How do you reckon time?
When I first stood in a redwood forest, I was like so many before me awed by the breadth and height of the trees. In the East, the fattest tree I had ever encountered was an American beech in Yorktown, Virginia and the Angel Oak on Johns Island in South Carolina. Redwoods are “fatter” than that beech and have even greater diameters than that venerable live oak. Redwoods, as everyone knows, are also taller. Redwoods are significantly older than surviving American beech trees and live oaks, with some redwoods appearing as seedlings a couple of millennia ago. On the ground beside beech, live oak, and redwood, I found their dimensions overwhelmed objects of the mind and imagination with observable reality.
The duration of growth in those old trees compared to the duration of my own growth isn’t observable in the sense that the size differences are observable. The trees’ lifetimes push my imagination and concept of time to their rather finite limits. Those limits are a wall that prevents full comprehension, that is, an understanding suffused with a “feel” for the time that passed since those old trees started growing.
Exceedingly long lives challenge my brain and maybe yours, also. So, when I first encountered a bristlecone pine and learned of its age, I found myself incapable of getting any “feel” for its lifespan. Sure, I can say the numbers, but…
You know that old expression about a watched pot of water never boiling? Bristlecones dilate time even more so. A watched bristlecone pine never grows. And yet, strangely, unwatched pots of water do come to a boil, and bristlecone pines do, in fact, grow. But, gosh, do they grow slowly. Without knowing all the variables, I assume the mountain air that envelops them and the thin soils and bare limestones to which they cling and to which they adapted over millennia slow their growth. For humans, their environment, if not altogether forbidding, fosters no permanent habitation.
Bristlecones grow too slowly for the average human to notice. I suppose only dendrologists can closely track their growth with the finest of calipers or tree corers. Who among the ordinary visitor wants to stare at a tree that in some years doesn’t even produce a ring? Humans exist in a different time frame, a blink, so to speak, of the bristlecone’s eye.
Is there any way to comprehend the 4,000 years of a bristlecone pine’s life? Let me rephrase: Don’t you have difficulty comprehending any past because of an uneven passage of time, the varying progression that passes quickly or almost not at all? Haven’t you said, “Wow! That roller coaster was fun; I wish it lasted longer” and “As I put on the brakes, I could see everything slow down right before the crash”?
Personal time dilation is what we superimpose on the so-called objective calendar and clock time that we can scientifically apply to bristlecones’ growth rates. The clock time is irrelevant to our “feel” for such endurance. Should we press ourselves to imagine a montage film sequence of a bristlecone’s life or something akin to that technique used to show the passage of “time” in the movie version of The Time Machine? But were we to do so, would we see “time” or simply tangible or observable changes in the environment indicating time’s passage? We can model time and note what we call its effects, but as for actually seeing it, well, let’s just put it down as one of those inescapable intangibles that paradoxically produces tangible results. Is that a wrinkle developing on your brow? Hey, there’s another at the corner of your eye.
Dendrologists can examine bristlecones accurately enough to get a number like 4,000 years old, the clock or calendar time of the trees. But that is just a number to the psyche, and numbers, as we know aren’t whole brain entities. If they were, no one would gamble; no one would buy a lottery ticket. Numbers have meaning, but that meaning isn’t holistic when it comes to durations. And the numbers that mark an ancient bristlecone’s age carry little or nothing of a feel for the tree’s duration and survival through Earth’s vicissitudes. Don’t believe me? Try internalizing 4,000 years.
Archaeologists and anthropologists assess entities even older than bristlecones. The pyramids, for example, are a millennium older than the current stand of trees. Göbekli Tepe is more than twice their age, and cave drawings take us back tens of millennia. And ancient ancestors Homo habilis and Australopithecus afarensis predate the trees by two to four million years. Should we call that deep time? But even those ancestors’ lives are a blink relatively speaking. How so? Geologists dive down a deeper time well, one that goes back hundreds of millions to more than billion years. Astronomers, dive the deepest, going back to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Bristlecones? Tah! They live fractions of a blink at best.
Especially with regard to comprehending time, numbers that are intellectually meaningful can be personally meaningless. And big numbers and long durations need not apply. In what sense do you remember the time of your childhood? I’m not asking you to remember the number of years, but in a sense to comprehend them, to feel their passage? What was a watched pot of water seeming never to boil during some event during your youth, you now view as lasting that proverbial blink.
