What is time?

Note that the date is changed!  The meeting on Feb. 26 was cancelled due to my reaction to the second shot of Covid virus vaccine.  I'm better now, so we can pick this topic up again.  March 12!  7:00.   

It has been a little while since we have tackled a classically philosophic topic.  While "What is Time?" is not exactly a "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" quality topic, it can be a little esoteric and hard to "get into" for many people.  Hopefully my introduction here will help.

 "What is time?  If nobody asks me, I know; but if I desired to explain it to anyone who should ask me, then plainly I know not."  St. Augustine

 Time is usually broken down into 3 general categories: things in the past, things in the future, and the miniscule moment that separates them.  We like to think that this beautiful, fleeting moment we live in as being a moving, flowing snippet of time with essentially zero duration since the past follows so quickly after it, and the future is yet to be.  A razor's edge, is how I like to describe it. 

 Science measures the passage of very small durations of time by using the vibration of molecules, and large amounts of time by using the speed of light as a reference.  The human mind can perceive time only in what I would call practical terms, limited by the speed we take in perceptional information and processes it in our minds.  In that context the speed of thought might actually be very slow. 

 One metric I have always liked is that our minds can stitch together images into a flowing, coherent pattern if the images change at a rate of 22 frames per second or higher.  In the old days of movie film, if the film projection slowed to below 22 FPS, the images would appear to the audience to be jumpy and disconnected on the screen.  Typically films would be made at 30 FPS, avoiding this problem.  If that 22 FPS rate is true, then maybe the speed of thought is 1/22nd of a second?  Cognitive science measures the speed of neuron synapse info transfer at a much higher rate, so let's table this for now and maybe come back at it from another angle in a separate BQ.

 We normally see causal events in a common sense sort of way, where something happens and events follow due to this initial event.  A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples on the surface.  We understand this process because we are looking backwards, into the past, and we infer the movement of time from the motions we see. 

 But what if time is not moving, and we only infer the motion because of this perceptional frame of reference.  What if we take out the idea that the "present moment" is special in any way, but rather is just one of an infinite number of frames of reference we can perceive at any one time.  If we take motion out of the process, can we create a description of time that does not move?  Philosophers with way too much time on their hands have done this by suggesting that space-time might be composes of individual frames, each of infinitesimally small in duration, but connected much like the 2-dimensional frames on a movie strip.  These frames, they say, are actually 4-dimensional blocks.  They are composed of the 3-dimensional universe plus a 4th dimension of time.

 Ok, admittedly this is getting a little strange to think about.  If these block frames exist, and they include the past and the future, does that mean the universe is already set?  It leads us back towards issues of Free Will and predestination.  As always, things seem to be interconnected.

 My suggestion is to give this topic a good start, and let's see where it goes.  Are there movies you've seen that play with time as a plot theme?  Interstellar comes to mind for me, but time in that movie is handled by Einstein's special relativity, for the most part.  Time travelling stories often deal with time manipulation.  What comes to your mind?  How about The Lake House starring Sandra Bullock and Kenau Reeves.

What is your life's story?

 I had a dream last night that I moved to a new house in the Midwest.  In my dream I met a new neighbor, and to explain to him who I was I recounted an abbreviated resume of where I have lived, what I have done, what schools I attended, where I have traveled, my family and their accomplishments, and so forth.  This list of items then, in effect, provided a sort of definition of who I am. 

This rang a bell for me when I considered a past BQ topic, what gives our lives meaning?  I recall a meeting maybe 20 years ago when a group of us discussed a list of possible answers to that question that I passed out earlier in the evening that included things like, Life is a journey; Life is the pursuit of pleasure; Life is pain; Life is meaningless; Life’s meaning is to fulfill God’s plan, and many more.   The act of sitting down and considering the ways we react to each of the possibilities in the list provided a kind of feedback that we might not otherwise see.  

Do I think life is a journey?  Yes, a journey we take step by step, every day.

Is life the pursuit of pleasure?  Yes, but more than just pleasure, and pleasure in moderation.

Is life pain?  At times, but it gets better.  And there are many kinds of pain and not all are bad.

The idea that each of us could be somehow defined by the lives we have lived and the actions we have taken through our lives makes sense when we look backwards and examine the decisions we made and consequences of those decisions.  Our “cause and effect” brains can see the billiard balls bumping into each other, each contact affecting both in some way.  We may have made a decision to take a new job, for instance, and that decision had lots of consequences.  Making that decision was important in many ways and affected many people who were not so obviously going to be affected.  You can see it looking back, but you didn’t see it when you anticipated possible outcomes. 

I was recently asked to think of a decision or action I took that had a large impact on my life, and to share that action with a small group.  In the context I am trying to create in this narrative, this life altering decision or action might be seen as defining, in an important way, who I am today.  My life’s story, and the stories of all those around me, has been affected by that one decision I took, and stopping to think about it can be cathartic. 

What is your life’s story, and does it define you?