Here on Steem we are all having the time of our lives. And since the founders agree with us that time is money, you get payed for taking the time to write and read all kinds of stuff. It’s amazing!
But what is time? It seems so familiar and so ungraspable at the same time, that it really puzzles me. To question the being of something never leads to easy answers, but this time the riddle seems unsolvable. We are always already in time, and our whole way of being seems embedded in time.
What baffles me the most is that the subjective appearance of time is so radically different from the objective scientific point of view, that one wonders whether the two are even the same thing. If we take for example the appearance of a glass of water (it’s liquid, transparent, tastes like water, etcetera) and compare it to the scientific analyses (made out small particles and energy that form lots of H20 atoms that are configurated in a certain way, etcetera) one can make of it, we see that they somehow add up. That is, one can jump from the subatomic level, to the atomic, to the level of appearances without radically changing the nature of the thing observed. The observance of a glass of water can more or less be reduced to its scientific properties.
The appearance of time can in no way be reduced to its scientific properties. We perceive time in our day-to-day lives as the thing we live though, with its present, past and future in which things change, come to be, and decay. Scientists tell us that time is a dimension of this four-dimensional ‘block’ of spacetime in which there is no fixed present, and the past and future are just like left and right, two sides of a one way road. So in the world of science (the truth?) time doesn’t pass at all, and the future and past are as real as the present!
Source: NASA
So is our experience of time an illusion? Are we all having the time of our lives for eternity here? What do you guys think? Is time unreal? Or are we just missing something?
Steem on Steemians!
Roy
PS Another interesting point of view on the nature of time can be found here:
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@roydestory/playing-with-time
Finally science got it right. How can you measure bits of eternity?