thoughts on the acceleration of time
Published at 8:26 pm on February 25th, 2008 in Uncategorizedeveryone knows that time goes faster as you get older. previously i believed that this was due to the fact that a given unit of time would comprise a smaller percentage of your total memories. but what of the fact that i barely remember *anything* (temporal experiences, that is. i’m full of knowledge of varying usefulnesses). my brain is not some kind of storage device that records my whole history linearly, and therefore the idea of percentage of memories is total bull.
i just had a thought while talking to my mom on the telephone: what if the perceived increase in the passage of time is the same at any point for all our consciousnesses? now, i’m not suggesting an accelerating constant across all conscious beings or anything like that. it would seem to me to be something tied closely with individual cultures - groups of consciousnesses.
that was the bulk of what i wanted to get down. that its not that all 22-year-olds will feel time accelerating at the same rate. but that everyone with generally the same experiences do.
thinking more about it, it would be very easy to tie this observation to a culture’s use of technology… but the fact that both technology and our perception of time are both accelerating would be a very weak correlation.
i more notes related this subject from a few years ago in my paperlog, i wonder if i should re-visit them? (i just passed matt the book, we’ll see what he thinks)
Matt showed me where your blog was hiding. But I have a suggestion.
Maybe as you get older you have more points of references to gage exactly how fast time is moving. When you’re a kid, what do you really have to do in day? Practically nothing. You’ve only really only got one sign post : Bed Time. And if you complain well enough, that is a variable post.
But when you get older, you have more things to do so you have more points of reference.
To further my pointer: Consider a man, sitting in the most perfect train in the world. So this train moves seemlessly, no bumps no cracks, and the only way you can tell you’re moving is if you look out the window and see the scenery is going by. Now take away all external points of reference. If the motion remains constant you never notice that you’re even moving. There’s gotta be some jolt to let you know you’ve changed speeds (and I am going to assume it doesn’t exist here). Or there’s gotta be some scenery, otherwise you’d never really know how fast you were going).
So I am going to extrapolate on this more. Yes that’s right, evidently I have an assignment due eventually and this is how I procrastinate hah hah. Anyway here’s my thought. I am basing this on a video I once saw called “Imagining the 10 dimensions” or something like that. I thought the way they explained the fourth dimension and our experience of it as three dimensions creatures was nifty…so here’s my idea.
If we move through space time at a constant rate, in something like the perfect train, the only way that we notice we’re moving is if we look at various posts along the way to notice the scenery changing. There are things that change when you’re a kid, but do you really notice them? There’s nothing like in “in 3 days I’ve gotta finish the assignment” [true story]. There’s never anything you have to do that you’re looking at. Here’s how I further compare childhood to growing up.
If all the scenery is exactly the same when you look out the window you never notice that you’re moving either. And then say you’ve got like a random pole. And these random poles are spread very very far apart. So you can measure the distance between your post with help from your watch and get an idea of how fast you’re going. But if the posts are REALLY far apart, that will take a LONG time. And in between all those posts you never really know, you just do your thing. BUT if you’ve got posts that are closer together you can gather more data faster, you can get and idea of how fast you’re moving sooner.
Replace posts with assignments and I think that’s it. So in short, repetitive summary: when all you do all day is play sometimes that’s like a never changing scenery. You don’t worry about things to come as a kid, you take this moment by moment, you never even bother to look for a post in this perfect train through space time. Since there are no jerks, there is nothing to force you acknowledge you’re changing (I am discounting puberty and stuff…hah hah ). But with more responsibility comes great awareness. To further explain myself, do you ever get in a one track mind when playing a video game and not notice how much time has gone by? Do you notice how slowly a boring lesson is going because you’re constantly staring at the clock? Time hasn’t changed rates, you’re just looking for more or less indication of it’s change.
That’s my idea slightly stoled from Einstein (So now you know that’s got like super credibility cause I mean, you wouldn’t mess with the man). I hope that made some sense of what I think happens here.
I would highly suggest watching the 10th Dimension video… SUPER COOL!
A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.