I suppose a philosopher might say I’m addressing the psychology of time rather than its philosophy. Okay, I’ll grant that. And physicists might jump into the conversation with statements about change and entropy, order vs. disorder, measurements on relative and absolute scales, and the “physical” beginning of time in the Big Bang or in some clashing of “branes” at a juncture of dimensions. But after all those books, papers, and discussions about the nature of time, have we extended our understanding by much? Do we still echo Augustine of Hippo’s comment that if no one asked him to define time he knew what it was, but if someone asked him, he was at a loss to explain it.
Sorry, philosophers and physicists. Time is of variable importance. It’s always important to humans in their present circumstances. But only in so far as individuals convince themselves by conscious effort or by a chance encounter does the duration of anything outside the boundaries of an individual life take on meaning. Interested in fossils? Then the time since their living forms succumbed to death is meaningful. Interested in old houses or antiques? Ditto. Capability for “feeling” Time’s passage for either relatively old fossils or relatively young antiques waxes and wanes with interest intensity. But even in the most personal attachment to Time, the passage of our own lives, we have difficulty trying to “feel” what we once felt about the duration of any moment. Remember that in the experience of any two people, the same event exists in a variable time frame. A batter hitting a ball perceives the moment differently from a fan observing the hit; an outfielder making a diving catch perceives time differently from a fan observing the catch. Same goes for crash victim and witness, drowning person and saving lifeguard, or even for a crew running a high-speed camera to capture a bullet hitting a pumpkin.
Am I a modern proponent of the Eleatic School? Am I Parmenides reborn? Am I arguing that Being is immutable and that Time is an illusion? No, I see an old living bristlecone, and I know it wasn’t born full grown. I see a dead one, and I know time has tangible effects.
Sure, I have said elsewhere, notably on the frontispiece of this website, that time is of secondary importance to place. No universe, I argue, no time. No place for time, no time. Place, I argue is primary over time, and place sets up how we perceive time. Standing next to an old beech, redwood, or bristlecone becomes a frame for time that differs from standing next to a baby, near an ant hill, or on Broadway at lunchtime. So, yes, I prefer a view of time that emanates from the psyche and not from some number divided by the Planck constant or the speed of light. And yes, I prefer to think of what time is in relation to me rather than in relation to time as fixed by some dating method, such as relative dating by superposition of rocks, with older rocks underlying younger ones, or as absolute dating by measurements of uranium half-lives or carbon-14 analysis. Even the count of tree rings in an ancient bristlecone pine or in a younger redwood or beech, though intelligible markers of time’s passage, do not define time’s indefinable essence, to speak Neoplatonically.
You know that you have yourself used a term like “time’s passage” or have spoken of “Time.” Yet, if I ask you whether time has an independent existence, that is, whether it exists outside of psyche or even outside matter, could you say anything more than what Augustine said in the fourth century? Would you argue Neoplatonically with Newton for an “Absolute Time” as either an Ideal or an Idea? In your attempt to answer that definitively, you’ll probably end up siding with Einstein and recognizing that time is not only variable, but it is even measurably variable, and that variability is the reason that the rate clocks tick on navigation satellites have to be adjusted for a different rate of ticking in “Earth-time” or those satellites will never direct us accurately from point A to point B.
But what, you might ask, do we do with an absolute like the age of the universe? Does it tell us nothing meaningful? Of course, such information does have meaning in showing how this place we call the Cosmos has rearranged itself from primordial plasma of inconceivable temperatures and unimaginable smallness to today’s Cosmos with a few imaginable temperatures, some relatively measurable distances, still many unimaginable temperatures, and a place of indefinite largeness.
Sure, clocks and calendars are the meaningful stuff of the intellect. The frontal lobe knows what to do with them. The inner brain, however, is befuddled unless it’s involved in that unconscious tracking that enables you to wake for a meeting or in that release of hormones and in the death of cells and aging. But you notice here and above that I speak of reckoning time with no real understanding to impart to you. I have no diet for your mind with accompanying claim that if you ingest these thoughts for three months, you will be able to explain Time. With Time we are probably equally wise or equally ignorant. Augustine was a smart guy; all those other philosophers were smart, but pin any of them down to a question and answer session on Time, and you will get answers based on those tangible effects. Everyone, regardless of intellectual ability, can see wrinkles and fat trees.
Can you feel the duration of the Cosmos? Does it have personal meaning? Do you have a feel for the age of a bristlecone? How about for your own age and the passage of your youth? Remember, I’m not asking for the numbers, but for comprehension that is holistic.
So, we’re back to my initial question. How do you reckon time?
