Time, Temporality & Perceptions Thereof: What Are They?

[Anonymous]

....Time is relative. That is to say, a second to your good self, may seem to be ten seconds to me ( unless time is being measured of course, stop watch or what not !!! )

If you watched me sleeping for an hour, I may wake up thinking I've only slept for ten minutes. Again, unless the time span of my nap is being measured, time is relative to the person experiencing it.

This subject is one that you could seriously fall out with people about.....and one which I obviously know very little, so I'll go now.

Moggadon

 

[sudi5]

The way I see it....time is a medium upon which we imprint our three dimensional activities.

In order to exist in these three dimensions, we must have something that will "record" our existence, thoughts, etc.

Something like the way the sand on the beach takes an impression of your foot when you walk on it. Because the grains of sand are smaller then the overall size of your foot, you leave a mark.

I think the speed of light acts as the sand on a beach. We move more slowly (i.e.: smaller,) than 286,000 miles per second, so the actions in these three dimensions are "recorded" or impressed upon, the "grains" or particles of light at sub-light speed.

Sudi

 

[Anonymous]

The thing about time is that, when you look at what time it is its always the wrong time when you know what you think the right time is!

Erm...or look at it this way, time didn't exist until someone said, "Hey, what time is it?"
Then someone replied "Whats time then?"
And it was so, that time was thing we measure the decay of our moleculer structure...blah blah blah...

So, what is time?

It is the most unexplainable thing ever, but I've just explained it so, I'm wrong and that was in the past and now that was in the past and the future is now and now that is the past oh bollocks, I watch to much Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy!

...so, then someone said, "I know what I'll call this time thing!"
"What?" somone said,
"I'll call it...whats that?"
"What"
"That...Its like a large sprout..."
"Mmm, so it is!What are you going to do?"
"I'll call it a Cabbage"
"Umm...where did you get that from?"
"I was going to call time by that name but it suits this much better!"
"So, what are you going to call time?"
"I will call it 'TIME'"
"Wish I'd thought of that..."

And so you see, we humans narrowly avoided living in a world where we would look at the Cabbage on our wrists and say "Oooh, look at the cabbage..." or "I haven't got cabbage for that!" or "...cabbage to go to bed!"...and so on.

I paint a lovely picture don't I!?

 

[Anonymous]

Time- a definition

Time is the difference between CAUSE and EFFECT.

Time wasn't discovered, it's always been here and there, but it was only once we were significantly evolved enough, on an intelligence level, that we were able to find, first a need for it's measurement, and secondly, the means to measure it.

We're strange creatures, in that we're probably the only animals that feel the need to mark the passing of time at all.

Moggadon

 

[Anonymous]

tempus fudgit

What if everything was going on at the same time ?

so there is no past, present or future just the "now"

yesterday the "past" whilst I was experiencing it was in fact the present, and my future, my "tomorrow" hadn't happened yet.
Today however my future is now my present.
As mentioned earlier time doesn't realy exist, we've created it, to serve as a method of reference and also for aiding comprehension, how else would you make appointments etc etc etc.
So in some respects "time" is only relative to the perceiver, we simply all follow the same sytem to make things more compatible.

But lets speculate on the concept of circularity, what if everything was happening at the same time, similar to the concept of parallel worlds, but in this case all together and unfolding at once.
We just don't perceive it all at once, just what is relative to us!

Take for example the famous photograph of the little girl with a silverish suited figure in the background(taken up on the moors somehere) well couldn't the figure in the background actually be from a different time?!
I don't mean that it's a ghost or that it's someone who has travelled back in time but .....let me explain with a short story:

Lets say it's the year 2030 and there's some construction workers working on a sight, which wasn't there 20 years previously when the photo of the little girl was taken( yes it's in the same location) now some how a cross over happens a "glitch" in the great cosmological system and bingo the bloke appears in the photograph too!

Anyway ta da got to go, didn't realize the time!

 

[Anonymous]

Isnt linier time a concept that we made up to track the passing of the sun around the planet?
Im sure that I heard a report that past future and present all co exist in the hear and now and the use of hyperspace can prove the fact. (becouse it operates outside of the linier time line)
Alot of ppl consider traveling on the astral plane a version of hyperspace traveling.
If that is the case then time travel could be just a state of mind.
After all time isnt anything other than a human concept.


