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Indigo cantor

commander in chief, Satori International

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How could we relate to the world around us without the concept of time?

I have often wondered about what life would be like if I could not include the concept of time. It is in EVERYTHING we do, think, talk about, it is a component of life that is completely man made, it seems to me it is the glue that holds everything together? without it... what do we have? how do we explain? where do we stand?
what is NOW?
So, how would you explain " life" without time? the universe without Time? all your thoughts without implementing time?

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    Jul 22 2011: Very interesting all.

    Would it be safe to say then that:

    1) The phenomena we call time defines in an inextricable manner the nature and state of all energy or matter.

    2) Entities of sufficient insight create and explore measuring systems reflecting their preoccupation with and concepts of the value in a particular moment?

    Just looking for some feedback and trying to paraphrase our collaborative interpretation.
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    Jul 12 2011: ME too Alex... Pretty amazing Brains here!!!!
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    Jul 12 2011: I've very much enjoyed reading this conversation and the many different and interesting views, one can have loads of fun debating about concepts like time for days on end -- great question by Indigo! I, however, after reading all this and debating in my mind, am unable to reach any other conclusion than the most pragmatic for me: TIME EXISTS ONLY BECAUSE WE ARE FINITE. I have been trying to remind myself of this conclusion these days as I battle the fear of making some important and potentially "risky" decisions that will change the current direction of my life.
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    Jul 11 2011: I think time is a property of space-time. Yes, so what? It's not "visible" or able to be sensed by human beings. Why? Because there is a chance that space-time is not as mild and continuous as anyone could imagine. Space-time could be as a wool-cord fishing net, where holes are so tiny that there is no physical object with those infinitly little dimensions. Therefore, time cannot be detected alone, except by intersecting two o more space-time hyperplanes, which are themselves representations of several pointwise events in living experience of two or more people, in a manner of speaking. Only in cases like that time may acquire its seeming "vectorial" look. I wonder whether there are other ways of making a geometric or topological operation with these space-time hyperplanes that can show to us time in a way completely different we look until today, that is, as a point in life of someone (the "present moment").

    The key and trick lies on geometric nature of space-time. But time could be so different from the positive real axis, and more likely to be as a fractal 2-dimensional figure. One possible way for "watching" time is by means of some kind of "fractal gravitational microlens" made of overlapping space-time hyperplanes curved in a way that, for some observers, it would seem the trigonometric circle. Only then it would be possible to contemplate time in all its extension and true nature.

    So, we cannot separate time from our daily experience due to we are not able to design a physical device smaller than Planck time whose purpose were to slice this peculiar space-time, a result of a blending of continuous and discrete, two different scales-of-measure dimensions not compatible with our fuzzy, quantum brain. Indeed, time could be the bridge between man and universe. Or maybe brain could be the link between macro and microcosmic worlds.
  • Jul 2 2011: Time exists (although as Douglas Adams famously wrote : "Time is an illusion - lunch time doubly so."

    But he just meant that while time exists - it does not apparently "flow" in the way we perceive it to do. As human beings living in 4 dimensional spacetime we are trapped in the eternal present. But this is not how science views time - all our past present and futures are hanging around - somewhere.

    http://www.nikhef.nl/pub/services/biblio/bib_KR/sciam14327034.pdf

    Indeed the concept of some things happening backwards in time is perfectly OK with theoretical physicists (when dealing with quantum events.)

    Here is a quote about this dealing with the way Richard Feynman thought about it and the way his Feynman diagrams (pictorial representations of quantum interactions) work..........

