Time and time perception (split from Can I say that Time is Linear?)

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

Let us also remember that time experience in various animals are VERY different from one another ,,,,,,,,,,,,, This  IS  relevant to this topic . . . .

 

 

[swansont]

12 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Let us also remember that time experience in various animals are VERY different from one another ,,,,,,,,,,,,, This  IS  relevant to this topic . . . .

No, it’s not. Time perception is time perception, not time.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

18 hours ago, swansont said:

No, it’s not. Time perception is time perception, not time.

Dear Sir 

I can scarcely believe in  "Absolute  Time"  ..  ..  ..

[dimreepr]

22 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Dear Sir 

I can scarcely believe in  "Absolute  Time"  ..  ..  ..

Isn't it now for you?

[swansont]

21 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Dear Sir 

I can scarcely believe in  "Absolute  Time"  ..  ..  ..

Good. There is no such thing, and nobody has suggested that there is. Was there a point to this?

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

43 minutes ago, swansont said:

Good. There is no such thing, and nobody has suggested that there is. Was there a point to this?

Seems  Yes. You say : 

" Time perception is time perception, not time. "  

 

This indicates that there is an entity in itself fixed ,  which can/should then be perceived/experienced by living beings. I quote from Intl Encyclopedia of philosophy ( by your kind permission) : 

 

 

Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness

" Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, employs the term “phenomenology” in its etymological sense as the activity of giving an account (logos) of the way things appear (phainomenon). Hence, a phenomenology of time attempts to account for the way things appear to us as temporal or how we experience time. Phenomenology offers neither metaphysical speculation about time’s relation to motion (as does Aristotle), nor the psychological character of time’s past and future moments (as does Augustine), nor transcendental-cognitive presumptions about time as a mind-dependent construct (as does Kant). Rather, it investigates the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the unified perception of an object that occurs across successive moments. In its nuanced attempts to provide an account of the form of intentionality presupposed by all experience, the phenomenology of time-consciousness provides important contributions to philosophical issues such as perception, memory, expectation, imagination, habituation, self-awareness, and self-identity over time.Within the phenomenological movement, time-consciousness is central. The most fundamental and important of all phenomenological problems, time-consciousness pervades Husserl’s theories of constitution, evidence, objectivity and inter-subjectivity. " {quote ended}

 

 

 

53 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Isn't it now for you?

May  be. But would  U  comment  a little bit more, PLZ   ??

[Bufofrog]

6 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

" Time perception is time perception, not time. "  

This indicates that there is an entity in itself fixed

For an observer an hour will always be an hour in his own inertial frame, but the observer may incorrectly perceive the time as faster or slower than normal.  An hour in the doctors waiting room may seem longer than an hour talking to someone you find attractive and desirable.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

7 minutes ago, Bufofrog said:

For an observer an hour will always be an hour in his own inertial frame, but the observer may incorrectly perceive the time as faster or slower than normal.  An hour in the doctors waiting room may seem longer than an hour talking to someone you find attractive and desirable.

I totally agree with U / Dear BufoFrog . . . . .. 

[swansont]

57 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Seems  Yes. You say : 

" Time perception is time perception, not time. "  

 

This indicates that there is an entity in itself fixed ,  which can/should then be perceived/experienced by living beings. I quote from Intl Encyclopedia of philosophy ( by your kind permission) : 

 

Time is something that can be studied in the context of physics. It is relative, not absolute. As you have posted on this topic, you are aware of this. As I have posted on the topic as well, you know I know this.

Time perception is a psychological/neurological/philosophical phenomenon, as your quote indicates. Time seems to pass quickly or slowly based on a wide variety of condition, etc, etc. I will note that "relativity" isn't included in that list. So this "fixed entity" claim seems like a charade.

The two (time, time perception) are distinct topics of discussion. Can we get back to the topic of the OP, please?

 

 

 

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

11 minutes ago, swansont said:

 

Time is something that can be studied in the context of physics. It is relative, not absolute. As you have posted on this topic, you are aware of this. As I have posted on the topic as well, you know I know this.

Time perception is a psychological/neurological/philosophical phenomenon, as your quote indicates. Time seems to pass quickly or slowly based on a wide variety of condition, etc, etc. I will note that "relativity" isn't included in that list. So this "fixed entity" claim seems like a charade.

