The Absurd Nature of Time

Time is an illusion created by the mind

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Sometimes it takes a whole village, and sometimes it only takes @thenovelleist asking you where you’ve been to coax you out of the darkness and back into reality. Self-doubt comes in all shapes and forms and seems to be especially abundant within the more subject/creative fields. I often wonder whether my themes are right for me or my audience. My “niche”, or whatever you want to call it, is the absurd, and more specifically, the absurdity of life in general. An excessively broad category if you are anything like me and overthink everything to death. How do I differentiate between what is interesting to me and what is interesting to you? As I’m writing I realize that perhaps I’m overthinking, again. So, without further ado, here is what has recently been keeping me up at night: The Absurd Nature of Time.

“Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.” (Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir)

The nature of time has been something of a mystery in science for a long... time. We are entangled with entropy — the inescapable, irreversible dissolution of order into chaos, our arrow of time, the thing that ruins everything we love, and destines us all to dust. On the other hand, without entropy we would be unable to differentiate one moment from the next, all minutes would mesh into one. Most likely consciousness would not have emerged at all. Without entropy, it seems, there would be no time.

Despite our empirical conception of time (as a continuity of successive events) many scientists today postulate that its an illusion rather than an innate feature of our universe. A mental construction crafted by the same consciousness which, for thousands of years, has been contemplating the question. The cognitive faculties which allow us to shape our world are the same ones that limit our vision. They create a narrow peephole from which we view all of reality. They permit us to manipulate our environment through thought alone, and enables us to hover above our timeline and fly to both past and present. Our mind is bound to our body; we think and feel from our body as it is projected into the world.

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger...” (Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths)

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Was there time at the beginning of time? Was there only time? What is time if no one is there to observe it? According to Stephen Hawking the concept of time meant nothing before the birth of our universe. As science comes closer to accepting that the universe is not infinite but finite, and ever expanding, and that Einstein’s theory of relativity contains several pivotal pitfalls, the idea that time began at the Big Bang singularity begins to falter.

Einstein postulated that time is an illusion. For example, due to gravitational time dilation, seconds move slower at sea level than atop a mountain. Gravitational time dilation states that the more mass an object has, the greater its gravitational field, which warps the fabric of space and time, producing gravity. When a stream of light particles pass by an object with sufficient gravity, these photons will appear to bend. Thus, mass can warp the fabric of time itself, causing it to move faster or slower depending on how massive the object is and how strong its gravitational pull. The faster one moves, the slower time passes in relation to a static observer. Watching a spaceship from Earth, we perceive it as moving slower through space and time than the astronauts would. They would also age slower than us earthlings.

This is just one in a sea of examples on the strange nature of time. Perhaps the strangest illustration of time dilation can be seen in and around black holes, but more on that next time.

As stated earlier “time is the substance (we are) made of” (Borges). The relative nature of time is not only felt when we look up at the sky and see a spaceship makes its way into outer space. We are time, and through our experience of the self we create time. In moments of anxiety, meditation, boredom, you’ll notice how radically your perception of time is altered. In these circumstances time, space and self are molded together — intensified or weakened.

Discus Chronologicus - Christoph Weigel

Time, as we know it, is a useful illusion. Without time we would not be the conscious beings we are today. The music to which we listen, the rising and setting of the sun, everything becomes visible and possible through our innate temporal understanding. Ultimately, time perception is not mediated by a specific sense organ, as is the case with seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. Subjective time is a psychical and emotional state which transports our entire self through life.

Time’s mysterious nature is, to me, vastly interesting, but also incredibly reassuring. As we float through the fabric of spacetime, in a barren cosmos, it is difficult to think we are part of some grand design. Particles are not embedded with purpose, there might not be a higher being waiting on us when we pass away. But what if time is not an arrow, shot in one straight line from start to finish, but a book: at times characters die, then you turn back a page and they are alive again…

“Mistake me not! All is contained in each.

Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup

Is that which has been, or will be, to that

Which is—the absent to the present. Thought

Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,

Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

They are, what that which they regard appears,

The stuff whence mutability can weave

All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms,

Empires, and superstitions. What has thought

To do with time, or place, or circumstance?

Wouldst thou behold the Future?—ask and have!

Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo!

The coming age is shadowed on the Past

As on a glass.”

- Percy Bysshe Shelley Time: Sunset