    "Feynman used the idea of motion backward in time when he invented his famous diagrams in the late 1940s. Dirac had developed his fully-relativistic quantum theory of the electron in 1928, and discovered that it contained negative energy solutions. These solutions were identified as anti-electrons or positrons. Positrons were observed as predicted in 1932. Following Stückelberg [Stückelberg 1942] and Wheeler, Feynman re-interpreted positrons as electrons moving backward in time [Feynman 1948, 1949a, 1949b, 1965b]"

    http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/localepr.html

    In other words the math which explains this stuff is based on time reversibility being a part of it and so scientists know that some things work both forward and backwards in time. I gather that without this concept - the numbers do not add up. Its all heavy going and way beyond lay people like me so at some point we just have to accept that we either have to go back to school and complete post doctoral work in quantum physics or just trust that they know what they are talking about - I opt for the latter. :^)
  • Jun 25 2011: The concept of time was created so that one could remember and talk about events. Without the concept of time, events could be confused and people may not be able to talk about past events so they could share the information they learn with their children or others around them. I believe the concept of time is just as fundamental to the teaching processas language. Change does not need time, we just talk about the changes with the concept of time. The sun does not rise because we think it is 8, we think it is 8 because the sun rises.
  • Jun 19 2011: The baffling questions of Physics are: Is 'TIME' truly fundamental?

    Moreover, is space-time fundamental ? I think it is impossible to dicuss time using Physics as a tool, rather than our mental drive.
  • Jun 19 2011: First of all , I think it is necessary to know that the Physics of today vehemently opposes our common sense.

    When a person (or any living being) is born , there are three obvious things which come as a package--the body of the newborn , an abstract thing which kindles life in that body(I would refrain from using the word 'soul') , and a more abstract concept of personalised time.So,I think that it is that very abstract concept of 'time' which sets our life going.It is a permanent adhesive without which there can be no order in this world . It makes life more interesting,because you have something to do every moment,and we prepare ourselves to meet life as it comes by,needless to mention , as 'time' passes .

    I suppose this is what our intuition says.

    If we look at it not as something abstract but something which requires deeper insight , Physics says that , probably the concept is completely devised for our convenience.Maybe the universe was born without time embedded in it . Maybe it is for our convience that we say " the universe was born billions of years ago " or " 24 hours make one day " and so on.

    Unlike what we experience , the laws of Physics are symmetric with time . If we assume a law to be a man , he would be indifferent to what had happened or what happens next , because he does not know anything like-'had happened' or 'will happen'.It is impossilble to define an ' arrow of time ' for the laws of Physics.

    But look at the flip side of the coin. There is a certain fabric defined to be space-time.There is a limit upto which the sensible notion of time is valid,the limit defined to be Planck time.Discussing the concept of time beyond this limit becomes meaningless.It is impossible to describe the universe at a time lapse smaller than the planck time.Note that this is a part of Physics.

    This completely contadicts the declaration of the non-existence of a clock for Physical laws.It is indeed tough to comment on time using Physics.
  • Jun 10 2011: I have thought about this question, but to be in this universe is to be in time in some sense. Of course thats what Einstein confirmed. But I suppose thats not the end of it - new physics sometimes apparently treats all time as being present simultaneously. Indeed if you study Feynman diagrams you can see some interactions that work backwards in time (as we think of it).

    Clearly better men than me have grappled with this issue. TS Elliot for example in Burnt Norton.

    And of course there are the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5"

    Tralfamadorians say that human perception of time as linear and flowing with only one moment existing at 'once' is erroneous. (quoting here!). All moments exist concurrently and it is only an illusion if they appear to have any linearity. Tralfamadorians see people not as a single image but as a kind of wormlike manifestation that runs from the past into the future - from cradle to grave.

    I have often though something similar - that, at each present moment, all past and future moments are present but the future exists as a kind of set of possibilities. As the quantum wave function collapses, as it were, the many potential futures crystalise into one definite present that creates our history-line. Thus free will and cause and effect both exist in what would otherwise be a deterministic universe.

    About 20 years ago I had an experience that drove this home to me. I was sailing on a yatch in a storm when the main sail was accidentally and violently jybed onto me by the helmsman. I felt the boom brush my head and I was stuck by the traveller which flung me down and seriously fractured my arm. Even a half step more and I would have been in its direct line and without question I would have died.

