being effected by nearby large quantities of matter. Embarrassingly, this new theory has remained an anomaly and some thousands of theorists have spent years trying to remove the contradictions (euphemistically ‘unify’) this theory with the other great idea of modern physics: quantum theory, both needed after the discovery of a real challenge: the electron.
THE ELECTRON Twentieth Century physics literally began with two experiments, whose significance were not fully appreciated at the time; the first was the ‘discovery’ of the electron by J. J. Thomson (1856-1940) in 1897, the second occurred 3 years later when Max Planck (1858-1947) made his mathematical guess of a formula for the discrete exchange of energy in material cavities, heated to high temperatures (called “Black-Body Radiation”). Now, we know that this quantized exchange of energy was another example of remote interactions between electrons. These were soon discovered to be the source of all electricity and the dynamic parts of all atoms. Still under the spell of Descartes, some physicists wanted to know what shape and size of these newly discovered fundamental particles. Even these particles can excite each other at great space and time separations via a finite quantity of electric charge and resist such change in motion with their finite mass; these foundational quantities of reality are very tiny but not vanishingly small, as required by Classical Physics. Mysteriously, no experiment has ever found a finite size to electrons; they behave in all circumstances just like a mathematical point. A further mystery is generated by our best theory of electrons, known as Quantum Field Theory, whereby electrons and their ‘anti-particle’ (the positively charged electron) can mutually annihilate one another disappearing in a burst of electromagnetic radiation. The electron exhibits the mysterious ability to behave as both a particle and as a wave; a definitional paradox, as the particle concept is centered on the property of existing at any moment at only one point in space while all real waves are spread out over extended regions of space at every moment. Strongly influenced by the Viennese Positivists, Heisenberg, rhetorically dismissed the particulate electron “as humans cannot observe this object at all times”; he also obsessed that an electron cannot have its location measured and its speed (actually Newton’s momentum) together, better than a small, but finite ‘error’, related to Planck’s quantum of action. Unfortunately, all these conclusions were weakened by noticing that all of this theory was only mathematical (and statistical) that resisted all attempts at realistic local interpretations. Classical physics failed to respect the fact that Newton’s definition of instantaneous velocity and its extension to momentum could never be measured in a manner consistent with Newton’s intention, as humans cannot observe two instants in time with zero temporal (or spatial) separation. This fundamental flaw was automatically included when quantum mechanics evolved directly out of classical particle mechanics; never worrying the majority of theoretical physicists.
This did not bother some physicists who, were quite happy to only view the electron existing as a wave, until it hit at only one point on a target detector. However, they were delighted that their wave imagery could “explain” the bizarre ‘interference’ effects of an electron passing through a screen with close “Twin Slits”. It is an embarrassment (to all but mathematicians) that physics cannot create a coherent ‘picture’ of the micro-world of atoms and electrons. It must be pointed out that quantum theory only makes its predictions about long-term averages; a not very satisfactory situation: it would be like biographers only being able to say that, in the long-term, “all their subjects are dead”. Western logic has long been based on the exclusive usage of either/or choices whereas Eastern cultures have more focused on the broader implications of “and”. All of these findings of quantum theory have also threatened the traditional western view of causality. Some have concluded that major revisions in the philosophical assumptions underlying physics are needed; the present author agrees and sees that revising our ideas around Time will be necessary. We moderns like to view the medieval scholars as wasting their time speculating on ‘how many angels might dance on a pinhead’ but now we simply see our ‘angels’ as electrons. It is fortunate for modern physics that its embarrassments have remained hidden behind advanced mathematics. Richard Feynman (1918-1991) shocked his contemporaries when he proposed that the electron’s “anti-particle” (positively charged electron) could be viewed as a regular electron travelling backwards through time, from the future, but this bizarre imagery has been around long enough that the cognoscenti have learned to accept it. Even so, physicists are still human enough to prefer their normal effects on the present to arise only from the past. We will return to this preference later when we view time from a subjective perspective.
