What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. ~Saint Augustine
As certain as it is that 8:30 will arrive to spoil every morning of my existence, time is a very bona fide part of my life; only my experience of it is subjective. Human beings surely lead frenzied lives, but examine the rest of surrounding existence; there is a universal clock guiding everything from the cosmos, to nature, and even highly superior living things that contemplate the actuality of time itself.
I suppose that it’s fully acceptable to deem psychological time as relative; the existence of physical time, however, is absolute and can be witnessed all over. Everything we know and do is, in essence, nothing without the concept of time. To our ancient relatives this would have all appeared as supernatural; but through evolution, humankind has deciphered the multitude of cyclical patterns through the years. Animals are quite aware of when it is time to voyage south, when to hibernate, the ideal times for harvesting or reproducing; solar and lunar eclipses recur on a sequential schedule. Time is a piece of the essential composition of the universe, a dimension in which events happen in succession. All living things—from the simplest to the most advanced—have a primary notion of time.
It’s true that psychosomatic time was fashioned by man; it is a completely human mechanism for managing our day-to-day living. Physical time, on the other hand, has been around since the dawn of creation. Essentially, modern man is really a creation of time. Those pesky numbers on the clock counsel us when to work, sleep, and eat. We have affixed unreal articles and numbers (February15, 2008) for the exclusive intention of helping us in our understanding and measurement of time, but to disprove its physical authenticity is absurd.
Although physical time is the only sort of time that can be demonstrated as real, psychological time is essentially the only thing that matters to an individual’s conceptions of the world. A point in time that may have been exceptional to me, may be completely insignificant to another—no two people will have the same exact experience of psychological time (although their physical time experience will be perfectly alike). No one can ever really grasp what time is; but then again, can anyone really 'know' what anything is? For all we know, everything may be nothing.
2 comments:
Aha! To the contrary, I think we can know for certain that everything is, at the very least, not nothing, by its nature of being in the first place! Existence dictates nothingness to be vanquished.
Okay, I'm just being a jerk. Your final comments sound like radical constructivism though--if what you mean by "know" is to know infallibly. But I think you're right to say we must also have appropriate doubt for what we think we know.
haha not a jerk...a contructive critic. You simply further clarified my thoughts. It's not that we "know" that everything is nothing. it's simply imperative to doubt it all as we perceive it. thanks for the illumination.
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