About time #1
I had this idea a while ago; an exercise in trying to take those random, recurring thoughts from the shower and put them into words to give them some structure. The main topic that came around has been around time.
I’m not an academic so these are just opinions and meeting my own curiosity. Time is endlessly fascinating to me, in terms of what we think it is, how we experience it and the fiction we create around it. Who doesn’t love a fun time-travel film?
I love the way that this video explains the first five dimensions in such a simple way, which still be challenging.
I think this helps us to look at time. If we forget about hours, minutes and seconds and start from a place of stasis; nothing changes and is completely still — is there time? I’d argue that our concept of time only appears if we put ourselves as an actor in this scenario. There is no time until we are present. As our 4 dimensional selves, our internal systems work, we are capable of moving and interacting and so we introduce time to this space.
Breaking that down, we could say that time is a vast array of actions/reactions. If two marbles were all that existed, there’d be no time. If some kind of trigger moved one ball towards the other, they’d bump and go off in different directions. Depending on the energy involved in that trigger and how one ball impacted the other depends on the decay of that action. At some point, without further triggers, would this scene once again be timeless having once known time? With some sense of chronology, we have a before and an after this event took place. Should another one occur, there would be another marker of time to gauge things by and so the notions of after and before now exist.
Here we also come across probability, which I think is an interesting factor that helps make sense of time and the 5th dimension. Depending on factors affecting the first marble; the nature of the trigger, the speed, the point of impact of the trigger and all of the potential places the marble could go with both hit and don’t hit the second marble. All of these outcomes exist. What is different is that as human observers, we perceive only one of them.
Much as that video describes a 2-dimensional being struggling to perceive the 3rd-dimensional space, perhaps this is a limit of our perception of our reality. Is there a sense of us consciously navigating it — I doubt that. Maybe we experience all possible outcomes but are only aware of each one, which then challenges what we believe we are.
Considering ‘time’ to be actions and reactions with all possible outcomes in existence, the idea of a timeline is less a straight line and more of an eccentrically drawn line through each point of multiple outcomes.
Navigating time is therefore about possibilities and probabilities going to the future and retroactively tracing back a vast array of reactions to their triggers continuously until we reach our destination.
Perhaps all possible outcomes already exist and the human experience is consciously experiencing random pathways through them. Here’s where we can consider fate…if we wanted to. There is a massive array of how things can go but whether this could ever be a conscious act or chance that we experience a given outcome when ‘we’ might be experiencing them all at the same time but not aware of that is a fun conceit. ‘We’ experience all of these possible outcomes so pouring everything into this single progression of time that we feel we’re consciously aware of is part of our limitations.
Considering this mental model of time doesn’t imply that we can in any way impact it or traverse it but it can make for some interesting lines of enquiry.
