Where does the time go? That's a common phrase we use to describe how fast things are moving in our lives. It can be relative to today, or a longer period, even a lifetime. But is time really going anywhere? Does time move, or do we move through it?
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This brings up an interesting aspect, that we can think of the past things that have happened, and think of the future that can happen, but can we think of the present? Think about it. If the present immediately tuns into the past each millisecond, then we can never think of the present itself.
What is happening becomes the past, so we would be thinking of what has been happening, as recent as a fraction of a second ago. We would also be thinking of what could be happening based on what has happened. We can predict into the future by projecting the pattern of what is happening now forward.
A ball is thrown towards us, and we anticipate and predict where it will be in order to catch it. We aren't thinking of the present position and trying to act on that alone. As each moment passes, the brain processes the position of the ball as a stream in time. Our internal physics engine sees a trajectory form from one position to the next. We need that stream in time to understand more about the potential future outcome as where the ball will be.
Each present position has a history of past positions, leading to future positions which become the present and then the past. Then we catch the ball as we know where it will be when the future we predicted becomes the present state of being at that moment we catch it.
The present is always becoming the past, and the future becomes the present as the new state of being. We reach into the future and bring the potential becoming into the actual being.
I started off with a thought and title on "Where does the time go?", but now the writing has diverged onto other things about time. Let's see if I can bring it back.
Time may not exist, but use that word to describe reality and make sense of things. Even if we didn't have a word for it, there is this aspect of living where things are not static, frozen, unmoving. That's what time is talking about, non-static, unfrozen, moving, dynamic, change. If there was no time as a function of existence, then everything would be 'dead', as nothing would be moving, nothing would be happening. Essentially there would be nothing at all that would exist because no creation would be possible.
Maybe it's better to think of time as a function, not as a 'thing' itself, since it's not something itself as far as we can detect. Like a math function with data plotted on a graph, the function is not the data, but describes the data as it moves through time. The function of time is a way to describe what happens as one thing relates to another. Time describes relations of change. If nothing changed, then time wouldn't be in operation. It would be like staying at one data point within a function or graph, and no new data to move towards.
Everything is a data point, moving through the time function. Our lives intersect with other lives. Sometimes we move together with others, sometimes we move apart, but time is always there, functioning as part of measure of our existence. We can measure time due to relative changes. The planets move, the Earth revolves around the sun, the gears in a watch turn to move the second hand.
Since time may or may not be a thing in itself, but is a function, we are moving through time. Time may not go anywhere per se, but relative to us as the data point in a function, it moves around us and does go places. We as data points only have a finite amount of time as extistents in the function.
Time is limited. Time goes by quickly, and before we know it, we're several decades old, nearing the final years of our life. In the grand function of time, we are limited datasets contained within a larger one, progressing along in time, until we don't and our data stop being part of the future.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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And then when you look back , Time is all you had and to look back it’s all memories
We have time. What we doing with it? "Enjoying" life, pleasure, gratification, while we continue to perpetuate wrongs, or are we trying to figure out how to make a heave on earth?
Time is just a reference on how far we have traveled and till where and when we can go on our journey in life.
I’ve often wondered what would life be like without clocks/a measure for ‘time’:
I guess we would naturally wake up at sunrise, animal style. Sleep more in winter...
would we have jobs? Would we be more of a community based earth? Maybe we would all work together more if we weren't chasing the clock (then again that has more to do with 9-5 life - different story)
Would we move around as much and travel? Would we be as advanced as we are now if we simply didn’t put a measure on time?
It’s something I always ponder for sure:) I wonder if anyone else does or if you have any thoughts on this?
We would be much more backward than we are now without knowing the existence of time. Time is something invisible, but after all it is the invisible things that make the human move forward. Those humans who noticed and described time in the past, several millennia ago, were true geniuses, because they could notice the existence of something that we are not able to see, but that still makes us much better.
If today we don't notice the existence of time. How many people would be able to "discover" it? I think that very few, very probably none, would be a very difficult concept to understand.
The knowledge of time is one of those things that makes us separate from the animal world. It is very likely that no animal can know or understand time.
Animals are very aware of time. Geese need to travel thousands of miles to flee their breeding grounds before the snows, and return just when the thaw takes hold. When I hunted, the Elk would split the herds up just before the season began, and the bulls would hunker in the deepest thickets, where but few hunters had the fortitude to go.
Some herds actually flee the forests altogether, and wait out the season in suburban fields, where they cannot be hunted. They are much smarter than most of us think. Mature buck deer do much the same, although the blacktails here don't herd, but are dispersed throughout the range singly. During hunting season, mature bucks only come out at night to feed. This is why hunters must be in places to hunt by dawn, or just before dusk, to catch out the overeager and stragglers.
Many animals hibernate, and many more are quite sensitive to time of day. Our free brothers, the wild animals, have far greater sensitivity to what time it is than do we captive thralls, with our fire; light that pushes back the night that we can serve our overlords the longer.
Of course, I am sure that even plants can be aware of time in that way. But that is a very primitive way of understanding time. The human can be aware of a time from which he will not even live, or from which he never lived, the human has a truly complex understanding of time. If we had an animal understanding of time, we could not have made any progress that we have made as a society.
The Elk and Deer predict the season accurately without clocks or calendars. They do this because they know if they do not, they will die.
I do not see what makes our understanding of time more advanced.
Well, humans can predict, plan and manage complex organizations with a much more accurate forecast of time than an animal, being able to measure all kinds of unpredictable variability.
Humans can also understand more precisely, the effects of current and past causes, to foresee the future. It is said that the sun will go out within 4500 million years, whether true or not, the fact that the human can capture in his brain this figure, and the fact that he can find alternatives so that a future society can avoid this catastrophe, it tells us a lot about the superior understanding of time for the human. An animal could not even understand such a large amount of time.