It makes me think anyway.

 

[Anonymous]

(I'm new to this, so be gentle with me)

Reading Gary Lachman's article on James Webb in FT150 (a bit old I know but we've only got a computer recently) Webb is quoted as saying

"despite the undoubtedly hallucinatory nature of my experiences, a residue remains that I simply have to take seriously."

Lachman tells us that Webb had visions of 'cyclical time', that the gist of his visions had to do with time.

I myself have suffered from depression or manic depression for all of my adult life and have had similar alterations in my perception of time. As with Webb, after the 'bad' period passes, I can assess these feelings as to their accuracy and content. The experience is not the same as being delusional. Rather than being an alteration of thought, it is an alteration of perception. Something about time feels different.

What set me thinking was meeting a friend of a friend in a coffee shop. This man suffers from schizophrenia, which gives us an odd fellowship, even though I do not know him well. On this particular day he was obviously agitated and I could notice certain delusional ideation running below our conversation. A point that he continually returned to was how he had seen 'a different kind of time', where time looped back on itself. I found this unnerving as I was just coming out of a 'bad period' myself where I had begun to feel that my relationship with time had 'fractured', as if the organ that was used to detect the passage and flow of time had become somehow broken.

Can anyone shed any light on this, or post any similar experiences? What is it we use to monitor time? Could chemical or electrical disturbance lead to certain shifts in time perception?
I was royally freaked out when I found out that I wasn't the only one...

NOTE: The Lachman article on James Webb can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2008030...e_damned_the_strange_death_of_james_webb.html

Here is an excerpt of the text containing the quote above and addressing Webb's experience with time perception ...

... Webb had already plunged into madness. “My life has just emerged from a nightmare,” Webb wrote some time later. “I had a full-scale nervous breakdown, with hallucinations, visions and a fine repertoire of subjectively supernatural experiences. Hoist with my own petard, some would say.” The cool rationalism that called occultism a “flight from reason” seemed helpless before the kinds of experiences he had gone through. “Despite the undoubtedly hallucinatory nature of many of my experiences,” he wrote, “a residue remains which I simply have to take seriously.” He tried to fit what was happening to him into some system, calling on Gnostic notions of ‘æons’ and Hindu accounts of ‘kalpas’. But the visions were too vivid and extraordinary to be neatly filed into some metaphysic. The gist of them had to do with time; the world had become a kind of Heraclitean flux. He had “seen molecules.” ...

He wrote of “a shattering vision of the wheel of life.” He saw his previous incarnations. He became convinced that there is a “principle of consciousness which is not merely the result of a congerie of experience” – what Ouspensky had called the Linga Sharira, the ‘long body’ that extends through countless lives. But the worst was that there seemed to be no stability. Things would not ‘stand still’. No sooner did he look at something than he saw its entire history, its present, past and future. An oak was an acorn, then a rotting mass of mulch. Although he believed there was a “way out”, Webb shrank from the knowledge that we are all “imprisoned in the coils of cyclical time.” ...

 

[brianellwood]

time

I had a period a few years ago when I was able to tell the clock time to anyone who asked with accuracy, though I didn't wear a watch...it just came straight into my mind, I could also wake myself at any given time in the morning. This lasted for around six months and then suddenly stopped. My private clock vanished, though I have never noticed a change in the perception of time.

 

[Anonymous]

More on my experience of time

I have not worn a watch since I was about sixteen, but have never had any problems with finding out the time. This is probably more due to a totality of time cues in the environment (Quality of light, direction of shadows, clocks on buildings or in shops) than any well developed body clock. It's amazing the amount of clocks that you notice if you don't wear a watch. Also I too, at times, have been able to do the 'waking up at a certain time' trick, although it sems to work best when there is no particular pressing reason to get up. Also my success ratio seems to be far higher in Spring/Summer than Autumn/Winter, which would seem to suggest that this faculty is partly based around sunlight.

I mention this because during my experiences it has not been my 'watch time' sense that has been effected, that is, I have always been able to still guess the correct time to withinh 20-30 minutes. It has been my sense of the nature of time that has shifted. If time is imagined as a straight line, and we as human beings move along at a steady pace from birth to death, this I think is 'watch time', the actual passage of time. What happened to me was that I felt as if I had moved off that straight line, that somehow I was not part of that steady flow any more. I lost any sense of the duration of time between events. That is not to say that I did not know how far apart events were in 'watch time', but that I no longer felt that distance. Life felt like a film montage, where different pieces of film are spliced together in such a way as to convey the impression of the passage of time. All points in time felt equidistant as I thought about them. This was definately a different experience of the nature of time than the one I was familiar with.

