☆☆☆ On the Nature of Time

it’s sooo runny. Can you keep track of it?

It was another sunny yet somewhat cold spring day when it hit me. Time. The thing responsible for making us miss the train or leaving someone out in the cold. It seems so graspable. One moment it exists while in the other it vanishes. We can record time with our phones. We can feel it by touching an old photograph or see it when we notice that gray hair in the mirror. But what is this thing we call time exactly (and why even bother)?

Time is kind of strange because we have completely gotten used to it. We don’t really question it anymore. But if you think about it, it has only really been around us in this form for a fairly short time. I don’t think Moses would have had the iWatch and certainly the Egyptians wouldn’t have had that fancy wall clock from Walmart (which by the way is going to break after being is use for about 3 years). We are so confronted with time that we take it as a fact. It exists to us as the sun does or the trees outside of the window or, yes, Justin Biber. Unfortunately they are all a reality. But is time such a reality?

The concept of time becomes a little shakier when we realize that there are different time zones on our lovely planet. The people in San Francisco and London aren’t going to eat lunch at the same time. You might point out that this is obvious. But it gives us a pretty good clue about what time actually is. The reason why the San Francisconarians are eating lunch reasonably later than the Londonarians is that the earth rotates. The sun will be at a different point in the sky. So noon should be later for the people in the west than for the people in the east. But this really just means (if you think about it for a while) that time is nothing other than movement.

Clocks which have been synonymously placed into the same category as time are nothing else but little (or large) devices which measure movement. It is the movement of a motor or the movement of some atoms (if you want to measure “time” — that is movement — really accurately with an atomic clock). Time isn’t real in the same way in which topographic field lines on a map aren’t real. It is a concept to help us. It simplifies our life.

The problem with this is that it actually also makes life a lot more difficult. It can make it like hell on earth. Just think of the last time you have been late and missed that plane or made that bank transfer too late — you can be in real trouble. So time is somewhat of a double edged sword. It does simplify things and does enable a more orderly way of life, but unfortunately we also get dependent on it, perhaps even addicted (just what is wrong with those people constantly checking their watch? It’s not like they can gain seconds by doing it, right?)

So I guess you could say that time is overall a pretty good idea, but completely depending on it can have the tendency of enslaving you. It can make you worried. It can make you anxious. I can make you nervous and stressed out. And all of these things happen because there is something, some event in the future we are thinking about. And yes, while we are talking about time, we should also abolish the concept of a future — at least in the sense of a reality in itself (like the trees outside of my window which fortunately do exist). So there is something really interesting happening here: Time which is movement in the physical world is nothing else than thought in the psychological world.

All of psychological time is distilled in the form of thought. The future is thought. It’s actually even easy to see the evidence for it in language itself. Like in this sentence: “I will go there tomorrow”. The word will, indicating the future tense, is derived from the words “mind, determination, desire”. In other words it is equivalent with the intention of wanting to do something. So it is an action based in thought, or a will so to speak.

So time seems to have two sides. A fictional physical concept which sometimes helps us in our daily lives and a non-fictional inner reality that lies at the root of human beings.

What are your thoughts?

TobeTada2017