If time is an idea, or actully several related ideas we have, then our memories, which "recall" the past, are literally a store of these ideas, which increase. So because the amount of information in your memory increases, you perceive what you think is "the flow of time". Then recall of memories is you "linearising" a set of events, which your brain orders in time. You know which memories are older, and which are newer because of the way your brain stores information. Really an individual's sense of time is a function of biological timing mechanisms, and the gradual increase in information, or as we IT nobs like to say, an increase in information entropy. We perceive entropy increasing because it increases in our memory correspondingly. We also have various kinds of theoretical time, as in the direction of a cosmological arrow, proper time, coordinate time, simultaneous time, and so on. But time is really just memory, or more exactly the ability to store and recall events, by synchronising them with a biological timing mechanism--the "now" of consciousness. Any, um, ideas? ...Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Suppose we have an idea that we can build a timing mechanism that measures extremely small amounts of time. What happens though, as the amounts or 'pulses', of energy that correspond to ticks of the clock mechanism, or the escapement, get smaller is they act over smaller distances, or on smaller regions of space. Eventually we find that making the pulses smaller has no discernible effect on our ability to reliably synchronise two pulses (or a pulse with another 'clock' in order to adjust or restart a sequence, by delaying the next tick essentially). Since one of two attosecond clocks will run more quickly in a lab one floor above the other, identical clocks will need to be kept at identical distances from the surface or the center of the earth. The largest amount of time we can measure, depends crucially on the smallest 'quantum' amount, up to this adjustment factor.
Stephen Hawking discusses the idea in the opening post in A brief history of time. He describes three arrows of time: the psychological arrow (as in the OP), the cosmological arrow (the future is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding), and the thermodynamic arrow (the future is the direction in which entropy increases).
I've read ABHOT. Perhaps I'm regurgitating some of it. But anyway, looking at the three ideas of time in Hawking's book, the first and last examples are the ones immediately accessible to us. We can conjecture reasonably that psychological time is a function of natural timing mechanisms which are biological or biochemical. We also know that thermodynamic entropy will be a fundamental aspect of any mechanical system we can build, and so must be fundamental biochemically. Cosmological time remains the 'outlier' and there is also the thermodynamic history, and whether time, or the thermodynamic flow, is emergent.
I am not sure I fully understand this. Perhaps it would help me if you could explain/speculate on why perceived time speeds up as we age, keeping in mind your hypothesis above.
I am not sure this is the case with me. I am not sure my memories come with 'age markers'. I think I have a narrative of my life and when I remember I have to actively place a specific memory in this linear model. From my phenomenological experience I would almost think two areas of my 'brain' are involved. One with the model, one with the memories. (I am not suggesting this model of brains based on mind, but mainly getting across that there seem to be two things, not one with time markers.) I have no lived quite a while and a memory can come and I have to openly and consciously check with the 'life mural narrative' to place the memory in a year and in between the right memories on either side. But, since I am not quite sure what your model is, none of this may contradict what you are saying.
Time doesn't speed up, but as people age there seems, for them, to be less time to get things done. It might be because older people have more memories to deal with, and spend more time thinking about past experience than younger people. Or that young minds/brains are obliged to be more "open" to experience to reach the same level of memory, or develop "mature" worldviews. Anyway, that's the psychological arrow/rate of time, we know it's subjective and that externally, time doesn't change. Nor does our desire to know what time it "really" is.
Einstein began his inquest into the nature of time and space by making two key assumptions. By the standards of thinking of the day, and certainly nowadays, these were quite modest, or even "commonsense" things to assume, or, they aren't strange assumptions to make. But they lead to quite nonintuitive conclusions. By pursuing the idea of simultaneity, Einstein concluded that the idea itself is the "strange" part. The developments in industry, travel, and in Einstein's day, the railway systems meant this idea of simultaneous, synchronised events and train scheduling, for one, were becoming increasingly important. We arrange uncommonly synchronous events to occur in the world, whereas nature permits us to communicate between moving frames of reference at maximum the speed of light.
No. It's more than this. I am not saying that time 'out there' speeds up, but my experience of a week, a month, a year has changed. Remember how long a summer was when you were 10? Right, but it seemed like your OP was trying to deal with experienced time as it relates to memory, not time 'out there'.
Time 'out there' is also an idea, is what I'm saying. It might be an idea that's backed up by a lot of theories, and we've built a lot of clocks, but an idea is what it is.
I won't try addressing this scientifically, but here is something which may satisfy your request for speculation: "How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier. " - Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Thank for for the quoted speculation, though actually I was hoping the OP writer's answer would help me understand what he was getting at, and I think it did. That said, I must of have a more interesting adulthood than Mishima - which I find hard to imagine, but there it is. I have many vivid impressions, in fact I was more able as an adult to have vivid impressions than when I was a teenager. I opted for numb then and was good at it. Nevertheless I noticed even as a child that experienced time was speeding up, and this has not stopped. Travel or moving to a new country does seem to temporarily slow it down, however. Also extreme pain.
Which does appear to bear out what he said, in particular your last sentence. Childhood and the teen years are those of exploration and the forming of identity. Once that identity has largely solidified, further adventures are perceived almost entirely from within the context of that identity; and therefore are rarely conducive to further personal growth. Perhaps you are confusing the meaning of impression and memory.
I am not sure what the distinction for Mishima was between a 'left...vivid impression' and a vivid memory, so I suppose you could be right (that this is leading to a problem). I But I don't think I disagree with the OP writer. I tend to think of our speeded up perception of time as having to with how little we are changing. The larger percentage of 'me' that is changing, the slower time seems - painful experiences potentially having a different effect on perceived time. So infants who are changing rapidly and globally experience time as slower than we do, and so on up. Which I think fits OK with his explanation. When we travel we actually have to see what we are looking at, rather than get slight cues and fill in with memory which we can do for places we see all the time. Ditto other senses. Also we are navigating with more creativity, hopefully, and focus, since we need to.
As noted, clocks that have extremely fine mechanisms and can gauge the likes of attoseconds, will be desynchronised at different gravitational potentials, or on different floors of a building. They will also desynchronise if they are in relative motion at the same potential, which means moving away or towards each other. This is the time dilation effect; if the clocks also move towards or away from the center of gravity, there will be a double effect on the moving clock--it will slow down because it's moving at constant potential (along a constant gradient) and if it moves closer to the earth's surface or it will speed up as it moves away from the surface (along a varying gradient). The same amount of energy appears to act at different time-rates, but locally the clocks maintain 'proper time'. The desynchronisation is a function of changing spatial coordinates, with or without gravity 'acting' during the transformation, and which clock is chosen as the reference frame.
So it wasn't quite memory - as he suggested - but more how much of the brain is engaged in change. I do not suddenly have less memory if I move to a new country, but my brain is engaged with things more in the manner of a child - who is in a sense of foreigner here.
yeah like a blank slate you would have to familiarize yourself with the environment. not like you are scared like a child its just somehow an emotional response to learning a new area
Let me stop you here. It is 'quite' memory. If your brain is "engaged", you remember things don't you? If you're unconscious, your brain is "otherwise engaged"? If you remember less, is it because you are less engaged?
I knew you were saying it was memory. But since The Marquis seemed to agree with what I had said, including about travel (at least possibly) then 'memory' cannot be the only factor. Not necessarily at all. If I am in a new place I tend to be less likely to remember things. My total memory does not decrease when I am in a new place. It seemed like your model was based on their being more memory as we age. However when I travel, I have the experience of time slowing down, despite the fact that I do not have suddenly less memory. Not sure the relevence of this. Or this.
