What is Time?
People around the world have been asking the same question for centuries. However, I am sure, that no one of them has found a specific answer to it yet.
At first, I would like to dive into history for a bit and explore what different philosophers and wise man has thought and discussed the topic in the past.
For instance, Aristotle claimed that “time is the measure of change of things”. On the other hand, René Descartes answered the question, by saying that a material body has no capacity for temporal endurance and that God by his continual action re-creates the body at each successive instant, so according to Descartes, time is a kind of constant re-creation ourselves. Another philosopher, Immanuel Kant said time and space are forms that the mind projects upon the external things in themselves. Time and space are, according to Mr. Kant, forms of humans’ intuition. Kant says that time “is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever” (by the way, there is also a posteriori -condition as well, but it’s not related to that) which is probably best understood by that we have no direct perception of time but only have the ability to experience individual things and events in time. The philosophers of the early 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger posed an idea, that time is essentially the form of becoming, which was, in my opinion, in a way similar to Aristoteles’s ancient idea.
Nowadays we have three competing philosophical theories about time and its understanding.
According to one of them, Presentism, only the present time is real. Presentists believe that only present objects and present experiences are real. However, in our reality, the Presentists’ theory fights with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which on the other hand says that simultaneity isn’t always absolute. In spite of that, and according to Presentism, we recognize things in our present experience comparing them to our memories of past experiences and our expectations of future experiences. Presentists would say that the dinosaurs have extinct because we can’t sense them in very that moment, even though our current ideas of them have not gone away.
Another theory about time is the growing-past theory. According to it, the past and present are both real, but the future is not, because the future is indeterminate or merely potential. According to Growing-Past theorists, Dinosaurs are real, but our future death is not.
Another common name for this theory is also an A-theory of time.
A-theorists say that time is linear, and the present always follows the past and the future always follows the present. A-theorists say that the future is not defined, but the past already is. A-theorists tend to cite the Ancient philosopher Heraclitus, saying that “it is impossible to step twice into the same river”
The third theory, eternalism, or the so-called B-theory says that there are no objective differences between the present and the past. Shortly, B-theorists claim that we just don’t know much about the future, but it is as defined as the past is. B-theorists tend to add as well that such physic phenomena as quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity support their thoughts quite well.
As an example of the theory, an Eternalist (or B-theorist) wouldn’t say that the Second World War exists in the past; they would rather say that it is in the past for people living in the 21st century, but it is in the future for the Ancient Greeks.
When it comes to debates between A- and B-theorists, many A-theorists argue that by rejecting temporal ‘becoming’, B-theorists reject time’s most vital characteristic. However, B-theorists don’t agree with that, they argue with A-theorists saying that all the time — the past, the present, and the future already exist in so-called “parity”. Both visions lead to many other philosophical questions, such as “free will”, but I can surely write about that in another essay.
Not a long while ago I have been reading a book called “the Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. To be honest, it is quite a boring novel, but it had a lot of interesting philosophical thoughts in it, about the time as well.
The main character, Mr. Castorp, lives in a sanatory and has plenty of time to think. He notices one interesting truth there — when there is a lot of things to do, the time flies by, and vice-versa, when you are a bored stiff and don’t have anything to do, the time goes as slow as a tortoise. However, as time goes by, and one day you look back at your past, you see that moments filled with action seem actually to be longer than you felt them in the past. On the other hand, boring moments of your life have left barely any memory to you, so you might not even remember their existence. When it comes to me, I have personally found his thoughts really interesting.
When it comes to science, many scientists are sure that our body is capable of detecting different time durations even if we are not conscious of doing so. For example, when we notice that the sound has come from a certain direction, we do this by unconsciously detecting the very slight amount of time it takes for the sound to reach one of our ears.
However, when it comes to longer time gaps, such as minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months, our body is incapable of measuring them properly.
At least when it comes to memory techniques, you can’t use one, when you have to measure a certain amount of time. All the mentors across the world will claim to you that you can’t teach yourself remembering periods of time, even after hours of practice. Simply, it is always safer to put a cooking timer, than memorizing that you have to take your cake out from the oven in 20 minutes — you won’t be ever able to do that.
In conclusion, I can say that people have been interested in time for centuries, they have designed all kinds of clocks to measure something they couldn’t even sense. Philosophers discussed the topic a lot in the past and keep doing that even nowadays, still going in circles. Time is a fourth dimension, which mechanisms have not been researched quite well yet.
However, time is everywhere around us — our biological clock is ticking constantly changing our organisms, physical time in going forward on your room’s wall clock, and the psychological time, which is a people’s understanding of the physical time, is always with you inside your own head, no matter are you sound asleep or wide awake.