TIME ASYMMETRY Physicists have taken the mathematical view of time, where both ‘directions’ are equally possible; this is reflected in their “Laws of Physics” but does not accord with human intuition. In fact, we also believe that only past events seem to influence current events (the ‘present’). But this is as much to do with the fact that our memory only grows forward in time and our lack of direct senses to detect the future. They ‘explain’ the apparent irreversible facts of material reality by appealing to that statistical improbability of “closed” systems moving from situations of more disorder (more ‘likely’) to ones of less disorder (less ‘likely’). This is sometimes referred to as “increasing entropy” and made unchallengeable by calling this the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. Hidden here are many assumptions about the role of causality in physics; a necessity for using calculus in physics.
MEASURING TIME In their never ending quest to reduce the world to numbers (“the metrical bias”), some ‘hard-headed’ physicists retreated from the vague verbal world of philosophy into their laboratory, where they could devise repeatable experiments (hence “objective”) to ‘prove’ the existence of disputable entities. This might convince many but some experiments cost billions (e.g. at CERN) so even repeatability becomes problematical. Thus, an operational view of Time itself, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, might be highly useful in the conduct of some advanced experiments but not in everyday affairs of life (few are going to carry a caesium atomic clock with them to produce an exact number for their business meetings.) The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is some entity (or even substance) called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. One needs an agreed intuition before we can simply apply the ‘Duck Test’ (if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck then we must have some kind of duck). Just because some psychologists inflict IQ tests on children, does not prove the existence of a substance called ‘intelligence’.
TECHNOLOGY OF TIME KEEPING Temporal measurement has pre-occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in early navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic frequency of caesium atoms (see Atomic Clock below). Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value (as per “time is money”), as well as variable personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.
History of Time Measurement Devices Generally speaking, methods of temporal measurement (chronometry), take two distinct forms: the calendar, a mathematical tool for organizing intervals of time and the clock, a physical mechanism that counts the passage of time. In daily life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day whereas the calendar is usually consulted for periods longer than a day. Increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously. The number (as on a clock dial or calendar) that marks the occurrence of a specified event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from a central reference point. A large variety of devices has been invented to measure time. The study of these devices is sometimes called ‘horology’. An Egyptian device that dates to c.1500 BC, similar in shape to a bent T-square, measured the passage of time from the shadow cast by its crossbar on a nonlinear rule. The T was oriented eastward in the mornings. At noon, the device was turned around so that it could cast its shadow in the evening direction. A sundial uses a projection to cast a shadow on a set of markings calibrated to the hour. The idea to separate the day into smaller parts is credited to Egyptians because of their sundials, which operated on a duodecimal system. The importance of the number 12 is due the number of lunar cycles in a year and the number of stars used to count the passage of night. The most precise timekeeping device in ancient times was the water-clock, (or ‘clepsydra’) one of which was found in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I (c. 1500 BC). They could be used to measure the hours even at night, but required manual upkeep to replenish the flow of water. Both the Ancient Greeks (12th through 6th centuries BC) and the people from southeastern Mesopotamia regularly maintained timekeeping records as an essential part of their astronomical observations. Arab inventors and engineers, in particular, made improvements on the use of water clocks up to the Middle Ages. In the 11th century, some Chinese engineers invented the first mechanical clocks driven by an escapement mechanism. The hour-glass uses the regular flow of sand to measure the flow of time. They were used in maritime navigation. Magellan used 18 glasses on each ship for his first circumnavigation of the globe (1522). Water-clocks, and later, mechanical clocks, were used to mark the events of the abbeys and monasteries of the Middle Ages. Great advances in accurate time-keeping were made by Galileo (1629-1642) and especially Dutch scientist, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), who invented pendulum driven clocks. The English word ‘clock’ probably comes from the Middle Dutch word klocke relating to words for ‘bell’. The hours were long marked by bells in abbeys as well as at sea. Clocks can range from portable personal watches, to large ones erected in public places, like ‘Big Ben’ in London. They can be driven by a variety of means, including gravity, springs and various forms of electrical power while being regulated by a variety of means such as a pendulum. A chronometer is a portable timekeeper that meets certain precision standards; a precision first achieved in 1735 by John Harrison, claiming an English government prize.
The most accurate timekeeping devices are Atomic Clocks, which are accurate to seconds in many millions of years and are used to calibrate other clocks and timekeeping instruments. Atomic clocks use the frequency of transitions in certain atoms (like caesium) to measure the second. This defines the second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation that corresponds to the transition between two electron spin energy levels of the ground state of the 133Cs atom. Today, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is used to synchronize timekeeping systems across the globe.