    At that instant, even as I flew thru the air I had the most distinct feeling that the universe had split and in the other universe I had been killed. This was such a strong physical feeling I still feel it today,
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      Jun 13 2011: Oh, the Tralfamadorians! Hello past reading experience, nice to see you again!
      It feels, though, that if you want to be treated with respect, not seen as a crazy dreamer, you are supposed to believe in time as a straight line. They say your life starts when the sperm meets the egg and ends when your brain shuts down. I can't believe that, and never will. Which makes me uncomfortable in some situations, but what to do?
      • Jun 14 2011: Much prefer to be a crazy dreamer :^)
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      Jun 17 2011: By the way, Peter, I also had a experience long time ago (when I was almost 21). I was sleeping in my bed. I dreamed on a setting where everything was exactly as my room was. Each detail was as I knew by that time. The only exception was that there was another guy identical to myself, but his name was very extravagant, an alien-like one. He started a conversation with me, telling me everything about me and my own world. He knew it all. Then, he told me that he was living into a parallel universe, where everything was almost exactly the same way it was in this universe, but dimensions in that new universe were millions of times less than the universe I was living in (i.e., this one). Till this point, anyone can say that this is a simple self-suggestion of mine. The amazing thing here has to do with other things he told me too. He asserted that a train of events will happen to me the next 180 days starting the day after. Each of his predictions were fulfilled exactly the way he said it will have been happen, including location, time, people and circumstances from which I have had no idea at that time.

      I think this experience taught me that there's something wrong with quantum-wave function, because there exists (at least this is the way I read that incident) some location in universe (or multiverse) that has our destiny stored in some kind of hard disk drive and, therefore, when any one of us do something, here and now, it's because that teleological HDD is reading at once any bit of certain information that is reflected in the way everything displays as a process or an event. Let's remember that HDD has a random access to its registers, and the strong implication of this has to do with a very uncommon kind of non-linear time: the CLUSTER INDEXING TIME. That's it. Time would be just a random number associated with any pre-allocated position of the register containing the experience you are about to live in short. So, time could be anything but real positive NUMB3RS.
    • Jun 19 2011: WOW !! Everyone here at TED is a modern day Einstein (especially Peter) !!! To be very honest,I did not understand a word what you said (or trying to convey),Peter.It is maybe because I do not know much regarding this subject.Nevertheless,I am very happy that I am a part of the forum where I can get to learn so much(I really mean SO MUCH) from my fellow TED members.
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    May 31 2011: Time is a temporary interuption in the concept of eternity! This side of heaven, time and life are inseparable. Have you ever thought about the word 'lifetime'? It means as long as you have life, you are going to have time! You simply can't help it! Time is the only factor on earth that you will always have as long as you life! Think about it! That makes Time more important than every other issue, even money. So stop saying Time is money, because it isn't! Time is Life!
  • May 22 2011: To move away from time we could look at why we invented it in the first place, it being a concept. Time takes us from the now. Now is the moment of self-realisation. So, time came into being the same time we did, or at least knew we did. To lose time we must lose ourselves.Some people lose themselves in their work or their play or their meditation, when the concept of time dissapears (you lose track of time).
    So, to answer the question, we could hve a great time (pun intended) without time but we'd be lost
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    May 16 2011: So the thing we allow to rule our lives is just an invention of western man and many people find great peace and relaxation in stepping outside the tyranny of time if only on weekends or vacations. . Life in community, as much of civilization lived for most of human history, was not governed by time and did not involve clocks or measurements of time. Today, life in monastic communities continues that way and it is common practice at ccntemplative retreats to have no watches, no clocks. We move from activity to activity at the tolling of bells. Freedom from the clock brings peace, rest, calm and most importantly allows a centered place within, a place of equanimity from whihc to be fully prseent in each moment.People like me who love wilderness camping, fishing, long distance ocean sailing or just quiet days managing my meadows, beaches and gardens here on my island don't live on the clock..the clock is meaningless. With freedom from the tyranny of time comes peace, real enjoyment, real presence in the moment
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      May 17 2011: The concept of time has been around awhile. Obelisks are thought to be used for time around 3500 BC, surely the idea of time was around much longer then that.
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    May 15 2011: maybe if we could live just in the present moment we could transcend time ....how to do that though ....what can take our concentration and hold it where we are at any particular time .... it won't be a thought ...it will have to be an experience i reckon.....
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      May 15 2011: That's it!!!
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        May 15 2011: i can't think myself through these time issues too much i'm afraid, Lindsay ....this is the closest i can get and when it happens it feels great..... it doesn't stop my ageing process (damn) though which i've been told is programmed into my dna somewhere ...
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    May 15 2011: Theoretical Physicist , Brian Cox', five part series on time is just fascinating and we we should all take comfort in the fact that while all physicists agree that time is not kronos..not what we measure on our watches that no one yet has come up with what time actually is. Einstein thought he knew..for a few months in 1915but recanted in 1916. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADiNk_3Lr1o I believe it was Cox would did a time experiment to explore the oft reported experience of time standing still during an accident or drowning..heroes who recount split second life saving decisions often recount often recount time slowing ..that every thing is very slow motion. The expriement involved a digital display of a single number flashing so quickly it appeared to people in normal time that the dispaly screen was blank. They had people jump from a great height onto a trampolene and attempt to read the dispaly in free fall. They all saw the number clearly. ( I will try to find the cite..may actually be one of Brian Cox's 5 part series).
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    May 15 2011: CONTINUED from my previous comment……….