The two (time, time perception) are distinct topics of discussion. Can we get back to the topic of the OP, please?

 

 

 

Most Respectable Moderator : 

I dont wanna break rules on these forums in any way. Be assured of that. However , here I cannot act according to your will. I cannot return to the so-called OP. Time and time perception , I surmise , cannot be disentangled from one another,,,,No , they plainly simply can-Not. The next best thing for me to do--I am almost sure--is to keep silent so that I might possibly not break the rules and regulations  .. .. ..

[dimreepr]

"can I say that time is linear"

No-body knows...

[swansont]

4 hours ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Most Respectable Moderator : 

I dont wanna break rules on these forums in any way. Be assured of that. However , here I cannot act according to your will. I cannot return to the so-called OP. Time and time perception , I surmise , cannot be disentangled from one another,,,,No , they plainly simply can-Not. The next best thing for me to do--I am almost sure--is to keep silent so that I might possibly not break the rules and regulations  .. .. ..

I don’t understand why you can’t just open a new thread to discuss it. Is there something preventing that? Don’t answer; it’s rhetorical. I’ve split this into its own thread. Have at it.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

18 hours ago, swansont said:

I don’t understand why you can’t just open a new thread to discuss it. Is there something preventing that? Don’t answer; it’s rhetorical. I’ve split this into its own thread. Have at it.

Appreciations ! 

Dear Moderator swansont ! 

I gather that now I may by the name of  write a bit more on this split page under the title of Time and time perception    .....................  

Main theme I was developing was that U cannot so easily disentangle time per se from time perception. An ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE by the name of Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing written by six highly qualified scholars shows us that The nature of time is rooted in our own body(first sentence of the article) 

 

Address  : 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00074/full  

 

Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time. This study explored the connection between time perception and interoception and proposes the Interoceptive Buffer saturation (IBs) index. IBs evaluates subjects’ ability to process salient stimuli from the body by measuring subjective distortions of interoceptive time perception, i.e., the estimated duration of tactile interoceptive stimulations. Thirty female healthy subjects were recruited through consecutive sampling and assessed for common variables related to interoceptive alterations: depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI-II), eating disorders (EDI-3) risk, and anxiety levels (State Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI). Interoceptive cardiac accuracy (IAc) was assessed as well. 

 

Imagery , to , have  a significant role to play in giving birth to the idea of time. Readers may refer to "Phenomenology of Perception" by Maurice Merleau-Ponty   and to  (( https://elifesciences.org/articles/33904 )).  

 

This link is also helpful in realizing how we have subliminally derived Time Existence from Time Perception : 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5964239/ 

 

I quote now from Stanford encyclopedia : 

 

One of the earliest, and most famous, discussions of the nature and experience of time occurs in the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine. Augustine was born in Numidia (now Algeria) in 354 AD, held chairs in rhetoric at Carthage and Milan, and become Bishop of Hippo in 395. He died in 430. As a young adult, he had rejected Christianity, but was finally converted at the age of 32. Book XI of the Confessions contains a long and fascinating exploration of time, and its relation to God. During the course of it Augustine raises the following conundrum: when we say that an event or interval of time is short or long, what is it that is being described as of short or long duration? It cannot be what is past, since that has ceased to be, and what is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being long. But neither can it be what is present, for the present has no duration. (For the reason why the present must be regarded as durationless, see the section on the specious present, below.) In any case, while an event is still going on, its duration cannot be assessed.

Augustine’s answer to this riddle is that what we are measuring, when we measure the duration of an event or interval of time, is in the memory. From this he derives the radical conclusion that past and future exist only in the mind. While not following Augustine all the way to the mind-dependence of other times, we can concede that the perception of temporal duration is crucially bound up with memory. It is some feature of our memory of the event (and perhaps specifically our memory of the beginning and end of the event) that allows us to form a belief about its duration. This process need not be described, as Augustine describes it, as a matter of measuring something wholly in the mind. Arguably, at least, we are measuring the event or interval itself, a mind-independent item, but doing so by means of some psychological process.

