TIME 
The 2-time teaser
One of the most succinct (and strangely
poetic) descriptions of time
was possibly written in 1947 by Lewis Mumford
(an American historian of technology and science) :
"The clock is a piece of power-machinery
whose "product" is seconds and minutes:
By its essential nature it dissociates time from human events
and helps create the belief in an independent world
of mathematically measurable sequences:
The special world of science.
There is little foundation for this belief in a common human experience:
Throughout the year the days are of uneven duration,
the relation between day and night steadily changes,
and a slight journey from East to West
alters astronomical time by several minutes...
While human life has regularities of its own,
the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs,
these change from hour to hour with mood and action,
And in the longer span.., time is measured not by the calendar,
but by the events that occupy it.
The shepherd measures from the time the ewes lambed;
The farmer measures back to the day of sowing or forward to the harvest:
If growth has its own duration and regularities,
behind it are not simply matter and motion
but the facts of development: in short, history.
And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession
of mathematically isolated instants,
organic time ... is cumulative in its effects.
Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run backward...
Organic time moves in only one direction --
through the
cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death --
And the past that is already dead remains present in the future
that has still to be born."
And long before Mumford,
St Augustine (354-430) asked :
"When we say that an event or interval of time is short or long,
what is it that is being described as of short or long duration?
It cannot be what is past, since that has ceased to be,
and what is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being
long.
But neither can it be what is present,
for the present has no duration".
He also argued that the present must be
timeless (without interval /
duration)
because,
in an interval of any duration, there is a beginning and an end.
The Zen-Taoist view is to trust in nature's subjective time (which is holistic)
as the basis for existence / "reality".
Clock (objective) time is recognized only as a construct,
a convenient collective illusion,
upon which society is based.
Time does not pass...
This illusion arises from dualistic linear thought patterns,
- mental step-sequential processing-
which creates a
fantasy of past and future.
By definition, the past is gone,
the future never comes.
what is left can simply only be "now",
in timelessness..
outside of words.
(like laughter).
Nowness can't exist in an objective sense,
like the concepts of
quantum matter,
and
holographic reality -
It is "between" instants :
It was now just now.
*
Perception of time appears not to be associated with any particular sense.
We cannot perceive temporal
order that differs by less than about 20 milliseconds.
We perceive changes (events) in time in the present /now.
Can any "sense" be made of this ? :
LogTime is the idea that Subjectivity
is the logical (mathematical) basis for estimating time intervals,
since it seems to explain the “quickening passage of time”
that is associated with aging.
This closely follows an arithmetic progression (logarithmic scale).
It is a quite different time scale from clock time.
(which has a geometric progression).
The idea that subjective time is related to information-processing
was first suggested over a century ago.
It assumes that
subjective Time is based on the overall biological information-processing rate,
and that the
subjective experience of life’s duration
is related to the total information processed.
The faster /slower information is processed,
the more /less experience is accrued,
the longer /shorter the experience of time for those events.
Clock time has no causal link to subjective time (except by co-incidence).
It is presumably accepted as the appropriate measure of time
because one second of subjective time roughly corresponds
to one second of clock time, for most people.
It may also be because the variability of subjective time
is more easily regarded as the illusion,
whilst the time of physics (clock time)
offers a more comfortable "real" order from natural chaos,
It is interesting to consider that subjective time,
based on the concept of information-processing rate,
is objectively “real”
!!
As the world temperature changes (either warm or cold),
this acceptance of clock time may change, since
Experience of time duration lengthens /shortens
as body temperature increases /decreases.
and decreased /increased body temperature
causes a decrease /increase in information-processing rate.
Subjects with decreased body temperatures tested prospectively
(i.e., when they know in advance that they will make time estimates),
do not show decreased time estimates !
but,
when retrospectively tested
they do.
Information-processing rate change with aging is probably more a result of
brain deterioration than lowered brain temperature, since
body temperature (unlike information processing), doesn't peak at age 20,
but decreases monotonically during a lifespan .
Other phenomena also affect time sense :
A sudden change in the rate of a pacemaker (“pulse rate”)
can cause a highly altered time experience.
Brain tumors can slow our internal clock, and
events then occur very rapidly, making it too fast to judge time,
and to comprehend everyday activity.
Sudden accidents can trigger detailed memories of whole lives
in just a few seconds of clock time.
Dreams that seem to take hours are only a few clock minutes.
And, since all experience is viewed objectively as having a chemical basis,
there naturally exists may drugs that can affect time sense.
*
Perhaps because of the apparent illusory
nature of time,
there are many approaches to its analysis.
Below is a flavour of some of these
directions :
What we see, is in the present.
We see motion.
Motion occurs over an interval.
Therefore: What we see in the present occurs over an interval.
But it seems unreasonable to extrapolate from motion
to all
other visual experiences).
If the experienced present is a durationless instant,
then we would not see anything at all,
since light takes time to travel.
But experience is that fast events,
such as electron beam flicker on your monitor,
have no time order, no flicker,
even though the beams must travel.
Since the speed of light, sound, and nervous transmission are finite,
we must only ever perceive
what is past.
(whether durationless or
not).
And, since cause always precedes effect, and perception is a causal process,
we perceive the past (in the present), but we can't perceive the future.
But it is possible to argue that there is no perceivable past :
To perceive something as present is simply to perceive it:
There is no need to invoke ‘the
experience of presentness.’
And so there can be no ‘perception of pastness’.
(duality has its rules !).
and so on.......!
TOP
©2009 bob harbinson
and Silver Pipe Productions S.A.
All site images protected by digital watermark.
Please
make contact from the homepage
for permission to copy content.
(your email address will be protected from spammers).
The researched information in this article is published in good faith.
Corrections are welcomed.
for sources and resources go to homepage index ...
