It’s Time We Revisit the Notion of Time

In the Tralfamadorian view of time, every moment exists simultaneously, and life is a series of experiences to be appreciated rather than a linear progression.

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Tralfamadorians, as described in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five are an alien species that abduct one Billy Pilgrim, keep him prisoner, and teach him their philosophy on life.

They are green, resemble toilet plungers with eyes, and are fatalists – i.e. they believe that everything is predestined and that nothing can be done to change the course of the universe. They can time travel and do not view time linearly, because of this, they know how and when the universe will end, but accept it, as their worldview dictates that they have no power to change future events.

It would seem Tralfamdorians are Eternalists.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

What is Time

My four-year-old woke up one morning and rushed to tell me his new theory of time. “So you see Daddy”, he eloquently stated, “I once thought ‘Tomorrow’ was far away, but now I realize that tomorrow is right after ‘Today’, the day that is about to end. So it’s not that far”, he cheerfully concluded.

It seems time, in the procedural, lapsing sense, is wired into our biological brains. We are all aware of the passage of time. From birth, up to inevitable demise, we feel the cold hand of time degenerating our bodies. Time is experienced through circadian rhythms, which regulate sleep and wake cycles, our aging process, and Earth’s motion around the Sun. It would seem that, to us, time is simply: “change“.

Is it? Well, it depends.

Theories, Theories Everywhere

The thermodynamics interpretation of time describes it as having a direction (an “arrow of time”) based on the increase of Entropy (think of Entropy as the degree of disorder in the universe, where it all started nice and tidy, going into shambles like a toddler’s room after he messed up his entire toy collection). It sits well with why we remember the past and not the future, and why certain processes (like mixing cream into coffee) appear irreversible.

On the other hand, philosophers like Immanuel Kant argued that time is a framework of human perception, a-priori to experience. Kant argues that time is not something that we derive from experience but is a pre-existing framework of the mind—a pure form of intuition. This means that time is built into the very structure of our perception; we do not experience it as an external entity but rather as the necessary condition under which we organize all of our sensory data.

However, even though time is a subjective condition imposed by our minds, it is not arbitrary. Every human being experiences time in the same structured way. For Kant, time (like space) is a universal and necessary feature of how we perceive phenomena. In other words, while time does not exist as an objective property of things in themselves (the noumena), it is universally valid as the mode in which all natural phenomena are ordered.

Because time is a subjective condition, Kant asserts that it does not apply to things as they are in themselves (independently of our perception). This distinction between phenomena (the world as experienced) and noumena (the world “in itself”) means that while scientific investigations can describe how time organizes events in our experiential world, they cannot claim to uncover the “true” nature of time as it might exist beyond human sensibility.

Which kind of rhymes with the mess quantum mechanics have brought into this already murky playground.

While classical physics considers time a constant, unchangeable background—always ticking at the same rate, no matter what—quantum mechanics defines it as just a number that tags events (you can think of it as an event index).

In layman’s terms, there is no “tool” allowing you to measure time, and there is no explicit concept of past, present, or future. Quantum theory doesn’t include a built-in “present moment” or a flow of time. The equations work the same whether you perceive time as moving forward or backward. Moreover, most quantum equations are time-symmetric, meaning they don’t prefer the past over the future, and quantum particles affect each other over a distance in zero time via quantum entanglement (which is a euphemism for “we have no clue how this works”).

This greatly differs from our everyday experience, where we feel time “flows” from the past onto the present and into the future. However (to complicate things even further), the quantum process of wavefunction collapse during measurement introduces apparent irreversibility, which does align with the macroscopic arrow of time observed in thermodynamics.

To put it in simpler terms, quantum mechanics describes particles as a wavefunction that represents all the possible states they could be in at once—like a spinning coin that is both heads and tails simultaneously; however, when you measure the particle, this wavefunction collapses, forcing it to pick one specific state, similar to the coin landing on either heads or tails when caught. Apparently, a process that has a “before” and “after”.

Furthermore, when attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity (which describes gravity and spacetime), the nature of time becomes an even bigger issue.

As opposed to the event index of quantum theory, general relativity describes time as dynamic and intertwined with space, forming a four-dimensional spacetime (basically, it says we do have clocks). This discrepancy is known as the “problem of time” in quantum gravity.

And of course, one cannot discuss time without mentioning the Many-Worlds hypothesis.

The many worlds theory posits that every time a quantum event occurs, like a coin flip, the universe splits into multiple branches, each reflecting a different outcome. This means that instead of a single outcome, all possible outcomes occur in separate, parallel universes, even though we only experience one result in our own world. Basically, you can go back in time, kill your grandparents, and still live to tell the tale in your own personal timeline.

Confused? So are we.

It seems unlike our natural, day-to-day, concept of time, no two theories are fully aligned when it comes to an exact, and non-ambiguous definition of what Time actually is.

Time in Art

When David Bowie sings: “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth” he portrays time as an external entity, one that moves events along (putting a cigarette in your mouth, lighting it, causing it to slowly burn away). A beautiful personification of that elusive entity that propels us forward through … time. Ahh, that ambiguous self-referencing let’s-have-it-both-ways again. So Bowie, may he rest in peace, does not help either.

Could the answer lie in literary texts? Ballet? Paintings? Performance art?

In Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” the narrator uses a stream-of-consciousness describing the events over a single day to weave in memories and reflections that blur the boundaries between past, present, and future. Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” describes time as cyclical and nonlinear where past, present, and future intertwine in the history of the Buendía family, while Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring” performance combines rhythm and repetition to portray the cycle of life and death.

In Merce Cunningham’s Ocean – a dance sequence performed in a circular space, with no clear beginning or end based on John Cage’s original concept (who also created 4’33” – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence) the choreographer again tries to convey the feeling of the passage of time. Are you feeling it yet?

