Saturday, November 13, 2010

The [Enigmatic] Nature Of Time

If this wasn't on the Psychology Today website, I'd think it was fake.  But it is.  On PT that is.  So it got me thinking about my perception and conceptions of time.  Humans perceive time as linear; events have chronology, ie one thing happens, then another, then another and so on.  But is time linear?

I believe the multiverse to be a collection of discrete moments (ie events, the time frame of which is the smallest unit of time imaginable [or more correctly, unimaginable]) that an entity (eg a human consciousness) follows in a random path (like connect the dots).  Because humans perceive time as linear, this path should be roughly linear (straight, zig-zag, wavy, it doesn't really matter as long as no moment is ever visited twice).  Hashing this out with my roommates a few weeks ago I came to the conclusion that time is probably a fourth dimension.  I thought of this when trying to consider where all these moments were.  I mean, they had to be somewhere, right?  Somewhere out of reach of all of us (as in, we can't jump out of our time-bubble moments to view the "big picture"); there must be another dimension, in addition to xyz that contains them all!  Brilliant!  Anyway, in this model time isn't linear, rather it's sort of like an amorphous gel that all the moments are suspended in.  Kind of like the plum pudding model of the atom.  Interesting…

I think this PT article lends credence to my floating moments model.  (I kinda like that name, too; I think I'll keep it.)  What this article is suggesting—that the brain can have some (limited) precognition—suggests that time is not linear but a substance(?) that pervades reality.  Not circular, I think, because then precog would only extend to a certain period of time (like thirty-two nanoseconds or five minutes or ten millennia or something).  Unless time circles were infinite and concurrent…

Just what kind of substance(?) is time?  Hmmmm…

1 comment:

Craig Fraser said...

You can get the study here if you're interested-http://dbem.ws/online_pubs.html#psi

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