It is easy enough to pose the question: What is Time?
The trouble comes in answering it.
For some folks, Time is a pure concept, an abstraction, akin to things like justice, the good, eternity, the infinite, and God. But it can be little doubted that as facts go, Time is among the brutest, the most ineluctable realities we face. Were it not for Time, we might anticipate being able to live forever. Time, to put it in Heidegger's words, is a 'not to be outstripped' fact about our very existence; it is not the kind of thing we can hope to evade by means of some purely analytical, deconstructive process, and this suggests that treating Time as a pure concept would lead us to some thoroughly unsatisfying conceptual consequences; it would make us blind, as it were, to the most basic fact of life, to the approach of our own death.
On the other hand, calling Time a brute fact does at the same time call to mind its conceptual facet, for who can imagine a single non-conceptual fact? Perhaps we can refer to unknown facts, cosmic constants which science has yet to unveil. These may belong to that class of non-conceptual facts, but by virtue of such—as Dingen-an-Sich, as "things as such" (here in opposition to things as appearance)—they are immediately inaccessible to us. And they only come to light insofar as they have been brought under the heading of some concrete concept, of which temporality is the foremost (at least, such was Hegel's opinion of the matter). Facts, even having a concrete character, also at the same time have an abstract character. Facts, it seems, link the world of concepts to the world of physical things. Whatever is eternally true of temporality governs cause and effect, change, decay, order, chaos, and nature itself. So, in some respects, a knowledge of Time provides us crucial clarity in interpreting the proper domain and objects of physics and indeed, of all sciences.
Metaphysically speaking, we can occupy our attention with change, which is at least visible, if only by means of synthesizing a manifold of experiences (to use a Kantian language). That is, if we think of experiences of events as synthesized from a series of snapshots, we can bring those snapshots together in our understanding as a single flow, as an event proper.
At the same time, it seems somewhat unreasonable to think of events as "originally manifold", so that we have to do some further work of retroactively putting everything together. Of course, events "unfold" or "unfurl", so that events come together from manifold sources before our eyes. And in this respect, the emergence of an event does add to experience manifold elements which in seeing coherently, we take up altogether into a unity of sorts. Kant seemed to think that this manifold would remain disunified if it were not for the apperceptive self, the self-aware kind of being that we are. Memories and anticipations or plans do not appear as a unity without the being for whom life is itself conceived as a whole, i.e., in which I am someone individual. It seems that synthesis is not some pure abstraction, but something that belongs to lived, embodied experience as such. Even the understanding itself, construed broadly, seems to be meaningless without reference to embodied sensuality. What then is change to this synthetic understanding, prior to interpreting its coherence by accounting for it calendrically?
Change does imply measurable "rates", so that common endergonic and exergonic reactions both take place with reference to regularly repeatable physical paces, to seconds and hours, days and years, and so that change can be also tabulated according to various relative metrics, but this is not what I am attempting to indicate by change. What I rather mean will come to light better if we follow a certain imaginative experiment.
Let's begin by imagining the whole world as a 1-dimensional stream of particles. In such a constrained environment, every subatomic particle is locked into a specific order. Nothing "gets around" anything else. As such, light could not penetrate into this universe, except to say that there might be some two particles between which a photon would be able to bounce back and forth. These would be the natural spatial limits of every photon.
Also, particles would be unable to form into atoms. This should be evident from the fact that particles could not orbit each other! Everything would remain locked into the most basic elementary forms. One has to wonder if there would even be the possibility of forces trying to break this locked quantum state.
Also, we have to try and think of this universe from the inside, which may be quite difficult, since we are so much accustomed to seeing it in four dimensions, with change taken alongside length, width, and height. It is even difficult to discern whether a particle would even see horizonally, in the sense that particles closer to it would appear larger than particles hidden behind them! Indeed, perhaps the only horizons in that unidimensional universe would consist of the two particles that fell prior and posterior!