    1: Today’s belief in External Time is similar to the belief in External God. What’s common to both beliefs is the expectation for some extrinsic entity which governs the universe, the life, the phenomena. But as the idea of extrinsic God is in constant retreat for centuries, the natural human tendency is driving us to find a substitution to that idea. So here we have a created a new, very powerful concept of an extrinsic Time running and dominating us and the universe from outside. This extrinsic Time has became a kind of new God for some, not just in their daily life, but also as a concept, as a thought, as an all-around ruling entity.

    2. I mentioned above that time is a kind of a scale. So let’s take another scale which is less abstract and easier to grasp. This scale is used by us to measure the space and the changes in it. We call this scale “Distance” and its units are Centimeters, Inches, Meters, Kilometers……. .
    But, would anybody say that the distance is not depending on the space ?? It’s obvious that it does. The distance is made of space. The distance is just our mind’s definition to the difference between two points’ locations. This means it’s a scale created by minds to make an order in space, giving the distance units mentioned above. But we all agree that the units themselves are nothing but a space of different sizes which we accept globally as a standard. The units and the distance have no independent existence, because without the space existing, there will not be distance nor units of distance. Now all we have to do is to replace the word Distance with the word Time.
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    May 15 2011: IMO, the confusion with the time concept occurs because people turn it up-side-down. People who seek independent existence of time and think it’s a kind of stand-alone entity, think that the phenomena and changes are occurring because there’s a very fundamental entity which is running constantly and endlessly and all the things have to obey that entity. The confusion they make is this: They think that the changes in the universe and in our lives are the outcome of the time, while I think that it’s exactly vice-versa. It’s the time that is the outcome of those changes. The interaction of those changes with any living mind, creates the urge in that mind to make an abstract scale within that mind which helps it to make an order in those changes occurrence. We call this scale TIME.

    Now I shall make one challenge and two analogies to demonstrate this.

    I want to ask those believing in an independent existence of time, to find even one time measurement which does not includes utterly any change – even any change in the time measurement device (watch, atoms, stars, sun….) or mean (like our consciousness). Because if there’s a stand-alone entity of Time, it should not be dependent upon any sort of change.

    The Analogies: First, Please keep in mind that I do not mean to offend anyone, particularly with the first one. But I think the analogies will help to see what I think is a wrong pattern of thinking.

    CONTINUED on my next comment………..
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    May 14 2011: Time as we came to accept it (the way we measure time) was just away for us to measure suns and moons and star placements with math.