TIME IN HISTORY As we might expect, temporal ideas vary with great civilizations reflecting the different paths and obsessions exhibited by different human groups.
HINDUS
The Vedas, the earliest texts in Hindu philosophy dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC in India, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the whole universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction and rebirth, with the latest cycle (or epoch) lasting 4,320 thousand years for a total of (perhaps) 4,320 million years in separate and parallel realities. Current physicists have reinvented this imagery and have called this the ‘Multiverse’. Carl Sagan (in Cosmos) commented on this scheme: “The Hindu dharma is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only dharma in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”
EGYPTIANS The Ancient Egyptians were well aware of the passage of time, due to the annual flooding of the Nile, that determined their annual harvest cycle. None-the-less, as a culture the Egyptians valued No-Change, successfully resisting societal changes for almost 3,000 years, while building massive memorials to remind themselves of the deaths of their rulers and belief in personal immortality. This was a culture that had not abstracted the concept of Time from the experience of living but was well aware of the seasons of life and the universality of personal death (or ‘passing’ to use the modern euphemism.)
GREEKS The Greek language denotes two mythological views of time: the first, Chronos is the personification of time in pre-Socratic poetry (often portrayed as an Old Man); he controls literal (sequential) Time, whereas his complement, Kairos was used for indicating the right moment for an event to occur. Like several great civilizations, such as the Mayas, the Greeks had a cyclic view of time – admittedly a very large period but this vision deeply impacted their world-view, in contrast to others (like Israel) that followed a linear one, implying primitivism in the past and progress in the future. Cyclic civilizations, like that of individuals, were seen to be a giant circle not a simple straight road. Even if cataclysms were to occur and destroy a civilization, then Time would restore it again (eventually). This belief in recurrence led to an optimistic view of life (and eliminated the need for personal immortality). This cyclic view of time was in marked contrast to the radical thoughts of some famous intellectuals, such as Parmenides in denying all change: our impressions were simply illusions, hiding one single and indivisible “Being”. A famous follower of Parmenides was Zeno, who (building on the sly assumption of infinite divisibility) created paradoxes, where fast runners, like Achilles, could never over-take a much slower tortoise when the slower mover had a finite head-start; similarly clocks should never track one day of our lives.
It is not surprising that the principal Greek philosopher of Eternity, Plato rejected the suggestion that time was an illusion but accepted it as ‘the moving image of eternity’, while he identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies. In a dynamic binary model, he just classified ‘Being’ as a defining feature of eternity, while ‘Becoming’ was a characteristic of the Natural World. He claimed that what is revealed to human senses is a limited representation (a ‘poor drawing’) of an unchanging eternal master example (his “Forms”). He saw the ordered regularity of Time that makes it possible for us to accept these as images of Eternity. Thus, Time itself coming into its own existence along with the whole Universe, is reducing chaos to order, making the motion of the universe harmonious and intelligible, transforming Becoming closer to pure Being. Our temporal world is a balance between the ultimate pure Being and unimportant multiple Becomings. At the very least, Plato believed that Time was a completely different substance from Space. Like the Jewish Bible, Plato believed that space preexisted before Time. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, disagreed with his teacher but fell into the trap of ‘Substance’ thinking; asking what is Time made of? How was it created? He was certainly confused on its variable features: Time certainly seemed to contain the Past, which is once was, and now is not, while the Future is going to be, but is not yet existing. This style illustrates the difficulty of fitting change into a verbal structure built of timeless concepts. Again, analytic thinking has problems seeing some thing larger than itself when it is composed of identical parts: If all we know is Now, then how many Nows does it take to make up lifetime or even a Day. This illustrates the need to expand language to do a much better job with the foundational concept of Relationships, so that Now becomes a relationship between our unique pasts and our unique futures; ‘Universal’ concepts can lead to logical conflicts. Later, in book IV of his “Physica” (or ‘Lectures on Nature’), Aristotle simply defined time as the “number of moments in respect of the before and after”: ironically, a mathematical ‘cop-out’, by Biology’s Father. Later, the subsequent schools of Epicureans and Stoics pretty well disagreed on most things but did agree in their views on Time as the turning of the Great Wheel of the Universe but the Atomists strongly denied that it could be infinitely divisible as all division must conclude at the undividable atom. Some Stoics, still believers in the Continuum, saw the present as a blend of both past and future. This view readily evolved into seeing Time as an Absolute, inner flow unrelated to anything external. One leading Stoic claimed that day and night, a month a year are NOT Time nor even parts of Time but light and dark: the revolutions of the sun and the moon; but Time is “the container of all of these”. The fact that these verbal statements have become detached from experience does not seem to bother these ‘Masters of the Verbal Analysis’.
