Time may be a psychological projection, philosopher argues
“Time flies”, “time waits for no one”, “time flies”: the way we talk about time tends to strongly imply that the passage of time is some kind of real process that occurs in the world. We inhabit the present moment and move through time, even as events come and go, blending into the past.
But go ahead and try to verbalize exactly what is meant by the flow or passage of time. A flow of what? Rivers flow because water is moving. What does it mean to say that time is running out?
Human beings have been thinking about time for as long as we have had records of humans thinking about anything. The concept of time inevitably permeates every thought you have about yourself and the world around you. This is why, as a philosopherphilosophical and scientific developments in our understanding of time have always seemed particularly important to me.
Ancient philosophers on time
Ancient philosophers were very wary of the notion of time and change. Parmenides of Elea was a Greek philosopher from the 6th to 5th centuries BCE. Parmenides wonderedif the future is not yet and if the past is no more, how could events move from the future to the present to the past?
He believed that if the future is real, then it is real now; and if what is real now is only what is present, the future is not real. So, if the future is not real, then the occurrence of any present event is a case of something inexplicable coming from nothing.
Parmenides was not the only one skeptical about time. Similar reasoning regarding the contradictions inherent in the way we talk about time appears in Aristotlein the ancient Hindu school known as Advaita Vedanta and in the work of Augustine of Hippoalso known as St. Augustine, just to name a few.
Einstein and relativity
The first modern physicist Isaac Newton had presumed an unnoticed but real passage of time. For Newton, time is a dynamic physical phenomenon that exists in the background, a regular, ticking universal clock according to which all motion and acceleration can be described objectively.
SO, Albert Einstein has arrived.
In 1905 and 1915, Einstein proposed his special And general theories of relativityrespectively. These theories confirmed all those long-held suspicions about the very concept of time and change.
Relativity rejects Newton’s notion that time is a universal physical phenomenon.
In Einstein’s time, researchers had shown that the speed of light is constant, regardless of the speed of the source. According to him, taking this fact seriously means considering all the speeds of objects as relative.
Nothing is ever truly at rest nor truly in motion; It all depends on your “frame of reference. “A frame of reference determines the spatial and temporal coordinates that a given observer will assign to objects and events, assuming that it is at rest relative to everything else.
Someone floating in space sees a spaceship passing to the right. But the universe itself is completely neutral as to whether the observer is at rest and the ship is moving to the right, or whether the ship is at rest with the observer moving to the left.
This notion affects our understanding of what clocks actually do. Since the speed of light is constant, two observers moving relative to each other will attribute different times to different events.
In one famous example, two equidistant flashes occur simultaneously to an observer at a train station who can see both at the same time. An observer on the train, heading towards one flash and away from the other, will assign different times to strikes. In effect, an observer moves away from the light coming from one strike and toward the light coming from the other. The other observer is stationary with respect to the flashes, so the respective light from each reaches him at the same time. Neither is true or false.
How much time passes between events and what time something happens, depends on the observer’s frame of reference. Observers moving relative to each other will, at any time, disagree about the events currently occurring; events that occur now according to one observer’s estimation at a given time will occur in the future to another observer, and so on.
Under relativity, all time is equally real. Everything that has happened or will ever happen is happening now to a hypothetical observer. There is no event that is merely potential or a mere memory. There is no single, absolute, universal present, and therefore there is no flow of time as events are meant to “become” present.
Change simply means that the situation is different at different times. At all times, I remember certain things. Later, I remember more. That’s all there is to say about the passage of time. This doctrine, widely accepted today among physicists and philosophers, is known as “eternalism”“.
This brings us to a crucial question: If the passage of time doesn’t exist, why does everyone seem to think it exists?
Time as a psychological projection
A common option has been to suggest that the passage of time is an “illusion” — just like Einstein famously described it at some point.
Calling the passage of time “illusory” incorrectly suggests that our belief in the passage of time is the result of an erroneous perception, as if it were some kind of optical illusion. But I think it’s more accurate to view this belief as the result of a misconception.
As I propose in my book “A brief history of the philosophy of time“, our perception of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection – a type of cognitive error that involves a misconception of the nature of your own experience.
THE the classic example is color. A red rose is not really red in itself. Rather, the rose reflects light at a certain wavelength, and a visual experience of that wavelength can give rise to a sensation of redness. What I mean is that the rose is not really red nor does it give the illusion of redness.
The visual experience of red simply depends on how we process the objectively true facts about the rose. It is not a mistake to identify a rose by its redness; the rose lover does not make profound claims about the nature of the color itself.
Likewise, my research suggests that the passage of time is neither real nor an illusion: It’s a projection based on how people make sense of the world. I can’t really describe the world without the passage of time, any more than I can describe my visual experience of the world without referring to the color of objects.
I can say that my GPS “thinks” I took a wrong turn without really committing to my GPS being a conscious, thinking being. My GPS has no mind, and therefore no mental map of the world, but I am not wrong to understand its results as a valid representation of my location and destination.
Likewise, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is indeed dynamic for me in terms of my experience of the world.
The passage of time is inextricably linked to the way humans represent our own experiences. Our image of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality that we offer will inevitably be imbued with our point of view. The mistake is confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself.
This edited article is republished from The conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