And we should wonder whether this linear world were itself capable of being bent! could the cosmically long line be folded into a knot? Could it be made to pass through itself at various points? And what would be that suspiciously dimension-like background which made possible this very bending? Have we not already violated the terms of a unidimensional universe in supposing such a possibility?
And what of the patterns of particulate motion? What forces would there be? Gravity? At least this would seem to remain intact, though one wonders if particles would be able to escape its grasp, or whether this whole unidimensional universe would be prone to collapse back into a singularity. Such questions are difficult to answer, but perhaps we can suppose the force of individual impacts between particles sufficient to ensure that at least some of them escape massive singularities.
And yet, it does seem that we must question whether gravity can exist in a world incapable of spatial flex! Would space be flexible in a unidimensional world? We often refer to gravity as the curvature of space. However, in our hypothetical world, space would seem somewhat rigid! Perhaps the most we can say is that in some places, particles would be prone clump close together and in other places would be more dispersed (though this too starts to sound like additive waves and such, and hence, to operate under higher dimensional physics). This fictive world of ours seems to have some very strange properties indeed!
But granting at least that particles are capable of coming close or drawing far from other particles, is it not a little odd that we should note that, in fact, photons do behave in this very way, that they bounce back and forth, as it were, between troughs and peaks? Of course we tend to imagine photons in a three or four dimensional framework, as moving along a vector as waves in an electromagnetic spectrum.
Still, in our one dimensional framework, they would simply bounce between two poles, their particle horizons. And if matter can move, even in this highly constrained environment, then perhaps all matter moves, if only toward the infinite ends of the unidimensional space which constrains it: an infinitely long line of infinitesimal particles bouncing off of each other, non able to get around each other, all forming a line that grows with Time. And what drives this "growing" at all, if not the energized photons, full of charge, bouncing back and forth between the other particles? does this not, as a whole net effect, press the whole line to become longer and longer over time?
If we were to suppose that we could begin with a very short line, in which every particle were packed as closely together as possible, i.e., as much as gravity would allow for—would not the energetic force of those oscillating particles press for more room? and in so doing, would they not become the very force of the unfurling of Time?
It has now become possible for us to ask the question we initially wanted to consider: where in this unidimensional universe would be the present? It would be in the change between the positions of the particles, would it not? But then we would have a two-dimensional universe, because we would need to map the changes of the unidimensional universe over Time. And this is why perhaps we have had a tendency from the start to regard Time as conceptual, because it plays an intrinsic role in our metrical accounting for Spatial change. Perhaps then, if we wished to stick to the unidimensional account, we would never even be able to escape the initial singularity which preceded our unidimensional big bang! If this world were to come into being at all, it would only be able to do so by virtue of a prior, higher dimensional Time which preceded it!
So then, we have come to an important realization: Time has to already be in place for the world to come into being. Time, as it were, sets the stage for creation. If there is any dimension which is fundamental, it is the Time dimension. This is the one dimension that can be taken as fundamentally really, as the sine qua non of the world. If that is so, then the so-called particles of the unidimensional world we have been so far imagining would be not unlike quantum particles, which pop in and out of existence; their very becoming and unbecoming would simply be their distance in Time from each other. And this would suggest that, unlike the treatment of Time as a pure concept, Time has a concrete function as a real dimension; indeed, the most real of dimensions, even if this has been indicated by 'virtual particles'!
We have been concerned as far as possible to avoid reducing Time to a merely "metrical-conceptual" account, like that of number and other mathematical entities. We have wanted instead to focus on what energizes us to think of Time, what first gives rise to its significations in experience.
But we have also been compelled to introduce Time as a second dimension in our highly constrained universe, having no other means of representing a present in opposition to a past or future when we treated this dimension as spatial. This is quite telling, and brings to the surface of our investigation just how much the force of thinking Time as a concept has hold of our every understanding of it.
