Perception of Time

I was told to write a short blurb about this, and a full page if not more about another topic to do with how things are produced, distributed, and disposed of. I did that, but a short blurb will not satisfy me for this write up on my Perception of Time. This is for my Psychology class.



1) How do you perceive time? Past, Present, future?

2.) Do we have free will?

3.) How do you perceive the moment right now?



Where does time exist?

Well where does pain exist? Is it in the moment that you have an experience that should cause it, is it in your skin when you are cut, is it in your nerves as they tell you that you've been cut, is it in your mind? If you take a pain killer you may not feel the pain, but where is it now? The experience that should of caused it still happened, your skin is still cut, your nerves will still receive the fact that they have been damaged, but the signal will not reach your brain. It will be cut off, the pain does not exist because it can not reach your mind.

Where does colour exist? Is it in the light rays, the photons speeding through all points that are illuminated? Is it on the object that you see the colour to be resting on? Is it in your eye? Is it in your mind? Colour is your interpretation of wave lengths. They are perceived as red to blue, with purple linking the two (purple not being in the colour spectrum, but I'll ramble about this in a different post). You are told that the colour you looking at is what you give the name to it, but what if you were in someone else's perspective? Maybe what you see to be yellow they see to be orange, green, blue, maybe they don't see it at all. Colour, like pain, exists in the mind.

Now for time. Where does time exist? Is it in the moment, is it between the moments? How much time passes when you are not looking? Does time pass when you are not looking at something that is designed to tell how much time has passed, such as a clock or a watch? What about when you focus on something and more time has passed than you think of it? I'll leave these questions for you to answer.

This may make more sense after the statement after it, however it relates to special relativity. How 'time slows down' the faster you are traveling, especially when relating to speeds closing in on c, or the speed of light (3.00x10^8m/s I think). 35,000 light years away there was a star that exploded approximately 30,000 years ago. It released supercharged particles that travel extremely close to the speed of light. Because of this time dilation (the slowing of time) occurs in large amounts. These supercharged particles have a decay time of 15 minutes, so after 15 minutes of existence they no longer exist and will break apart; yet we have detected them and observed them. How is this possible? Because of the time dilation that has occurred, from the particles point of view (yes, I know that particles cannot observe things, but if you were traveling along side of them..) only 15 minutes of our time has passed. From our point of view 30,000 years have passed.



Time, just like pain and colour, is subjective to the individual observing it.

Time Does Not Exist.

It is all in your mind.

There is a Native American language that has no past or future tense. They only have present tense. With this, does this mean their language only lives in the moment? Their language only allows for what is happening at that one time. A language is a key into how the society that it was developed in observed time. If the language has past tenses, in that culture there was a past. If there was no present tense, often everything is put into past tense, and then what ever is happening has already happened. Kind of like the moment of now exists with a slight lag, as you may occur in online gaming. What has happened has already happened but until your computer can process what has already has happened you will not see what is currently happened. What you see and what you do will be a moment behind.
If time is a constant, shouldn't all languages have a past, present and future tense? That would be convenient, but time only exists in the way we perceive it. Time is a human invention, the concept of giving a numeral value to the distance between events is completely made up. There however is an internal clock that may keep time. If you have a regular routine you may wake up and fall asleep at the same time every day and night. This can be maintained with no indications of time of day, no clocks, sunlight, or moonlight.
There have been some cases of people being trapped in caves or mines for lengthy amounts of time. The individuals who are stuck underground may still be able to keep to their regular routine of when they are hungry, when they sleep, when they wake up, but will have no idea of what time of day is it. There was a case of someone being trapped in a cave for sixty days and the individual continued his sleeping and eating pattern though all of this. Despite doing that, with no way of recording how much time had passed he believed he had only been stuck for a few days, maybe a couple weeks at the longest, even after sixty days of solitude.
Animals also do this. Animals cannot read the time (well most I'll assume) however they know when they need to do what they need to do. They can keep track of time though internal clocks, and the use of the sun. They don't need to be told the time, for their clock does not have any time. It just has relative points to their routine. To animals keep time? No, it's all in their mind; just as it is for us.

Personally I perceive time to be irregular. During a slow day at school the time passed may seem to be much longer than what has already, but when I focus on something for long periods of time I think it may of only been a few minutes when hours have gone by. Time is not perceived without you being told, without you observing a clock. The twenty-four hour clock that we have matched up to how long it takes for the earth to rotate is not completely accurate to how our bodies perceive it. Teenagers' minds have a twenty eight hour day. At this point of their life it will be the longest, inspiring them to stay awake for longer, stay asleep for longer, or even both. As you age this time slows and lowers itself closer to the twenty-four hours in a day that we see on a clock.
I know this mental time dilation occurs with everyone. Something about how your brain flows, when you are not keeping any thought on time you are not keeping track of it, and may slip away from you. It is the same for when time goes by slowly. You are focusing on it, so you keep more attention on it, and it stays as it would. This changes from generation to generation also. If boot-up time of new computers is less than a minute but still stressful for many they must of not been around when the original OS's were released and you had a several minute wait if you were lucky for the most simple of activities.

The concept of free will does not relate to time as much as others think it may, in my opinion. Free will is a topic surrounding do we have control in what we do? I see it to be as follows: No matter what the situation is (complete freedom to do what you want, being controlled, or having preset life's), you have control. If you have complete freedom then you are in control no matter how you look at that. If you are being controlled, you don't know that for sure. With this idea you can easily apply willful ignorance and assume what you are doing is of your own free will. If you do something that you don't think you should, it is still you choosing to do that. The same applies to preset lives. If your entire life is planned out by a higher force, or has already been done by you in a past life, any interpretation of it, you can use the concept of willful ignorance and go on with your life making your own decisions far as you know.
If you sit around and wait for someone to control you, you are the one making the decision to do so. I think this proves that free will may not exist directly, but your actions are controlled by your thoughts that far as you know are coming from you.

In the moment, right now, I am perceiving time to be going by fairly quickly. I feel hurried to finish this because I would like to see my girlfriend who is waiting for me, I would also like to eat dinner. If I don't finish this in time I will have to work on it later when I am not as interested in doing so, though this topic interests me a lot. I"m surprised at how little I put into it, but if another topic similar to this occurs in any of my classes so I have to write about it or I just get inspiration to do so with no exterior inspiration I'm sure I will end up adding onto this.