Time

What is time? We can tell it passes, but can we really define it? Is it always the same, or does it change?

Physicists say that time is not always the same. It shifts with gravity and speed. I don't understand all that really. It's been proven they say...I guess as much as something like that can be proven. Of course those kinds of proofs aren't like proving that there is an oak tree behind the building. I guess it's something like a philosophical or mathematical proof. It is all an abstraction.

So what is time really? I guess it has to do with movement, becasue that is the only way we track it, by counting things that move in a cyclical pattern: the sun, clock gears, atoms. In our experience of time, we can all certainly think of instances where it seemed to go faster or slower. Of course, empirically, we say that is just our perception, because the cycles we count by continue to pass without alteration even when our perception of it changes. But that is just the thing. Our perception is really all we have to go by. Even counting the cycles is mediated to us through our perception. So, if I can only notice this thing called time through my perception, maybe we can rightly say that it does speed up or slow down based on our perception of it!

What about the cycles we are counting then? Well, if those cycles are bound in time, then perhaps they speed up and slow down as our perception does such that the gears actually take less time to rotate when we perceive time to go by quicker. This is confusing, so I'll try to clarify...if our universe is bound in this passage of something called time, then everything in it is bound in time. It takes time to cross from one place to another. It takes time to type one letter after the other as I write this. I can't get out of it. Even the clock and the atoms we coutn by are bound in time. So if it changed durations, we could never perceive it in the world bound in time, since it would all speed up or slow down at the same time. We'd have to be outside time to tell.

But humans are half spiritual, and spirits are not bound by time. So perhaps when we disengage from such focus on the things around us, like when bored, or sleeping, or engaged in a consuming activity, time is actually changing speed and the way we perceive it is because our spirits, which are outside time, recognized it.

St Augustine examined time as well. He lived before there were clocks, so his world was not so strictly bound to the seconds and minutes of the cycles of gears and atoms, but more like cycles of days and years. Still it was an interesting topic for him. What is time? He says that if we break it down to the smallest moment of our perception we can realize that it has no substance...like a mathematical point is the present that the future (our expectations) squeeze into and the past (our memories) squeezes out of. The present is an infinitesimally small point through which expectation become memory. So, there is really no present. I see a moment coming and as soon as I try to apprehend it, it has become a memory. So the present really doesn't exist at all! But then, the future doesn't exist either. It hasn't come to be yet. And the past doesn't exist either because it's already gone. So all of existence is really a series of infinitesimally small, massless presents, smaller than a moment. How fragile our life is! Remember this isn't my logic, it's St Augustine's!

This line of reasoning seems to color so many things. I think of the Matrix, and time travel, and so many other ideas all rolling through my presents at the speed of time...whatever that is!