Time is a weird thing. We don’t all seem to experience it in quite the same way—sometimes it passes quickly, sometimes slowly, and it seems to go by faster and faster the older we get. There have been plenty of theories that attempt to explain just what time is and why it’s so mysterious, and some of them are pretty mind-bending.
10 St. Augustine’s Theory Of Mind-Time
Christian philosopher St. Augustine had a couple of things to say about time. First, he said that time was absolutely not infinite. Time was, according to him, created by God, and it’s impossible to create something that’s infinite.
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He also said that time actually exists only in our mind, a bizarre conclusion that all has to do with how we interpret time. We may say that something lasted a long time or a short time, but St. Augustine said that there’s no real way to quantify that. When something is in the past, it no longer has any properties of being anything because it doesn’t exist anymore, and when we say something took a long time, that’s just because we’re remembering it that way. Since we only measure time based on how we remember it, then it must only exist in our memories. The future doesn’t exist yet, so that can’t have any measurable quantities, either. The only thing that does exist is the present (and that’s a complicated concept we’ll get to in a minute), so the only logical conclusion left is that time only exists in our heads.
9 The Topology Of Time
What does time look like? If you try to picture time, do you see it as a straight line that goes on forever? Or do you think of time sort of looking like a clock, going around and around, circling back on itself every day or every year?
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Obviously, there’s no right answer, but there are some intriguing ideas about it. According to Aristotle, time can’t exist as a line, at least one with a beginning or an end, even though there must have been a time when, well, time started. In order for there to be a moment in time when time began, there had to be something before that marked its beginning. The same goes for the end of time, he said. In order for the line of time to come to an end, there has to be something after it to mark that particular point as the end of time.
There’s also the problem of how many lines of time are there—is there one line of time that everything travels along together, or are there multiple lines of time that alternately intersect or run parallel to each other? Is time a
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single line with a lot of branches? Or perhaps moments in the time stream exist independently from other moments. There are plenty of opinions, but no answers.
8 The Specious Present
The idea of the specious present deals with the question of how long the present actually lasts. The usual answer, something about it being the “now,” isn’t very descriptive. For instance, when we’re in the middle of talking to someone and we’re in mid-sentence, we’ve already finished the beginning of the sentence and it’s in the past, but the conversation itself is still taking place in the present. So how long does the present actually last?
E.R. Clay and William James refer to this idea as the specious present—the space of time that we perceive as being in the present. They suggest that it can be as short as a few seconds and probably not longer than a minute, but
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it’s the amount of time that we’re immediately, consciously aware of.
And within that, there’s still a little bit of wiggle room to argue.
It could theoretically have something to do with how long a person’s short-term memory is—the better that is, the longer the present is. There’s also the idea that it’s just a matter of instantaneous perception, and the second it’s passed and you’re relying on your short-term memory, a moment is no longer a part of the present. Then there’s the problem of the present and something of an extended present, which is where the specious present comes in. The present must have no length of actual time, because if it did, part of that time would be in the past and part would be in the future, contradicting itself. So the specious present tries to explain the present as an interval of time that has duration, yet is a separate thing from the objective present.