When I first stood in a redwood forest, I was like so many before me awed by the breadth and height of the trees. In the East, the fattest tree I had ever encountered was an American beech in Yorktown, Virginia and the Angel Oak on Johns Island in South Carolina. Redwoods are “fatter” than that beech and have even greater diameters than that venerable live oak. Redwoods, as everyone knows, are also taller. Redwoods are significantly older than surviving American beech trees and live oaks, with some redwoods appearing as seedlings a couple of millennia ago. On the ground beside beech, live oak, and redwood, I found their dimensions overwhelmed objects of the mind and imagination with observable reality.
The duration of growth in those old trees compared to the duration of my own growth isn’t observable in the sense that the size differences are observable. The trees’ lifetimes push my imagination and concept of time to their rather finite limits. Those limits are a wall that prevents full comprehension, that is, an understanding suffused with a “feel” for the time that passed since those old trees started growing.
Exceedingly long lives challenge my brain and maybe yours, also. So, when I first encountered a bristlecone pine and learned of its age, I found myself incapable of getting any “feel” for its lifespan. Sure, I can say the numbers, but…
You know that old expression about a watched pot of water never boiling? Bristlecones dilate time even more so. A watched bristlecone pine never grows. And yet, strangely, unwatched pots of water do come to a boil, and bristlecone pines do, in fact, grow. But, gosh, do they grow slowly. Without knowing all the variables, I assume the mountain air that envelops them and the thin soils and bare limestones to which they cling and to which they adapted over millennia slow their growth. For humans, their environment, if not altogether forbidding, fosters no permanent habitation.
Bristlecones grow too slowly for the average human to notice. I suppose only dendrologists can closely track their growth with the finest of calipers or tree corers. Who among the ordinary visitor wants to stare at a tree that in some years doesn’t even produce a ring? Humans exist in a different time frame, a blink, so to speak, of the bristlecone’s eye.
Is there any way to comprehend the 4,000 years of a bristlecone pine’s life? Let me rephrase: Don’t you have difficulty comprehending any past because of an uneven passage of time, the varying progression that passes quickly or almost not at all? Haven’t you said, “Wow! That roller coaster was fun; I wish it lasted longer” and “As I put on the brakes, I could see everything slow down right before the crash”?
Personal time dilation is what we superimpose on the so-called objective calendar and clock time that we can scientifically apply to bristlecones’ growth rates. The clock time is irrelevant to our “feel” for such endurance. Should we press ourselves to imagine a montage film sequence of a bristlecone’s life or something akin to that technique used to show the passage of “time” in the movie version of The Time Machine? But were we to do so, would we see “time” or simply tangible or observable changes in the environment indicating time’s passage? We can model time and note what we call its effects, but as for actually seeing it, well, let’s just put it down as one of those inescapable intangibles that paradoxically produces tangible results. Is that a wrinkle developing on your brow? Hey, there’s another at the corner of your eye.
Dendrologists can examine bristlecones accurately enough to get a number like 4,000 years old, the clock or calendar time of the trees. But that is just a number to the psyche, and numbers, as we know aren’t whole brain entities. If they were, no one would gamble; no one would buy a lottery ticket. Numbers have meaning, but that meaning isn’t holistic when it comes to durations. And the numbers that mark an ancient bristlecone’s age carry little or nothing of a feel for the tree’s duration and survival through Earth’s vicissitudes. Don’t believe me? Try internalizing 4,000 years.
Archaeologists and anthropologists assess entities even older than bristlecones. The pyramids, for example, are a millennium older than the current stand of trees. Göbekli Tepe is more than twice their age, and cave drawings take us back tens of millennia. And ancient ancestors Homo habilis and Australopithecus afarensis predate the trees by two to four million years. Should we call that deep time? But even those ancestors’ lives are a blink relatively speaking. How so? Geologists dive down a deeper time well, one that goes back hundreds of millions to more than billion years. Astronomers, dive the deepest, going back to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Bristlecones? Tah! They live fractions of a blink at best.
Especially with regard to comprehending time, numbers that are intellectually meaningful can be personally meaningless. And big numbers and long durations need not apply. In what sense do you remember the time of your childhood? I’m not asking you to remember the number of years, but in a sense to comprehend them, to feel their passage? What was a watched pot of water seeming never to boil during some event during your youth, you now view as lasting that proverbial blink.