ROMANS It took a Roman (the Masters of Common-sense), Lucretius – the Poet of Atomism, whose masterpiece was rediscovered late in the Middle-Ages (see “The Swerve” by Greenblatt) and brought the dangerous (atheistic) idea of atomism to a genius who could exploit it – Isaac Newton. Lucretius simply thought of Time as “what happens”. The fact was that the old idea of Cyclic Time was running out of psychic power by the mid-Imperial stage of the Roman civilization probably helps explain the ‘sales power’ of Christianity with its promise of personal immortality. It is ironic that (unchanging) Great Ideas are subject to the ravages of Time (and fashion).
MAYANS The Mayans were another civilization where their priesthood obsessed on the nightly sky and its logical complement: Time. Although they appeared not to have invented any mathematics, they did create a hugely complicated and large calendar. Their calendar combined a 260-day religious year with a 365 solar year to give a basic period of 52 years. There are some indications that one of their (theoretical) events began over 400 million years ago but modern calculations indicated that their current ‘LongCount’ began about 3114 BC. Some modern astronomers have correlated Mayan cycles with that of the Solar system (about 24,000 years). One cycle ended in 2012 and freaked-out many people.
TIME IN RELIGION Most religions have developed some of their basic ideas around Time, or at least, birth and death. Here, because of the western tradition, only classic Christianity will be reviewed. The two major Christian thinkers about Time were St. Paul and Augustine.
ST. PAUL Saul of Tarsus, was a Jewish intellectual (Pharisee), who switched from persecuting early Christians to becoming one of their most important proselytizers, writing 14 of the 27 books of the New Testament. Paul (to use his Romanized name) obsessed on the death of the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth and his resurrection: one universal act while the other was an attractive novelty in the eyes of most men and a very attractive promise to any new believer; this was an irresistible offer when combined with the prediction of the early end of Time. The rejection of myths would later come back to haunt modern Christianity when it began to be subjected to scientific investigations, such as archeology.
AUGUSTINE Augustine (c. 400 AD) was a Christian bishop in the Roman city of Hippo in Algeria, North Africa. He has long been considered one of the leading rhetoricians and theologians of the late Roman Imperial era. His two most important books are “Confessions” and “The City of God”. As a philosopher, he was responsible for merging Plato’s atheistic ramblings with Christian theology into a blend called NeoPlatonism that has even lasted until today. Unfortunately, he invented the concept of eternal damnation for mortal sin. His writing influenced later theologians, such as Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, who also contributed to the guilty views of this influential religion. In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning, medieval theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning. This view is shared by Abrahamic faiths as they believe time started by creation, therefore the only thing being infinite is God and everything else, including time, is finite. Catholic theologians generally subscribe to Augustine's belief that God exists “outside of time in the eternal present”; that Time only exists within the created universe because only in space is time discernible through motion and change. His meditations on the nature of time are closely linked to his consideration of the human psychology of memory. Modern thinkers about Time, such as Husserl and Heidegger, were much impressed with Augustine’s writing on this subject, which was sophisticated enough to be grounded in human thoughts about the Past (memory), the Future (our imagination or expectations) and the Present (active attention). In fact, he claimed to have discovered Eternity in the quiet silence of the mind.
TIME IN LITERATURE Shakespeare is a major influence in English-speaking cultures, even upon the uneducated. He was a great inventor of memorable phrases and even new words (‘neologisms’). Apparently, his obsessions can be inferred by how frequently he used a word; two of his favorites were ‘rich’ and ‘time’. Priestley believes that Shakespeare was a ‘time-haunted’ man (like himself). In medieval art, abstract ideas – like love, death and time – were often personified. A popular image (even with philosophers) was Time as moving waters: rivers, streams, floods, tides, etc. This is not only because movement implies time but also the notion of irresistibility; none stop for man, as King Canute cleverly demonstrated. These images are slippery because most imply a fixed boundary leading to the bad analogical question: “what are the Shores of Time?” The power of these images is that water is well-recognized as vital to life, as is time itself. One of our oldest relevant images is “Old Father Time” – often carrying his huge death-bringing scythe to cut us down before we may be ready. More artists have complained about “Time – the Destroyer” rather than “Time – the Great Healer”; even most mystery writers exploit the expectations that the details (Who? What? Why?) of the crimes at the heart of their stories will eventually be revealed. Omission of these key elements lead to a shortened career as a mystery novelist.