At the beginning of these feeling I was in the process of coming off anti-depressant medication (paroxetine), and the farther away I got from finishing the medication, the more my conviction grew that something had gone wrong between me and time. I remember writing at the time that

"...the primary effect of depression is an effect on time."

It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that anti-depression medication would have an equally powerful time-based effect. I suppose that I was, as James webb was, using my knowledge to try to rationalise something which was by it's nature irrational. Philip K. Dick sums this up beautifully in 'Valis'

"...an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And, not only that - as if that weren't enough - but you... ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them..."

That being said, I still experinced these events and feelings and glimpsed something else which was no more or less subjective than anything else.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Re: time

I had a period a few years ago when I was able to tell the clock time to anyone who asked with accuracy, though I didn't wear a watch...it just came straight into my mind, I could also wake myself at any given time in the morning. This lasted for around six months and then suddenly stopped. My private clock vanished, though I have never noticed a change in the perception of time.

I can usually wake myself up at any given time. I usually just repeat the time a few times in my head before I hit the pillow.
When I wake up, it's normally pretty accurate.
It was more reliable when I was younger.

 

[brianellwood]

Time

I imagine time flows in quanta, as apparently gravity also is now supposed to (FT yesterday), and not in a continuous stream as we normally imagine it. When I was at college in the 60's I went on a few acid trips like many others, which seemed to dilate my feeling of time. I spent hours looking at frost crystals for example, but in reality 5 mins and so on, but time was never fractured in my perception. There is a theory that all time exists together, past, present and future and is supposedly only available to God to see in one. I'll try and find the reference.

 

[mikelegs]

This doesn't have to do with time perception, but with the mind trying to make sense where sense cannot be made. I was driving somewhere one windy day when I was in college. Coming up to a marquee-style sign for a restaurant, I glanced over at it. Something was wrong with it. I looked again, and I recognized the letters, but the words didn't make any sense. For a moment I actually panicked as my brain really struggled to make words out of those letters on that sign. Just before I started really freaking out, I finally realized that about half the letters had blown down.
I've never had such a panic attack before or since, so I don't know why it happened then. Maybe because just enough letters blew down to lose the meaning of the words. Still, I don't know why the empty spaces didn't clue me off sooner.

Getting back to the time subject, I often cannot remember the proper chronology, given two random events in my distant past. I try to use other events, or any memory of my age as a hint to put things in the correct order, but often cannot. This isn't quite the same as a lack of time perception, but along the same lines.

 

[Anonymous]

More on different kinds of time

I came across something that illustrates what I was trying to say above:

"Mechanized, time is abstracted from the biological and intuitive rhythms of our lives and from the human scale of that unit of mnemonic time that is bounded by the grandparent's memories of childhood, as those memories are narrated for and changed in the memories of the grandchildren. In the direction of time-is-money, the mechanization of time obviously anticipated and reflected the needs of industrialized, televised, computerized society. But once mechanized, time begins to play strange tricks on memory..." p73

The above quote is from a book called "The Farther Shore: A natural History of Perception" by Don Gifford (Faber and Faber, London, 1990). 'Watch time' and 'experience time' are two seperate things, which mostly match each other in our minds. However it is possible for the two to become out of sinc, remember boring lessons at school or 'time flies when you're having fun'?

In the book Gifford looks at the way our perceptions of the world have changed as our culture has changed. He talks about Romantic time, best exemplified by William Wordsworth, which believed that the experience of time-past could be fully remembered and captured thus enriching time-present. This splits time into three seperate places, future, past and present. In this way of thinking all are nearly uncapturable because we can never relive the past, the present is the past as soon as it happens and the future is a lad we can never reach, because it is the land of the present when we get there.

