While our subjective experience of living moves forward through time our scientific intellect looks back objectifying through logic and mathematics:
“… the physical universe only acquires an objective existence, as a suitably scientific object, within a logical and mathematical framework which must be imposed a priori by the human mind.” (Thibault Damour, 2005)
And within this framework, the objective universe described with the Theory of General Relativity has abolished our temporal experience of proper earth ‘time’:
“Some physicists believe we should think the unthinkable and abolish time altogether. …. the notion of time is meaningful only in a small range of physical situations in the universe, such as human experience.” ~ Physicists Carlo Rovelli, (Michael Brooks, 2008)
And indeed, it is within our neurological processes producing our awareness of Earth’s three-dimensional motions that our consciousness emerges through our perceptual forms of of the physical world, and of course, within our concept of ‘proper’ time.
Our concept of time explodes into existence more than 13 billion years ago with the birth of the universe, and within the ‘cosmological arrow of time’ (1) lays our objective theory: an elegant four-dimensional reality with flexible time inextricably entwined into the curved geometry of an expanding space: scientific space-time, our universe dances before our eyes with a velocity of light-years, but science objectively excludes the concept of temporal time and stationary position.
Yet with the arrival of planetary cycles and human participation our temporal-time arose to accommodate our life of empirical experiences; our relatively stationary positions of three-dimensional plane geometry and our ‘temporal time’ measuring the slower velocities of motion with our seconds, minutes, hours and days.
With eons of evolutionary adaption aligning our ‘psychological arrow of time’ we experience life profoundly yet move casually within this dimensional matrix of perceptions.
When our feet hit the floor in the morning, we stand within our subjective Life-world (2)- the immediate psychological experience of living- the ground zero of reality for us where mankind takes over from space-time and theory sits in the back seat. This is our immediate awareness of reality, the real-time where we recycle cosmic activity into the motion of human activity and produce our human meaning…
‘Without awareness motion is pointless and without motion awareness is meaningless.’ ~
We are ‘aware’ of our environment as we inattentively lace on our tennis shoes for a morning match but we’ve probably forgotten something: as children we had to painstakingly learn this elementary yet intricate ‘spatiotemporal’ (3) act of coordination; the simple geometry of the relative movements in this simple activity while moving through time becomes complex, but not nearly as intricate as what we do once we get on the tennis court.
Arriving at the court we watch a serve begin in our immediate moment of awareness; the tennis ball is struck and launched into an arc through space at about 80 mph; our ‘perception of motion’ (4) produces the visual images of sequence flowing past our awareness into memory:
“For while passing, it was being extended into some space of time, so that it might be measured, since the present hath no space.” ~ Saint Augustine
Reaching back into this memory we can re-create a conceptual framework for time through metaphor by freezing the tennis ball’s perceived motion into sequential ‘snap-shots’ for examination.
Using an arbitrary1/64 of a second for clarity (instead of attempting to portray our phenomenally intricate neurological functions) we put our time ordered memory to task and recall the flight of the tennis ball in reverse, from the tennis court baseline across the 80 feet of space back to the racquet that launched it.
Freezing each of the 1/64 of second snap-shots of the ball in flight we’ll see in our minds-eye about 40 tennis ball images suspended in an arc across the court as if held by a stout wire.
This is an abstract framework of time in motion; now watch another serve and imagine this sequential freezing during the balls next flight
But this intellectual exercise upon memory can collapse into the intellectual quandary of “Archimedes’ arrow” producing endless divisions of retrospective motion; and time loses the flavor and nature of our forward experiences which begin within…
“… the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.” ~ William James
Picture a row of dominos winding around a hardwood playing court floor, thousands of them in an extended row that are set into motion by pushing the first one over. It makes contact with the next, and the next and the next as they each in turn begin to fall in blurring motion. At any given ‘moment’ several of the dominos are neither standing upright nor lying motionless on the floor, but are ‘in motion’ as a ‘group’ and this group presents itself as a moving entity, a ‘manifold’ if you will, of single dominos in motion.
This produces the experience of our “…specious present…”; what we can retrospectively and intellectually divide into endless ‘moments of time’ are actually a meaningful ‘whole’ flowing forward as experience which cannot be numerically fractionalized.
Our psychological experience of time is what is happening ‘now’, not what we intellectually reflect upon; and what is happening ‘right now’ is often much fuller [and more complex] than what our intellect can ([or even has the ‘time’ to] inform us of by picking our memories apart into pieces.
Our energy level as we feel the trickle of sweat between our shoulder blades while an insect lazily buzzes overhead between us and the hot sun. A lazy buzzing that matches the slow movements of spectators but crazily contrasts with the speed of our keen intellectual focus upon our opponent’s abilities and tactics as we await the next serve; what the game of tennis ‘means’ to us to begin with, whether we emotionally like or dislike our opponent and even if winning or losing the match is more or less important than the immediate excitement of physical exertion and the mental contests of tactics.
And many more factors all come together ‘in the moment’ as ‘the’ experience that immediately defies intellectual awareness; we don’t ‘know’ it, we ‘feel’ it.
While the ‘time’ of our intellect can endlessly divide the ‘time’ of human experience in retrospect and stipulate divisions of ‘time’ into the future as the inherent conditions of its logical operations upon our experiences, it cannot stipulate and penetrate the elusively flowing ‘moment of time’ that actually ‘is’ our psychological experience- ‘right now’.
This is Time’s presence in our life giving birth to not only our divisions of thought and actions but to the ‘sum’ of these divisions that are felt, not known- the very real experience of Life itself -‘in the moment’ of time.
References:
1. Damour, Thibault (2006), Once upon Einstein, trans. by Eric Novak, (Wellesley, Massachusetts, A.K. Peters Ltd.), p. 40
2.Brooks, Michael (2008), What makes the universe tick?, New Scientist, 19 November 2008. Retrieved from:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-w hat-makes-the-universe-tick.html?full=true&print=true
3. Hawking, Stephen (1990), A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, New York, Bantam Trade paper edition, p.145
4. Encyclopedia Britannica (2010), Lifeworld, retrieved from: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/340330/lif e-world
Endnotes:
(1) Arrow of Time: identifies three arrows of time:
1. Psychological arrow of time – our perception of an inexorable flow.
2. Thermodynamic arrow of time – distinguished by the growth of entropy.
3. Cosmological arrow of time – distinguished by the expansion of the universe. (Stephen Hawking, 1990)
(2) “Life-world, German Lebenswelt, in Phenomenology, the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sciences, which employ the methods of the mathematical sciences of nature; although these sciences originate in the life-world, they are not those of everyday life.” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2010)
“Lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together”
Lifeworld. (2010, November 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:33, December 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lifeworld&oldid=394937136
(3) spatiotemporal (abridged)
Function: adjective
Etymology: spatio- + temporal
: having the quality of something that is at once extended and enduring : of or relating to the spatial and temporal together : of space-time … <the spatiotemporal limits within which our reason functions – Times, spa·tio·temporally “+ adverb
“spatiotemporal.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (27 Dec. 2010).
(4) “Motion perception is the process of inferring the speed and direction of elements in a scene based on computer science.”
Motion perception. (2010, December 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:42, December 28, 2010. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Motion_per ception&oldid=402951933
(5) Dr. Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist and Professor, Istitut des Hautes Etudes
Scientifiques and a member of the French Academy of Sciences who received the prestigious Einstein medal and numerous other awards. See: http://www.ihes.fr/~damour/
