Five Types of Time

Summer Fundraiser 2013, Day 4

The theme of this week’s fundraiser is the amplitude of time. That is: there’s plenty of it!

Tip jarThis little chunk of it — the seven days of our bleg, plus the wrap-up — has great significance for us, and we have to cram a lot into it: persuading our readers to help out, recording donations, writing thank-you notes, plus normal blogging activities.

In the larger scheme of things, however, it’s just another chunk of minutes, hours, and days, no different from all the rest. “Time be time,” as the Rasta character in Neuromancer says.

But is that true?

Except in the neighborhood of a singularity — e.g. a black hole — the dimension we experience as time is, for all practical purposes, linear and uniform. From a purely scientific standpoint, all intervals are similar, regardless of their magnitude. But that’s not the way we human beings experience time: a split-second is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from a decade.

For the sake of philosophical contemplation, I have arbitrarily divided the human experience of time into five distinct types:

1.   Micro Time
2.   Conversational Time
3.   Quotidian Time
4.   Macro Time
5.   Cosmic Time
 

These categories are not simply larger or smaller versions of one another. Each has its own intrinsic characteristics, based on the subjective way the human psyche experiences it.

1. Micro Time

This is the interval of time that is perceived as an “instant”. Most of our existence passes without our being aware of it. However, there are certain occasions — most of them probably less than pleasant — when micro time dominates our experience. Take, for example, the split second between when your skidding car leaves the road and the front bumper hits the tree. Or the interval between when your foot slips on the ice and you land on your coccyx on the sidewalk.

Positive examples might include the moment of childbirth, or the triumphant sensation of being the first runner to breast the tape.

Micro time is the minimum unit of conscious human experience. The optic nerve transmits about twenty distinct images per second to the brain, so 0.05 seconds may be the smallest unit of micro time. Or there may be other senses — hearing, touch, proprioception — that have smaller units of transmission. But somewhere in that neighborhood lies the smallest quantum of experienced time. Below that we cannot go.

It would be impossible to live as a human being if everything were experienced in micro time. That’s why our brains are equipped to aggregate perceptions into discrete chunks of greater duration.

2. Conversational Time

Much of our experience is mediated by language. The exchange of information between people, or the recollection of such exchanges, or the imagining of them — this is the stuff of most of our routine existence. Those who adhere to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis assert that nothing can be thought without the mediation of language, which determines one’s thought-forms.

The temporal space in which conversation occurs forms what I call conversational time. It is bounded from below by the length of time it takes to form or hear a phoneme — which is a very brief interval, much smaller than a second. However, the more significant unit of conversational time is the morpheme, the smallest unit of language in which semantic meaning can be encoded. Collect these units into words and sentences, pass them back and forth, and you have conversational time.

A New Yorker can pack a lot of conversation into two or three seconds. In my part of the world, where the slow drawl is the order of the day, the same amount of meaning takes somewhat longer to convey. So the span of conversational time must remain elastic.

The upper limit for conversational time is hard to pin down, but it can’t really be more than a few minutes. After that the ebb and flow of what was said fades away, and the conversation has been “chunked” into encoded packets for later recall.

Quotidian Time

This is the realm of the agenda, the classroom, the bus schedule, and the workaday world. It contains all those experiences which are held in short-term memory, after the ephemera of the conversation have disappeared into oblivion.

What happens this afternoon references and recollects what occurred this morning, and the nexus that binds them together is quotidian time. When you sit on the edge of your midnight bed and recall the triumphs and defeats of the day, that is the vantage point of quotidian time.

The upper limit of quotidian time is probably a day or two, and no more than a week. It is bound by the capacity of the brain’s neurons to hold the short-term memory of experiences. During sleep these neuronal memories are passed to long-term storage, which has a different, more associative structure than short-term memory. After a few days those short-term experiences are gone, and quotidian time gives way to the next level.

Macro Time

Beyond the quotidian, time becomes flexible. What occurred forty years ago may be as clear or clearer than what occurred last month. Sequences of events become jumbled, with different occurrences clumped together based on their common associations, rather than their exact linear sequence.

Macro time is the realm of the month, the year, and the decade. As one gets older — and I speak from experience about this — macro time looms larger in one’s consciousness, due to the sheer volume of material accumulated in long-term memory.

When I was nineteen, there wasn’t that much long-term material to look at. Now the panorama of the past is vast, a wide-screen movie that plays on and on, mostly in hackneyed repetition, but occasionally with a sudden burst of novelty when a long-forgotten buried nugget is suddenly excavated.

A deeper understanding of life and the world in general can come through the contemplation of macro time, but has little practical value. I may experience delight when I recall events of forty or fifty years ago, but such recollections rarely provide anything that has utility. They are simply the furniture of bygone days.

Cosmic Time

This is what lies beyond the trivial span of one’s own lifetime. It extends indefinitely far in both directions, past the life of our civilization, our species, our planet, our galaxy, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch — or to Heat Death, depending on how much missing mass there is out there.

Cosmic time is the proper object of religious contemplation. At the far end it merges into eternity. And, if you define the word “eternity” as I do — “experience without duration” — then this is where you enter the realm of Hindu metaphysics, where the atman, the Eternal Self, contemplates the whole of existence. Without thought, without memory, without desire, it is simply the never-ceasing awareness of unqualified being. To it the created cosmos is maya, or illusion — a flicker of transient dross that appears, persists for a brief moment, and then passes away.

This, then, is where Ouroboros eats his tail. Cosmic time merges with micro time, the newborn baby cries, and we start all over again.

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Well, that turned out to be a lot heavier than I thought it would be. I never can tell where one of these meanderings is going to end up, once it gets started. It becomes a free-associative free-for-all.

Wednesday’s donors checked in from the following places:

Stateside: California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Germany, and the UK

Our blessings go out to all those who chipped in to help.

The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button, on the main page. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.

2 thoughts on “Five Types of Time

  1. If you expect further donations on the basis of this post, i would say you’re optimistic. Never the less. Keep up the good work. Time never runs out.

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