    Now this time is only relative to us, humans. The universe does not concern itself with our acceptance of time because we need to exist in order for that time to exist. A year to us is one planet rotation around our star. Mercury has a shorter year, Jupiter a longer one. This is how we measure time, you are asking if we need it to live life, and yes we do or else things would not get done as orderly. Chaos in order, and order in chaos. Having no structure is chaotic but the order comes naturally in universal ways (we call these laws of nature). Order in structure creates chaos but on a more comprehensive level, kind of. Therefore time creates order in which we can handle chaos. We need it, it is an organizing tool. Indeed we wrap our lives around the usage of time, but this isn't a bad thing by no means it actually proves how advanced we are, to bad we have no other intelligent species to compare ourselves too.

    Check out space-time. Time = space (sort of). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

    To explain life without time is easy. Survival. The meaning of life to me can be explained as simply survival.

    Example: Ants do not know time, all they know is how to multiply, build and organize; survival. Time doesn't matter, ants understand how to survive and only worry about survival, their lives are no simpler or greater than any other creatures. The result of such survival is proven in numbers. Estimation of one million ants per human. If ants ever mutated into intelligence, we would be in trouble. Sorry getting Science fiction here..

    Anyways life will continue on in the universe with or with out structures of time and/or any measurements for that matter.

    How to explain my life without time? Impossible. I was born into time, I grew up in this system of measurements. To explain my life without time is to say I am a spec
  • May 14 2011: I do believe that time doesn't exist. It is a most awesome thought! When I think of deja vu, for example, when you are experiencing a moment that seems to have happened before. I can only equate that to an understanding in which, either you have already had this moment before and that you are exactly where you need to be. So the fact that time doesn't exist, in my opinion, means that the past present and future are all happening at once. So therefore, when you experience deja vu, you have the sense of already living that moment because that moment has always happened. Obviously there are scientific explinations for all of what I am saying. But science I think is only now catching up to spirituality and what many have understood for years. There is most certainly an order to things, a process. So i don't want to say that because of what I'm saying, that what is going to happen in our future has already happened and there is n changing that. I'm not sure, I am confusing myself now, lol! But, to me, time is just like everything else we know, an opinion an idea, a perception and what is most certainly real, I don't even know. Because we cannot measure time, we don't know exactly when the universe was created, we can't pin point anything. So whatever present moment we may be in, is not present at all. There is just so much going on now to create the illusion that a present moment is actually happening. I dunno, this is a great topic though!
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    May 14 2011: Please explain why time is not a physical property of our universe.

    If you are to deny the concept, I wouldn't try and make an appointment with you ;-)

    Or would you re-invent a concept that can explain age-ing, the direction of experience, causality, prediction,...

    To me, this question is an interesting thought-experiment, but in real life, there has always been a 'before' and 'current'.
    even if we humans cease to exist, the universe would keep on unfolding in it's way,
    the direction in which it unfolds (from low to high entropy)

    You might just as well imagine a fourth spatial dimension perpetual to depth, length and width... or try to imagine a 2-dimensional universe...

    In short: I don't see the point...
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      May 14 2011: well actually many leading scientists believe there are 11 dimensions..have you not heard of M-theory?, String Theory, Parallel Universe? The 11 dimansion superstring theory is a leadaing contender for explaining the irreconcilable diffrences betwee Quantum behavior and physics. Time, our concept of linear time is often a bit of a fly in the ointment in understanding the universe..multiverses.kronos..chronological time..our human invention for markimg the passgae of the seasons, the phases of the moon, what makes a day what makes an hour.is bound to our tiny little solar system and how it works within that solar systemearth bound as it arises from is perceived from earth of the sun & moon..It is apparently not all that reliable when we speak of things a great distance from our soloar system or want to understand how the universe works. Also when you stop and think just logically about time as linear..as having a speficic beginning, measureable in speficic constant units..well I have trounle with that just instinctively. It is kronos, our invented earth bound system of time, that lets us keep appointments, know when to plant seeds etc. etc. but kronos is a very earth bound, solar system bound idea.
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        May 17 2011: As a matter of fact, I do. Time is one of those 11 dimensions... I thought you knew that.

