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From: dat@hpcnoa.UUCP (dat)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Created Yesterday
Message-ID: <93000003@hpcnoa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Jun-85 17:41:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpcnoa.93000003
Posted: Thu Jun 13 17:41:00 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Jun-85 00:31:14 EDT
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Organization: Hewlett-Packard - Fort Collins, CO
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Nf-ID: #R:decwrl:-216300:hpcnoa:93000003:000:3147
Nf-From: hpcnoa!dat    Jun  7 13:41:00 1985



	Speaking of which, I've long thought that we perceive time
in a relative manner.  There exists somewhere outside of human
perception an absolute time reference, and what we have as time is
our anthopologically biased interpretation of that. 

	Consider - we've all experienced having time go quite
slowly (waiting for 5:00 o'clock :-) and quickly (doing something
engrossing).

	The 'traditional' explanation for this phenomenon is simply
that we are 'paying more or less attention to the passage of time'.
I disagree with this, however.  My interpretation is that when
monitoring the passage of time conciously we actually change, for
a period of time, our PERCEPTION of time.  We change, in a totally
individual manner, time itself.  Similarly, if we don't notice time
passing it is because we have again changed our relative interpretation
of 'absolute' time.

	In other words, a given clock interval can seem long to some and
short to others based on what they are doing.  This is in fact caused by
their individual perception of time - they exist in parallel but in 
universes that are oriented to a different 'speed'.

	Consider also the case where two people are in a room
together - one has been working on an engrossing puzzle for an
hour and the other has sat watching the walls.  After the same
period of time they will report having experienced a different
duration of time!  The engrossed person would say something like
"An HOUR?  I thought we were in there for five minutes!" while
the other would say "An HOUR? I thought we were in there for days!"
(The same phenomenon occurs in sensory deprivation systems, I'm
told).  My contention is that their comments are in fact absolutely
true - that the have experienced different relative amounts of 
time in the same absolute amount of time.

	Similarly, I see no reason why absolute time isn't simply
another dimension in our universe.  The same relative versus
absolute differences occur in physical measurement and perception too.

	An argument in favour of time being another dimension 
can be obtained by moving 'down' a level of existence to the
two dimensional world of Edwin Abbott's "Flatland".  In this
universe the creatures can perceive forward-backward and up-down,
but cannot escape their plane of existence to the right-left
dimension that we are all familiar with.

	What would happen if, for example, we took a rod of
metal and heated up one end.  Having this heated bar we now
gradually moved it through the Flatland universe:

		--------------
	       /             / <- Flatland
	      /             /
      --------------       /---- <- The Heated Bar
      -------------       /-----
           /             /
           --------------
what we would see as simple third dimension motion (left-right)
the creatures of Flatland would view as a change in heat versus
TIME.  They would perceive the change in temperature of the 
cross-section of the bar that they could perceive as a function 
of time, whereas we see it simply as a function of motion in
our third dimension.

	Well?  Anyone have any comments about this?

					-- Dave Taylor
					Hewlett Packard