TIME AND OBSERVER
What was that? – that barely distinguished jolt, a touch of peculiar feeling that began gently knocking on the door…
The door of my consciousness…
Yeah, I could feel it now… a tinge of some sweet&sour feeling — barely discernible but steadfast anyway— floating along in the shades, in the twilights, on the periphery of the consciousness’s spotlight … Was it a feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment? Was it something not unlike a feeling of being vindicated?
Or, was I somehow missled to believe I might be dealing with the one of that particular kind?
Anyway, what’s the deal, what’s all this fuss about? Why at all has that resonance happened?
Not too long ago I wrote a mini-essay dedicated to the topic of Time. Then there was a couple vignettes where I touched the Base of Time again, trying to resolve the Conundrum of Now.
Those were modest pieces of writing, simple and transparent — I hope they gave a reader no trouble to see though: they were plain and crude, like the ‘Dogon Cosmology’s essentials :)
The point I was trying to impart was quite radical though: ‘there’s no such thing as an Objective Time in the whole picture of reality.’
Above all, I was trying to emphasize ‘what we perceive as the flow of time is just the consciousness’s reflection of the motion determined in the variety of processes.
ALL OF THEM, PROCESSES, are the entities developing accordingly their inner logic, charging at a seemingly self-decreed pace, unfolding with the assertive inevitability — and folding with the uncompromising finitude.
Since ‘the beginning of time’, i.e., with the first spark of consciousness in what we call now the Human Spirit — The Spirit has been dealing with processes.
The most ground-founding, archetypical Time-Registering Processes must be the most elevated ones, aiming at the stars and other celestial bodies (resulted — at some point in the history — in creation of the calendars). The backdrop of this kind surely helps affirm the paragon of time — which seems to be eternal — yet flowing. Amazing, there’s growing attention to the speculative conjecture alleging the ancient people had managed somehow to grasp the cyclic pattern in the space-scale motion peculiarity called Earth Precession.
Yet while lowering their eyes to the ground, observing ‘earthly things’, the sentient beings saw processes affirming rather the opposite — the temporal, transitory nature of things — their finitude.
“Life is short!” I bet this adage goes back to the far-distant antiquity.
No wonder the concept of time is so natural to us, and, probably, not only to us — humans. Neuroscientists are now swiftly zeroing in on the brain circuitries responsible for timing the internal and external processes.
So, the popular cliche: “it’s wired in our brain” doesn’t sound groundless at all.
In physics, they are all the same thing. But to you, me, and everyone else, time moves in one direction: from expectation, through experience, and into memory. This linearity is called the arrow of time, and some physicists believe it only progresses that way because humans, and other beings with similar neurological wiring, exist to observe its passing.
This is a quotation from an online article in the ‘Wired’ magazine, the content of which had stirred up a bit of excitement on my part that was mentioned above.
So, is this indeed that the so-called ‘time arrow’ is just (ours — observers’) ‘figment of imagination’? A construct (“historically wired into the consciousness of all sentential beings”) determined biologically, an instrument to gauge, to pace the motion in the omnipresent processes?
Mind you, the cognition itself happens in time, with a certain lag, as a process of elevation of the perceived material in mind, to create a true notion of what a subject has originally encountered; so, it happens not instantly but follows a staged path involving ‘a lot subjectivity’ on the way, to say the least.
Maybe, physicists should give up all the effort of ‘removing the observer from the picture’ for, against all the odds, if not stubbornly clanging on to the scene, it takes a rain check at worst?