Not to put a spam comment in here but this interaction; the string of comments, is what I like about this platform the most.
I didn’t think much about animals and time, yes they do hibernate, migrate and the like but the aspect of ‘time’ as we know it seems to be a human construct.
Technological advancement would be stifled, as time is way to coordinate efforts ;) Forget plane travel even if we managed to invent planes in that disordered confusion, as the planes would take off whenever and you might be late or days early.
We don't know whether time really exist or not. It is the relative movement of matter, things, energy etc. that gives us the sense of passing of time. We know that the earth revolves around the sun in 24 hours (slightly early) because our watches and clock show us that 24 hours have been elapsed but if the earth begin to move much faster or slower and simultaneously everything in the universe begin to move similarly faster or slower then we cannot realize that the speed of the earth has increased or decreased.
The enormous objects like black hole can alter the speed of time. If someone could survive near a blackhole, he will see everything moving very fast while a person on earth will see him as stationery because the relative speed of time is different in both the places.
I realized that when I was a child time used to move very slowly but when I grow up time is moving very fast for me. I don't find 24 hours enough for me in one day.
So, time is an extraordinary thing in this universe.
No, you would notice, because we set 1 second as a certain amount of time relative to movement in existence. If the earth would speed up, 1 second would still be one second for us, but we would have less time to spin around for 1 day, so the day would change length. 1 second is arbitrary, based on a division of the day. The day is what determines our measure of hours, minutes and seconds.
I wish I had more than 24h too hehe.
Yes, 1 second is a time in which the atom of Cesium completes 9,192,631,770 frequencies. But what will happen if Cesium atom complete that resonance in just half the time and so the other atoms? Will be able to realize it? No, never.
This is quite perspicacious, and contrary to what we have long been taught by those who fancy themselves best able to understand time, physicists. Time is the fourth dimension, they learn in school.
But, as you point out, it isn't a dimension at all. Einstein was extremely intelligent, but wrestled unsuccessfully to understand time, managing only gravity well enough in his famous formula. Time is that aspect of reality potentiating change; creation and destruction; continuation and stasis are only possible as time 'flows'. It is time that shows that gravity isn't an energy like other forces. It takes no time for gravity to affect mass.
It takes time for light to reach from it's source to our eyes, but the gravitational attraction simply is present, however attenuated it is, no matter how far you are from the mass exerting it. The idea of spacetime works in our calculations of orbits, but it is not just an aspect of spatial dimensions IMHO.
Much shrift has been given time by the greatest minds we have been afforded the ruminations of in history, yet your description of time as a function may be the best we have come up with. I find it far more likely to be closer to what actually is than the physicists' labeling it as a dimension.
Thanks!
You're welcome :) Glad it provided value to you. It's something I have come up with in my contemplations of how we can change things, and how reality works ;) Dunno if others have talked about it as well. I enjoy looking at what is and seeing what's there. It's fun to discover things by figuring it out on our own ;)
It has been said we are nothing more than vapors evaporating in the air. I also think of a couple of songs. Time - Alan Parsons Project and Tomorrow is Today - Billy Joel. Thanks for a good article @krnel.
Yup, tomorrow becomes today. We're always moving forward, not back, nor still. So the important thing to look at is the future, not the present or past, but that doesn't mean not to see where we are to know where we are going.
I was learning to a lecture on youtube some time ago about time and you touched this as well in this article. The lecturer said:
I found this interesting. And it got me thinking: what we actually need to take inventory of is our life. And if we are going to relate our lives with time (past, present, and future) then the most important period would be now--the present because in it we exist, not our past or future.
Not really. We are moving towards the future, always. The present is what is, but in our journey in life, we are moving towards the future, forward, so the future is where we need to set our eyes to know where we are headed, to know what destination we are moving towards. It's all about the future. A journey is about going somewhere. That somewhere is in the future, not the present.
Well, valid point.
But just food for thought:
If all our efforts are geared twoards the future, aren't we rubbing ourselves of today's blessing?
I believe every facet of our lives is important.
Our past holds our memories
Our future contain our prospects
Our present is the link to both domains. Thats why im particular about being present in time, not daydreaming of the future or being stuck in the past. Because only our present is certain, the past is gone and the future is uncertain--we can only predict or plan towards but we are not 100% certain of the outcome.
I appreciate your feedback.
Today is today, be grateful for what you have. The present is what we have now. But that might not last. Look forward to actualize more into your life going forward. We create the outcomes going forward, if we want. Or just let things happen without our guidance to create our own future... we moved rather than do the moving to self-direct life.
I loved the section about the present, was a total mind F for me lol you don’t usually think of it that way. Once you do it then takes of a Willy Wonka river boat trip aspect! Really liked that food for thought, particularly because I’m exhausted it was an interesting experiment to analyze in such a state.
There's a problem with all the new agey "spiritual" "be in the now", "there is only the present" bs. A positivity mask to make people feel good. This ca lead to just focus on their instant immediate gratification, and the future trajectory is ignored, and not learning from the past too. As if it
s all about "now" and enjoying life "now"... many problems in our times come from this short-sighted focus.
Beautiful philosophy and great writing sir.. thanks for sharing your life...sir your Post @upvote and @resteemit done.
You are really so beautiful writing and philosophy. thank for sharing this blog.upvote and resteemit done sir.
Time doesnt really exist. If the earths orbit speed would increase 100%, our lifespans would double and we would be clueless as to why we were living longer. If it would decrease by 100%, we would blame it on the food, or medicines. Who knows? Maybe it has changed.
Our lifetimes wouldn't double... it would be the same, just the measuring unit would change...
50 years would turn into 100 years. So the average person would live like 140 years.