SUBJECTIVE VIEWS
PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME There is no doubt that there is a broad subjective experience of TIME felt by all awake, normal humans. We have seen here that metaphysical questions and beliefs are beyond objective resolution; relying on each person’s own intuitions about reality. The position taken here is that we are all aware of change everywhere, so we have extracted the necessary component of this observation into the idea of Time. We directly experience our conscious awareness of the present or NOW, few people believe they came into existence only a moment ago, so the concept of prior times or the PAST seems quite reasonable particularly as biologically we can recall much of our past life with our mental facility, called memory. Most people recognize that their life will change from the present, so we can construct a view (or at least a ‘plan’) of the FUTURE in another vital but mysterious human facility called IMAGINATION. We are all aware that once we have acted then all such activity (known as HISTORY) cannot ever be changed: this has led to the consensus that TIME is irreversible. None-the-less, large numbers of people (another form of Commonsense) only regard their NOW as real, while many are recommended to forget their old slights or future hopes and just “live in the now”. This is the origin of the impression that time consists of collections of NOWs. This is probably the broad perspective of most animals but few intelligent people will stop planning. Our lives become analogous to a film of multiple ‘snapshots’. Some rationalist philosophers have suggested that we do not discover time but bring it with us; it is one of our major contributions to the scene; our minds just work this way. However, one needs to point out that most animals also respect the sense of time as they daily pursue food and other sustenance but none of them has ever indicated that they are secret philosophers. It seems true that very few serious adults discount the reality of objective (social) time. Some clever intellectuals may often make such claims and rely on slick use of metaphors but few would expose themselves to being the ‘cat’ in Schrödinger’s infamous (satirical) ‘thought-experiment’: wherein a vial of poison would be broken under the random control of a chunk of radioactive material. Quantum Theory may claim that the cat is both alive and dead, until we “open the box” but most realistic people suspect there is an irreversible difference and they would ‘bet their life on it’.
As well-educated adults, we have learned to respect the demands of society to respect the common usage of so-called ‘objective’ time; we try to get to our meetings ‘on time’, many take out ‘life’ insurance. After a major, undeniable event, most country’s tax departments will not let our survivors (or just our accountants) forget the consequences. Scientists have ‘atomized’ time into discrete events but this is not how most people see their lives; in fact, a more accurate view of ourselves from the perspective of molecular biology can see that we are vast teams of gazillions (trillions of trillions) of co-operating cells that must keep playing their game together in processes of incredible complexity to preserve the team, even while billions of the players come and go on a daily basis. The concept of dynamic process is far more prevalent than people realize: it’s not just the scientists. Failure to understand complexity does NOT make it go away.
MEMORY CONSTRUCTION Most people in reasonable health rely on their own memory for confirmation of the continuity of their own identity. We are able to recall (at least vaguely) prior events, before our present now, where we ‘re-see’ ourselves in the action. Now, this must be an active recreation, as we were never looking at ourselves from a Third-Party viewpoint, when we are actually doing any activity. Perhaps, the best we can do is to recall the sensory impressions (and feelings) experienced earlier; even then, modern psychology studies have shown how unreliable our memories can be. What we select to remember, like for any action, is to apply our values in the course of choosing, so even reviewing our memories is an active (unconscious) act of editing. Since these determining values are inherently subjective they must remain non-objective or equivalently, ‘unscientific’. Memory recall is an active reconstruction process, not a simple reproducing activity, like reshowing a movie.
