~~--> Time <--~~

[Canas]

Time: It's the only consistently complete constant that's constantly completely inconsistent.

To measure time is to assume that time in itself can be broken down in to units of measure. Naturally, you might think that seconds, minutes, and hours break time down in to a quantifiable and mathematically sound numerical value, something that remains constant and is impossible to change. We all believe that this is true, and never during the course of our day do we stop to contemplate the actual possibility that time is not a constant function, and not something that can be bent and shaped.

Consider the following: You began your day eating breakfast, showering, and readying yourself in whichever manner you have done for as long as you can remember. Now, quite often does time seem to slip away from our grasp, and all of the sudden today you are ten minutes late. Automatically we accept that this is in fact true, (whether or not it takes several clock-checks to be certain) when perhaps time had ceased to be measured according to it's values, ie. time skipped.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. I just read it and I thought "ridiculous". But one must consider what time truly is, for is it not something that is completely inconsistent throughout our lives? Mathematically speaking, sure, time may always remain constant, but our brains do not work solely on mathematics. How often do you find yourself guessing the time only to be completely off by hours? Have you ever been off by days? If we didn't have clocks, schedules, phones, calendars, computers and the like, would your concept of time change? Would an hour still feel an hour long, or would it be longer? Perhaps time would be quite short, at least from your perspective, and your life may pass you by quicker than you would think.

Consider the following: you are in a locked room with a light on. Using electrodes hooked up to your skull, scientists have been able to stop you from counting. Yes, you can't count. You start at one, and nothing comes after. Now you are asked, to wait exactly one minute. After what you perceive to be one minute, you are to say aloud "Stop". Surely you wouldn't be that far off, would you? The next test is five minutes. And then a half hour. Followed by an hour, and so on and so forth. How would your perception of time change if you were asked to do this? I mean, you could easily test this out on yourself and simply NOT count in your head. But do you think you would guess too early, or too late? And if you were to concentrate real hard, and get lost deep in thought and in spirit, wouldn't the time seem to "fly" by? Is that not a form of "time-travel"?

The fascination with time-travel has existed in our culture since seemingly the dawn of written thought, and quite possibly even before then. Most people withhold the belief that time is something that can actually be manipulated, say, a cyclical repetition of events that can be changed and interrupted if one were to ever discover the secret of time travel. There are plenty of made up rules, which really we know absolutely nothing about, such as that if one were to travel back in time they would not be able to change anything in the future. Simply because the future had already accounted for these changes, and the future had already predetermined that you would in fact travel back in time and carry out every activity that you could think of in the past. Rock on, Marty McFly.

But nobody has ever stopped to consider that the secrets of time-travel don't rest in a machine, or traveling faster than the speed of light... or flying around Earth backwards a few thousand times rotating the planet in the opposite direction. What if the secrets of time travel rested solely in the human mind? The entire world is based on perception, perception of the individual. And if an individual could perceive time in a separate, non-linear fashion, wouldn't that in itself be time-travel? To reach a higher state of consciousness could quite possibly slow down the progress of time in one's own mind, yet the outside world would merely be operating at the same mathematically sound frequency. If one could speed up and slow down this process, who's to say without proper perceptual training that an individual could not actually cause time to function in reverse, time as a negative function if you will. And even if this is ever achieved, as physically and logically impossible as it may seem, would we ever know the difference?

The closer you are to your internal clock, the closer you are to yourself. Time is short, time is long, no matter how you look at it time is certainly at least limited. Make the most of your time, and stop... to think about it.

[Version2]

Your article is fascinating and well written for sure, but I disagree with your interpretation of time travel. By the logic here, recalling a memory vividly is traveling back in time, and falling into a coma is traveling forward in time. Yes I can and have tranced out and felt like time was flying/crawling, and a few different psychedelics have... well...

I took something one night once and felt that my entire life had happened THAT DAY. And not just everything I had done up to that point, things I was going to do in the future as well. The entire timeline of me had been wrapped around that single day, I could send my mind backwards into younger versions of me, and forward into older versions, but I couldn't actually do anything, I couldn't change a single event that happened, or that was going to happen. It was certainly an experience, but time travel it was not.

[Canas]

At 2/3/10 12:08 AM, Version2 wrote: Your article is fascinating and well written for sure, but I disagree with your interpretation of time travel. By the logic here, recalling a memory vividly is traveling back in time, and falling into a coma is traveling forward in time. Yes I can and have tranced out and felt like time was flying/crawling, and a few different psychedelics have... well...

Precisely. That is in fact, exactly what I am saying.

Placing yourself in a different mindset, and altering your perspective on reality, be in for only a few minutes, is by definition "time" travel. Sleep, could even be perceived as a form of traveling through time, and why shouldn't it be? When time as a function ceases to be constant, is that not time fluctuation via your own perspective?

I took something one night once and felt that my entire life had happened THAT DAY. And not just everything I had done up to that point, things I was going to do in the future as well. The entire timeline of me had been wrapped around that single day, I could send my mind backwards into younger versions of me, and forward into older versions, but I couldn't actually do anything, I couldn't change a single event that happened, or that was going to happen. It was certainly an experience, but time travel it was not.

To me, it sounds like what you just described was hallucinogenic time travel to a tee. You're just thinking of time travel in the same way that it has been portrayed in movies and literature, instead of spiritually.

Really, I did not mean it as a serious take on time travel, rather something to open your mind about, at least in the slightest.

[142201]

That's a wonderful article. I've thought about how everything is relative to the observer before, but I'm afraid I can't put it nearly as eloquently as you just did. Well done.

[tigerkitty]

At 2/3/10 12:21 AM, Canas wrote: Precisely. That is in fact, exactly what I am saying.

Placing yourself in a different mindset, and altering your perspective on reality, be in for only a few minutes, is by definition "time" travel. Sleep, could even be perceived as a form of traveling through time, and why shouldn't it be? When time as a function ceases to be constant, is that not time fluctuation via your own perspective?

ehhhh... You can sit and say you don't believe in time but that doesn't stop your body aging, your cells re-replicating, or your heart pumping. Not believing in something doesn't make it simply not exist.

The idea of time travel isn't that you pass through from one moment to the next (despite your level of awareness of it) with the same bodily progression as normal. It's that you can pass from one moment to a moment x years from now without having any of the bodily effects of having made such a journey.

By your definition just existing is time travel, since we move from moment to moment.

It was well written, but definitely odd. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the logistics of it all. But it was interesting nonetheless.

[Canas]

At 2/3/10 09:07 AM, tigerkitty wrote: By your definition just existing is time travel, since we move from moment to moment.

That's what I was going for, yup.

It was well written, but definitely odd. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the logistics of it all. But it was interesting nonetheless.

Again, it wasn't really meant to be a serious commentary on time travel. Just a bending of the concept, at the very least, through sound writing. If you can change someone's opinion on something they know isn't possible in a few paragraphs, i'd say that's great argumentative literature. Although clearly I didn't change yours