Whatever the process in question is, it seems likely that it is intimately connected with what William Friedman (1990) calls ‘time memory’: that is, memory of when some particular event occurred. That there is a close connection here is entailed by the plausible suggestion that we infer (albeit subconsciously) the duration of an event, once it has ceased, from information about how long ago the beginning of that event occurred. That is, information that is metrical in nature (e.g. ‘the burst of sound was very brief’) is derived from tensed information, concerning how far in the past something occurred. The question is how we acquire this tensed information. It may be direct or indirect, a contrast we can illustrate by two models of time memory described by Friedman. He calls the first the strength model of time memory. If there is such a thing as a memory trace that persists over time, then we could judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. The longer ago the event, the weaker the trace. This provides a simple and direct means of assessing the duration of an event. Unfortunately, the trace model comes into conflict with a very familiar feature of our experience: that some memories of recent events may fade more quickly than memories of more distant events, especially when those distant events were very salient ones (visiting a rarely seen and frightening relative when one was a child, for instance.) A contrasting account of time memory is the inference model. According to this, the time of an event is not simply read off from some aspect of the memory of it, but is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.

The inference model may be plausible enough when we are dealing with distant events, but rather less so for much more recent ones. In addition, the model posits a rather complex cognitive operation that is unlikely to occur in non-human animals, such as the rat. Rats, however, are rather good at measuring time over short intervals of up to a minute, as demonstrated by instrumental conditioning experiments involving the ‘free operant procedure’. In this, a given response (such as depressing a lever) will delay the occurrence of an electric shock by a fixed period of time, such as 40 seconds, described as the R-S (response-shock) interval. Eventually, rate of responding tracks the R-S interval, so that the probability of responding increases rapidly as the end of the interval approaches. (See Mackintosh 1983 for a discussion of this and related experiments.) It is hard to avoid the inference here that the mere passage of time itself is acting as a conditioned stimulus: that the rats, to put it in more anthropocentric terms, are successfully estimating intervals of time. In this case, the strength model seems more appropriate than the inference model.

4. The specious present

The term ‘specious present’ was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, but the best known characterisation of it was due to William James, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology. He lived from 1842 to 1910, and was professor both of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard. His definition of the specious present goes as follows: ‘the prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ (James 1890). How long is this specious present? Elsewhere in the same work, James asserts ‘We are constantly aware of a certain duration—the specious present—varying from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and another part later) is the original intuition of time.’ This surprising variation in the length of the specious present makes one suspect that more than one definition is hidden in James’ rather vague characterisation.

There are two sources of ambiguity here. One is over whether ‘the specious present’ refers to the object of the experience, namely a duration in time, or the way in which that object is presented to us. The second is over how we should interpret ‘immediately sensible’. James’ words suggest that the specious present is the duration itself, picked out as the object of a certain kind of experience. But ‘ immediately sensible’admits of a number of disambiguations. So we could define the specious present as:

1. the span of short-term memory;
2. the duration which is perceived, not as duration, but as instantaneous;
3. the duration which is directly perceived — i.e. not through the intermediary of a number of other, perhaps instantaneous, perceptions;
4. the duration which is perceived both as present and as extended in time.

If James means the first of these, that would certainly explain his suggestion that it could last up to a minute. But this does not seem to have much to do specifically with the experience of presentness, since we can certainly hold something in the short-term memory and yet recognise it as past. James may be thinking of cases where we are listening to a sentence: if we did not somehow hold all the words in our conscious mind, we would not understand the sentence as a whole. But it is clear that the words are not experienced as simultaneous, for then the result would be an unintelligible jumble of sounds. (2) is illustrated by the familiar fact that some movements are so fast that we see them as a blur, such as when we look at a fan. What is in fact taking place at different times is presented as happening in an instant. But this is not standardly what is meant by the specious present. (3) is a construal that is found in the literature (see, e.g., Kelly 2005), but it is not obvious that that is what James had in mind, since James is concerned with the phenomenology of time perception, and whether or not an experience constitutes a direct or indirect perception of an interval does not seem to be a phenomenological matter. (Besides which, as Kelly points out, we might think it odd to suppose that past parts of the interval could be directly perceived.)