        Time might be relative, that does not mean it doesn't exist (which it clearly does).

        and if i assume our concept of time is somewhat earthbound... aren't we earthbound as well?
        So for all practical reasons, we can apply time as linear during our lifespan... and it is sufficiently approximative to what scientists use as time in their more detailed theories...
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    May 14 2011: Quite apart from the science of time, there is great mercy in the idea of non linear time,,it would mean that out of the present monent we can both grow the future and heal the past.
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    May 14 2011: Timeless means; limitless, borderless, freedom... It means in any situations, any type of characters, any group of creatures...

    I think the only thing which balances timelessnes is `heart`. A heart's stop working is equal to moment without time.

    We should live heart-centered to make our lives to produce somethings which could exist in the time tunnel.

    Do you need a starting step? Just look at people(strangers to you) eyes and do some favor to him/her without response/expectations. You'll get your response from the time tunnel endlessly.
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    May 14 2011: just a journey going on till the end
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    May 13 2011: Lets remove time. How? First we would define a minimal possible time interval. Then we would take a snapshot of reality in each of these intervals. We could visualise the time snapshots as a chain of circles containing one reality. Now lets take all those realities and spread them in one big plane of space without overlapping. There you have it - a model of the world without time in it with all other causality relationships preserved if we want them.

    It means that one can "participate" in his own birth and death. It would also mean there is one of us for each snapshot we have taken and we would be identical but slightly different looking.

    This is not something new. In some TED talks a software that creates space-time worms was used as visualization aid. The difference with the current idea is that it does not have to be a worm - the "next me" could appear anywhere in the space.

    And now we could begin to do weird things with the model.

    For example, because there is no time we would observe people and things popping in and out of existence anywhere and it may look random to us until we realise, for example, that breaking a nut would cause many broken nuts suddenly to appear each would be the same as the one we just broke but slightly different.

    Also all words that imply time relationships would not exist (like next, now, before, waiting, etc.)
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    May 13 2011: Did anyone listen to or already mention, a recent NPR program that briefly talked about adapting back to a normal (for him) perception of time from living with and studying somehow (the time thing is the only thing that stuck from that interview) indigenous peoples who have no concept of time except from night and day. The thought interested me and there was a funny story too that eludes me.
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    May 13 2011: My current photography/art work is working with this concept, although I didn't state it as not having a concept of time, but rather I ask, don't all moments from the past present and future exist in this moment? The place where I think of time not existing at all is in space although I haven't quite wrapped my head around the concept. I do think about it all, a lot.
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      May 13 2011: how beautiful & how insightful..Iyour photography and art work must be exhilarating if you start from here.
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        May 13 2011: lagtime.kimba.com is where the project lives for the moment!
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    May 13 2011: Time exist to us because we can only focus on one reality . Time is then the passing through different point in the grid that is the multiverse.
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    May 13 2011: if we live in kairos time kronos time stretches infinitely to accomodate everything that needs doing.The way to escape the tyranny of chronological time..linear time (Kronos time) is to be fully present in the moment where kairos time..natural time takes over. The way to escape the tyranny of kronos ( Chronological time) is through mastery of will. Rudolf Steiner has written much about this and offers some excellent and very accessible practices about stepping outside the tryanny of kronos time. here is a silly sounding and tiny example of great power in the excercise of will that everyone can practice..set an arbitrary time and commit at the tme to do something completely outside your agenda of priorities for that day..e,g at 10:17 am move look at the tip of your tie, remove an object from yur pocket or prse, look at it then put it away. Try to do that 4 or five times a day the first few days ok to have the time and action the same each day . The activity has tobe something you can do wherever you are at that time. Amazingly by about the thrird or fourth day you wont need a watch to know it is 10:17 am..you will just know it..and then you will know that through will you can escape the tyranny of kronos and live in the freedom and timeless possibility of kairos. The point is a simple but powerful one.. it is through will that we are free of the tyranny of kronos time. By excercising will we can move from time ruling us to us ruling time..making time accomodate everything we need to do..
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    May 1 2011: I just saw a brilliant comment on YouTube related to this that I simply must share:
    "Time is an abstract concept created by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay."
    (user name calvinthedestroyer, 1 month ago)

    I never would've put it better myself :-D .