RE: Special Relativity. Lifetime.
December 5, 2019 at 5:13 pm
(This post was last modified: December 5, 2019 at 5:25 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
Hmm so my premise is that there isn't a thing called "time" to which things happen to in the first place; much less one that gets affected by our sleep.
Time is an abstraction produced by the mind when motion is perceived. I'm borrowing the term abstraction from computer science; it refers to (as far as I know) the process of presenting to the user 0's and 1's in a more digestible form, like icons and letters. There is somewhat of a general agreement that the mind abstracts reality to maximize fitness, not truth. I'm of the opinion that "time" is one such abstraction. We abstract it from the perception of motion and change, thus why we need moving clocks or decaying particles to keep time. We can't keep time with a clock that doesn't move; if the universe stood perfectly still we would perhaps perceive it as being timeless even though that shouldn't be the case.
I think our notion of time emerged from the way sensations are transcribed into memory. It is our ability to move through such memories that gives us the impression that there is a "time" to navigate through. Our brains also have the ability to simulate events, something which seems unique to our species. We can simulate "what could have been" scenarios in which we envision the past differently. We can also simulate future events, something that has been termed episodic future thought. Our simulations can contemplate entirely fictional scenarios as well, we are not bound by reality, but all of these simulations sort of emerge out of our memory systems. If we didn't have such a system we would perhaps only perceive the present moment in which things are occurring, not time in which things already occurred or will occur .
So in conclusion, time is a byproduct of our brains. When your consciousness falls into sleep, waking up feels as if you've traveled through time despite knowing that you didn't.
Time is an abstraction produced by the mind when motion is perceived. I'm borrowing the term abstraction from computer science; it refers to (as far as I know) the process of presenting to the user 0's and 1's in a more digestible form, like icons and letters. There is somewhat of a general agreement that the mind abstracts reality to maximize fitness, not truth. I'm of the opinion that "time" is one such abstraction. We abstract it from the perception of motion and change, thus why we need moving clocks or decaying particles to keep time. We can't keep time with a clock that doesn't move; if the universe stood perfectly still we would perhaps perceive it as being timeless even though that shouldn't be the case.
I think our notion of time emerged from the way sensations are transcribed into memory. It is our ability to move through such memories that gives us the impression that there is a "time" to navigate through. Our brains also have the ability to simulate events, something which seems unique to our species. We can simulate "what could have been" scenarios in which we envision the past differently. We can also simulate future events, something that has been termed episodic future thought. Our simulations can contemplate entirely fictional scenarios as well, we are not bound by reality, but all of these simulations sort of emerge out of our memory systems. If we didn't have such a system we would perhaps only perceive the present moment in which things are occurring, not time in which things already occurred or will occur .
So in conclusion, time is a byproduct of our brains. When your consciousness falls into sleep, waking up feels as if you've traveled through time despite knowing that you didn't.