That leaves us with (4): a duration which is perceived both as present and as temporally extended. This present of experience is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present (if there is such a thing — see The metaphysics of time perception below) it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The real or objective present must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in an interval of any duration, there are earlier and later parts. So if any part of that interval is present, there will be another part that is past or future.

But is it possible to perceive something as extended and as present? If we hear a short phrase of music, we seem to hear the phrase as present, and yet — because it is a phrase rather than a single chord — we also hear the notes as successive, and therefore as extending over an interval. If this does not seem entirely convincing, consider the perception of motion. As Broad (1923) puts it, ‘to see a second-hand moving is quite a different thing from "seeing" that a hour-hand has moved.’ It is not that we see the current position of the second hand and remember where it was a second ago: we just see the motion. That leads to the following argument:

(1) What we perceive, we perceive as present.

(2) We perceive motion.

(3) Motion occurs over an interval.

Therefore: What we perceive as present occurs over an interval.

Still, there is more than an air of paradox about this. If successive parts of the motion (or musical phrase, or whatever change we perceive) are perceived as present, then surely they are perceived as simultaneous. But if they are perceived as simultaneous, then the motion will simply be a blur, as it is in cases where it is too fast to perceive as motion. The fact that we do not see it as motion suggests that we do not see the successive parts of it as simultaneous, and so do not see them as present. But then how do we explain the distinction to which Broad directs our attention?

One way out of this impasse is to suggest that two quite distinct processes are going on in the perception of motion (and other kinds of change). One is the perception of successive states as successive, for example the different positions of the second hand. The other is the perception of pure movement. This second perception, which may involve a more primitive system than the first, does not contain as part the recognition of earlier and later elements. (Le Poidevin 2007, Chapter 5.) Alternatively, we might attempt to explain the phenomena of temporal experience without appeal to the notion of the specious present at all (see Arstila, 2018).

5. Past, present and the passage of time

The previous section indicated the importance of distinguishing between perceiving the present and perceiving something as present.  { end of quote from stanford Encyclopedia }

 

Finally , The following links very cogently  prove the falsifiability of the entity of  Time ( as Absolute Per Se ) :  

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191203-what-we-get-wrong-about-time   

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Area54]

36 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

The nature of time is rooted in our own body(first sentence of the article) 

No it is not. The first sentence of the article clearly demonstrates this.

36 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time.

The relevant words are highlighted. Human awareness of time is not time. Human perceptions of time are not time.  Case closed.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

Area54 ! Many many thanx for your getting involved . . .. 

 

Quote from Area 54 :  

" The nature of time is rooted in our own body(first sentence of the article) ....No it is not. The first sentence of the article clearly demonstrates this. " { end of Quote } 

 

Excuse me  . . . .What you have typed in there is named  Paradox . .  . . 

 

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''  

 

Quote from Area 54 :   

" 

Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time.

The relevant words are highlighted. Human awareness of time is not time. Human perceptions of time are not time.  Case closed. " { end of Quote }  

 

This is a very clear example of time being either human-dependent or , otherwise , illusory. 

 

Quote from Stanford Encyclopedia :   

The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations. So, just as it is natural to say that we perceive spatial distances and other relations between objects (I see the dragonfly as hovering above the surface of the water), it seems natural to talk of perceiving one event following another (the thunderclap as following the flash of lightning), though even here there is a difficulty. For what we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves? If not, then it seems we perceive both events as present, in which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, and so not as successive after all. There is then a paradox in the notion of perceiving an event as occurring after another, though one that perhaps admits of a straightforward solution. When we perceive B as coming after A, we have, surely, ceased to perceive A. In which case, A is merely an item in our memory. Now if we wanted to construe ‘perceive’ narrowly, excluding any element of memory, then we would have to say that we do not, after all, perceive B as following A. 

 

According to  Prof.  Rovelli , the apparent existence of time — in our perceptions and in physical descriptions, written in the mathematical languages of Newton, Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger — comes not from knowledge, but from ignorance. ‘Forward in time’ can only mean in  the direction in which entropy increases, and in which we gain information.  (( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7 ))

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 16, 2021 by Prof Reza Sanaye

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Main theme I was developing was that U cannot so easily disentangle time per se from time perception

It’s literally my job to measure time independent of time perception.