He points out that standardised time is a relatively recent event and one that is yoked to the needs of production and commerce. It fits our society but it does not neccessarily fit us. As he says

"Our time rhythms are constatly being modified, sometimes by things as simple as the recent change in fashion from clock dial to digital display. That change substitutes what sounds like numrical precision, "It's 4:46," for the less precise spatial designation, "It's quarter to five."... The appearance of numrical precision and the widely advertized accuracy of timepieces based on quartz crystals seems symptomatic of the false hope that because we are increasingly capable of precise measurements of time, we are increasingly capable of management of time." p100

At the point in time where my experience of time altered I had stopped doing the majority of things that constitute normal life. I kept my own time table, ate when I chose, slept when I could, travelled only on foot around my immediate area. Gifford discusses the difference beteen past times and our own in terms of interactions in space and distance ie speed. He mentions William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1797-98 spending much time simply wandering the English Lake District on foot;

"In spite of the eccentric nature of their behaviour, they give me a glimpse of a profoundly different attitude toward the rhythms of life on foot. If I were on foot (and there were no telephone) and my collaborator lived four miles away in South Williamstown, how different the timespace of this town would be. I think of myself as spatially and temporally liberated by the everyday technologies a hand, but my freedom means that the rhythms of my experience are in a different sort of bondage. Of course I could choose to walk, but this is a perverse choice rather than unquestioning acceptance of a given. In 1798, I would have been bound to the rhythm of walking but free to observe the intimate textures of the space around me and inhabit the rhytms of my own thoughts and conversation. Conversely, I am free to overleap the four miles to South Williamstown but bound because I cannot more than glance at what I'm overleaping...." p107

Maybe this applies to my experience. Maybe I managed to get into a similar relationship with the world as the Wordsworths by totally removing myself from all of the obligtions and timetables of the civilized world. Through my own thinking I changed my own peception of time, I stopped using agreed rhythms and used my own.

Can anyone shed ay light?

 

[rynner2]

I think it's been documented (but don't ask me where!) that there is a difference between the experience of 'time as we live it' and 'time as we remember it', related to the amount of activity we perform in that time.

Thus, if you spend an hour walking to your friend's place, but don't do much else apart from enjoy the scenery, then that walk will take up less space in you memory than what you and you friend did together and talked about before you walked home again. So in recounting your day afterwards you might gloss over the journey - "I went to Fred's.." and then go into great detail about what you and Fred got up to.

At the other extreme, while driving you might get into a skid and fight to control your car. Afterwards you will remember every detail of the skid, the danger, how you turned the wheel or operated the brakes, even though all of this took place within a mere second or two.

But time is money - gotta go, because my 'free' surfing time is running out!

 

[CygnusRex]

So the basic thrust of this is the old "time is relative to the viewer" type thing.

This is amply demonstrated by the fact that I had my partner convinced for years that I always new exactly what time it was, but only when I was watching television.
She to this day has not figured out that the commercial channels start their programmes on the hour, and all I did was count the ad-breaks, which is fairly sad I know (but it amused me at the time).

The point I am trying to make is that when all seem to carry our own little bubble of perceived time, the only marker points we need are the ones where we interact with others, wether that is physically or mentally

I could quite easily believe that time doesn't exist, and that it is purely a human invention. Maybe a by-product of conciousness?

 

[Anonymous]

Certainly seems to be, the thrust of the book I was refering to on my previous post tracks the shifts in perception over time.

I remember hearing on a programme on radio 4(UK) that the Mayans had an entirely different conception of time, seeing time as an actively maintained force. They saw ritual as a way of keeping time going, or more accurately, constantly restarting it. If certain rituals were not excecuted, then time would stop and the world would end.

My experience felt so wierd because, rather than being a theoretical proposition about time, it was an actual experience. I've got some other stuff to ad about differing experiences of time, especially in connection to Parkinsons Disease, but I'll have to do that later.

I think I should widen this thread to include any information or ideas about time. Any ideas?

 

[Anonymous]

I've discovered that I have an unusually poor sense of time. I have to wear a watch and discipline myself to look at it fairly often in order to keep on shcedule. It's not just that I get distracted and forget that I have a meeting at 3pm or something. I have no sense of, say, how much longer the sun will be up, and I don't seem to be able to learn how long it takes to do certain things. One of my professors asked me how many images I could scan in an hour, and although I've done quite a lot of scanning, I really had no idea! I also can never seem to answer questions like, "how long ago did..." I don't seem to be hungry or sleepy on a regular schedule, either.
I'm not depressive, nor have I ever been clinically diagnosed with any sort of psychiatric problems. In school, I always tested very high on both the verbal and analytical skills tests--both sides of my brain seem to work equally well. So, what is it? Am I out of harmony with nature or something?

