This initially took me down a road of silly mysticism, like thinking about a fly with a gazillion images in its eyes, but even humans don't always perceive time exactly the same way. Who hasn't had a meeting that felt like it would never end, or said "five more minutes" to a toddler?
Time is an illusion, and mostly group-think. On a more philosophical bent, we are living in infinity, only we don't know it because our minds can't comprehend infinity, and many would go mad to think there are parallel universes where all possibilities are entertained.
Could a third option be that our sober perception of time isn't particularly accurate, and is a construct of our own consciousness? We see a day as a day, but for a fruit fly a day is 1/14 of a lifetime.
Humans don't really experience time the way it is presented here - as an equally distributed sequence of quantities. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Why let clocks dictate to you how to feel about finitude?
So it's like we humans have made up time and it's acting as a mental block to truly understanding what's really going on.
Time as a man-made metaphor gives a meaning to our world in a way analogous to religion?
The above thoughts are purely my real-time ramblings, I am clueless but interested :)
Time is an illusion. Science tells us it's linear, measured in precise nano-seconds. But humans measure time differently, it's based more on the depth of connection we have to others. You can have a life-changing event in a day, or waste away doing nothing for a decade. The more connected one is to the surrounding people and environment, the denser and more fulfilling time becomes.
What I've speculated is that perception of time is relative to how much you've experienced, i.e. how long you've been alive.
When you're a child, a week seems like a long time, because you haven't lived very many weeks. A year seems like an eternity, because relatively few have passed.
As more of these increasingly large time units get behind you, years, then decades... you have a firsthand understanding of what living their respective durations feels like.
It's like by living you're calibrating your ability to measure time properly, and then you die.
>Also, wouldn't counting the minute faster be the opposite of what you'd predict for someone who was experiencing time as if it was passing faster?
If they psychologically experience a wall-clock minute shorter (than a young person), then they'd tend to underestimate its duration when they are asked to count one.
The wall-clock remains the same and is lived by them the same -- but they feel its a short period, so they call out a short period when they asked to count one.
Great example. It also makes me wonder: If every moment of your work is so intense... does that change your perception of time ? A student once wrote that if he had one hour to live he would spend it in a boring classroom, because it would feel like eternity. Joking aside, the perception of time is an interesting subject...
I used to think that too, but nowadays I prescribe more to the idea that the perception of time is more related to how many new and unique experiences you have. As a kid everything is new and exciting, but as an adult you get stuck in a routine where things just blend together.
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