I find two concepts deeply mysterious and puzzling. One of them is the nature of consciousness, and the other is the nature of time. Both have been investigated by philosophers (particularly by sages in India) for at least a couple of thousand years, and Western philosophers and physicists have struggled to make sense of them for the last few centuries.
Both time and consciousness are necessarily related. To perceive the passage of time, there has to be a sentient entity that is conscious. In deep sleep or under general anesthesia, there’s no perception of time.
(Aside: I was quite intrigued to learn that while general anesthesia works quite well, the precise mechanism is not well understood by scientists.)
What is time? That’s a pretty dumb question, most people would say. But it’s one of the deepest mysteries that humans have ever attempted to answer.
The operational definition of time is that it is whatever a clock measures. All processes take time; nothing happens in an interval of zero duration. Nothing happens which does not involve time.
Something similar can be said about space: everything occupies a non-zero amount of space. That is intuitively obvious but it is extremely difficult to understand what space is. Continue reading “The Nature of Time”