I would agree that you cannot so easily disentangle time perception from time.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

5 minutes ago, swansont said:

It’s literally my job to measure time independent of time perception.

I would agree that you cannot so easily disentangle time perception from time.

Yes , ... 

I'm referring to the same thing ...............

[Area54]

10 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Excuse me  . . . .What you have typed in there is named  Paradox . .  . . 

I see no paradox in my observation and no logic in your argument.

[swansont]

45 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Yes , ... 

I'm referring to the same thing ...............

No, the situation is not symmetric. You need time to have time perception but you don’t need time perception to have time.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

24 minutes ago, swansont said:

No, the situation is not symmetric. You need time to have time perception but you don’t need time perception to have time.

In fact , as QT is well revealing , time is all but time perception.

[beecee]

2 hours ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

I gather that now I may by the name of  write a bit more on this split page under the title of Time and time perception    .....................  

As others have said, time perception, or the perception of time depends on the human condition and circumstances....You could say that "mind time" and "clock time" are two different things. A child sees the passing of time from one Christmas to the next, as an eternity: To an adult though, it can seem like yesterday. Sit with a hot blonde for an hour chatting and it seems like a minute; Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it sems like an hour. A quote, or words to that effect from the great man, Albert Einstein. This perception of time is explained here....https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age/#:~:text=Clock time and mind time,related to saccadic eye movement.&text=So%2C when you are young,that time passes more rapidly.

Physics explains why time passes faster as you age:

 

The nature of time itself is different. That is real...time is real, just as real as space,  and is interchangeable with space.  That time cannot exist without space, just as space cannot exist without time, both evolving at t+10-43 seconds in what we call the BB. I like the explanation given by Sean Carroll here....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVINOl0Ctfk

 

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

10 minutes ago, beecee said:

As others have said, time perception, or the perception of time depends on the human condition and circumstances....You could say that "mind time" and "clock time" are two different things. A child sees the passing of time from one Christmas to the next, as an eternity: To an adult though, it can seem like yesterday. Sit with a hot blonde for an hour chatting and it seems like a minute; Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it sems like an hour. A quote, or words to that effect from the great man, Albert Einstein. This perception of time is explained here....https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age/#:~:text=Clock time and mind time,related to saccadic eye movement.&text=So%2C when you are young,that time passes more rapidly.

Physics explains why time passes faster as you age:

 

The nature of time itself is different. That is real...time is real, just as real as space,  and is interchangeable with space.  That time cannot exist without space, just as space cannot exist without time, both evolving at t+10-43 seconds in what we call the BB. I like the explanation given by Sean Carroll here....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVINOl0Ctfk

 

No , No , Dear Friend . ..  

Space is zillions of times more intuitive/intuitionistic as compared with what is called "time"  ....

[beecee]

1 minute ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

No , No , Dear Friend . ..  

Space is zillions of times more intuitive/intuitionistic as compared with what is called "time"  ....

The success  of Einstein's GR confirms the fact that space and time  are simply different sides of the same coin. Time does vary for different observers, depending on their speed through space. Gravity also affects the passage of time. Like I said, without time, there is no space and vice versa.

[Prof Reza Sanaye]

33 minutes ago, beecee said:

The success  of Einstein's GR confirms the fact that space and time  are simply different sides of the same coin. Time does vary for different observers, depending on their speed through space. Gravity also affects the passage of time. Like I said, without time, there is no space and vice versa.

Fortunately/Unfortunately , we have gotten the extraordinary success of QT , too . .. . ..

[beecee]

17 minutes ago, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Fortunately/Unfortunately , we have gotten the extraordinary success of QT , too . .. . ..

Fortunately certainly, as it works, despite much we don't understand about it.

The fact remains though that time at the non-quantum level, is interchangeable with space, at the non-quantum level, and of course the success of GR. We have no universal "NOW" And obviously while the two do have extraordinary success, we have yet to meld one into the other, so to speak. Look into a mirror. What do you see? A past reflection of yourself. 

While much discussion about time and its existence or reality, is philosophical in nature, [Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don't know: Bertrand Russell ] the fact remains, we experience it everyday, and experience it differently and at at a different rate. Like I said, the obvious, there is no universal NOW. Something does not have to be physical to be real.