If Time would be a "mere concept", and one that relies upon the concrete-visible world of interacting particles for its most basic intelligibility, then it is nonetheless still a kind of "endurance", insofar as we admit that, behind change, there are prior conditions, prior questions of "existence" that inform the very possibility of visualizing and mapping change.
We have been concerned to visualize Time, to visualize change, to visualize the present as a certain sort of surface of change. We do not stand alongside the universe as outside observers who could watch change without being impacted by it. We are "in it", and change is something that we are very much a part of. But we are able to imagine this "being alongside" or "being outside" of the universe, much as God would be outside all of Time in Eternity. And when we imagine this unidimensional universe, do we not then impose the changes when we abstract away from what it "is" to what it "was" and what it "will be"? This transition between the transformations that we are immediately exposed to, versus those remote suggests that our immersion in temporality also has a "depth". The present is not unlike the surface of an almost unfathomably deep ocean, and one that is getting deeper all the Time.
We are rising further and further to the infinite sky of space upon the surface of this ocean which is filling the world with Time. Space, as all that is present, is just the surface of this ocean, just the "thickness of the now". And yet, we also see that light, which penetrates through this ocean, from the very edge of our understanding of creation, red-shifted and diluted in its energies, oscillating for eternity in the vast and asymptotically empty void retains the past as a certain kind of depth. We can see below us, into the waters of the past.
Time gives Space a surface, a proximity in the form of the Now, a distance in the form of the Past and Future, a surface in the sense of finitude, of birth and death. Time imposes this upon existence, so that in an important respect, the judgment of Time as a mere concept misconstrues it. Certainly, it is a condition for life and death. Certainly, it imposes existence upon those of us who are present. Time, in this light, is not simply a concept, but the most brutal and imposing of facts.
Always floating upon the surface of the now,
Yet lights below blossom from hoary antiquity,
Reminding us of where we have been.
Waters fathomless,
A storm above us,
Filling the world with presence,
Till at last,
Soaked and sea-logged,
The waters filling our every pore,
The air of life escapes us,
We drown.
What then?
The trouble comes in answering it.
For some folks, Time is a pure concept, an abstraction, akin to things like justice, the good, eternity, the infinite, and God. But it can be little doubted that as facts go, Time is among the brutest, the most ineluctable realities we face. Were it not for Time, we might anticipate being able to live forever. Time, to put it in Heidegger's words, is a 'not to be outstripped' fact about our very existence; it is not the kind of thing we can hope to evade by means of some purely analytical, deconstructive process, and this suggests that treating Time as a pure concept would lead us to some thoroughly unsatisfying conceptual consequences; it would make us blind, as it were, to the most basic fact of life, to the approach of our own death.
On the other hand, calling Time a brute fact does at the same time call to mind its conceptual facet, for who can imagine a single non-conceptual fact? Perhaps we can refer to unknown facts, cosmic constants which science has yet to unveil. These may belong to that class of non-conceptual facts, but by virtue of such—as Dingen-an-Sich, as "things as such" (here in opposition to things as appearance)—they are immediately inaccessible to us. And they only come to light insofar as they have been brought under the heading of some concrete concept, of which temporality is the foremost (at least, such was Hegel's opinion of the matter). Facts, even having a concrete character, also at the same time have an abstract character. Facts, it seems, link the world of concepts to the world of physical things. Whatever is eternally true of temporality governs cause and effect, change, decay, order, chaos, and nature itself. So, in some respects, a knowledge of Time provides us crucial clarity in interpreting the proper domain and objects of physics and indeed, of all sciences.
Metaphysically speaking, we can occupy our attention with change, which is at least visible, if only by means of synthesizing a manifold of experiences (to use a Kantian language). That is, if we think of experiences of events as synthesized from a series of snapshots, we can bring those snapshots together in our understanding as a single flow, as an event proper.