I have no idea how long it took me to write this!

 

[Beakmoo]

I'm pretty convinced by now that time isn't really linear. I can't explain the fact I have premonitions any other way. I've got a depressive illness too, perhaps seratonin acts as some kind of "time-desensitisor" for all the normals out there.
Or perhaps I'm talking complete bummox ?

 

[intaglio]

I'm surprised no one else has posted about this item from Wired that appeared in breaking news.
Link is dead. The full article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/2002060...ired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52703,00.html

Some quotes

On Tuesday, Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam presented a report that shook a few foundations.

He repeated and amplified earlier work that studies emotional responses to shocking or erotic imagery, seconds before the subject sees the randomly timed stimulus.

Saniga discovered the brain is hard-wired to perceive space and time as interconnected. "Pathology in time is always accompanied with a pathology of space, in a sense that space either loses dimensions or acquires other dimensions," he said.

"When time seems to stop, people often feel as if space becomes two-dimensional. On the other hand, when the subject feels they perceive the past, present and future (all at once), they simultaneously have the impression that space has infinite dimensions."

 

[rynner2]

There are several threads where I could post this article, but let's try it here.
Link is dead. The article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2002061...wersingenesis.org/docs2/4352news7-28-2000.asp

EXCERPT:

The Speed of Light: What do Recent Experimental Results Reveal?
by Physicist, Dr. Russ Humphreys

I've been pondering this experiment ever since I saw the technical article [L. J. Wang, A. Kuzmich, and A. Dogariu, "Gain-assisted superluminal light propagation", Nature, Vol. 406, pp. 277-279] on the Nature Web site on July 19th. The most puzzling thing to me is how the authors appear to deny the obvious implications of their data. They imply that their results do not suggest that information could be transmitted faster than the speed of light in vacuum, and yet the nearly-raw data in their figure 4 says just the opposite.

The figure shows two pulses, A and B, several microseconds wide and of nearly the same shape. Pulse B has traversed their cesium vapor cell, and pulse A has traversed the same distance (6 cm) in a vacuum, requiring the normal 0.2 nanoseconds to do so. Essentially every point of pulse B has arrived at the detector about 60 nanoseconds "earlier" than the corresponding point of pulse A. The completeness of the advance of pulse B implies we could indeed use it to transmit information faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

The astute reader may have noticed something even more weird about the above numbers: pulse B seems to have gotten way ahead of itself! A close-up view in the article (Figure 4, inset) shows that the leading edge of pulse B emerges from the cesium cell about 60 nanoseconds before the leading edge of the pulse allegedly causing it enters the cell. The newspapers actually got that point right. This raises the possibility of transmitting information "backwards" in time. That would be astonishing! It would bring into question the standard interpretation of scientific causality; a child might send a warning decades into the past, telling his father not to beget any children. What happens if the father heeds the warning?

Despite the astonishing implications, the authors write: "The observed superluminal light pulse propagation is not at odds with causality or special relativity..." because, they say, the equation on which they based the subsequent analysis "itself is based on the causality requirements of electromagnetic responses." But if the data itself says clearly that pulse B arrived before pulse A, then the theoretical basis of subsequent analysis is irrelevant. I wonder if the authors put in these mollifying words to help the paper get past the reviewers. But the discordance between the authors' data and their mollifying words has produced confusion in the media. One critic of evolution and the media wryly commented to me that the news reports combine two discordant themes: "This is new and unexpected," and "This is nothing new and there is nothing to worry about." ...

Rather odd: a physicist writing on a Christian fundamentalist website. But it makes interesting reading anyway about the scientific peer review process, faster than light travel, and also mentions Richard Feynmann's theory that antiparticles are ordinary particles going backwards in time.

 

[intaglio]

I see what you mean, Rynner. That article certainly plays hob with causuality but no-one has thought anything about it.

The 2 news items certainly make you wonder whether the next advances in physics will concern the nature of time.

 

[Ideasman]

Fascinating

If you pick up the link to the Bierman and Radin's published paper you find a true rarity - an apparently scientifically credible paper that shows statistically significant results in a parapsychological area.

