The Concept of Time

Few of the problems of philosophy are as obscure and as absorbing as Time and its place in Nature. The ideas of physicists engaged in the mathematical formulation of Time as a character of natural knowledge, and those of metaphysicians committed to a more comprehensive treatment of it as an attribute of reality, have but augmented the confusion and contradiction hanging about this complex concept. Newton handled Time as a Universal Absolute having objective reality. Leibnitz viewed it as a relational matrix. Kant differed from Newton in that he treated it more as a form of awareness than a self-existent absolute.

The incidence of Time on human perception is three-fold. The going-on of Time is felt in the ever-moving stream of consciousness. It is also revealed as a principle informing the process of Nature. As a conceptual framework for an arrangement of events postulated for correlating physical knowledge, Time affords a relative measure for the evaluation of the duration of events as well as intervals between them. The basic notion of pare duration originates in the awareness of self as an indivisible and sustained process. It is interesting to speculate whether Nature is in Time or Time is in Nature. Time occurs in consciousness; consciousness is a happening in Nature; and Nature is comprehended in consciousness. The problem is cyclical and does not admit of further reduction. Physical Time, i.e., Time in the sense of a measurable temporal series, is but an objective projection of subjective Time, i.e., Time as permeating processes of thought and of sense-awareness. Subjective Time is directly experienced; physical Time is a conceptual inference and therefore a mental construction.

The empirical phenomena such as succession and change are not essential to the subjective notion as well as its objective counterpart. The only safeguard for awareness of the passage of Time is a bare continuity of existence which is the purest of all processes known to simple consciousness. The varied progression of physical events is often construed as a factor that unsettles the generic identity of the subjective, and physical goings-on. Professor Dingle writes, "The going-on of events can conceivably stop; a child can picture thewhole course of Nature suddenly petrified, and it has often been done in romances; but subjective time does not thereupon stop." The conceivable petrifaction of the whole course of Nature and a reduction of all flux to an eternal immobility cannot in any way annihilate the going-on of physical Time, nor need it be expected that subjective Time would thereupon stop except it be with the extinction of the subject. The metaphysical basis for the concept of Time, subjective as well as physical, is the principle of the continuity of existence. It is the pervasive feature of not only perpetual flux but eternal immobility as well. Prof. Dingle seems to have stopped short at the simple appreciation of the apparent distinction between the subjective and the physical goings-on, failing therein to get at their generic identity inhering in a common attribute of continuity of existence. Mctaggart’s observation that a universe in which nothing whatever changed (including the thought of conscious beings in it) would be a timeless universe confines itself to notions of commonsense and lacks philosophic penetration.

Subjective Time has its ablest exponent in Bergson. He holds that duration experienced by one’s consciousness is the only real Time. It is qualitative and defies spatial anology. It is irreversible. The transmutation of experience into memory brings about the intuitive awareness of it. The difficulty with Bergsons’s philosophy is that it winds up with mere consciousness of duration and considers all attempts at objective treatment, through measurement, calculation, comparison and representation as so much mutilation of the real Time-flow. Time is denaturalised, when once it is treated quantitatively. A metaphysical attitude such as this is tantamount to a total repudiation of the procedure of science. Withal Bergson holds that the real Time which is conscious duration is the same for all observers and that the inconstant local times of a relativistic world are effects of physical perspective. How does Bergson establish the identity of conscious duration for all observers, when he excludes from consideration all ideas of measurement?–Of course, by direct intuition which, according to him, is the proper method of philosophy. Conscious duration has also got to reckon with the inconstancies and relativisms of local times. As the Time of this universe has its origin in duration directly cognisable by consciousness, only universality of consciousness can afford to encompass the multiple events of the physical world within an all-inclusive time-perspective.

The late Samuel Alexander discarded the subjective views such as Bergson’s. According to him Time is not mere enjoyment of duration of consciousness, but one of the two categories of the only existential reality, Space-Time. In his realistic meta-physical scheme the empirical characters of Time, such as succession and continuity, cannot be comprehended, except in relation to the correlative category of Space. Time is linked to Space, and together they form the framework of Nature. Time denotes process; it is directive. Space gives form, and is conservative. The doctrine of Emergence which is the mainspring of Alexander’s metaphysic of Nature utilises the time factors as the spear-head of changing reality–"Time is the Mind of Space."

While Alexander conceives of Time as an informing principle of Nature-stuff, Eddington treats of it as the arrow indicating the trend of the group of physical facts which could be covered by the general law of entropy. The law of entropy, according to Eddington, institutes a distinction between the past and the future. It gives meaning to the process of Nature, in the sense of distinct and irreversible degradation of the system of physical energy. There is a progressive disorganisation in Nature pointing towards a final stagnation when the universe will be an inert but extended continuum. But the truth may not be so simple as this. Many counter-theories have been put forward rebutting the notion of the running down of the universe and pleading the possible rejuvenescence of the ageing organism. But they seem to be still vague and yield no positive disproof of the law of entropy. Thus apart from intuitive consciousness of the passage of subjective Time from a known past to an unforeseen future, certain physical processes indicate an objective going-on of Time, manifested in the slow and definite degenerescence of the natural system. However, there is no special charm about the 2nd law of Thermodynamics in that it furnishes an instance of the going-on of Physical Time. Physical Time can be made to go on or stagnate, quite arbitrarily. The laws of Thermodynamics cannot exhaust the sum total of physical facts. There are laws of physics which do not pretend to infer any directed movement in the facts they govern. Physical Time can be made to indicate a directed process or an undirected static continuity according to the nature of the facts covered by the metrical laws of physics.