At the same time, it seems somewhat unreasonable to think of events as "originally manifold", so that we have to do some further work of retroactively putting everything together. Of course, events "unfold" or "unfurl", so that events come together from manifold sources before our eyes. And in this respect, the emergence of an event does add to experience manifold elements which in seeing coherently, we take up altogether into a unity of sorts. Kant seemed to think that this manifold would remain disunified if it were not for the apperceptive self, the self-aware kind of being that we are. Memories and anticipations or plans do not appear as a unity without the being for whom life is itself conceived as a whole, i.e., in which I am someone individual. It seems that synthesis is not some pure abstraction, but something that belongs to lived, embodied experience as such. Even the understanding itself, construed broadly, seems to be meaningless without reference to embodied sensuality. What then is change to this synthetic understanding, prior to interpreting its coherence by accounting for it calendrically?
Change does imply measurable "rates", so that common endergonic and exergonic reactions both take place with reference to regularly repeatable physical paces, to seconds and hours, days and years, and so that change can be also tabulated according to various relative metrics, but this is not what I am attempting to indicate by change. What I rather mean will come to light better if we follow a certain imaginative experiment.
Let's begin by imagining the whole world as a 1-dimensional stream of particles. In such a constrained environment, every subatomic particle is locked into a specific order. Nothing "gets around" anything else. As such, light could not penetrate into this universe, except to say that there might be some two particles between which a photon would be able to bounce back and forth. These would be the natural spatial limits of every photon.
Also, particles would be unable to form into atoms. This should be evident from the fact that particles could not orbit each other! Everything would remain locked into the most basic elementary forms. One has to wonder if there would even be the possibility of forces trying to break this locked quantum state.
Also, we have to try and think of this universe from the inside, which may be quite difficult, since we are so much accustomed to seeing it in four dimensions, with change taken alongside length, width, and height. It is even difficult to discern whether a particle would even see horizonally, in the sense that particles closer to it would appear larger than particles hidden behind them! Indeed, perhaps the only horizons in that unidimensional universe would consist of the two particles that fell prior and posterior!
And we should wonder whether this linear world were itself capable of being bent! could the cosmically long line be folded into a knot? Could it be made to pass through itself at various points? And what would be that suspiciously dimension-like background which made possible this very bending? Have we not already violated the terms of a unidimensional universe in supposing such a possibility?
And what of the patterns of particulate motion? What forces would there be? Gravity? At least this would seem to remain intact, though one wonders if particles would be able to escape its grasp, or whether this whole unidimensional universe would be prone to collapse back into a singularity. Such questions are difficult to answer, but perhaps we can suppose the force of individual impacts between particles sufficient to ensure that at least some of them escape massive singularities.
And yet, it does seem that we must question whether gravity can exist in a world incapable of spatial flex! Would space be flexible in a unidimensional world? We often refer to gravity as the curvature of space. However, in our hypothetical world, space would seem somewhat rigid! Perhaps the most we can say is that in some places, particles would be prone clump close together and in other places would be more dispersed (though this too starts to sound like additive waves and such, and hence, to operate under higher dimensional physics). This fictive world of ours seems to have some very strange properties indeed!
But granting at least that particles are capable of coming close or drawing far from other particles, is it not a little odd that we should note that, in fact, photons do behave in this very way, that they bounce back and forth, as it were, between troughs and peaks? Of course we tend to imagine photons in a three or four dimensional framework, as moving along a vector as waves in an electromagnetic spectrum.
Still, in our one dimensional framework, they would simply bounce between two poles, their particle horizons. And if matter can move, even in this highly constrained environment, then perhaps all matter moves, if only toward the infinite ends of the unidimensional space which constrains it: an infinitely long line of infinitesimal particles bouncing off of each other, non able to get around each other, all forming a line that grows with Time. And what drives this "growing" at all, if not the energized photons, full of charge, bouncing back and forth between the other particles? does this not, as a whole net effect, press the whole line to become longer and longer over time?
