Time isn't going anywhere, and neither am I

Time, as we've all heard from various physicists, is a dimension. Like length, width, and height, it can be measured, things occupy amounts of it in various locations, and so on. So, for example, Sir Isaac Newton occupies about 85 years of time, stretching from 1642 to 1727 AD. So far so good.

Our minds, however, treat time as a magical sort of dimension through which we are continuously moving, or which is continuously moving past us, and at a constant rate. We act and speak as though Sir Isaac started out in 1642 and moved smoothly through time in a monotone forward direction until he reached 1727, at which point he died and thus ceased to occupy any time at all. This is very strange. After all, during that span of time he managed to occupy varying amounts of length, width, and height, and he managed to change his location in those dimension widely, at varying rates, and in varying directions at will. Yet somehow he was riding a kind of temporal monorail all the while, with no possibility of stopping, changing direction, or speeding up and slowing down. Why do we think that?

What I realized was that this flow of time that we perceive is nothing more than an organizational principle for our minds to grasp the world we live in. Ask yourself what it would mean for time to stop, or flow backwards, or change the rate at which it flowed. Stopped relative to what? Flowing backwards relative to what? And so on. Stopping, flowing, changing rates, are all measures of movements relative to the dimension of time, and so time itself cannot be said to do anything of those things.

Five minutes, being a measure of extent in the temporal dimension, is five minutes long. Five minutes worth of events can be squeezed into it and no more. You can't speed it up or slow it down or stop it anymore than you can stretch five feet into ten feet, or squeeze it into five inches.

It isn't necessary to slide your hands down a five foot board from left to right at a constant speed for the board to be five feet long, or for the left-hand end always to lie at the left and the right-hand end always to lie at the right. Those things are inherent in the structure of space and the board itself. Neither is it necessary for you to perceive 4:00 in the afternoon turning to 4:01 then 4:02 until 5:00 comes around an hour later for 5:00 to be an hour away from 4:00 in the "future" direction. It would be equally as sensible to experience 5:00 turning to 4:59 and then to 4:58 until 4:00 comes around an hour earlier. 4:00 and 5:00 would still exist in the same relationship to one another, and the same events would still occupy the same temporal locations. That is because time isn't going anywhere at any rate at all. It's just a dimension you can use to measure things.

I don't claim that this is a particularly earth-shaking revelation to have experienced. What it has is all kinds of interesting philosophical implications and almost no practical implications whatsoever. The perception that we are moving through time, or that time is moving past us, is still a fairly good working model that allows us to live our lives and communicate with each other. It does have an impact on how I take things, and if you can truly accept that time isn't going anywhere and neither are you, it will have an impact on how you take things, too.

Death, for example, is simply one endpoint of one's duration in space and time, just as birth is the other. We don't typically get all upset because someone we love wasn't alive before 1902, for example, but for some reason we do get upset because that person isn't alive after 1989. Why is that? Nothing can change the fact that they exist from 1902 through 1989, and all the events of their life occupy those years. They're still there, and the events still exist, in those years from 1902 until 1989. They never did have any existence after 1989, just as they never did have any existence before 1902. All that happened was that we found out about it.

More to come.