I suppose a philosopher might say I’m addressing the psychology of time rather than its philosophy. Okay, I’ll grant that. And physicists might jump into the conversation with statements about change and entropy, order vs. disorder, measurements on relative and absolute scales, and the “physical” beginning of time in the Big Bang or in some clashing of “branes” at a juncture of dimensions. But after all those books, papers, and discussions about the nature of time, have we extended our understanding by much? Do we still echo Augustine of Hippo’s comment that if no one asked him to define time he knew what it was, but if someone asked him, he was at a loss to explain it.
Sorry, philosophers and physicists. Time is of variable importance. It’s always important to humans in their present circumstances. But only in so far as individuals convince themselves by conscious effort or by a chance encounter does the duration of anything outside the boundaries of an individual life take on meaning. Interested in fossils? Then the time since their living forms succumbed to death is meaningful. Interested in old houses or antiques? Ditto. Capability for “feeling” Time’s passage for either relatively old fossils or relatively young antiques waxes and wanes with interest intensity. But even in the most personal attachment to Time, the passage of our own lives, we have difficulty trying to “feel” what we once felt about the duration of any moment. Remember that in the experience of any two people, the same event exists in a variable time frame. A batter hitting a ball perceives the moment differently from a fan observing the hit; an outfielder making a diving catch perceives time differently from a fan observing the catch. Same goes for crash victim and witness, drowning person and saving lifeguard, or even for a crew running a high-speed camera to capture a bullet hitting a pumpkin.
Am I a modern proponent of the Eleatic School? Am I Parmenides reborn? Am I arguing that Being is immutable and that Time is an illusion? No, I see an old living bristlecone, and I know it wasn’t born full grown. I see a dead one, and I know time has tangible effects.
Sure, I have said elsewhere, notably on the frontispiece of this website, that time is of secondary importance to place. No universe, I argue, no time. No place for time, no time. Place, I argue is primary over time, and place sets up how we perceive time. Standing next to an old beech, redwood, or bristlecone becomes a frame for time that differs from standing next to a baby, near an ant hill, or on Broadway at lunchtime. So, yes, I prefer a view of time that emanates from the psyche and not from some number divided by the Planck constant or the speed of light. And yes, I prefer to think of what time is in relation to me rather than in relation to time as fixed by some dating method, such as relative dating by superposition of rocks, with older rocks underlying younger ones, or as absolute dating by measurements of uranium half-lives or carbon-14 analysis. Even the count of tree rings in an ancient bristlecone pine or in a younger redwood or beech, though intelligible markers of time’s passage, do not define time’s indefinable essence, to speak Neoplatonically.
You know that you have yourself used a term like “time’s passage” or have spoken of “Time.” Yet, if I ask you whether time has an independent existence, that is, whether it exists outside of psyche or even outside matter, could you say anything more than what Augustine said in the fourth century? Would you argue Neoplatonically with Newton for an “Absolute Time” as either an Ideal or an Idea? In your attempt to answer that definitively, you’ll probably end up siding with Einstein and recognizing that time is not only variable, but it is even measurably variable, and that variability is the reason that the rate clocks tick on navigation satellites have to be adjusted for a different rate of ticking in “Earth-time” or those satellites will never direct us accurately from point A to point B.
But what, you might ask, do we do with an absolute like the age of the universe? Does it tell us nothing meaningful? Of course, such information does have meaning in showing how this place we call the Cosmos has rearranged itself from primordial plasma of inconceivable temperatures and unimaginable smallness to today’s Cosmos with a few imaginable temperatures, some relatively measurable distances, still many unimaginable temperatures, and a place of indefinite largeness.
Sure, clocks and calendars are the meaningful stuff of the intellect. The frontal lobe knows what to do with them. The inner brain, however, is befuddled unless it’s involved in that unconscious tracking that enables you to wake for a meeting or in that release of hormones and in the death of cells and aging. But you notice here and above that I speak of reckoning time with no real understanding to impart to you. I have no diet for your mind with accompanying claim that if you ingest these thoughts for three months, you will be able to explain Time. With Time we are probably equally wise or equally ignorant. Augustine was a smart guy; all those other philosophers were smart, but pin any of them down to a question and answer session on Time, and you will get answers based on those tangible effects. Everyone, regardless of intellectual ability, can see wrinkles and fat trees.
Can you feel the duration of the Cosmos? Does it have personal meaning? Do you have a feel for the age of a bristlecone? How about for your own age and the passage of your youth? Remember, I’m not asking for the numbers, but for comprehension that is holistic.
So, we’re back to my initial question. How do you reckon time?
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