PAST BIAS If we assume that animal memories, including humans, are the actions of physical structures (by making the common materialist assumption) then we can see why our sense of Time is one directional, preferring the past to the future. That’s because physical assembly needs time to complete. So, if we are receiving influences from our personal future, then we have no way of detecting such ‘messages’. Stating that “memory is a faculty of mind” (as per Wikipedia) is not very helpful since we are referring to the most complex activities of the most complex structure we have ever encountered and humans have made little progress in thousands of years in understanding complexity, especially when we have deliberately adopted a strategy of Analysis or breaking things into smaller parts, as if we hope to find the ‘magical’ stuff when the secret lies in the coming together of simpler parts (“synthesis”). It is a pity that we have again reversed one of our technological inventions, such as the digital computer, to propose a model of biological systems, where multiple, simultaneous activities are being synchronized (a key time-word) while digital computers were carefully designed around sequential activity defined by a ‘master-clock’ (this is why the clock-speed was a useful measure of computer capability). Another problem with this mechanical analogy is the central role of ‘information’ – a hugely vague concept that is reflected in our digital technology as the presence or absence of ‘some’ electrons (a ‘bit’) but this has not been confirmed, as the scientific basis of biological information, except along nerve pathways.
TYPES
A key classification feature about our memories are those that record events (sometimes called simply ‘episodic’ memory) and declarative (or ‘semantic’ memory) that is useful for remembering abstract rules or definitions and passing academic examinations. Some episodic memories (usually involving locations and times) become long-term when made by the memorizer experiencing strong emotions .
We also have implicit memories that are not accessible to conscious recall but play an important role in life, such as riding a bicycle or influencing our feelings and emotions. We also have ‘prospective’ memory, when we try to ‘remember to remember’ (to do something).
TIME IMPACT
Our current tragedy about memory is that we recognize its central role in human life but have so little specific knowledge of its biological basis, which seems more than likely as we observe the negative impacts of head injuries; additionally, some us realize that stress and the passage of time (called OldAge) dramatically impacts the efficiency of memory: fortunately, some long-term memories seem able to persist for a life-time. Tragically, it is making new ones that becomes increasingly difficult with age.
METAPHYSICS OF TIME PERSONAL LIFE Most people eventually realize that their life is probably finite, so ‘wasting time’ is an unrecoverable error but Modern Life is filled with people ‘killing time’. None can imagine a truly static world: one where nothing changes – even our personal memories rapidly introduce changes. Conversely, if “All is flux”, how would we know? We need some static sign-posts to notice the changes. A few years ago, a French caver volunteered for an experiment, where he would spend a few weeks alone underground and without any means of measuring time. Surprisingly, on his emergence he discovered that he had been underground far longer than he had imagined – his mind had not given an accurate awareness of ‘objective’ time; so perhaps, a sentence of solitary confinement might not be as bad as we might fear.
CONCLUSIONS A major step in clarifying one’s thinking about abstract concepts, such as Time, is to realize that most western languages derive from Greek roots; they were so pleased by invented their “naming of objects (things)” that they extended this useful feature to everything, even collections of similar things, so they could talk using some features of what we have come to call ‘concepts’. Plato extended this original level of language to promote his abstractions into primary players, which took on the external reality of universals. In actuality, this was only the simple study of Object-Sets and their common property of Number (or Cardinality to use the technical term). This provided the philosophical foundation for the role of arithmetic in western thinking. Unfortunately, these clever (male) intellectuals over-looked the more important idea of relationships, which are also involved in situations of multiple existence. The overly masculine obsession with Things has blocked our ability develop more sophisticated language constructs. It is not a coincidence that Science has a materialist bias. This introduces a limited view of reality that has been mainly studied by western male thinkers but is intuitively recognized by the more intuitive half of our species: the females. Perhaps, they will now rise to play a major role in western philosophy, including offering better insights into the challenge of Time. An obvious conclusion is that Time is a concept that humans have invented to explain change and succession. These are two observable aspects of phenomena but no one has ever examined Time. The problem with the static Block-Model of time is that it reduces us to mere observers in the ‘Great Cinema of Life’, whereas many of us have a strong intuition that we are active AGENTS in most situations. In fact, our civilization has codified this perspective in our foundational legal systems, where each individual is held responsible for their actions; this is reflected in many economic systems, where “winners” regard themselves as deserving of their excess rewards. Time is an inherent aspect of Nature (certainly for its living exemplars) and as such cannot be defined in terms of other aspects; all linguistic attempts to define Time are doomed to failure. Words are too crude a tools to boil down a lifetime of experience into even an essay, never mind a sentence or two in a dictionary.