The theory about back propogation of EMR to a quantum coherent reciever embedded in the conscious brain (a la Penrose) is an interesting hypothesis. It would also be interesting to study people who had experienced pre-cognition as a by product of meditation vs 'normal' subjects.

It could also serve as an explanation for the highly publicised data on pet precognition - those cases where pets seem remotely aware of their owners departing work to return home etc.

I recall that Penrose has a chapter about the way in which microtubules could be aligned to act as coherent receivers. Is anyone aware of any investigation into artificially constructed coherent receivers?

 

[Anonymous]

Time: it's the most familiar thing in the world, but what exactly is it? If it's a dimension, why can we only see one way through it? If it's a flow of something, how fast is it flowing? One second per second?? And WHAT flowing??? If it's just a figment of the way the brain "scans" the world, then could we somehow "scan" other periods in our past or future, instead of this one? Any thoughts?
(By the way, this is my first attempt at posting a thread, so if it's redundant or misplaced, please do whatever's necessary!)

 

[Anonymous]

I would say that our perception of time is limited because we are physical world creatures and in that physical world, entropy always increases (entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity). Our our perception of time via physical world senses is restricted to a linear sequential view. Perhaps extremely creative people who think in terms of systems or entire world views actually do perceive time differently than the rest of us. I think children do. But even our language reflects this linear or sequential view as our (average, adult) perception of time. Think about it. If asked "when did that happen?" we either answer with measures of time ("a couple hours ago") or dates ("a week ago Thursday" "on the 3rd of December") and we thing of events in relation to one another within a sequence (before, during, after). Language reflects world-view.

It's interesting to note that spirtualists and people under the influence of drugs (even natural "drugs" like endorphins) frequently report an altered perception of time. Perhaps the limitations of being physical body creatures is the limit beyond which we must go to be able to really understand time?

 

[Anonymous]

Ten past nine.

 

[mendhak]

Very simply, time is our gauge of this sequential flow of events. In our perpetual attempt to bring order/pattern to the chaotic universe we live in, time helps us measure "what's going on."

Of course, over time (ha!), the definition and concept of time has been expanded and warped. It is important in so many physical experiments, yet it is nothing but a measure. I don't know where along the line it was give the attribute of being a dimension, and in that some have started believing it may be just another axes in the 3-d coordinate world we live in.

My thoughts are that scanning the past isn't possible. Those events have occured in the time preceding this current point. They are now irrelevant (from a linear-sequential-flow point of view). If it were indeed possible, we should be able to somehow manipulate and study the past and even the future. We should also be able to see what happened before the beginning of time (big bang).

 

[Anonymous]

I forget who said it, but time is something that stops everything from happening at once.

 

[Anonymous]

Not that it exists, anyway...

The past has ceased to exist. I cannot empirically measure past-things (Such as myself as an infant: Baby-101 , weighing 9.5 lbs and being a foot or so long no longer 'exists' to be observed or measured), nor can I experience things which have happened in the past (I cannot feel the wind which filled the sails of the Spanish Armada).

The future doesn't exist yet. If we want to talk about future events and objects 'existing' in the same way as the present, this assumes a pre-detemined path of things, and does away with free will. As most people these days live under the assumption of free will, we must (if this doesn't look like skirting round the issue) assume that the future is so far non-existant, and may come to be.

The present, then, sits between a non-existant past and a non-existant future, filling only the moment it takes to be experienced. As the switch between thing that is yet to exist , thing that exists and thing that used to exist is so brief as to be infitessimally small, the present, to all intents and purposes, has no length.

So, you have a past that doesn't exist any more, a future that doesn't exist yet, and a present which is infitessimally brief.
Therefore, time doesn't exist.


Although it's still taken me ten minutes to write and proof-read this.

 

[Anonymous]

What does 'Exist' mean in the context you are using it, 101?
If time, the past and the future do not exist, and we have, according to yourself 'a present which is infitessimally brief', then how can anything exist in this view ?

Actually, time does (apparently) have precise units beyond which it is no longer divisible. I believe there is no period of time smaller than 1 X 10^-31 seconds.
This is the 'present' you are talking about.

Just because we have no means of experiencing the past, it does not mean that it has ceased to exist, same goes for the future.
If time is an axis, it should be possible to move to any point along it.
That is unless the Langoliers get there first.

 

[phi23]

All times are