Can we find solace and understanding of the nature of time in Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present”? where she sits silently for hours each day, inviting visitors to sit across from her, soaking the shared experience of time and (mutual) presence?

Or shall we fall back to Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” symbolizing the fluidity and subjectivity of time, or Andy Warhol’s “Empire” (showing the Empire State Building over eight hours, challenging viewers’ perception of time and duration).

Would we find it in photography? In Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion“, or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s monumental work: “The Decisive Moment“?

The list goes on, and on. Books, performances, paintings, songs and lyrics, poetry. So much creative power was, and is, spent trying to grasp the notion of time beyond the rational mind. And yet, we struggle.

Is the answer buried in the past?

Time in Culture

While modern Western cultures portray time as linear—a straight line moving from a fixed past to an open future, many mythologies and religions describe time as a cyclic, repeated, process.

Such are Hinduism, personifying time as Kala (काल, ‘time’ or ‘death’ in Sanskrit), a deity associated with destruction and transformation (somewhat resembling the thermodynamic interpretation of time), and Buddhism which views the universe as going through endless cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction (the Yugas).

In other parts of the globe, native Americans and Aboriginal Australians see time as deeply connected to nature. Their concept of time is holistic and cyclical, reflecting the patterns of the seasons, the land, and spiritual traditions, where past, present, and future are interwoven. So do the Maya, and Aztec civilizations which developed intricate calendars that demonstrate a strong belief in the cyclical nature of time, where cosmic events and rituals recur in repeating cycles.

Simple, right? But simple isn’t necessarily right.

Looking at nature, people once thought the sun revolves around the Earth, and that worms are spontaneously created from rotting meat. Cultural theories are no more than narratives woven based on partial evidence, designed to explain reality in the best possible way available to the people of the time.

To better understand time, we need to delve into the instrument through which we perceive it, scrutinizing its inherent reality-filtering mechanisms, biases, and limitations. Only then can we hope to somewhat fathom the true meaning of time (to a limited extent).

Time in the Brain

In the mid-90s, Kurt Vonnegut took the stage at Santa Cruz University amphitheater on a hot summer afternoon. His opening question to the crowd was: “How do you think Rhinos perceive reality?” This seemingly odd question beautifully unfolded into an exposition of a creature (the Rhino), whose sense of sight is practically non-existent, however, his olfactory abilities (i.e. his sense of smell) are highly developed.

Think about it this way, said Vonnegut, smell, unlike vision, is not immediate. A smell can decay over days intermixing with new smells, creating an elongated sense of reality, where the Rhino perceives time as a mix of what we see as past and present. A past-present progressive temporal framework of mind whose notion of time greatly differs from ours.

Would it be fair to say that the perception of time is highly dependent on our input instruments (i.e. senses) and the underlying neurological mechanisms processing and storing the signals conveyed through them?

How can it not be so?

Research shows that rather than having one “clock” that ticks away in a single brain region, the brain appears to employ multiple, overlapping systems to track time over different scales.

Circadian rhythms, governed by structures such as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, regulate our roughly 24-hour cycles (sleep-wake patterns, hormone release, etc.), while interval timing (milliseconds to seconds), critical for tasks like motor coordination and speech, seems to involve networks in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and cortical areas.

Models such as the pacemaker-accumulator theory propose that a neural “pacemaker” emits pulses that are counted over an interval, though more recent views suggest that timing may emerge from the evolving state of neural populations rather than from a dedicated clock, and Hippocampus research has revealed neurons that fire at specific moments during a time interval—often dubbed “time cells”—which may help us sequence events and form episodic memories, to name but a few brain mechanisms involved in temporal perception.

In an experiment at the University of California, San Diego, scientists gave several groups of people a tour of the campus. The tour included 11 planned events, including finding change in a vending machine and drinking from a water fountain.

Afterward, the participants were asked to recall their experiences. People with typical brains tended to remember the events in chronological order. But those with damage to the hippocampus – where many time cells are found – recalled events without regard to the order in which they occurred.

For ‘time cells’ in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment, NPR, 2022

With all those internal clocks ticking around, one would have thought we should be able to “tell time”, i.e. mostly agree on the rate at which time passes. We don’t.

Have you ever felt time flies when you’re having fun? You are not wrong.

Neurotransmitters such as dopamine play a key role in how we perceive time. Changes in dopaminergic activity can speed up or slow down our internal sense of duration, which is why time may seem to “fly” when we’re engaged or “drag” during stressful situations.

Dopamine neurons in a brain region known as the substantia nigra pars compacta can alter the perception of time, according to research published in Science in December [2006]. Stimulating or inhibiting these cells makes mice behave as if time is moving faster or slower, the researchers found.

Midbrain dopamine neurons control judgment of time, Science, 2016

It’s Time We Wrap Things Up

It seems that while neuroscience, physics, art, and many other disciplines approach the nature of time from very different angles, most converge on the idea that our everyday experience of time is not as straightforward as a ticking clock, but rather a complex, emergent phenomenon arising from deeper processes.

It’s like nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

Physics, art, ancient cultures, or brain research; all seem to provide portholes into the concept of time, while none, as Kant would phrase it, captures the thing in itself.

Can we blame them? like us, they are humans, employing the single apparatus they have. Their brains, which, as we described above, are highly biased by evolutionary-generated neurological mechanisms that shape our perception, thought processes, and even the language in which we try to describe and analyze the concept of Time.

We would probably never (pun intended) fully understand time, or know for sure whether it flows forward, in cycles, or does not exist at all as the Tralfamadorians suggest, but at least we can make sure the way we spend it is worth our while.