The key to relating to time is not simply to intellectualize it by simply studying it conceptually but to realize that each one of us is a unique experiencing process. As the polymath inventor and genius, Buckminster Fuller reminded us sometime ago (1970) when he titled one of his books: “I Seem to be a Verb”. This is also one of my major conclusions in a longish life that: “Living is Doing”, whereas “Existence is simply Being”; “Stones exist – but people do”. This is why the initial Webster dictionary definition we began with, needs a major revision reflecting the centrality of Life, not simple Things. As unique individuals, we are not reducible to a single object, whose ‘World-Line’ wanders through a small volume of space for our short existence but as a dynamic process whose ongoing existence vitally depends on our accurate awareness of reality and making appropriate decisions as Captain of our Ship. A directly related concept is that of Consciousness, which relies deeply on our functioning memories. But this giant topic deserves its own essay. Our intellectual Obsession with Objects has led to a weak view of living as simply Being, and its related concept of Having; this resulted in far too many people limiting their lives to Taking (Things and People as Things – also known as ‘slaves’). Another intuition (one I certainly subscribe to) is that Loving has to become central to Living: the rewards from being in a loving relationship are more than worth any pain resulting from Time’s ultimate conquest of this invaluable relationship between people. Buddha was wrong: it is better to have loved and suffered. It can be seen from above, that much of the discussions about Time involved the concept of existence; this too is a difficult one to elaborate upon because it too is a foundational metaphysical intuition about our own lives (and future). Deep ideas seem to appear in closely linked triads, where discussion of one usually invokes the other two; here the third idea may be personal identity or consciousness. Try it and see what emerges. As a useful metaphor, imagine ourselves playing soccer. We only have a significant role while we are on the field, during this time our presence has an impact on everyone else otherwise we are just a name or memory. Interactions with other parts of reality seem a necessary component for any object to exist. Some objects are complex and their persistence as a player only continues while their important parts stay together (repaired in place). The three-dimensional nature of space means that some errors inevitably occur and processes fail to complete on time (desynchronization), eventually cancelling the larger holism that the process contributes to. Thus, activity occurs in (or over) Time but this does NOT mean that Time itself exists. This produces nonsense: “Time exists in Time”. On reflection, these ancients questions, such as: “What is Time?” are examples of low quality thinking. Going back to those early questions about ‘substance’. When we know that salt is a bi-atom molecule of sodium and chlorine, then so what? Does this help us understand its effect on food? No. So, why are we wasting so much time on these pseudo-questions? What kind of answers would be helpful? So, we are all aware of the impact of Time in our lives but we are regressing to more simplistic thinking by just accepting that some THING called Time ‘caused’ all these changes. We are witnessing the deceptive effects of abstracting all the real activity from the processes of the world, which gives them their unique features and end up with a common factor – Time. What have we accomplished? Nothing. So, when we are challenged by someone asking these types of questions, then just smile knowingly and walk away. Perhaps, these ‘metaphysical’ mental ramblings will encourage all of us (society) to refocus our thinking on relationships and hope physics evolves from its obsession with THINGS to interactions (a powerful form of relationships.) We need to upgrade our thinking from simplistic thinking about THINGS, such as How Many? What properties? How can we get more of them? Etc. Much of this is just quantitative actions, replacing important qualitative concerns with a simple number. Really?
At the end of your life, will you be satisfied with knowing that you went around the sun a large number of times or your bank accounts record large numbers of dollars? If so, then you have been sleepwalking in life or you are just a robot or zombie. So, it is with Time. No number can represent a fullfilled life. Treating every unit of time (second, day, year, whatever, as the same) defeats the opportunity to live a quality life, discovering and maintaining mutually satisfactory relationships with good and interesting people, creating and appreciating aesthetically rewarding artifacts, spending quality time enhancing this unique opportunity to experience life. Don’t waste this Once in a Universe opportunity. Believing in reincarnation or Eternity in a Heavenly Choir is just lazy thinking. This is it. NOW. You don’t need to “understand” an abstraction like Time; enjoy it, plan to DO MORE, soon. Stop worrying about Old Hurts or Lost Chances: the past is gone, stop fearing awful possibilities; just DO IT: LIVE!!