In Newtonian physics, Time was, understood as a uniform and absolute flow, valid for all observers and identical in all coordinate systems. The characteristics of events, such as antecedence, subsequence and simultaneity, retained a fixity of connotation independent of the systems of reference. Modern physical theory has challenged the tenability of every one of these ideas. The Restricted Theory of Relativity put forward by Einstein establishes the relativity of simultaneity, provides for as many local times as there are reference systems, and furnishes the formulae for the laws of change in time-rhythm from one system to another. The mathematical comprehension of motion and change brings about a reorientation of the Time-concept in the field of physical measurement. Time as understood in mathematical physics is of quite a different nature from the Time-extension of subjective awareness. In the essential function of being a composite framework for the causal arrangement of physical facts, Time and Space are practically identical. The distinctive notion of Time as something peculiarly non-spatial is not to be had in physics however far we may push our analysis. Any contrivance of measuring Time involves the selection of some sequence of events between which there is a measurable interval of some other physical quantity, the latter being used to define the measurement of the former. Time does not yield a measure of itself but has got to be measured in non-temporal forms. Applying the pragmatic test to the case, one is driven to wonder if there could be any validity in the Time notion at all. A simple spatial configuration is plausibly adequate to interpret position as well as movement in physical nature. In securing a static picture of rectilinear motion for purposes of quantitative consideration, the dynamic quality of Time is reduced to a variety of spatial representation, capable of being graphically projected along with a Space dimension, the two being compoundable in a Time-Space continuum of two dimensions. In the words of Einstein and Infeld, "Now the motion is represented as something which is, which exists in the two-dimensional Time-Space continuum, and not as something which changes in the one-dimensional Space continuum." In relativistic physics, Time is no more than a mathematical co-ordinate as good as any other spatial co-ordinate, the utilisation of such co-ordinates being solely for the compact description of observational measurements.

An ingenious theory, under the arresting appellation of serialism, has been elaborated by Mr. Dunne purporting to effect a metaphysical adjustment between psychical and physical events. By a species of mathematical tinkering, physics and psychology are sought to be dove-tailed into a structure of knowledge which claims to dissipate all discontinuities in our Time-perception. Mr. Dunne’s epistemology is founded on the logic of ‘Infinite Regress’ inferred from the obvious facts of ‘regression’ of ‘consciousness,’ ‘will,’ and ‘time.’ From a study of a series of precognitive dreams, mostly reminiscent of his own life, the author seeks to envisage the possibility of displacement in Time, the fourth dimension of the Space-Time world as visualized by the scientists. The alternating phases of mental existence such as waking consciousness and dream-activity are construed as the vitiating elements of an universally stretched-out time, cutting it up into numerous ‘pasts’ and ‘presents’ grouping round the various mind centres. The argument is that, were it not for the mentally imposed barrier between the two phases of mind, the dreamer’s attention would move about the associational network of mental impressions, and forth, round and about, in an unhampered and natural fashion. If this fanciful supposition could be treated as an explanation, the question of a man’s prevision of future mental states ceases to be problematical inasmuch as such ability is assumed to be normal and habitual. Some further experiments conducted by Mr. Dunne have led him to conclude that not only dreams could be precognitive, but one could, while quite awake, observe images of future happenings. It is our obsession with the past that stands in the way of the future beckoning to us in abrupt flashes. Such considerations as these, fortified by the logic of the serialism of the fields of presentation and the multi-dimensional facility which the theory of Relativity has extended to the imaginative faculty of thought, have suggested to Mr. Dunne a possible parallelism and a cognitive connection between the regressive series of consciousness and the series of Time-traveling fields of presentation, the larger field containing the smaller and itself traveling in another dimension of Time. Mr. J. B. Priestley gives us a succinct impression of Mr. Dunne’s theory when he writes, "He believes that each of us is a series of Observers existing in a series of Times. To Observer One, our ordinary full-awake sharp selves, the fourth dimension appears as Time. To Observer Two, which is the self we know in dreams when the First Observer is not functioning, the fifth dimension would appear as Time."

No doubt the whole scheme is a masterpiece of imaginative construction. It has no match for the height of ambition, the simplicity of conception, and above all the wish-fulfillment it affords to the luxurious indulger in abstract speculation. The comments of Eddington in his letter to Mr. Dunne, "I agree with you about ‘serialism’; the ‘going-on of time,’ is not in Minkowski’s world as it stands. My own feeling is that the ‘becoming’ is really there in the physical world, but is not formulated in the description of it in classical physics (and is, in fact, unless to a scheme of laws which is fully deterministic)," are significantly restrictive. Eddington refers only to the ‘serialism’ of time and not to the parallelism and the cognitive connection between it and the regressive series of consciousness, which one will do well to note.

We have, erstwhile, been dealing with the concept of time as a positive attribute of Reality, and examining a few of its implications in science and metaphysics. But philosophies are not lacking which have disputed the claims of Time as an element of Reality. From Parmenides of Greece down to Mctaggart among the moderns, a host of eminent thinkers have viewed with suspicion the perplexities of the Time-factor, and spun out abstract-idealist systems of static Reality under the delusive impression that they have dispensed with Time inasmuch as they have discountenanced change. But, change or no change, Time is bound to assert itself in philosophic thought as it is inextricably bound up with Nature, Existence and Consciousness. The philosophy of Sankara, reared on religious mysticism, banishes Time from the realm of Reality. A monistic preoccupation with a perfected universe makes it impossible to think of Nature as a Timeful process. The doctrine of Maya is a conceptual aid to dispel the contradiction between concrete experience and abstract idealism. Paradoxically enough, what is brought in to save the system casts a doubt on the eligibility of the system itself. To exist and to be in Time seem to be conjoint characteristics. Nothing could be in Time without existing. Nothing could exist without being in Time. Time and Existence, Nature and Consciousness are the four-fold basis of all theories of knowledge.