If we were to suppose that we could begin with a very short line, in which every particle were packed as closely together as possible, i.e., as much as gravity would allow for—would not the energetic force of those oscillating particles press for more room? and in so doing, would they not become the very force of the unfurling of Time?
It has now become possible for us to ask the question we initially wanted to consider: where in this unidimensional universe would be the present? It would be in the change between the positions of the particles, would it not? But then we would have a two-dimensional universe, because we would need to map the changes of the unidimensional universe over Time. And this is why perhaps we have had a tendency from the start to regard Time as conceptual, because it plays an intrinsic role in our metrical accounting for Spatial change. Perhaps then, if we wished to stick to the unidimensional account, we would never even be able to escape the initial singularity which preceded our unidimensional big bang! If this world were to come into being at all, it would only be able to do so by virtue of a prior, higher dimensional Time which preceded it!
So then, we have come to an important realization: Time has to already be in place for the world to come into being. Time, as it were, sets the stage for creation. If there is any dimension which is fundamental, it is the Time dimension. This is the one dimension that can be taken as fundamentally really, as the sine qua non of the world. If that is so, then the so-called particles of the unidimensional world we have been so far imagining would be not unlike quantum particles, which pop in and out of existence; their very becoming and unbecoming would simply be their distance in Time from each other. And this would suggest that, unlike the treatment of Time as a pure concept, Time has a concrete function as a real dimension; indeed, the most real of dimensions, even if this has been indicated by 'virtual particles'!
We have been concerned as far as possible to avoid reducing Time to a merely "metrical-conceptual" account, like that of number and other mathematical entities. We have wanted instead to focus on what energizes us to think of Time, what first gives rise to its significations in experience.
But we have also been compelled to introduce Time as a second dimension in our highly constrained universe, having no other means of representing a present in opposition to a past or future when we treated this dimension as spatial. This is quite telling, and brings to the surface of our investigation just how much the force of thinking Time as a concept has hold of our every understanding of it.
If Time would be a "mere concept", and one that relies upon the concrete-visible world of interacting particles for its most basic intelligibility, then it is nonetheless still a kind of "endurance", insofar as we admit that, behind change, there are prior conditions, prior questions of "existence" that inform the very possibility of visualizing and mapping change.
We have been concerned to visualize Time, to visualize change, to visualize the present as a certain sort of surface of change. We do not stand alongside the universe as outside observers who could watch change without being impacted by it. We are "in it", and change is something that we are very much a part of. But we are able to imagine this "being alongside" or "being outside" of the universe, much as God would be outside all of Time in Eternity. And when we imagine this unidimensional universe, do we not then impose the changes when we abstract away from what it "is" to what it "was" and what it "will be"? This transition between the transformations that we are immediately exposed to, versus those remote suggests that our immersion in temporality also has a "depth". The present is not unlike the surface of an almost unfathomably deep ocean, and one that is getting deeper all the Time.
We are rising further and further to the infinite sky of space upon the surface of this ocean which is filling the world with Time. Space, as all that is present, is just the surface of this ocean, just the "thickness of the now". And yet, we also see that light, which penetrates through this ocean, from the very edge of our understanding of creation, red-shifted and diluted in its energies, oscillating for eternity in the vast and asymptotically empty void retains the past as a certain kind of depth. We can see below us, into the waters of the past.
Time gives Space a surface, a proximity in the form of the Now, a distance in the form of the Past and Future, a surface in the sense of finitude, of birth and death. Time imposes this upon existence, so that in an important respect, the judgment of Time as a mere concept misconstrues it. Certainly, it is a condition for life and death. Certainly, it imposes existence upon those of us who are present. Time, in this light, is not simply a concept, but the most brutal and imposing of facts.
Always floating upon the surface of the now,
Yet lights below blossom from hoary antiquity,
Reminding us of where we have been.
Waters fathomless,
A storm above us,
Filling the world with presence,
Till at last,
Soaked and sea-logged,
The waters filling our every pore,
The air of life escapes us,
We drown.
What then?
